darkshinobi100 2018-12-03 20:02
really good town building game and I like how you used the theme in it, some background musioc would be nice but overall it's a fun game
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → Sacrifices must be made - Ludum Dare 43
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 803 | 3.07 | 45 | |
| Fun | 857 | 2.75 | 45 | |
| Innovation | 686 | 2.95 | 44 | |
| Theme | 406 | 3.62 | 43 | |
| Graphics | 912 | 2.46 | 43 | |
| Humor | 740 | 2.37 | 39 | |
| Mood | 837 | 2.83 | 39 |
really good town building game and I like how you used the theme in it, some background musioc would be nice but overall it's a fun game
Fun concept for the theme. I had a lot of trouble playing because my resources wouldn't update. I think I had them, because I was able to build more stuff, but I never seemed to get more people despite building houses and hatching babies. But it was a cool concept - I wish I could have gotten a little farther into it.
Fun concept for the theme. I had a lot of trouble playing because my resources wouldn't update. I think I had them, because I was able to build more stuff, but I never seemed to get more people despite building houses and hatching babies. But it was a cool concept - I wish I could have gotten a little farther into it.
Fun concept for the theme. I had a lot of trouble playing because my resources wouldn't update. I think I had them, because I was able to build more stuff, but I never seemed to get more people despite building houses and hatching babies. But it was a cool concept - I wish I could have gotten a little farther into it.
Agh, sorry about the repeat comments. I can't delete them. This seems to be a known bug.
@dob Interesting. What browser were you using? It works for me in Firefox and Chrome. I have also had some friends play it, with no issues on their machines, but I don't know what browser/s they were using.
I did try it on my phone, that doesn't work well at all...
I tried it in Chrome on Windows. It worked correctly on my MS Edge browser - got a little farther this time.
Really addicting game, I had a fun moment playing it, thanks!
The issue I had was my population was not increasing and the events come way too fast. Also, I never had time to sacrifice. Maybe I'll try playing again. There is a fun concept here.
@dk5000p Did you click the star on the Hovel? You also need to have a pig to get it. If you don't have a pig, and you click it, it will still make a baby sound. (Bug)
Same with pigs, you must have the corn, or you will waste the star.
I need a pig to get a kid?
@dk5000p Yeah, they eat pigs... lol
I guess babies don't usually eat meat, but they grow up fast.
I had the same issue as great-bobleny, the mechanic around population seems really weird. If population started at 3 (one per resource farm) I probably wouldn't have had the issue, but I kept making corn and wood while waiting for a new person to pop up.
A fine effort. Needs to be a bit more forgiving - putting "need" icons around might help to explain the resource flow you intended. And the timing / events / plagues would be more engaging if those limits were clear.
@FireSlash That's funny, I was reading your comments on an unrelated game when you posted this...
The game is very much about sacrificing your population to appease the God. So the primary goal is to get a steady supply of humans to sacrifice, which makes it hard to keep your farms going.
What I found to work well for me is:
Place the three farms to start.
Then assign a farmer to the trees and the corn.
When the corn gets to 3, reassign him to the pig farm to collect your three pigs. (keep moving him back and forth between the two farms).
When you have enough wood (5) to build a church, do that next. (You will likely have to do some pig sacrifices before you can grow your population)
Then place a hovel.
Each time you "hatch" (dob) a new baby, sacrifice him.
Now you should be able to keep your plague ticks under control.
Then build a couple more hovels to have a steady supply of humans to sacrifice.
Once you have about 3 hovels, you should have a frequent enough supply of humans to both sacrifice and to grow your farms.
I restarted the game a few times before understanding how to do things. I probably needs to explain why stuff happens like when you want to "create" a baby and you have no pigs have a message that says you must have a pig. Other than the confusion, this was a nice town management game.
The start is a bit hard as I did not understand how the buildings work together and how I can increase my population. I really like that you took the challenge to make strategy game in a weekend. I really see some potential here but it needs more polishing. Sounds and art are fine just the gameplay itself could either need a tutorial or a simplification.
Pretty nice, it needs some polish for sure, but not too bad. I got really annoyed with the sounds :p
Sounds were a bit intense, graphics could have been more consistent. Gameplay was slow but worked fairly well. Good job!
An interesting game with a kind of mechanics. I put a rating) Please rating and me, thanks in advance)
I like the management/supply chain aspects, but it gets a bit unwieldy the longer you play. The timers seem to speed up until it becomes impossible to even gather the resources, much less add and remove farmers as they are dying off and being born.
It also seems possible to place buildings on top of each other and render them unusable.
The mechanic of sacrificing resources in order to delay negative events is interesting.
It would be good if the different resources had multiple uses so that there were more trade offs and decision points.
This concept could be developed into a fun game with some work.
