zaza 2018-12-04 04:43
It felt a little confusing at first, the art is really cute! congrats on your first jam :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → Bow-wow Before God
By papabirb
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 893 | 2.92 | 34 | |
| Fun | 865 | 2.74 | 31 | |
| Innovation | 568 | 3.08 | 32 | |
| Theme | 669 | 3.23 | 32 | |
| Graphics | 452 | 3.61 | 32 | |
| Audio | 536 | 2.90 | 33 | |
| Humor | 253 | 3.39 | 31 | |
| Mood | 820 | 2.87 | 31 |
It felt a little confusing at first, the art is really cute! congrats on your first jam :)
i really like how efficient your pixel art is, this game looks like a early 8bit game, but with a heck more strategy than thoses.
@zaza Thanks! I definitely need to work out the feel of it more, but it wasn't something I had time to work on during the jam. This is the first game I've made that wasn't for school, so it's all a learning experience for me! :)
Lovely aesthetic! Keep up the good work!
@fattori @izi Thanks! I love the look of 8bit games, and pixel art is something I love to do, so it was pretty fun for me to do the art whenever I needed a break from the coding.
@papabirb We should have teamed up this jam... maybe next time! (:
Nice work! Here are my thoughts: - The graphics and relentless dog puns are really charming. - I love the contrast of a cutesy dog character demanding human sacrifice. ([All hail Mr. Poofers.](http://homestarrunner.com/ween18.html)) - I was pretty confused by the shop screen. It was unclear what to click on to purchase a boost, or that "MAX" and "+25" represented two different boosts for sale, as opposed to being two pieces of information about the same item. I was also thrown off by the icons for the type of Sacrifice Points being redeemed. For example, the max boost for Pats requires 1105 Sacrifice Points, but there's a Human icon to the left of the number 1105, and an Animal icon to the right of the number. Since the Animal icon is in the same cell as 1105 and the Human icon is not, I thought it required Animal points, but it actually requires Human points. It was only after I noticed the icons outside the table to the left that I realized that the icon to the left, not the right, represents the type of sacrifice required. I'd recommend shifting the icons and numbers in rows 2 and 4 to the right, so that the appropriate icons are in the same cells as their respective numbers. - That said, once I figured out how to play, I got the hang of it pretty quickly. I think you have a solid set of core mechanics here. You may want to tweak the balance, though; I was able to hold out for the max boost in each category without having to use any Special Sacrifice points. - I know you want to do a proper tutorial for the post-jam version, but in the meantime, perhaps you should mention the disaster/blessing mechanic in the description. I wasn't sure what the alarms represented at first. (Speaking of which, are disasters caused by anything specific, or are they random?)
@birdwards Thanks for the detailed feedback!
* Thanks! It's hard to think of that many dog puns in a short amount of time, haha. Continents don't lend themselves well to puns.
* Me too! It evolved naturally as a theme once I got the idea for my mechanics.
* Yeah, I'm not happy with the shop screen. My problem is that I made the actual pixel size of my screens too small to properly render details like menus, so in a post jam version I'll probably be redoing all the art and editing the coding to fit a bigger resolution pixel. I couldn't fit the prices and the icons in the same cell, so moving everything to the left like a dollar sign equivalent was the best I could do with the space I'd given myself to work with. Next time, I'll make mock-ups so I can find a better actual size for my screens, if anything just so I can use smaller fonts (relatively), as anything smaller than 8pt font was unreadable on these screens, making the UI difficult to design.
* Yeah, I agree. Tweaking the balance is what I'd planned to do up until the submission hour, but I had to get some sleep, so I got it to a point I was mostly satisfied with and put it up as is. I definitely consider it still in progress for balancing the timing of things and how many things do what. I might need to look up some information on game balancing, because as is it's a lot of random plug-and-play values I've been using to see how it feels.
* Good idea! I'm not great with descriptions, I'll add that in real quick. The disasters are actually both random and caused by something specific: in general, there's a chance for random natural disasters to occur (which mostly just means going into disaster mode with randomly chosen flavor text); if your Followers or animals (or both) for a continent drop to 0, it goes into disaster mode with a special version of the Sad Continent sprite, with specific flavor text to match.
Thanks for playing!
Really neat game! The graphics were all super cute too :P
@patvanmackelberg Thanks!! :sparkles:
what the hay did i just play
srsly i didnt understand anything. i just waited around until i had to press bless.
the graphics were cool and i stayed for the puns, but i didnt understand the controls and im done
@shieldgenerator7 Sorry, I didn't have time to put in a tutorial or a how to play page :( I did my best to explain it in the description though! I love that all the lines in your comment rhyme :) bit of a Zecora vibe!
