Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD41 → Sim Defence
By vinegarlove
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 608 | 2.87 | 22 | |
| Fun | 577 | 2.77 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 404 | 3.26 | 21 | |
| Theme | 390 | 3.50 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 642 | 2.37 | 22 | |
| Audio | 481 | 2.29 | 22 | |
| Humor | 69 | 3.68 | 21 | |
| Mood | 321 | 3.07 | 22 |
Nice start, I see where were you going with it, too bad you didn't manage to get all the content into the game. It's a nice blend of incompatible genres that you've pulled off in a great way. Maybe not sending enemy waves before you choose your first answer would be a good way to let players familiarise themselves with the interface/game.
@Moczan Thanks for the comment and the brilliant suggestion, i really appreciate it.
The idea vastly surpassed the execution sadly. I had in mind the following feature: - A good tutorial. - Reverse Date (The goal would have been to lose after discovering some truth about the other character) - Having the enemy and player units to interact
Instead of all that, i did a parser for a 25 lines dialogue o/
An interesting concept, it would be great to see it developed further. I'd love to see the tower-defence side of it added to. Having to juggle between fighting off bad vibes whilst keeping up conversation would be a really fun game!
I was curious so I checked out the source code, especially to see the parser. I think that you got lost in all of the artificial complexity. You probably don't need 8 different scripts for a jam game, and you definitely do not need a parser (but you know that already). What are you attempting to parse? Even in a more complicated game, what is the problem parsing is an answer to? I had a similar problem in college, overdesigning left and right. I suggest you recode the game, with a simpler solution in mind. Recoding my applications was good practice for my similar problem.
it wasn't overly clear what the bottom part of the game was for. Some tutorial or instructions on how to play the game would have been helpful.
Hey, congrats on your first LD, and welcome to the community! :)
Awesome idea! The dialogue is great -- of course there could have been more content, but I think what's there is great. If there is some more interaction between the two games, maybe if the dialogue also reacts to the tower-defense game, I imagine this would be really fun! It's of course unfortunate that you've underestimated the complexity of the game, but what you've got here is a good start and a good concept, so I hope you'll continue this project.
I had a look at your source code, and the dialogue parser does seem a little overly complex to implement and debug in a 48 hour game jam... My advice for next time would be: If you really need to use a specialized data format (which may well be the case because it simplifies level design), pick a format that can be parsed with minimal effort. For dialogue trees, you might want to use XML if there's a library for it in your framework. Otherwise, design your own format that can be parsed for example using regular expressions with capture groups. For our game, we used this approach to design platformer-style levels in a simple text format, and managed to parse it in about 10 lines with a regex. It's absolutely ugly, but it works and it's easy to debug. (if you're interested, [here](https://github.com/phigames/ld41/blob/master/web/baselevel.dart)'s the source code with the level string, [here](https://github.com/phigames/ld41/blob/master/web/baselevel.dart#L89)'s the parsing section)
Anyway, I hope you're continuing development on this, and see you next time! :)
Nice first LD! I hope you learnt a bit from it!
Seems like you were probably short on time so you didn't get to get to everything you wanted (like me haha) so maybe game suggestions aren't as useful because you probably would've done more had you had time! BUUUT in terms of the game, I'd say it wasn't super clear which graphic corresponded to what when the game was running. Also a quick polish thing you can do with a short period of time is add in a title screen and some simple in-game instructions, they add more to the game feeling like a full game :)
Oh also, despite not being quite finished, this game has a lot of charm to it :)