karreg 2017-08-01 11:25
The music is very cool and dive me into a good mood ! What a shame the dashboard is so static ! Good entry anyway :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD39 → Starship Alpha
By michael-terrorized-games and jessica-terrorized-games
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 3.50 | 8 | ||
| Fun | 2.60 | 7 | ||
| Innovation | 3.20 | 7 | ||
| Theme | 3.75 | 6 | ||
| Graphics | 2.40 | 7 | ||
| Audio | 3.40 | 7 | ||
| Humor | 3.00 | 5 | ||
| Mood | 3.40 | 7 |
The music is very cool and dive me into a good mood ! What a shame the dashboard is so static ! Good entry anyway :)
The idea is solid and there seems to be quite a few events in there, based on looking at the code, but this is just not very enjoyable to play.
I'm going to be blunt from here on out. There are *many* of issues with your entry. Due to the nature of the design these are mostly *user interface* issues, so I'll just give you a quick run down. Here we go:
* Stats update every 15 seconds. This should be every second or even multiple times a second. If the numbers aren't constantly changing, then the user doesn't know if anything is happening at all. **Immediate feedback** is *super* important in UI design.
* Teaching unimportant information. The user doesn't need to know how often events happen. Tell them they happen occasionally, that's enough. **The less you need to teach to the user the better**. Only give them the bare essentials as all they want to do is to start playing now!
* Vague information. The production bars give me a relative representation of production as in there is more food production than fuel production, but the stats on the right are absolute values. So how much fuel do I get every minute if my production is 5 bars? **Accurate information is required for decision making** so the GUI should relay this information.
* Loads of buttons, nobs and doohickeys. General rules: **less is more**, **concise is better**. All the 8 production widgets could have been represented as sliders, with the production name and amount on top of the slider. Unity has great built-in GUI sliders for this purpose.
* GUI scaling. The GUI does not scale with the resolution of the window. Unity has great built-in tools (RectTransform anchors) for this too.
* Noisy background image. It is supposed to look like a hyper drive effect, yes? Well, all it does here is make everything harder to read.
Keep playing different kinds of things for inspiration and reference. Keep developing different kinds of things for practice and fun! Eventually you'll get great at making things.
fun but ugly. i didn't like the graphics (just ugly) and the music (it was good, just not my taste), however I liked the gameplay. I had some issues with UI but the game is good.