@justalocalhero Wow, you are the first person to comment on the timers. There is a bug causing the timer to run away and start executing as often as possible. I haven't worked out the problem yet...
When I get a bit of time, I intend to fix this bug and many of playability issues.
Are people supposed to die randomly or is this a bug? Kind of kills the game, it would be hard enough without randomly loosing citizens...
@kruemelkeksfan It is not a bug. Each time an event tick (top right bar) occurs, your citizens will each eat 1 pig. If there are not enough pigs, they die.
This ended up being a bad way of forcing you to use pigs.
hm ok, so its just hard to keep an eye on it. Another question: is it intended, that plagues go absolutely ham if you failed once? After my first plague I get the second after like 20 seconds, so that I cant do anything...
Did anybody record playing this game? I feel like Im utterly incapable of playing it (never having more than 3 citizens reliably) and I would like to watch other peoples tactics O.o
The beginning of the game was a lot of fun, as I tried to assign my farmers strategically to wood, corn, and pigs. As soon as the first plague hit, however, the game became a lot more difficult. The Events seemed to happen faster and faster, and my tree farms were being devastated right after I placed them onto the ground. This happened repeatedly, so I just gave up. The idea is fun, but I suspect something is up with the speed of events.
@dob @dk5000p @simon-strange @tornoz @norb @furtive-pygmy @joramwolters @justalocalhero @kruemelkeksfan @firebug
Thank you all for your honest feed back. I have finally gotten around to creating a post release which I think addresses most of the problems.
If you have the inclination and time, please give it a try and tell me what you think. I have some ideas that could turn it into a mini 4x or city sim game.
Remember, this is a post release, please do not update your rating.
R4 is meant to be the version I would have created if I had another 24-48 hours. The win condition may be the exception (when I thought of the game Friday night, I was assuming there wouldn't be a win condition).
* Tweaked the audio and graphics; hopefully they are better...
* Added audio controls.
* Added difficulty levels.
* Added a win condition.
* Fixed runaway timers.
* Enhanced people management.
* Made it clear what resources each building is lacking.
* Wood is now required to produce a baby.
**R4 on Itch ** https://bobleny.itch.io/sacrifices-post-ludum-dare-43r4
Pretty solid game. It took a few moments to get into the flow of it but it had tension and it worked well. I could see with a bit of polish it could be very enjoyable. Good work.
I played the jam and the R4 versions. First of the jam one - most of the stuff was fixed in later versions. Mainly the crazy timers and the clunky UI. I gotta say though, that I kinda liked the pace picking up, just at a slower pace. I can't tell from my R4 (medium) run if that is still in, just too slow or that was removed entirely. You could also make the sacrifies just slow down the event progress (not revert it entirely) to make the events still pop-up from time to time (that would mean a change of the win condition though). If you wanted to lean more towards the sacrifises and the morbid, you could have the player raise the workers, so that at first they would be useless except for sacrifises. They could age as well and the same would apply for old workers. (I told you the idea was morbid).
Nitpicky time: * UI should show the requirements at all times (it's great too see I can't make more of something, but I'd like too see at a first glance that making babies requires wood. (And while we are on the subject - why do babies require wood? Is that a dirty joke?) * the notification sound could be more abtract and/varied - the crying baby sound started to get on my nerves pretty quick (maybe I'm just not paternal enough?) * the music is followed by super a long delay * the buildings could be placed on a grid
Overall, a nice entry and if you added some extra depth and polished the visuals and player-feedback I could easily imagine playing it on mobile.
@secretpocketcat
Thank you for the feedback. Mobile was what I was thinking when I created it. When I have the time, I would like to implement some other ideas I have to see how they work out.
I actually shortened the baby cry in R4 because it was so annoying... lol
What I never got around to in the Jam version, was making wood more relevant. So the R4 hovels have a chimney on them for burning wood to keep the babies warm.
I was wondering if anyone would notice the long delay at the end of the music. There is only the one song, so I wanted a delay to break it up.
In R4, I separated the building ticks and the event ticks. This made it easier to balance the game with different difficulty levels. The building ticks are a constant 5 seconds on all difficulties. On medium, there are about 12 event ticks per event, and they start at a 35 second interval decreasing to a minimum of 25 seconds over a period of about 10 minutes.
Your right though, I think R4 would be more fun if the building ticks also sped up, as the game progressed. This would have been much more difficult to balance though.
If I do a mobile game, it will use a grid or predefined plots.
I never considered making the workers more personable. That could have been fun, but there is no way I would have had time for that...
I like the idea of training them, as opposed to just being born with traits like most other games implement.
It's a cool game, i liked it. Maybe it was a little too hard because even though I sort of figured out what to do, everything went way too fast after the first even and I couldn't manage to slow things down.
Interesting concept! I included it in my compilation video series of games from the Ludum Dare, if you’d like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/o0MHxxyY-UU