FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD39 → Drone Supervisor

Drone Supervisor

By jimbly

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall294.0465
Fun643.7965
Innovation244.1165
Theme4743.2265
Graphics4292.9566
Humor3052.3553
Mood3482.9055

Comments

naminuz 2017-07-31 22:56

Impressive programming system and the tutorial is quite steady and efficient.

quixx 2017-07-31 23:00

wow. This is pretty complex for that short time. Nice job. I enjoyed playing it!

phantom-lab 2017-08-01 05:23

I could play this for hours! I hope you develop this game into something bigger! :D

smbe19 2017-08-01 12:04

Very impressive game. Played it for quite some time and I really enjoyed it. The second level is quite difficult to solve.

I'm not sure but are new resources added over time? Because I had thought out a way to craft something and only needed more money. When I had enough money I couldn't build it anymore because there was now copper blocking the path. Maybe I just miss remembered my plan?

jimbly 2017-08-01 13:49

Glad you enjoyed it =). Resources are fixed when the level starts (obviously re-plenish each turn though), but nothing changes, so maybe you mis-remembered your plan.

kosmo 2017-08-01 22:41

Pretty fun -- almost has a 'clicker game' style wrapped up in a more strategic simulation.

My only real complaints would be that it was not intuitive how much money I would make from combining certain materials. While I understand the crafting system after I looked at the recipes, I did not notice that until after I had played. During my first game I spent a while combining 3 different materials and the resulting money I got was barely more than I would have got for simply returning the 3 ingredients.

jimbly 2017-08-01 22:46

@kosmo Thanks for playing! Yeah, the crafted items should really be boosted in value to make them more worthwhile (except the Diamond Ring, that one is already high enough, I think), as it ends up often worthwhile to sell two loads of raw materials than one crafted, and that's just not as cool ;). Balance got a bit neglected towards the end of trying to finish this in time =).

attrition 2017-08-02 04:46

Really fantastic concept. Also quite complicated, but I think you explained it as well as could be given you also had limited time to make everything work ;) Good work!

steve-johnson 2017-08-02 05:36

Wow, some real complex gameplay! Super excellent tutorial. As someone who's done some JS game making in the past, I'm really impressed with the design here and I hope you keep doing LD.

I wish you had added sound though. :-)

jtn191 2017-08-02 18:59

pretty complex puzzle game!

deathray 2017-08-03 00:50

I really like this style of game! Well done! The perfect Ludum Dare game? Just about IMO. The only thing I would change is to make the graphics a little more detailed, or more cohesive. I hope you continue to develop and publish this.

zarkonnen 2017-08-03 12:11

This is brilliant. It's a really well-executed programming / economics game. Having to balance short-term income and investment is really neat.

pandakipu 2017-08-03 19:09

Excellent ! I like this kind of puzzle game :D

Good job !

maggardjosh 2017-08-03 21:46

Really complex for a jam game. I think you did really well with this. I couldn't stop playing :smile:

Well done!

piscythe 2017-08-03 21:47

Very nice work here! I like the amount of finesse that can be involved in rigging the drone chains combined. It's the sort of game that can be tricky to pick up at first, so making a tutorial stage was a very worthwhile investment of time. Though I often found myself coming up short on cash, I found it quite satisfying when I got the assembly line for a diamond ring together, let alone the masterpiece in level 2. It was very nice to be able to rewind time and sell things for full price so I could try out all sorts of different combinations. I did run into a number of situations where I had to combine resources that come in different quantities and ended up with resources wasted sitting around at the crafting station. Still, it's a mechanically interesting game with a lot of nice quality of life features.

jimbly 2017-08-03 23:57

Thanks everyone for the great feedback!

@piscythe Glad you liked it, and nice job on Level 2, and nice job on being the only Ludum Dare person to actually put their name on the high scores so far (although I did say that isn't part of my compo entry ;). Yeah, I regret not having time to add sound, but the tutorial was definitely worth the trade off, especially after I saw my first play-test be completely and utterly baffled =).

cmlsc 2017-08-04 05:38

Wow, you got a **TON** done during 48 hours! Art wasn't the best and it would've been nice if it had some audio, but the gameplay was pretty good! I wasn't a big fan of it being left to rotate and right to delete. For some reason it was natural for me to use left to try to delete and place while using right to rotate(probably because place and delete are in the same category of actions). Although that was just my opinion. :P

The game itself seemed pretty polished and had a ton of content! Great job!

drtizzle 2017-08-04 09:42

Wow this has a lot of content! Good that you've included a tutorial, because it is much needed :). Very deep game with fun mechanics, with some work this could be a cool finished browser game!

wowods 2017-08-04 12:00

This one is great. It has more content in it, also the tutorial is very helpful.

winterslice 2017-08-05 05:26

I spent FAR longer playing this than I should have, because it was fun and interesting. That is all.

ropedog 2017-08-05 06:06

Holy crap - this is really well done! I can't believe you fit all this in during a LD! There's really a ton going on here. You could've just stuck with the drones and arrows and called it good, but you added freakin' recipes which adds a ton of depth. Nice job!

elede 2017-08-05 15:14

Thanks for the tutorial.

