amkingtrp 2018-08-16 21:41
Enjoyable puzzle game; pretty straight forward mechanics make it easy to pick-up and play, and I found the keyboard controls to be actually perfect.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Cave Dwellers
By cheesey-bob
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 203 | 3.62 | 27 | |
| Fun | 99 | 3.76 | 27 | |
| Innovation | 184 | 3.52 | 27 | |
| Theme | 388 | 3.50 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 564 | 2.74 | 27 | |
| Audio | 522 | 2.29 | 27 | |
| Mood | 383 | 2.89 | 25 |
Enjoyable puzzle game; pretty straight forward mechanics make it easy to pick-up and play, and I found the keyboard controls to be actually perfect.
The art isn't really well, but it's surprisingly enjoyable and really fun! good job!
Interesting idea. Esp. since you made it a puzzle game and not a simulation. I however seem to fail to grasp the mechanics, I was stumped at the level where you have to get 9 population. Maybe you should indicate more which characteristic requires more.
Still, solid little game!
Loved the game simple and challenging, great take on the theme.
A very solid puzzle game playing on limited space and resources. After the tutorials you get slapped in the face with the sudden difficulty spike. I must say the first non-tutorial level is one of the harder levels :P And the last level required a few retakes but I managed to beat it spent a solid 30 minutes to beat all levels and I had fun every minute.
The graphics and sounds are not that great but gets the works done. And it would be nice if it supported mouse.
My win screen :D TsRd8CD.png
Thank you all for the kind words! I'm glad people were able to enjoy this. Art and sound design are not my strong suits, so I definitely deserve criticism in those departments - something to aim to improve for next time.
Apologies for the difficulty spike! I should really have done something about that after playtesting, but didn't for whatever reason. If anyone gets completely stuck on a level, you can edit the data files to change the win condition for the level (though you'll have to restart the game). The "level_x" files show the layout of the level and the "levelData_x" files have the win threshold on the second line.
Congrats @sh1rogane!
It's really fun! Definitely a great idea for the theme. You did a great job with the design as well, with the tutorial levels and increasing difficulty. I honestly don't mind the art. It's simple and portrays the buildings/icons well. I would have liked a bit of background music. Everything feels too still when I'm stopping and trying to think how to solve the puzzle. Maybe if the river was animated or there was some sort of environmental lighting kind of effect so it doesn't feel so static. Overall, you did great!
While I generally don't like resource puzzle games I liked this one a lot!
It got very difficult for me at "Cutting Corners", I think I still need to figure out how the mechanics work. If the game taught you the mechanics of the game (and the tricks it may have that you'll need to beat the game), it would be a lot more enjoyable for me. Also, the audio hurt my ears just a little, might need to make the sounds a little less strong on the ears.
This puzzle game is really cool! It controls great, rattles my brain, and it has so much potential. I'd play a post jam if you made it. Keep it up!
I'd like to give this a try and rate it, but how do I run this without any .exe file?
heeeeee i was impressed by the puzzles. mechanics were good as it went along. then it got really hard. xD nice work!
Thank you all for the feedback! I'll see about making an updated version with a more approachable difficulty curve.
@lexyvil I've now put the installation instructions from the itch.io page onto this page as well. The file "Cave Dwellers.jar" is an executable java file, so you should be able to run it as you would a .exe file.
If your pc can't run the file (after extracting it from the zip), then you may need to update or install java for the game to work. This is free, but if it's too much hassle for you to do this for a LD game, then I'll understand if you skip this one. Though, as far as I know, it's pretty standard to have java, so this shouldn't be an issue.
The audio is very unpleasant. I find that sometimes the sound plays really quietly, and other times it plays so loud that it hurts my ears. Otherwise, I like this game quite a bit. The graphics are neat, and so are the mechanics. It really had me stumped, but that's what a puzzle game is supposed to do.
This is a fun and interesting puzzle game! It does get hard rather quick, as each level is a breeze and I get stuck on this one level for over 20 minutes.
hard.png
I feel like I've done every combination but I keep getting a population of either 7 or 8, when I need 9. Not that it's a bad thing, since I do love myself a challenge. 5/5 for the theme and as well for fun though~
@lexyvil A lot of people are having trouble with that level (in hindsight, I did make it too hard for the first non-tutorial level). So, here is the solution:
https://imgur.com/a/Dt3ZVbl
I think the levels after that are of a more appropriate difficulty.
@the-tophat-demon Sorry about the audio! Was the issue that the volume wasn't balanced between different sound effects, or were you getting inconsistent volume between repeated plays of the same sound effect?
Really needed to think through the puzzles which was awesome and fun. Any tips for puzzle design?
@cheesey-bob Well, playing it again (same downloaded file) the audio sounds completely different. I guess it was glitching out the first time I played the game? The sounds would play real quiet, and occasionally they would play ear-burstingly loud and cut themselves off halfway through. When the audio works, its not too bad.
@the-tophat-demon That's very strange. I'll note that down as a bug. Thanks for getting back to me.
@crastinator Thank you very much!
What I did for the main levels was make the map, then play around with it in game for a while to see what score I could get. This method, of course, only works for open ended puzzle games like this, and I wouldn't recommend using it for anything other than a LD game, as it's really not exploring the possibility space thoroughly enough.
I think what I did right in terms of puzzle design was the tutorial levels. For those, I wrote a list of all the aspects of the mechanics that the players should know, then put them in the order I thought they should be taught. For each aspect, I then made the simplest possible level which required the player to understand that aspect.
If you want to hear some good advice on puzzle design, you should play through Portal with the director's commentary on.
Very nice puzzle, with a good theme. Damned, these fields must have a crazy productivity ;-). I think that I took 9 level to fully grasp some mecanism. Well done.
Tricky stuff as it went, but overall well-done. Hope you've had a great LD!