FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD43 → Upsystem

Upsystem

By jcsirron, btrotter101, terryg, tamara188, Brandio, Jack Campbell and Miley

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall6093.3333
Fun7762.9033
Innovation6233.0133
Theme3043.7933
Graphics6773.1933
Audio3103.4133
Humor7362.3930
Mood5053.3231

Comments

anfaas1618 2018-12-03 08:21

Big team wrok needed to male game like this this is a nice peace of art control a bit off But made in 48 hrs great...looks like my game too..chek it out

mmason 2018-12-04 05:54

I made it to the home world and I have to say if that joke was there before I got there I didn't see it but it was a groaner. The controls are a bit mysterious but not too bad once you get used to them, I didn't really feel like I had a lot of control over when I was going to lose a ship but I think that is kind of the point. overall a fun little game.

dry-squid 2018-12-05 05:59

Woah woa woa! The aliens are coming! Ring the bells everybody!! I really liked this game, felt rewarding to build up a fleet of ships and then see them all destroyed. Cool simple mechanics. I can see this being fun for quite a while longer with more missions and character

btrotter101 2018-12-06 01:34

We tried really hard to hide the joke until the end. But it's so easy to slip up... :)

jlv 2018-12-06 02:13

Great game, with some very visible inspiration from FTL (and that's for the better). I loved the tactical possibilities, and the balance of the game, if a little harsh in harder difficulty modes, was great in easy.

Pros : - Great mood, humor, and fishy twist - Audio gives a true FTL feel - Nice spaceship design - A lot of thought seemingly went into the mechanics, and that makes for a great reflexion game where rushing is, if not impossible, kinda hard. - Easy mode

Cons : - UI is a little clunky (status messages appear in front of the oh-so important resource sharing window) - Non-easy modes are...actually really hard

Overall, excellent work !

eva 2018-12-06 02:25

I liked the audio and the concept but wasn't sure what most of the icons were for.

carraka 2018-12-08 04:11

Definitely reminded me of FTL! Perhaps I'm risk averse, but I was always happy to find new ships. Now I just need more flavor text in my events, and I'm good to go.

That pun, though ... why ... xP

generictoast 2018-12-08 06:32

Really nice atmospheric sound effects but i was pretty lost at what i was supposed to do. Perhaps a more detailed tutorial could have benefited the game. Other than that, a really cool concept and being able to work with such a large group of people to create a game within the given time is quite impressive!

2018-12-09 01:42

I liked the concept of this game, but the controls were really cumbersome, and made it difficult to really enjoy due to that.

gafblizzard 2018-12-11 16:28

Comments and rating based on original submission version, easy difficulty.

Music: Nice and atmospheric, but I couldn't really turn it up to listen because then the sound effects were far too loud in comparison.

The icons seem reasonable, but need a text tooltip as well, since a lot of the time I couldn't figure out what they did. I tried to resupply, which made an arrow window come up, but none of the arrows seemed to transfer anything. I must have clicked the wrong order or sent something to scout first. I got it to work afterwards I think? But it still seemed to take several click before the window would appear. I think what I was missing was that I couldn't trade with a ship if it was involved with EITHER end of a trade.

The random scouting made it hard to have much of a strategy, since I would see something like 15 fuel collected and nothing else, even though I have full fuel already...even on easy.

Eventually I made it to the homeworld!

Overall it was a reasonable spacey game, nice work.

jfraser314 2018-12-11 16:44

Not my style of game, but still interesting. I haven't played Faster Than Light, so your comparison didn't bring up any strategy or understanding (but I am aware of its existence). I did not get to the end :(

brandio 2018-12-11 21:44

@gafblizzard Thanks for the feedback. I think you found a bug where a ship tries to trade with its self, that's why the transfer arrows weren't working. Glad you played onward!

adamd 2018-12-14 08:45

I was a bit lost as well to begin with but got the hang of the game in the end. I liked the concept and enjoy games like FTL a lot. Could just do with some more polishing but it was fun and I really liked the atmosphere.

pkenney 2018-12-16 03:45

Very nicely done! The mood is really great, with the sounds and background music/ambiance. But that just did well setting the stage for the real star: the strategy. I was definitely thinking a bunch, and making some tough choices. It was a nice mix of both "puzzling" out the order of operations that would be effective, and also on making uncertain risk/reward tradeoff decisions, too. The outcomes were a nice mix of things often going my way, but then going wrong just enough that I was always worried.

I did make it to the end (normal difficulty) but with only three ships of one ... crew ... each. I think I lost one ship to total starvation, one ship sacrificed to delay the bearlons, and another ship abandoned while scouting.

The food needs are pretty extreme, and I ended up deliberately starving most of my crew so that I'd only need one food per ship per jump. But hey, you know... sacrifices must be made, right?

If I had to critique, I would say that the controls are a bit fiddly, and it took me a little while to adjust to them. But honestly, it's a complex enough strategy game that it's pretty normal and I would say these controls are actually pretty darn solid for a jam, where you haven't had ten iterations with playtesters to refine. The roughest part of it was actually the tutorial piece... I got pretty confused about why I was trying to activate certain ships but could not, and the tutorial "taught" me that there's an order to my ships, which is a lie. I pretty quickly figured out the truth, but that misled me a bit. It's good that you left a tip about how to do transfers, as this was not super-smooth either. But since I did read the tip (there was only ONE after all) I was pretty good to go quickly.

Anyway, a very nice all-around package here. I enjoyed it - nice work!

artur-hawkwing 2018-12-17 16:59

Nice game! You integrated the idea of sacrifice well, and I liked the jump animation a lot. The music was nice, and the strategy was very interesting to learn and play.

302-dave 2018-12-29 03:30

I played twice on Normal mode, and it was very difficult, but I think that serves this game well -- The game play loop encourages you to come back and try a new strategy. It nails the masochism trigger that these procedural perma-death games need. It also fits the theme really well considering that from what I can tell, you have an incentive to offload as many crew members as you can to doomed ships so that you can save supplies for later. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

kettu 2018-12-29 13:37

Nice game! I liked the atmosphere and the thrill when ending the turn and hoping that the enemy fleet doesn't arrive yet. Well done!