eric-smith 2018-12-04 01:55
Nice. I'm also a fan of the Synty Studios POLYGON character/environment packs! I own 4 of them.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → PeonCraft - Sacrificed
By kornel-meszaros and tomfurrier
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 652 | 3.28 | 83 | |
| Fun | 896 | 2.68 | 83 | |
| Innovation | 320 | 3.41 | 82 | |
| Theme | 370 | 3.67 | 83 | |
| Graphics | 4.33 | 11 | ||
| Humor | 242 | 3.41 | 81 | |
| Mood | 400 | 3.46 | 82 |
Nice. I'm also a fan of the Synty Studios POLYGON character/environment packs! I own 4 of them.
I just ran to the marked spots and ragdolled to the ground when i reached them.
The game looks nice, but the gameplay is a bit lacking and boring. Let me know if I missed something.
Also, the intro should be skippable, it's annoyingly slow.
@fenderbate: The goblin scout dies when reaching an enemy building because he is not enough to fight. :) That's a feature. Go on, don't give up! :)
I like the setting a lot! Seeing the players looming over the battlefield is a very cool imagery. It is also a great touch seeing the other Units attacking the scouted buildings. But the gameplay is lacking, just running from point A to B is not very appealing.
Nice graphic and atmosphere of the battlefield. It could be better with some added mechanics - it feels a little bit empty - but I liked it!
Are voices come from WarCraft? Its so funny
Interesting Concept but even level 1 rogues get stealth right? haha, I def enjoyed the experience would've liked a more satisfying death animation. i.e. a strong enemy chopping off my head or the Giant Hipster smashing me with his hand. Still a fun entry.
Well the music and art are great, it really sets the tone for an epic battlefield, the big guys are awesome. I was really excited to play, but dissapointed when I found out there's really not much to do, you just run to the designated spots, die and do it again. Is there any gameplay use for the complain and confirm commands?
Thanks guys! We promise that after the Jam ratings are over we'll add a free DLC with our voices saying more peon complaints! :D
Graphics were very nice but some more unique mechanics could've been added to make gameplay a little more fulfilling. Other than that, very well done!
Really funny! An obvious parody, and you've done it quite well! Confusing at first, but quickly realised my inevitabled purpose. Great job pals!
AhAH i loved the intro with the Warcr... Peoncraft title and the war startegy :p Good job super cool
Definitely a really cool take on the theme! I loved the graphics. The gameplay needs some more work, as there isn't really any objectives. I treated it more as a simulation, and it was a cool world to explore. If you took more time to work on this, you could have something really cool.
Hungarian developers ;) Jó játék lett srácok :D
@jmarkohun Thank you fellow hungarian dev! :D Köszönjük szépen! :)
This game is amazing! As a fan of the Age Of Empires series, I actually so this t my peons a good amount (although not so much as some…) .I love the idea of playing as one of them! The audio is cool and the art is nice.
My one comment is that it would have been nice to see some challenges / obstacle to getting to the objectives. Maybe a puzzle, a set of guard enemies to be avoided, etc. Without that, the game got a little repetitive.
This game is amazing !!! The amout off assets you have createt is incredible. Maybe you could add some background music do make the mood perfect...
I get why strategy games don't usually make you play as a peon - it's kind of boring. But I really appreciate the little guys' sacrifice so much more now!
As for the game overall? Wow. Great job on the aesthetics (it reminds me a bit of the Xbox 360 game *Kingdom for Keflings*) and you wonderfully captured the mood of Warcraft with those grunts. The looming players are just awesome imagery. If you want to keep going with this I agree that there needs to be something to actually do while walking from A->B, but as a jam entry? I'm so glad this got made. Props.
The visuals are really compelling here, with the nice poly models and these two huuuuuge player giants dominating the visual space, standing over and gesturing. That was VERY cool. The voice commands, existence of "complain" button, and the music were also very nicely put together.
I appreciate that you felt free to use asset packs but then opted out of the related categories. That said, your "direction" or whatever you want to call the skill of putting elements together, was on point here.
I found the gameplay fell a little bit short of what I'd imagined when I saw the awesome visuals. I let my imagination run a bit, and imagined I would be helpless but running around in a battle and able to kind of use stealth. So OK, it wasn't that, which would have been extra-cool. But what you did have was still enough to get me running around in this cool space and getting that feeling of being a peon, which is what you were after.
Nicely done - cool entry here.
