FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD44 → Brain Drain

Brain Drain

By parserk and svdvorak

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1793.8132
Fun2863.5833
Innovation184.1133
Theme264.1933
Graphics1914.1233
Audio2123.6630
Humor1843.5131
Mood3703.5032

Comments

bartman 2019-04-30 14:24

Ohh pleaaseee add a macOS or webGL version, your game looks very cool and I would love to play it!

tiffi 2019-04-30 14:27

Didn't get too far I guess. Why are they sometimes just going away if I didn't even use them? A little too fast paced for me. Would have loved some cool sfx. The graphics are pretty cool! Thank you very much

jam373 2019-04-30 14:29

Great! Love how chaotic it gets.

alexfsmirnov 2019-04-30 14:31

The game looks amazing! I love the artwork and the idea! The window gets a bit messy after workers keep on dying, but that's OK. This is great, nice job!

awerar 2019-04-30 14:37

Wow! This is a really cool game. I did find it quite hard to keep track of everything though. And also I didn't quite understand why you would wanna link people and such. Despite all this, the graphics are really cool and your theme interpretation was spot on. Well done!

vjmunhoz 2019-04-30 14:49

waiting a Web or Linux version in order to play it =)

tomfu 2019-04-30 14:55

A big plus is probably that I saw the thumbnail and was interested. It seems like a fun idea and I really liked the artstyle of it.

Sadly I didn't know exactly how my choices of putting them in order had an impact on the game and so I felt better connecting them randomly to the tasks. I also didn't get when the people would disappear and when they would get a burn out. The visuals for the individual happiness was hard to indicate.

I also have a crash to report. The game sometimes broke down. My instinct tells me that it has to do with the process of dragging the linking while the person gets "inactive" or something similar.

But overall my suggestion would be to slow down the speed of the game in order to have time to understand some mechanics of the game and maybe add some more isuals to indicate certain processes a bit better.

yohsk13 2019-04-30 15:10

2007$ and a dozen of fried brain o/. Fun and Chaos at the end (Panic factor when the deadline of a project is near and you throw every employee at a project to avoid a strike and fry 3 of them in the process). it took me some time to understand that the mental health (border and face) is different from the green under them (contract time I guess ?). Very fun, very fast paced game.

svdvorak 2019-04-30 15:33

Thanks everyone for all the feedback! Sadly I got the game fully playable pretty late in the jam and never had time to do too much game balancing so it seems to skew towards pretty hard the first few tries. Though I don't want the game to become too slow when you've played a few tries.

@bartman @vjmunhoz I'll see if I can get a Linux & Mac build out, it's built using FNA so there is no option for a web version sadly.

@tomfu I agree that the visuals could be improved, just didn't have enough time! Thanks for the info on your crashes, I've only had one and not sure what caused it. I'll see if I can find the issue.

cem-adiloglu 2019-05-01 08:42

very cool idea but unfortunately i need a mac or html version to play too

would love to try it

nico-fallosch 2019-05-01 12:03

Very interesting gameplay and good music! Sadly my game just randomly closes after 3-5minutes :/

max-torn 2019-05-01 12:16

The game is very pleased. management is simple, but of course you need to keep track of so many things. Enjoyed playing it. Not enough buttons to remove dead characters

doramemo 2019-05-01 12:56

This is a well done mini-game! The art style was great, and the gameplay concept was interesting.

I agree with tomfu that the effect of linking people together, people leaving after a while, etc, are not well explained. I would like to know what "linking" and "leaving" means from the worker's perspective: does "linking two people together" mean they work together? Or does it mean one supports another?

The game pacing could be very intense if you're not utilizing the functionality of linking people together. Although that happened to me on my first try without reading your instructions xD (I was only directly linking people to the jobs) But if the player knows all the mechanics available, he would just randomly link everything together. That's what I did the second try and people would finish the job very quickly and never die. Also on my second playthrough, when I used this strategy, the game never ended and it unfortunately crashed after I got to around $8000.

Interface-wise, I think the screen could be divided into two columns - one for workers and one for jobs. It was very messy when there are dead people on the screen and they were not automatically removed. Also one note to the death mechanic: maybe people dying could count as a failure towards the "!" counter too. Or if you want to make it more interesting, people dying could slow down the rate of new workers spawning.

Overall the game fits the theme quite well and provided a good amount of fun :)

jofersgames 2019-05-01 12:57

Really cool idea and lovely art :)

sbeif 2019-05-01 13:09

One little note, both the people and the tasks overlap incorrectly, making it hard to understand what you're clicking on when there's more than one item at the same location.

Anyway brilliant take on the theme! I loved the art and bgm. Great job!

svdvorak 2019-05-01 14:15

Thanks again for the great feedback! I haven't figured out why it every so often crashes, still looking into it. I'm also trying to get a Linux and Mac build.

@doramemo Good write up. I agree, it's a little unclear though the info-screen was too cluttered as it was already and I kinda wanted people to figure it out for themselves. The idea behind linking people together is that they work more directly with eachother and get less drained from it.

$8000 is a lot! I think you hit the ceiling on difficulty-levels there, will have to add more.

The fact that people dying doesn't count towards failure is by design, as is them staying on the board. It's more of a point that in this company, people don't matter, calculations do. Having them stay is a reminder to the player of the effects of their actions. I do like the idea of slowing down the rate of new workers though, it makes sense.

@sbeif I was hoping to add some physics into the game so that no item could overlap but instead would push eachother out of the way. Didn't have time to get that done though. So now you have to keep it clean and structured manually, as best you can.

svdvorak 2019-05-01 16:48

@bartman @cem-adiloglu @vjmunhoz I've now added Linux and MacOS builds! Enjoy! :D

m2e 2019-05-01 17:07

MacOS build doesn't work. "Could not open because it's possible broken or incomplete"

pusheeneiro 2019-05-01 17:54

Nice graphics.

msalison 2019-05-01 20:57

Nice game ! Really good idea and very challenging ! I like it :)

svdvorak 2019-05-01 22:12

@m2e Ah, darn. I'll give it another shot tomorrow, I can't really test it myself since I don't have a Mac.

vjmunhoz 2019-05-02 12:39

@svdvorak the linux version worked! I executed the "Brain.bin.x86_64" file. I'll play more later and give a proper feedback. Thanks!

svdvorak 2019-05-02 16:06

@vjmunhoz Excellent, thanks for trying it! @m2e Fixed it now, I put in the wrong application name. Tested on my friends old Mac. Just re-download the file and it should work.

m2e 2019-05-02 18:31

I like the concept, sound and graphics, but it's a little bit to stressful for me and I cant play it with touchpad very well.

vjmunhoz 2019-05-02 20:28

I've played a couple of times now. The first time I mistakenly thought that the health was the time and vice versa. After understanding it better I could go much further. I think this could be a nice mechanic for a game simillar to papers please, or these type of "job simulation" game. If you are into those things, I can imagine some weird stories that could come up!

A list of upcoming "contracts" and "subjects" would be nice too.

The best part of it I think is the "Innovation" and "Theme" categories. =)