raiponz 2017-12-05 10:46
After few turn my city was in fire and totaly plaged. I m sure im missing something important but what ?
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD40 → Catastrophic Cities
By drauthius, worai and Sauili
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 572 | 3.45 | 47 | |
| Fun | 657 | 3.22 | 47 | |
| Innovation | 643 | 3.08 | 47 | |
| Theme | 614 | 3.40 | 47 | |
| Graphics | 326 | 3.89 | 48 | |
| Audio | 637 | 2.63 | 44 | |
| Humor | 886 | 2.18 | 38 | |
| Mood | 810 | 2.96 | 47 |
After few turn my city was in fire and totaly plaged. I m sure im missing something important but what ?
Great entry!
Although you warned me, it is reallly imba :D
Overall, it's a bit difficult to actually judge the degree of impact spending money had, since there are so many different things that change over the course of a turn (Appproval, Crime, Unemployment etc.). Perhaps some sort of graph to track how they change, and some in game descriptions to remind the player what each building does. Graphics and audio were decent.
I really enjoy the idea of a city builder that is SIMPLE. I've been working on a city builder idea of my own for ages, but have never really gotten it anywhere nearly good enough to show. The balance between simplicity and feeling like you have agency in your choices is a tough line to walk in game design, and just building enough of a system to feel like a complex enough city to govern over is also hard.
Your game looks great, but I have so much trouble trying to figure out what does what - maybe the system works well, maybe the system doesn't - I can't really tell because I can't follow the causality of what's going on on the screen - your text explanation is fine, but noone reads, and the moment-to-moment gameplay relies on feedback to the players.
And then there's the matter of the random builds - do the locations of stations and hospitals etc matter? If they do then I should be able to direct where they go. If not then maybe the graphic you have there doesn't make sense - or it needs to be made clearer that it doesn't matter, that you can see the station putting out fires from any distance, for example.
The icons on the screen aren't really clear - I can understand the fire icon but I can't tell whether my efforts in spending has made any difference. I can't tell if I overspent or underspent on the fire department - I spent, and the fires hasn't gone out.
Then the putting money into things thing - I can't tell what the money has gone to/is going to. I can't tell if I've overspent or underspent - again, feedback to the player on this is needed.
Feels like the dials about spendings should be locked in where they were, having to hit + every turn feel wrong.
Are there goals? Like growing the population? Or keeping bad things down? I can't really tell.
I really liked the graphics and the amount of detail you have put into them. It feels very nice, when the city grows without you placing the buildings manually. Also the user interface and the icons were structured and well made.
The idea is very innovative and I haven't seen anything like that before. I like the fact that you have to watch multiple values (money, criminal rate, acceptance rate), and so on.
This game suited the theme very well. The more industry you have, the worse it is :-)
As you said yourself, the balancing was not good. After a short amount of time I had nearly no fires (or at least I could put them off in one round) and my acceptance rate was constantly at 95% to 100%. For a prototype this is very good and I would have loved if it would be a little harder and if there would be an actual goal :-)
The overal was good, but the unbalanced experience make unconfortable, cause I made some decisions thinking that they would affect on a way and then my rates go low... I missed the schools too...
An interesting timekiller indeed. I imagine this would work quite well for mobile as well. Looking forward to what you make from here.
However, after a certain time, it just becomes too easy as I just get more and more money available to throw at arising problems.
The city visualization is really pretty, but the game lacks some kind of feedback to let the player know how much their budget allocations impacted the state of the city. Also, it could be clearer why the approval rate changed the way it did. It felt a bit like people in bigger cities just like to hate their elected officials.
The game has a nice concept, the sound is quite good and the visual style is really nice. The scene doesn't feel very dynamic though, it looks a bit static. Gameplay wise, I felt that it is missing feedback to tell the player what was a good decision and what was a bad move. Overall a great game though!
You've got to get he start juuuust right, but when you do you can snowball by every turn investing half in fire and half in health, and if you see even 1% unemployment, put all your money from that turn in to industry. If you do it right you barely ever need to invest in police.
