FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD42 → This is a Town

This is a Town

By mdacoffee

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall3.4310
Fun3.4310
Innovation2.9310
Theme4.3110
Graphics2.6810

Comments

pierre-avinain 2018-08-14 11:58

Very cool game, with an original idea to do web-based game !

happy44300 2018-08-14 11:59

Nice little city builder, keep developing it!

parkerduncan 2018-08-14 12:06

I like the basic idea of a sim city clone. It was one of the ideas we thought of going with. I could never actually figure out how to get food to my supermarket. With that since there is no punishment like a game over if you get to far into debt or everybody leaves your town because they are not happy makes it feel kind of pointless after a sec. I know Sim City type games usually don't have a game over but they tend to have multiple ways of your town kind of just not working if mis managed. Never the less I still really enjoyed the game and concept! There was a good amount of thought to the paths you can go down with this game.

11tomi12 2018-08-14 12:11

You should bind the Next month button to a key because you need it very often. The idea is neat, though!

gexalmighty 2018-08-14 12:15

Either I don't understand how this works or there is a bug with income, I can never seem to gain money even if all of my buildings are green or yellow, I just lose money every month and I didn't do the math but it feels like im losing much more money per month than just my builder costs even if I don't build anything

wevel 2018-08-14 12:46

The main idea of this works well and definitely fits the theme. However, its a little too easy to run out of money, especially as its difficult to tell which buildings are the ones making or losing money (even looking through the finances history).

mdacoffee 2018-08-14 12:54

@pierre-avinain @happy44300 Thanks for the encouragement! It means a lot for my second (published) LD entry.

@parkerduncan Glad to hear you liked the idea - I'm curious to see how others would have done it (I haven't seen any for this LD so far).

As for supermarkets, they need "stuff", which is produced by factories. If you build a factory nearby (realistically, anywhere with utilities, since they have a large range) supermarkets should then have "stuff" to sell.

I've added penalties for debt to a [to-do list](https://gitlab.com/dacoffee/ld42/milestones/3) for a future post-LD update. The original plan was that any buildings whose balance dropped below 0 would move out, leaving an empty lot that needs demolishing, but this wasn't added by the deadline. Instead, I'm intending to add an income-based tax mechanism, meaning that if a building's needs aren't satisfied, their income drops, meaning you can't claim tax from them.

mdacoffee 2018-08-14 13:03

@11tomi12 Thanks for the suggestion - I've added that to the post-LD to-do list.

@gexalmighty @wevel I didn't have time to complete the proper incomes/expenses breakdown in the Finance menu - you might have noticed how small and empty that menu was. I've added that to the to-do list as well.

The actual transactions log was designed partly as a debugging tool to be honest, but I kept it in as it's somewhat helpful. If you're not sure which buildings are costing money, you can identify them by the number in the "reason" column of the log. This corresponds to a building ID, which you can find for each building by clicking on the building and looking at the number in the address bar. (Don't change the URL manually though, as that will reload the game and you'll lose your progress.) I'm aware this is tedious, so I'm hoping to improve that at some point.

baconinvader 2018-08-14 19:21

Fun little city builder, glad you managed to finish it!