Power Plant Manager

cnoble 2017-08-03 01:14

That was a fun game!! I really liked the clicker style gameplay of waiting for the next upgrade. The menus were crisp and smooth, nothing interrupted the gameplay. I liked having it run in the background and that the colors changed if the air was too polluted.

My only 'complaint' would be there is no end condition. It took about ten minutes for me to get to the power level desired to power the city but there was no 'celebration' to acknowledge that. I just kept playing until about 600% then I turned it off.

It was a super fun game though!! Keep it up!! :D

josh6680 2017-08-03 01:37

@cnoble Thanks! Yeah, we ran out of time for adding win/lose conditions and screens. The intended win condition was getting the power goal to 100%. There would have been a couple lose conditions, such as pollution at 100% and power goal negative for too long. Thanks for the review :)

chispalbc 2017-08-05 00:08

it is really fun but also a little easy. Some buildings are too cheap and give too much power but i know that kind of things need a lot more time than 72 hours :smile:

josh6680 2017-08-05 00:17

@chispalbc Yep, it's definitely not very balanced. Seems like making a strategy game is kinda pushing it for such short amount of time ;) Thanks for the comment.

jahndis 2017-08-05 00:22

Ah dang I wanted the world to implode when I got too many of the highest power tower. Pretty nice little upgrade game. Took me a bit to figure out how to supply the nuclear power plants with enough water. Nice work!!

josh6680 2017-08-05 00:35

@jahndis Thanks for the feedback :) Yep, it could use some cool endings for various conditions.

cornelia-xaos 2017-08-05 03:16

I was disappointed at first that I wouldn't be able to play this nor request a Linux version.. but then I realized it was programmed using the dot Net framework and I wanted to see if maybe I could compile it using mono... Well.. It seems you left something called "JGL" out of your source submission.. that or I'm not putting something in the right place as you have two source submissions....

jesus-gonzalez 2017-08-05 03:37

I see this as an innovative take on the Idle clicker genre. Sadly it's unfinished. Still great concept.

josh6680 2017-08-05 17:30

@cornelia-xaos Sorry about that. At first I left out JGL since the code kinda sucks right now and has some major bugs, as I found out this time around. I've [reuploaded the source](https://joshprograms.com/ludumdare/LD39-Josh6680-Source.zip) with it included anyway if you want to try. From my previous tests with Linux, I think you need to install the correct version (2.3) of the `libsfml` and `libcsfml` packages from your distribution's package manager and then run the mono command on the .exe, but I haven't had very good results with Linux, Mono, and SFML as of yet. When I did actually get it to run, the mouse input did not work, which renders the game unplayable.

hugimugi7 2017-08-06 13:09

Pretty fun! :smile: But unfortunately too broken (Easy to get tons of energy)

josh6680 2017-08-06 17:36

@hugmugi7 Thanks, and yep, it's unbalanced, but also varies depending on how fast your computer runs the game. That's something I'll be looking into for future games.

fwazle 2017-08-08 02:06

You have a really fun game here! I really liked the art style. Well done!

mikethewayne 2017-08-13 08:46

What a game! Reminded me a little of cookie clicker, only your game is far better. Love the wire-mesh graphics, also how the background darkens with pollution. About pollution though, Natural gas should produce less than oil, which should produce less than coal. Have you never played SimCity 4? :D

I didn't find it too unbalanced, at least at the start of the game, but I guess I'm running it on a slower computer (although your game's processing shouldn't run differently based on hardware, that isn't great, but it is tough to deal with). I also liked how the more population there was, the more difficult it was to achieve your power goal. Also, what was the reason for the power goal? I thought it would've been an end-game thing, but the game didn't end, so I decided I'd go for another goal: to reach MAX_INT on power goal (about 2,147,000,000), in the aims to crash the program!

I started out the game with a few wind turbines until I could afford a nuclear reactor, which then overheated, so I bought a few coal factories. Eventually, I could buy more nuclear reactors, this time with cooling towers. 4 power plants later, and I achieved the power goal, which didn't satisfy me. This is when I decided to go for overflowing the program. First using the power of the gods, then pyramids, I could finally afford an energy nexus. So I filled the map with them. About 20 minutes and a cup of coffee later, I had got to 2 billion on the power goal, and with the final press of the "2" button... Alas, the game did not crash...

What a brilliant entry, though, I really enjoyed it, only way to improve it is to improve the balance a little!

josh6680 2017-08-13 19:14

@mikethewayne Thanks for the feedback! The power goal was indeed intended as the end game, however I didn't get around to implementing any ending, so it just keeps going.

The speed of the computer is definitely affecting the game, so far I haven't found a good way of dealing with this, it certainly seems to be one of the tougher issues to solve.

Nice try overflowing the power, but it's actually a floating point number and not an integer! So the maximum is actually the insane value of 340,282,346,638,528,859,811,704,183,484,516,925,440!

zyxer 2017-08-18 18:34

I actually started playing this game because the art style intrigued me. Now that I played it, I find the game as a whole actually quite interesting. I would really like to see in which direction you want to go with this game.

The wireframe art style takes some getting used to. I think it would look better with a well-chosen color palette. I also wonder how animations would look in this art style (especially the wind turbines).

The explanations were good and it didn't take me long untill I just had to press [2] once, and I had reached the goal. There definitly should be a way to lose power (a presume that's what the population was intended for).

mr-houdini 2017-08-19 16:38

I find the overall idea solid and fun. However it is a little bit easy after a while. If you make this game challenging it could be a great entry. Nice job, good luck!

huvaakoodia 2017-08-20 06:26

It works, more of and idle experience than a game at the moment, but more development time would have helped there.

The wire frame graphics are ok. Kind of like looking through an old power plant control terminal. Not that I have any knowledge of what those really looked like. It is the illusion that counts.

The program update certainly should not be affected by the computer processing power. I think that is the reason why I needed 6 Cooling tower 3.0s around a single nuclear power plant. Delta time is your friend there.

Solid start for something more fleshed out.

inappropriatename 2017-08-20 15:02

I enjoyed this more than i was expecting to. I must have covered more than half the tiles with almighty nexus of power buildings xD 10 seconds of that was enough to meet 20000% of the power goal xD

qualitycatgames 2017-09-27 08:08

@ZYXer:

The wireframes were done using code I threw-together last minute. Animations and such are totally planned. i just didn't feel like dealing with a 3D transformation matrix and all that kind of stuff...

I agree there's much to be desired Maybe in the future!

sry for such a late reply, assuming even that you are notified of this...