It would be nice some background music.

Anyway, very good game!

christina-antoinette-neofotistou 2017-08-07 14:57

This was so much like leapday, but also 10 times more impressive, because I was working for spryfox at the time and I remember how much work it was to implement! Congratulations, it's super fun <3

aterlamia 2017-08-07 17:12

fun little puzzler and with a great tutorial at the beginning to help you on your way add some music and sounds to make it complete (and some more levels) and i can see people playing this often

bombjack 2017-08-07 18:55

very fun and original gameplay. Congrats

kthulhu1947 2017-08-07 19:58

Very fun game. I just love it. I spent a lot of time on it ;-) Keep moving forward.

simonhutchinson 2017-08-07 21:24

This is amazing for 48 hours. I can't even imagine figuring out all these mechanics and level design in that amount of time. Really impressive.

Also, great idea having the tutorial. I would have been COMPLETELY lost without it.

jimbly 2017-08-07 22:30

@christina-antoinette-neofotistou Thanks! I had dinner with a couple of the guys working on Leap Day at PAX Dev a few years back, but don't think you were one of them ^_^. Glad you enjoyed my game! Really sad Leap Day couldn't be turned into something successful - although I've been wracking my brain about how this could be converted to a well-monetizing free to play game, and so far coming up empty ;). Definitely has potential as a high-score competing puzzler though...

herniewise 2017-08-08 03:08

Good game and w/ a lot of depth for a 48 hour game!

seurimas 2017-08-08 03:24

Hey, 41 turns ftw :D I really enjoyed this one. One thing I missed for a while was the recipe book. That would be a good include for the tutorial. Goal-setting would be a possible next step (e.g. complete in under X turns for 3 gold stars). That said, well done for 48 hours.

mato26 2017-08-08 18:06

Great one :) It's impressive amount of work done in such a short time. I mean including tutorial, high scores etc.

fwazle 2017-08-08 18:40

Wow! I love this game! Very challenging and well balanced. Well done!

jimbly 2017-08-08 19:53

@mato26 Thanks! As noted in the description, high scores (at least, the viewing of them) was added post-compo, ignore that for the purposes of rating, but since they were being calculated and stored (and, in theory, visible through an external link) already, I thought I should show them in-game too, as that was just a tiny additional amount of work (already had the scores back end for my engine set up from a previous Ludum Dare).

madbeagle 2017-08-08 21:44

My first 5-star overall vote - an incredible amount of work in 48 hours. A new benchmark to aim for in terms of depth and polish.

tim-eriksen 2017-08-08 23:19

So, this game just cost me like 2 hours. Hands down the best LD39 strategy game I have tried so far! The game would have been better with some better graphics and some sounds/music, but what you have presented here is very well put together. Thumbs up for a good tutorial too!

gelisam 2017-08-09 03:51

Amazing game, it has kept me entertained for hours!

I didn't realize that the recipe list was in the game, so I spent a ton of time trying different combinations and writing down the results. Eventually I saw, or rather I thought, that there was a logic to the recipes, that it wasn't simply a secret list of recipes which work while the rest gives junk, like in some other crafting games. There is certainly a logic to which combination produces pure materials, bracelets and necklaces, and so I was convinced that this was some sort of puzzle, that by experimenting I would learn more about the logic of the recipes and I could deduce how to make the masterpiece. Unfortunately, I was wrong, there was some logic to some of the recipes, but in addition to those logical recipes there was also a secret list of special recipes which couldn't possibly be deduced. Oh well!

I got a good laugh the first time I got "large junk" instead of "junk"; I had made a complicated contraption for electrum + electrum + electrum, and I thought the supersized junk was a way for the game to tell me that I was trying too hard... Oh, that might have been a good recipe logic! The recipes which combine too expensive stuff would give a large junk, those which combine too cheap stuff would give small junk, and those which are incomparable (some items are cheaper than the target, some are more expensive than the target) would just be "junk" :)

I think that having to build an assembly line in order to try a combination is a great way to solve a typical balancing issue which crafting has. In some games, we have access to an infinite supply of (a subset of the) materials, and we can combine them freely. For example, the adventure games which allow you to attempt to combine any two objects in your inventory. Since this is low effort, this leads to a thoughtless style of crafting in which the player simply tries every single combination without thinking about which ones might work. In other games, attempting to combine two items consumes those items, even if the combination fails, and so when we get a rare item we are unlikely to experiment with it for fear of losing it. By having the player build an assembly line, we can encourage experimentation by having an infinite supply of materials, yet combining them requires some effort, so the player is less likely to brute force and more likely to think about which combinations are likely to work. Hence my attempt to figure out the combination by experimenting. It's also really nice that the positions of the resources means that each combination requires a slightly different assembly line, so this experimentation doesn't get boring. Especially since there are several obstacles which naturally emerge out the interaction between nearby assembly parts, so some assembly lines are surprisingly more complex to complete than others!

