ninjacatz 2019-04-29 17:49
The game is very atmospheric, I liked how the cubes stagger)) Good job!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → Populistic Optimization by Genetic Selection
By erikkire
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 191 | 3.46 | 31 | |
| Fun | 293 | 3.08 | 31 | |
| Innovation | 80 | 3.62 | 31 | |
| Theme | 216 | 3.37 | 31 | |
| Graphics | 326 | 3.10 | 31 | |
| Audio | 322 | 2.62 | 27 | |
| Humor | 364 | 2.11 | 28 | |
| Mood | 138 | 3.44 | 30 |
The game is very atmospheric, I liked how the cubes stagger)) Good job!
This game was a very unique game, the art style and audio really complement this "sad" world. I was really struggling to get past the aggressive creatures stage. I have 1 problem which might just be me but its your choice of stats meter style of the creatures, i struggle to see which is good or bad. Other then that a very enjoyable game. I would take this further.Stuck.PNG
Very interesting game. Game gets alot more interesting when you introduce virgin births.
Nice mood, but I had a hard time understanding the mechanics at first.
Fits the theme well, mechanics eventually clicked though the meters are _very_ small which made it hard to read information to make decisions. Didn't make it past the aggresive creatures stage, though that might be my fault for killing off all the outer units at tbeginning assuming they were the hostile ones.
I enjoyed playing this game, and the art style, while being simple, fits the game really well. On the other note, the sound of killing a creature was too loud, and the bars where kinda hard to see.
Thanks for the feedback @rustycrow I agree that the good/bad indicator could be confusing. I made it so that if the bar indicator is on the right side it is a good thing for all properties.
Fantastic job establishing a mood. The simulation you created of a society was great. My biggest gripe is that there is no incentive to play the way you intended. It is easy to kill people and rather than wait and establish a productive society, even if the latter is quicker.
Graphics fits perfectly the gameplay. Dark kingdom when you can get an instant lighting bolt on your ass for not being an blue hedgehog. Nice little game dude, you hit the mark with theme interpretation, hope you had as much during development as I did playing it.
The game doesn't work, this is all I see.
Schermopname (280).png
@mika-la-grand The intro is a bit confusing, sorry. Strange that you do not see the top of the screen. Maybe your screen resolution is lower than the game-minimum. The game needs 1024x768 pixels. This is the start screen, or part of it. Just press some random buttons then press enter for the game to start. But it will be difficult to play if your screen is smaller than 1024x768 pixels.
I dont understand intro, but that i am maybe too dumm for understanding it.
Love the idea and execution once you get a sprawling civilization going, but the meters are really vague. Aggression seems random entirely, I've tried a population with left meter aggression only and right meter aggression only and no matter what they frequently kill each other; so that was a tad bit frustrating. Still a cute and relaxing entry, very cool!
@eddensoft I do not blame you, the intro thing is a bit farfetched... What you do is entering a DNA sequence (you know, A,T,C,G), assumingly you own since the idea is that the first and original creature was created in your image (a copy of you and therefore you, since the theme is "YOUR life is currency"). The creatures could therefore be seen as you and you are using their (and your) life as currency... hmm
@peringo The "aggression" stat shows a certain probability that the individual will hurt another nearby. So even if the bar is low there still is a chance of this to happen, just much lower than if the bar were far to the right. Best is to find individuals with zero (bar to the far left), these will never cause any problems, and let these reproduce.
Great game on many aspects. I really loved the mood, the variety of interactions, and the long-standing fun of distroying your citizen in a glorious blast of lightning !
Pros : - Deep gameplay that gets even deeper at each level - Impossible to "cheat" with Virgin Births - Simple but efficient graphics - Great "juice" (screenshake, thunder sound, ...)
Cons : - Maybe some levels would benenfit from being shorter - Impossible to "cheat" with Virgin Births
Overall, great work !
Nice minimalistic art style and unusual gameplay. Remind me game of life Additional plus for pure GL implementation. Unfortunately didn't hear any sound. In total - great entry! :thumbsup:
Great Game! I love the audio, gameplay, and graphics. It's well executed and unique. Good Job! :D
https://gyazo.com/7d03913b120c1d67267267e5df83fab3 I ate dinner and accidentally left it running for a hour and came back to a giant civilization of highly fertile, lazy, healthy, law-abiding citizens.