What a great compliment to Warcraft series (which I am a huge fan of). Graphics are very advanced and gameplay is interesting enough. :)
So cool theme and mechanics. The art concept is amazing. It's a shame my laptop couldn't take it for too long, but I enjoyed!
I really want to try your game, but I'm a mac user ( Don't judge me :p), Do you plan to make a ac release soon ? Thanks, your game seem to be amazing !
Oh man, those jump scares when I'm not expecting to get killed, lol.
It seems a lot more time was focused on presentation, rather than actual gameplay.
Well done! You've done a great job at making something look this good in such short time!
nice cool game here !
Small Bug: The wood chopper in the human base is chopping in the wrong direction.
I realy like this game. It reminds me of my War Craft 2 & 3 time. You even made human peons and different orc models. Nicely done :). There are game called Savage (and Savage 2) which are like your game, but as team play 12 vs 12 (plus commanders) games ;).
Loved the idea you modeled your two avatars playing from behind. It would be great if you would have finished the killing animation but we all know how the deadline crawls closer and you don't have time for some minor things
Cheers everyone!
Thank you for your reviews, you make us really happy! :)
In return, we made the WebGL version of the game too!
Hi @leandre-renouard, Thanks for your interest. I have added the WebGL version and the Mac OS-X version. I hope this way you will be able to play the game! ;)
I loved the art work, & those huge characters watching over you! It was fun roaming around, but I didn't manage to survive very long.
@garygreen the part of the simulation is being _the sacrifice_ ;)
Very nice game ! :)
(but I did not get what the Q and E buttons where for, just fun ?)
I really like the big characters who are rising in the sky. The atmosphere is also very good
I'm a big fan of low poly, nicely done. More work needs to be done on gamplay but this game has a lot of great potential!
I really like the idea and the presentation. But there is very little to do in the game. Maybe if the "fake player" actually issued commands and you had to gather resources and things like that would make the game more interesting.
Nice job though.
Very neat. You did that in 72H, I'm impressed.
Good job ! I like the button to complain. It would be funny if the chef could answer it.
Very good game, I love those giants. And an improvement may be giving more feedback when you die because I didn't understand at the beggining what was happening after I died 😅
You get a huge amount of innovation points from me, though probably because I was a massive wc3 fan. When I fired up the game I got the concept immediately, and it brought a wide smile to my face. The gameplay is simple, but it was such a brilliant pov to have that no one ever considers. Loved the giant characters to make it feel like you were playing on a WC tabletop battlefield, and it made me miss things like orc burrows and all the peon quotes. One concept that might be interesting to add would be to have 3 possible locations of the enemy and you have to figure out where their base is first. Tbh I'm not sure how to make that fun since it'd be another trek if you ran into the wrong base but that's just one of the core concepts of scouting 4p maps.
ngl, the whole time I was thinking there's no sacrifice if I can just send spirit wolves out :)
I don't understand it.
Thank you all for the reviews! :) @peachtreeoath that was absolutely the goal, I'm glad you liked it this much! :) Unfortunatelly we did not have enough time to improve on the scouting mechanic and thus I'm not a good level designer, being a programmer myself, we kept this method.
@franciszek-pyrc I'm sorry to hear that. The game is a simulation for a peon (basic unit in strategy games like Warcraft) which is often used for scouting in an early state of a match as it is cheap to produce. This way real life players often sacrifice the cheap peon to discover enemy base locations because bases are randomly spread across maps. You play as the peon being sacrificed for this. The other mechanics are just fun factors for those who played and WarCraft 1-3 games. :) I hope this explanation helps you.
Really fun premise. After a bit playing it I was able to figure out what to do. I thought I was supposed to go to the green circle, (still don't know of I was supposed to) but then I realized that it's actually the player gods clicking stuff? I loved that! I really felt like I was on the playing field. Also, to avoid your ragdolls from breaking apart when you die, which is really annoying, either lower the force applied to it, uncheck Enable Preprocessing and/or enable projection on the Joints using either ConfigurableJoint.projectionMode or CharacterJoint.enableProjection all on the ragdolls joints. (https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/RagdollStability.html)
A man after my own heart! Warcraft 3 is my favorite game, and this was a fun change of perspective. The graphics and concept are nice, although the mechanics are a bit bare, it was still fun to play as the peon for a bit.
It's ok. I wish there was a little more gameplay though :-)
Wow, @eric-smith thanks for the tip!! When we'll have time will fix this!
Graphics are really nice and I liked the parody with RTS games, but I missed more things to do, I was just running around. The idea is interesting, I hope you continue the development.
