thesnide 2018-04-23 11:46
I'm definitely a CLI lover :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD41 → Age of Spires IV (Text/Console + RTS)
By david-greene
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 532 | 3.08 | 20 | |
| Fun | 540 | 2.91 | 20 | |
| Innovation | 362 | 3.33 | 20 | |
| Theme | 424 | 3.41 | 20 | |
| Humor | 1.87 | 14 | ||
| Mood | 2.81 | 13 |
I'm definitely a CLI lover :)
I really loved this game, and the interface is fantastic! It's a great idea AND I think the LD crowd would be into it - but it would have a much lower barrier to entry if you could get this on the web somehow. I don't know if it's possible, but via web assembly, or something.
Anyway, really cool entry - I just wish there were more people around!
Very well done CLI interface! I'm loving how many different CLI games came up this time. One suggestion, since I was silly my first time, is to have a help window that you can pop back up somehow, with an indicator on screen of what that key is.
@mrspeaker Thanks for taking the time - I totally agree... I was thinking of using Mina SSH and/or some sort of jailshell on a terminal somewhere and hosting it that way... just didn't have the time yesterday/today. Tomorrow looks better, but I'm in no rush.
This was actually pretty cool! I like your take on the concept. You've got a core simple system that creates pretty emergent gameplay, and the console does it for me. It's an unusual setup and you've made it work. Nice entry!
Interesting game. Ended with a score of 318, with 50 farms... though the bots don't really provide a challenge. Don't know if anyone was hosting a server, but I'd recommend making some tougher bots for people who just want to play singleplayer :)
There's something really nice about this. Maybe it's the style, but it made want to try and figure it out even when I had problems running it :) (There's an issue when you quit the game, the window closes but the process is still active, blocking the server and crashing any new instance of the game you start. Played on Windows 7)
There's a lot of CLI-based games this time around surprisingly - and this is the best one I've played till now. :) The core of the game is solid, and the gameplay variety manages to build off that. Good stuff.
I like the design of this game! I wouldn't have expected as simple mechanics to be able to produce an interesting RTS, but I think you managed it. My only complaint is that while the interface looked cool, it was annoying to use at times and the learning curve on it was rougher than it could have been.
I have a real problem with the amount of soldiers I need. If I make to many of them, they starve to death way faster than I can deal with this problem, and I have no idea about the amount of soldiers I actually need. Maybe add an opportunity to check your enemies' status? Nice idea, neat game!
@Sophie - I completely agree with your assessment. The console project I was trying out for this is called Lanterna, and it had some limitations that I could probably have coded around (and contribute back to their project), but ldjam, time constraints and all that... I wanted to add some sort of persistent "status bar" at the top/bottom for info, but in the end adding another "window" was just plain easier/faster.
@Zinkler - I think the problem is that the attacking party gets a massive advantage with the chance to pillage their enemies (steal food). Battle (attacking) is required to keep your soldier count low (so you don't have to feed them) or you have to spam farms. When making my youtube video, I got rushed down by the rushbot (I think) a few times in a row. It wasn't very fun. In the 1.1 update, I gave defenders a slight advantage with army deaths, but I don't think it was enough. If I had to redesign from the beginning I'd probably make it so food was used to "create" soliders much like ore was used to "create" buildings and ditch the upkeep idea. This way, your army was your army and you would have an incentive to keep a big one (maybe with a small fraction of an upkeep).
Thanks for playing!
Nice game. I think you really shouldn't have omitted graphics, I love the old style command line aesthetics and would have given it a high score. The game was a bit confusing at first but the interface is good and I got accustomed to it pretty fast. The game is a bit hard but every time I learn more about the game and get better results so I feel challenged rather than frustrated. It seems that I can host a server but I didn't try that yet. I think an in-game tutorial would be great, since it is hard to read and memorize a large text tutorial. Great job.
Note for others with this problem, if you try to run this on Windows and just get a bunch of ANSI escape codes, run "javaw" instead of "java" and it seems to work.
Running the post-compo version - my first game ended by me being attacked before I figured out how to do anything. Second game seems to have ended but didn't tell me anything... maybe I was about to run out of food (have more warriors than I had food on the status screen), but it didn't say anything this time. Next game I was defeated as soon as I built my first farm... next game I literally died before I could press any buttons, game timer is at "4m59s" -_-. Noticed there are 7 players in these games, and maybe a stray javaw.exe process, maybe some change a previous bot was still playing and had lots of stuff or something? Killing all Java instances between runs seems to make me not die in the first 3 seconds now.
It seems I'm maybe losing farms as well as warriors when I get attacked, some message about that would be nice.
Once I managed to live more than a minute or two, final score was 32.
I like the console aesthetics, though having to reposition windows each time and having to switch focus to the right window to be able to (q)uit was rather annoying.
Some status about the enemy - perhaps strength of neighbors and a time-delay on attacks so you can see what's coming would be very useful.
Funny concept, Reminded me of the first clicker game -forgot its name- because of the old school interface. But actually, it's balanced (something rare for a compo game) , and the mechanics are simple to understand (even if it could have a li'l bit more of indications) . Overall, nice one !
Took a bit of of getting used to and to figure out the trick to stop losing by my warriors starving in the cold. Then I got game over at Score 177 but no sign of why the game was over, did I win, did i get attacked? Was playing only single player with bots, probably would be more fun against actual people. Some indication of whats going on with my enemies would be nice, an ascii map or something even.