The city graphics are lovely, adorable little buildings. The music is just enough to provide atmosphere and fits the game well, but does get grating eventually. It's hard to tell what does what, it feels like maybe improving fire and health decreases unemployment somewhat, but not as much as industry and that crime is constant at 0 unemployment, but i'm not sure what fires and diseases actually do. Also, approval rating sometimes seemed to shift a lot arbitrarily even though I had kept everything down.
Nice game ! I was rich in my run :p Loved the art style.
Really smart idea for a jam. Only real comment I have is that I wasn't entirely sure where the income increase was coming from
When I started to understand how the mechanics worked it became quite nice, the only problem was that when I found a working strategy all I had to do was click the + icons each turn putting similar values in there each time. It'd help alot if the old values perhaps would be remembered when you end a turn, that'd make for faster gameplay and less boring clicking. Otherwise cool game!
Loved the game, the idea and the graphics, I'm really enjoying it.
I don't know if that's how it's supposed to work but I wish if there was more informations given to the player such as the % reduction once you build,ect.. We can figure it out after few trials though.
A cool feature you could add in my opinion is to add upgrades to the buildings and/or add new threats overtime.
Aside from that, I loved the game, nicely done.
Was able to get crime rate and unemployment down to 0% and approval to 77% before inevitably falling. Buying the hospital removed the sick icons from the buildings, but I don't think the fire station did anything. Could be cool to see everything rebalanced. The buildings were very nice though and seeing the city grow was fun. Keep up the good work!
The game was interesting, but became easy far too quickly for me. I got a feel for how much I needed to invest to wipe out disasters, and my approval and income just kept going up. I stuck at 100% for a while before quitting. If there were harder things to take care of later, or more unpredictable situations, it'd be interesting!
I was able to get past turn 30. Things seemed mostly under control. People really seemed to like playing with fire in my city, most of my budget needed to go there! :)
I was unsure if the location of my buildings played any role. It was annoying to see that my second fire department was built practically next to the first one. I also don't know whether to prioritize building new buildings, or simply spending the money on the departments as they were.
I did see a relation between my spending on each of the 4 factors: I was able to keep crime, unemployment, and health at a very low number and I was still making a profit. So I think the balance was not too bad, but I would've liked a bit more feedback. Every sim player loves graphs :)
Also, nice graphics!
The idea is super great, and the game is really fun too play. I also liked both the music and graphics. More in game info, and more player control. But overall a very fun little game. Well done.
Very nice game, although very difficult. The RNG can be a little rough at times, but I'd imagine that could be ironed out easily with a bit more time. As an example of that, it's possible to you fire station to light on fire the instant it is built. That's game breaking if it happens on the first turn.
Graphics are great, and the icons are clear. It's easy to gauge your progress at a glance, and is rewarding to see your city grow. I like the UX for the most part, although the text % could be nicely augmented with bars, etc. Anyways, a fantastic game to have been made in a jam!
Interesting visual style, but this game is kinda impenetrable to play, haha! It's very hard to get a sense of what effects your actions are actually having, and even harder to get a sense of what they'll do before committing to them.
Really liked the building models you used here. Sounds could use a bit of work, so does the HUD and the overall aesthetic of it.
But fun experience! It really shows promise and a lot of potential. Keep up the great work!
oh, another city builder! and this is really nice game, quite promising
you had a lot of good things going with this game - graphics were nice and polished - interface well made - too bad the balance was off - nice game
Overall I really quite liked it despite your warnings of it being unpolished and imbalanced. Nice little city sim, I had fun trying to find the balance and keep my approval rating from dropping! And neat little graphics too. Great submission!
I think this game nails down the basics of a good citybuilder. It's extremely simple, yet i had to really convince myself to exit the game and write this, because i could see myself balancing the numbers for hours. This game can be actually used as the foundation for a lot of different citybuilding games. Great work!