Very interesting idea :D Was fun to play^^
I am a huge fan of warcraft and this is an excellent game. Loved the twist. Also the sound and graphics and animations are outstanding. Good work
Great concept and for a jam game it really looks great too! :) There could have been a bit more instructions on what to do. Still, as for me, I was just happy that I got a bit of that zug-zug action in third person. :D
This is a great use of the theme! I love the graphics and the sounds!
Very funny game and the use of theme! Good luck!
I **really** liked the premise, but the execution could have been a bit more creative.
Considering it's a jam game with pre-made visuals, I believe you could have dedicated more time honing the game mechanic.
Currently, the game is simply "run to a marked target 4 times". Some observations from the top of my head:
- Since you're scouting, you probably shouldn't know where the enemy buildings are. Some kind of thick actual fog obscuring the map would be good (the pretty posh way would be with a fogmap and some funny world-space fog shaders, and the cheap jam way would be a big particle system, and you delete particles from visited tiles), or at least do not put a huge bright goalpost right on the target! - Given there is no exploration, then at least some challenge, say, enemy troops you have to avoid, or a competing enemy peon you can whack to make him fall back to the base for some time. - There is a lot of flavor mechanics that don't really add to the game: - Jumping, while satisfying, is literally useless. trim it or make it useful! - Running, too, could just be always-on or removed entirely. - I think the unit responses are a great flavor, but it would be nice if they had some use (say, if you had to complain to get your next order, and acknowledge to stop being clicked). - You're using copyrighted sounds from Warcraft 3, I would suggest replacing them with your own voiceover (which if done decently can actually add to the game's character).
Overall, this is a great concept! I was smiling all the way through the game.
Haha I love it, always wondered how a peon in Warcraft felt :-D I do however which there were more objectives with more stuff to do, like being commanded to build stuff :-)
Anyways, the controls felt great :-)
Hello guys, hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Thank you for all the reviews, we are happy to see this many! :)
Extra thank you @kroltan , your feedback is well detailed! These are the most valuable ones. When we'll have time we'll look into those how can we implement them!
I love the idea but the game isn't really fun for me. Basically: walk to a point, die, start again.
The low poly art drew me to this game as I am a great fan of low poly =) When I rated the game I noticed that the graphics entry was opted out of so I understand that it may have been asset art? Nevertheless, I like the look of the game. It was not so obvious why you died but I read in your description that it's the way the game acts when sacrificing. Fun idea to sacrifice scouts because it probably reflects how terrible their job must have been for real in the past. Thanks for your entry!
Played the game, nothing real interesting about it. My head is always ripped from my body when I die. If all I do is walk from building to building in a sequence guarantee I die every time (because of invisible arrows)then walking is the real game play? Complaining or confirming doesn't do anything. This isn't a bad idea per say, just needs some polish and more features that comes out as more of a game and less of a tech demo. For example if it was real fog of war and you couldn't see down the map or the guy was holding a shield with DMG points to defending against the arrows. Anything really, because at the moment there is nothing here.
Great graphics cool idea but i agree with some of the others here a fog would have been cool and maybe some stealth or exploration by removing the quest marker. it was cheeky and fun so cheers :D
I agree with @bingdom, nice presentation but it lacks in gameplay, anyway, there a nice there.
I loved the audio, voice acting, and the attention to the detail, such as the other units chopping wood or attacking the enemy buildings.
For a gamejam game it would have probably been better to focus on the base mechanics, but I enjoyed it regardless. It would be very interesting to play a game where you can switch different careers beneath the guidance of the player and accomplish various tasks.
@simanis thanks for the feedback!
One my inspirations is from an old game, Dungeon Keeper 2. It had this mechanic you mention. Try it if you have some time - you can posess units in it. :)
Great graphics! Definitely remind me of Warcraft 3 hahaha :) The game mechanism is matching the theme but I think it can be more fun. Good job!
The characters in the background really build the mood of this game! That's a very interesting concept and entry. Congratulations, well done!
Just like most mentioned, the gameplay is pretty lacking. Graphics and sound are not bad. But i found myself bored after a quick play through of the game. Definitely can be improved next time :)
Overall this is great - I like the graphics and the sound effects and the overall atmosphere. I like the RTS spoof and humour of the concept too. I liked how you see the world procedurally continue after you make the objectives (like when you scout a tower, you later see your allies attacking it).
my only real criticism is I would sometimes die without understanding why? like i wouldnt see/know what killed me (could just be my bad skill though!), but this was minor as part of the game is dying as a peon! :id:
Good job!