Traffic Troubles

smbe19 2017-12-05 18:47

The music is quite annoying, sorry. The game is rather boring as it takes the cars forever to drive somewhere. Also I didn't really get what you're supposed to do. I built some roads between the houses and suddenly it said game over. Also, as there is no money you can just build a road on every field...

theozonebe 2017-12-06 14:45

@smbe19 I didn't want to limit the player on how many roads he can build, the real difficulty in the game comes from deciding which roads to upgrade. Building a road on every tile will only get you so far because some tiles will be used more often thus creating congestion and losing you the game. As for the sudden game over, that bug should be fixed now. Anyway, thanks for playing :)

jose-pedro-dias 2017-12-06 19:53

It's not clear where congestions are happening. Maybe a heatmap would be more effective than just 1 lighting increase (at a time all my roads were lighted but I couldn't figure out which ones were more congested). Nice effort though. The cars do drive :D

minimurgle 2017-12-06 20:01

I actually liked the music. It wasn't too distracting but it had some nice continuity. I just kind of fazed out while playing and then all of a sudden it's been 10 minutes and I've lost. Hadn't even realized the time went by.

I think there are 2 major problems with your game.

1. The way the cars move make it look like I'm running the game at 3fps, which is really annoying. Smoothing that out should help a lot.

2. My game also suffers from this problem but lack of information. I noticed that when a road was too heavily congested the warning noise would go off but I couldn't find the road that needed an upgrade. I noticed a bit afterwords that the congested roads would be tinted red but it was almost impossible to see underneath all the cars.

Overall I enjoyed this one. I think that if you could fix those issues and expand upon it a bit it'd be the kind of game people would just zone out and play for an hour or two.

alexfalkenberg 2017-12-07 10:52

Great idea that could use a little more work. I played through it several times just to see what might change during each play. I agree that better indicators for the traffic density/etc would be useful, and smoothing out car movement would be nice. I hope you continue to update and expand this game. :) Have a great LD!

marc-jones 2017-12-07 11:11

I like the concept. It was a little reminiscent of the original SimCity in terms of both the music and graphics. I understood that the real challenge in the game would come to which roads to upgrade, but I think having a limit on the number of basic roads would also add to the game. It would lead to decisions like "Do I upgrade this road, or build a new one?". I had the same problems as others in terms of finding the squares that were congested, and a slightly annoying thing later on where a new house would spawn and I wouldn't have time to build a road there before the game ended. Perhaps pausing the game to build roads would alleviate these problems, although that would of course detract from the slightly frantic gameplay which is perhaps what you were going for.

likirus 2017-12-07 11:14

a really nice idea, I got up to 1913 score. It starts to lag a little bit when there are a lot of cars on the streets and I agree it's not entirely obvious which roads get the most traffic, I mostly judged it by the number of cars I would see using the road, I didn't really see them turning red. And a minor thing, draw the roads ontop of the buildings, the semi transparent red buildings drawn over the road make it look a little bit red, so I kept thinking that those might be the areas that are congested, but they weren't

gruhh 2017-12-07 16:56

I liked the game, I think it would be interesting if the map was smaller and the roads bigger to be able to visualize the cars better ... And I was a little in doubt about the end of the game, because I felt that it ended without I knowing that it was ending. Congratulations.

Gostei do jogo, acredito que seria interessante se o mapa fosse menor e as estradas maiores para poder visualizar melhor os carros... E fiquei um pouco na dúvida sobre o fim do jogo, pois senti que o mesmo acabou sem eu saber que estava acabando. Parabéns. :flag_br:

btwj 2017-12-15 14:21

This game sort of reminds me of a grid-based Mini Metro. I understand that such a game requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work (like pathfinding etc), so it's quite commendable that you managed to achieve something like this in a short amount of time. I think some improvements that can be made would be to smooth out the motion of the cars so they don't visibly jump along the roads, and perhaps some balance changes to make this more strategic (for instance, some kind of money system or dynamic events that happen throughout the course of the game). Good job!

cubeeo 2017-12-21 00:50

I also was not a fan of the music. Granted, it's about on par with the type of music I would make, if I made my own. The mouse click location was a full two tiles off (at least)- one vertically and one horizontally. So, I just filled the entire screen with roads, and then did nothing else (since I wasn't going to be able to accurately place them anyway). Never upgraded roads (I'm pretty sure - never intended to, at least) - just filled the screen with roads, and let it go. Here's the end result:

TrafficTroubles.png

As you can see, without any strategy at all, I beat previous commenters who were actually strategizing, and paying attention to clutter or traffic. I did none of that - just spammed roads from the onset, until the screen was full. So, unfortunately, I think the scope of the project was too big, resulting in it not being refined and polished in a way that would prevent these things.

vfabien21 2017-12-21 08:32

The idea is interresting. Same as the others I reckon that information is missing. I also came to the same conclusion as @cubeeo : there is one big mecanism missing, a cost for the roads. Without it, we just have to pave the map.

But hey ! that's a game jam and the purpose is try to do interresting things. And that's what I really appreciate there. It is definitelly the kind of game I wish to plaay !

I have had one technical issue : I coud not upgrade the roads when left clicking them.

muffty 2017-12-21 11:26

The music definitely needs a mute button. Also think about an introduction or tutorial scene. I feel like you did not added very much game aspects.