A bit confusing... I had some trouble figuring out what to do, but the graphics and sound design were really cute.
A different game,cool game! Looks really pretty and well polished.
@akuirako Thanks! I plan to remake it when I have time so I can make it less confusing and hectic.
@morriss Thanks!! I'm happy I was able to add as much polish as I did, even if the game still needs a lot more work & even more polish going forward.
this was hectic and entertaining lol I was not very good at all. The graphics were cute and the whole thing seemed well put together.
@skettynmeebs Thanks! Yeah, it's super hectic, it seems to either go way too easy or way too hard inconsistently (I couldn't win at all playtesting, but post-jam I win too easily). I need to fix that. I'm glad it was entertaining!!
It took me a bit to figure out what's going on, some info texts are definetely needed! I really enjoyed your artwork on the world map ;) The god reminds me of the pokemon Swirlix :D Seperating the sacrifice shop screen and the god stats as well as the sacrifice screen and the continent screen made it quite hectic and resulted in a lot of switching back and forth between screens - I think the game would be more fun if you reduced the speed and the need to switch between screens. Still, great work for a first game jam! :)
Oh yeah, and a short overview about how the game works in the description on this page would be good!
@yazara Thanks for the feedback!! It definitely ended up more hectic than intended, though I personally enjoy the chaos of switching between the screens, but I do agree that less screen switching would be better. I intend to have it make much more sense when I fix it up after semester. I'll see about making a better description later to help new players more!
Nice Game! The art looked awesome and the audio worked well. A tutorial would've been nice though
@sthor726 Thanks! I definitely wanted to get a tutorial in there for sure, it's in my post-jam plans when I have time.
It was a bit difficult for me to get the idea of the game at the start. Once I understood the game it was fun, just you should consider putting a tutorial next time.
i was very confused for a bit but managed to get to a place where i could keep the world alive and the pup god happy! never figured out the shop though. I just clicked buttons until the god was happy. i LOVE this concept for user interface, especially in that making it spatial forces you to commit time to traversing it, and causes you to neglect one aspect while addressing another. Cool game!
Super ambitious game as a solo dev, the game reminded me of https://www.kongregate.com/games/gazthomas/tangerine-tycoon which has a different play area for each subsystem as well. Your game is super hectic on the first couple playthroughs but I did get a hang of it once I reread your game description. Like @swanijam said, you combined the UI of Tangerine Tycoon with a realtime resource juggling game and came up with something unique. Some more polish and tutorial should get this game up to where it should be.
@pedro-rosa Thanks!! I'm glad you had fun once you understood it! A tutorial is definitely in my plans, I'm finishing up finals in college right now so I don't have time yet to work on the game again, but after today I'll have all winter break to fix it up!
@swanijam Yeah, the shop is the least intuitive part; I made my pixel canvases too small to actually get good amounts of detail onto the screen. The good news is that the way I compensated for that + the game not being fully balanced yet goes well with clicking buttons randomly :wink: I'm glad you like the UI, that's definitely what I was going for! In the future it might be less spatial since traversing without a map can be kinda confusing and I think it adds to the hectic unintuitive-ness, but it'll still be function-based pages that take some amount of time to go between and thus have the aspect-neglecting, hopefully. Thanks for playing!
@peachtreeoath Thanks! It's definitely really hectic at first, that's the major flaw of not getting enough sleep to finish balancing it before deadline. After finals I'm gonna fix it up to ease in a bit slower and work up to the hectic-ness. Thanks for the link to Tangerine Tycoon! I'm enjoying playing that one on the side, it really is the same UI which is super cool since I've never heard of this game before. Very Cookie clicker-esque, but with minigames. More aesthetic polish is already in the works (easier to juggle a few art/music pieces vs. finals rather than programming/balancing/assembling everything vs finals), and a tutorial is planned!
Very confused at the start :confounded: But well made! Good Luck!
@falak Thanks!!
I definitely think a tutorial would help this game out a lot, but I can understand that you wouldn't have time to get that into the jam game. I was also pretty confused at the beginning of the game, but I stuck around for the great graphics and dog puns. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: The game has a very hectic feel, but in a good way. I hope you get a chance to touch this one up after the jam, because I think there's a really fun game here that just needs a bit of tweaking.
@302-dave Thanks!! I'm glad you liked the graphics and dog puns - I've got a whole big handful of more dog puns that are gonna hopefully make it into the post-jam game. Comments like yours this late in the game definitely help keep the dream alive - without the pressure of the jam deadline, it's a lot scarier to tackle a full project like this by myself, haha. I'm gonna try my best, though!