jimbly 2017-08-09 04:30

@gelisam Thanks for the feedback, glad you were entertained for so long! Sorry you didn't find the Recipes in-game, I've added a note about that in the "things you might not learn" section in my description here, as a few other people have also not realized that was there. I LOL'd at you getting "large junk", you really have to go out of your way to make that (but I had to put in some recipe for anything that didn't match the rest ;)!

wh05herlock 2017-08-09 06:13

This is a very fun game.

My only problem with it right now is that there is nothing to stop you from just delivering raw resources for a while, and hitting next turn without changing anything until you have tons of money and can set something more complex up.

I think it would make the game much more fun to have some sort of score, reflective of how much time you took to accomplish the goal.

It would also be nice to be able to access the crafting recipe book whilst in the game as well as from the main menu. I ended up playing with two tabs of the game open, with one just for the crafting recipes.

Other than that, it's a really fun game and one of my favourites so far :).

afendar 2017-08-09 12:09

Very good game with a very good tutorial system. Really very beautiful works on the logic of the game. With sounds and music it can also give another aspec. Beautiful prototype.

jimbly 2017-08-09 13:34

@wh05herlock There is a score (though viewing other people's scores didn't make it into the Compo version), and "fewest turns" is the primary metric, and you can access the crafting recipes at any time from the menu, as well as some limited recipes by looking at the tooltips on the resources themselves, but, yeah, having some better recipe overlay would be nice. Glad you enjoyed it!

ferminho 2017-08-09 22:21

Wow, good entry overall, very well balanced! makes you think a lot and try to optimize, it's hard to get the perfect combination! great work!

mryamz 2017-08-09 22:43

This is a very well balanced game. Great work, I hope you continue to update this game on the github.

baby-dino-herd 2017-08-10 14:59

I'm very impressed by what you've managed to complete in such a short time. The game is interesting and absorbing, relatively easy to pick up, and has a generally excellent tutorial system (though I missed the 'end turn' message at one point and kept getting 'invalid action' messages). Not much more to add other than little polish things, like it'd be helpful to have an easier way to distinguish between objects already placed and about to be placed.

hishicorne 2017-08-10 15:00

Wooooow, it's a huge game with many interactions doable, I'm impressed for a game made in a short amount of time ! It's a very good entry, congrats !

nerdyherbivore 2017-08-10 15:36

Amazing! Love the update with the undo. Great tutorial, I could play this all day!

jimbly 2017-08-10 15:56

@nerdyherbivore Yeah, I'm very happy with "undo" - I could really have used that when I was playing Level 2 super-seriously (I *think* that I managed to get the highest score possible... though it's hard to say with this game... and it's great that, as the creator, I don't know ;), as it took a lot of "try building this, see if it makes slightly more money, oh, it didn't, what did I have that was better before?" iterations, and now you can do that in-game instead of having to take notes to remember ;)

kubenexion 2017-08-10 19:30

Really nice game, with a good tuto :D

I can play it for hours!

maybelaterx 2017-08-10 19:39

Great game! The UX was superb, among the best I've seen in a LD entry.

catoto 2017-08-10 20:11

Very good game! Too bad I'm too dump to complete lvl 1 with only 600 bucks :'(

vasco-rodrigues 2017-08-10 20:47

Very complex game for such a short time. Really good tutorial. It's not my type of game so I can't pass the first level :p but it's a very good game and well built. Congratulations!

rialgar 2017-08-10 22:19

I love this type of game. Plays similar to SpaceChem, but different enough to not feel like a knock-off.

askania-m 2017-08-10 22:24

Oh, how I like this kind of games. When you learn and get used to rules and then can create and get some stuff and then develop your skills, etc. It is satisfying :)

foodzilla 2017-08-11 03:19

Hell of an ambitious project! I really want to take a look at your programming framework in Github, I have a feeling I'll learn a lot about doing JS games in it! :)

sarah 2017-08-11 14:20

This was fun, I love these kinds of games <3 The tutorial was really nice, it flowed well and didn't seem to over the top. I always just needed more power though :P Just a few more moves... Overall, great job :D

carsen-d 2017-08-19 20:25

Really fun and addicting game! It's definitely got a great framework that could be expanded quite a bit, and it would be glorious. Trying to optimize everything to get the most money was pretty satisfying, and definitely left me wanting to keep going one turn after another.