City Building Similuator

yyz 2018-12-14 18:58

The controls seem particularly confusing. The UX design does not seem to help either. Even after reading the instructions and seeing the goal of the game, I don't actually know how I am supposed to win the game. I am not sure if there are mouse controls, or if there aren't. It's not clear exactly what I am controlling or what I am doing.

I keep pressing Z, but nothing is happening in the map and I am getting the 'invalid position' error. Is this location based on my cursor? If it is, it isn't clear and there should be some kind of hover or visual selection to see where this 'position' is, and maybe even a warning or prompt to state why it is invalid eg "There is already a building here.". If it's not based on my mouse position then an indicator should be pointing to what it is referring to.

When I press X, I am using my mouse to click the building but nothing appears to be happening and there is no visual indicator to tell me that I have something selected either, which is really confusing.

I don't understand the two bars at the bottom right that are constantly going up and down. There is no explanation in the game as to what the bars represent and how they affect the game. Or if it does, it's not very visible and some visual effect should occur when the bar is filled or depleted. Or if not, even a simple text that says "You ran out of food!" would make the game clearer. My gold(?) income is also continuously going up but there are no indicators of where my gold is coming from. Maybe try a '+1' floating text to see where it is coming from if it's from the people?

Nevertheless, the graphics don't look too bad, but the building icons appear to be too pixelated as compared to the rest of the UI such as the gold coin icon and the humans. If the game has clearer instructions, it might be more playable. :)

mikabrytu 2018-12-14 19:23

Unfortunately I couldn't understand the goal of the game or how to play it

But the graphics are pretty nice

stola 2018-12-14 19:34

@yyz Thanks for feedback! Simple rules: Green bar indicates hunger, when it runs empty. 3 random citizens will die. You can decrease your hunger lost by building Green buildings. Also you can point out 1 of your citizens with white cursor and press X. Then determine if you want to sacrifice the citizen. Sacrifized citizen gives you little bonus on hunger bar. Blue bar indicates your technology, once it reaches full 3 bars game is over. You can increase the amount of technology you get by making Blue buildings. Building "Grey" buildings (gold mines) will increase your gold gain and allows you to build more buildings. Point of the game is to get 1 of each color which awards you 1 point. More points you get better. So when you are making sacrifices you should always find citizen that has least value to you eg. Color you got most at that moment.

Also simple instructions for moving and building: No mouse mouse controls. You move with your arrow keys. You can point 1 of your citizens with your white cursor and press Z, which will select the citizen and show it's Color. A to reverse and X to sacrifice it. Pressing X will move cursor to Building Screen (on right). With Up and Down keys you can select which building you want to build. After selecting correct building press Z, and then you can choose position of the building. Place the building with Z and reverse with A.

Invalid Position is called if you try to place building out of the map or above another building.

Because we ran out of time, game is basically impossible to lose since citizens will born be faster than hunger bar can never reach 0 when at under 3 citizens. Also thanks for pointing out the floating +1 gold, could have added that easily and we kind of regret not doing that. What comes to other instructions, we simply ran out of time. Ofc we could have added them on instruction page :(

Hopefully I answered all of your questions

yyz 2018-12-14 20:04

Hi @stola , thanks for the explanation. I hope that it will be useful to subsequent players who are trying this game out. It would be nice if more time was spent integrating the instructions or working on the UX and controls for the game as not many people may actually read lengthy paragraphs of texts before trying out a game to understand how to play. Prioritise spending some time designing a game that is intuitive to play, or even having a tutorial inside the game before the game starts would help get players invested into learning about your game and playing more, rather than relying on text instructions.

Edit: If possible, it's also a good idea to get some friends to playtest your game to see how they react, to see at which parts they got confused, so you know what needs to be improved. This will help you learn a lot about your game too.

All the best for the jam! :)

ranner198 2018-12-14 20:29

Screen Shot 2018-12-14 at 2.26.26 PM.png Ran in to an issue right before I beat it but I really enjoyed the game. Really retro and I LOVE RETRO games XD. The game played really well and smoothly. I jumped in without reading the controls and knew exactly what to do from the beginning so great job! 10/10 re-playability

dillon 2018-12-14 21:01

While the basic idea of placing buildings down and trying to keep a population alive isn't inherently a new idea, usually games will just simply put a population cap. The hunger system, and encouraging the player to sacrifice people before it's instead randomly chosen for them requires close attention, and either quick reflex or good spatial sense to figure out where specific colors are to be sacrificed.

That being said, while sacrifice is an element of the gameplay, given I don't exactly have a reason to care for the... villagers? Whatever they are, since they're just ultimately numbers for the score, and the random choice usually doesn't inconvenience too much, the sacrifice didn't really mean anything to me as a player, and I instead mostly focused on building choice. Although, that may just be because the population growth was too quick to have it matter.

Given the field size, and the lack of penalty for just stacking buildings right next to each other, other than a few instances of a person being in the way, the buildings were not functionally different from increasing a stat, or just pressing a button. Conversely, the need to move over a person to see their color, rather than a way to quickly cycle between them makes the act of finding a sacrifice enough of a nuisance to be discouraged from doing it.

To make the game more of a challenge, but still encourage sacrifices, I would make the field smaller, decrease the population rate, increase villager movement speed, and add buttons to quickly cycle between villagers, or alternatively, an indicator that shows their colors as they move around. You're free to disagree with my assessment though.

Minor, non-game breaking bug: Entering the build menu while an unbuilt building is still on the cursor, will result in text doubling up in the bottom bar.

tpsy 2018-12-14 21:42

@Dillon We initially had more plans for the interaction between buildings and people, and the individual roles of every new human, but we had to limit the scope to finish the game in time. You can see the remnants of that from the "Age" on each selected human, which should be updating itself for every individual human (but apprently it isn't).

With this our plan was to force the player to make quick decisions when sacrificing your people. To get the highest score you should always try to sacrifice the color you have the most, but if you are running out of time you might have to settle on the second highest color. The more people of certain color you have, the easier they are to find. The three randomly chosen colors might be off from your lowest color, which obviously hurts your final score.

I appreciate all the criticism though! I agree with the things you brought up, there's definitely a lot to be improved in our game.

dillon 2018-12-14 22:16

@tpsy I understand the quick decisions part, and the different numbers of each color determining the best to sacrifice. The point was more that given quick population growth, and the hassle of finding the correct color taking focus away from buildings, the result is that it's often just easier to let the random 3 be eaten and continue trying to grow the population or gold production.