Interesting game, I've always liked genetic type games. The art is simple, but works for the purpose. It's a bit small though, would be nice if things were a bit more zoomed in.
The sliders seemed like they were supposed to indicate the stats of the creatures, but the line being high or low on the bar didn't really seem to affect them. Unless they were not in the order I thought they were?
@muchoswaffles Thanks! Wow, nice city. The cities I have left unattended have often just stopped growing unless you do not take care of them. Its all about probability.
The problem with the sliders is that it is binary, your chance of interpreting it wrong are 50% for each of them. Is the law-abiding better when it is more to the right or more to the left? I might never find out. The same goes for all other properties.
At the end I just killed people off when they turned gray which seems to work fine. Still the last level seems to take forever! At the random spawn rate in this game this might take half an hour which I think is way too much for an LD game if nothing really happens in it. I have spent an hour on the Self-Surgeon and it was a real challenge and an action game. Here I just sit there and type this text while watching the other window to see who turned gray. I still want to see the ending but I am not sure if I can stand this that long.
That sounded all a bit negative, more than it really is. Actually I like the game. I am a big fan of these little seemingly autonomous worlds with little computer people in it. Reminds of me games like Sim City :-)
Only that in this case there is not really much going on and the game is not very difficult. It just takes long.
What I really love about this game is the gradual introduction to the mechanics. Each level one new property and a simple text explaining everything. Also a simple help key, it could not be easier to understand, really great job allowing me to play your game easily. I cannot stress enough how important this is. I have play (or tried to play) games that had their controls only mentioned somewhere buried in the game's LD site description and games that present a large wall of text at the start of the game. Then some games show you a control screen but only for a second. You have found just the right way to present your mechanics and controls, everything is really clear. Like I mentioned, the only improvement that I have is that the sliders could be more self-explanatory. After looking through the help once again, it is clear from that, that all sliders are better the more they are to the right. Still that could have been a littler clearer, maybe put a little text right next to each slider, e.g. for the Health it could say "Sick", "Feeling Good" and "Healthy" or something, just an indication as to what this slider means and whether it is more on the good or bad side. Just an idea though.
OK, after typing all this I still have 63 to go. As I said, this keeps dragging on and on... :-)
Good work on this game overall, a little background music and sound effects, for killings, sacrifices, births and virgin births would have done oa lot for the atmosphere.
I love the graphics, the gray-scale palette and this little animations. Nice detail how the cubes move in the wind :-D
Really nice entry, interesting game, keep up the good work!
P.S. I am quitting this now, 60 to go.
EDIT: I just was that you have an audio category and that some people commented on your audio. For me it does not play any sounds so I will skip rating you in that section.
This was an interesting entry. I liked the premise as I am a fan of these types of simulations going back to Little Computer People on the C64 and later Sim City (also on C64, but also on many other platforms as well).
I found that there wasn't really much strategy to it, though, as I just waited to get a few people, killed some, and repeated until I had done enough.
I did, however, really enjoy the simplistic graphics, the effects, and the audio.
Good entry, and I am looking forward to future ones.
The mechanism expresses the theme well.
There are always sad feelings in the process of the game.
ld.png
Very interesting game, I really liked the art style. Good job!
This is a very good idea. A very good idea that relies on communication of information. And that's where it falters.
The sliders mean diddly squat, for two reasons: is higher better or worse (Which direction even is higher?)? The sliders tell you that citizen's value for that stat relative to the other citizens, but it doesn't tell you what their true value is. I had a lot of citizens that seemed to be murdering other citizens even though their law-abidding stat was all the way to the right; I suspect this is because even though they were the most law-abidding, their true value was still very low.
What does the productivity stat even do?
How does fertility work? It makes citizens produce offspring more often, but what does that actually mean? 10% more often? 100% more often?
Law-abidding is just annoying. A random chance for a citizen to murder another. Randomness is good for the stat generation, but not good if you need to actually rely on it. I need to rely on my best citizens not getting killed just because I rolled a 1 on a dice.
It's difficult to tell how close a citizen is to death. I know they fade out to black, but if you're min-maxing, it would be nice to see exactly how close they are.
I think about this game again these days.
I think the mechanics of the game are beautiful.
The mechanism both connects the topic and embodies the feedback loop of a complex system.
The only downside might be that the goal of the level is not clear. I'm stuck.