scottdev 2019-10-08 13:22
Looks great and cool idea for a game :smile: reminds me of Fallout shelter
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD45 → From Nothing to Mine
By koemeterion and deathstorm
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 554 | 3.45 | 49 | |
| Fun | 585 | 3.22 | 49 | |
| Innovation | 742 | 2.94 | 49 | |
| Theme | 241 | 3.75 | 49 | |
| Graphics | 626 | 3.42 | 49 | |
| Humor | 703 | 2.41 | 47 | |
| Mood | 869 | 2.91 | 48 |
Looks great and cool idea for a game :smile: reminds me of Fallout shelter
I enjoyed this quite a bit! For long-term play I'd want some sort of auto-selling mechanic, but for something with the scope of an LD game that's really not needed.
Balance wise I think it's a bit too dependent on your start. If it starts going well early on, you've won, and if not, there doesn't seem to be much you can do about it
Really cool and interesting concept you made, absolutely loved the concept you have
It's a complicated game for a game made in 3 days, that's great ! Good job.
nice game and has much potential!
I really like this type of games and the balancing is really hard to do (for me) but here it feels right and also spot on take on the theme!
A lot of different buildings, interesting core concept. Costs get overwhelming rather quickly.
Hard af it is. :sweat_smile: I've never been good in management games, but an exponential rise of rent cost seems too unfair to me.
The concept is interesting, I want to get back to the game later ant try to win. Neat art style, feels like some old Win98 game. :)
At first i thought i wouldnt enjoy this type of game, but i was surprised. A lot of complexity but in a welcome way :)
@hartvichio If we can anything, then its complex and complicated stuff. Its always a challenge to make it enjoyable. So its nice to read feedback like that. Thanks.
And thanks to everyone else for the nice words as well!
Very nice concept, but it's too hard I think?
I like the idea there are a lot of mechanics and different building and event. its hard but seems balanced ok. The tutorial is a nice thing to have. This is an amazing amount of work for a jam.
cool management sim! really difficult though— and in the beginning it really just throws you into the thick of it to figure out the systems in the midst of the ever-increasing rent and debt, so i imagine for most it may take a few tries before they get the hang of it— pretty fun though
Thank you all soooo much for your nice, kind and constructive comments. I really enjoy reading them.
Yes it is hard. Too Hard? Maybe, but we knew as we shipped it, that many people will say that. As koemeterion already said. Yes its pretty complex and maybe complicated, but thats the way we like it. Graphic Style link Win98. Yes... sure.. that was totally intendet *cough* it's not just our graphicabilities which limits us here XD
I love so many really enjoyed it and had fun with it. Thanks guys. These nice comments are the reason to participate again and again :)
I love these games! The potential is huge! And the graphics are beautiful!
Great game! Indeed, slow at first but I had so much fun =) Would play the released version
Wasnt able to get out of depth :( but still interessting concept
Very cool once you get your initial few workers it is ok. But geting the first workers is hard
SO COOL
Great game, a little bit too slow for a jam test. But the progression is quite good. Well done.
Amazing how much work went into this game!
Interesting game. I think it has a lot of promise, however currently it felt a bit slow, perhaps having more workers to start with would work well. But well done for the amount of work that must have gone into it.
Cool entry. The start feels a bit slow, which is a petty as there is so much to discover! Unfortunately, one of my workers decided to leave at the second I hired him ... that's inconvenient ...
Overall, I enjoyed the game. With some more fine tuning it would be awesome!
The starts is too low, but i like the idea, congrats!
All around I like this game! You can tell allot of thought went into it. A little bit slow at first but once I figured it out the game took off.
Cool game but way too hard. Workers quitting for not having to work for a few seconds is also totally unrealistic :D
Awesome! Very ambitious entry. I played for around 20 minutes, and here are some notes:
- Sometimes my workers went on strikes immediately after unnassignment from a previous workplace. - Energy and eco mechanics are a bit unclear. - It would be nice to see how much money you'll get as soon as market cooldown ends.
Liked the UI in general and especially different rooms artwork. Great job!
Interesting game, hard start and workers quit quickly sometimes.
amazing game, really liked it. for me the only problem is the rent at the beginning, as it took a little time for me to figure out how everything works, by the time I learned I was already in some serious debt, but after a little while I manage to start making real money =) well done!
A bit unclear on the instructions so I tried to experiment by myself, and yeah I definitely suck haha. But you've created a very complex system in 3 days and I'm amazed by that!
Very fun challenge! Takes a bit to learn, and slow to start, but worth it - nice job!
This was really hard, as everyone has already realised :-) Of course you’ll probably tweak everything and make it more balanced, but I think the fact that everything happens in real time may also be a problem; maybe time should only advance when actions are made? For instance I had two workers leave immediately after I hired them because I did not have time to assign them a task; or browsing the prices of goods made me lose precious seconds (I mean days). That seemed a bit unfair. Also on my first run I did not understand that two offices were useless and would not let me sell twice as many goods…
Apart from that, the game is enjoyable, the graphics are nice. It’s a very good starting point for a game that I would definitely play!
(just a side note: even if their wage increases, I felt bad paying my workers $200… maybe you could multiply all currency values by 10!)
Hey @samh you have a lot of good points. Most of our last LD games where turn-based so we decided this time we're trying a realtime approach. Now it makes the whole expierence kind of stressfull, especially at the first time playing where you have to figure out a lot. At the end of day 2 it was the first time we had a 90% build of all systems working at the same time and we where missing 2 planned buildings at the end. So we decided on concentrating on what we have at that point. At the end to make the game challenging we came up with the balancing we have now.
Purely personal opinion: I dont like stressfull games, especially where you're building a factory / company / infrastructure. But without the hard challenge the game would not make that much fun we have now. As a player you have to be 20 minutes totally focussed on what you're doing - thats what I like about the game. The "low" loan of you workers came just from last-minute-balancing. There where no time to change the whole system and just multiply by 10 ... please. As if you think about such a simple solution in the last 2 hours ... :D
The leaving workers had a dayly 5% chance to happen if there is an unassigned worker. We underestimated how much 5% actually are.
I see a lot of points that could be improved, because as the game is right now, there is no real "freedom" for the player to play differently.
Anyway, thanks for your feedback!
Wow! This is awesome! It was pretty challenging, and the start was a bit too slow, but this was a very ambitious game with a lot of depth given the time constraints. Great job, I love these types of games. :smile:
Like others I was impressed at the scale of this game until I looked at your guys' past games. Seems like you always make these heavy system games which is pretty awesome. I'm curious, what are some of your favorite games to play since you have some influence from them? I feel like something like Factorio or maybe Cities Skyline...
Good to hear some of the strategies in your posts above. I was trying to figure out some good builds to keep afloat and it's good to know that I wasn't crazy thinking I had to be optimal right off the bat. My game is a bit on the difficult side as well but I will agree with you, just make a game that you're happy playing and you'll feel good about it in the end!
Hey @peachtreeoath Well the fun part with Factorio and Cities Skylines is, those two games are my most played games on Steam. So well done by figuring that out :D Other would be games like Anno, Banished, RimWorld / Dwarf Fortress. Even games like Concrete Jungle, Product Line or Blueprint Tycoon. Nearly everything where you build and manage stuff / staff. Our games most often lack some animation or movement on the screen, and I personally see a big chance of improvement for the next LDs (or other games we make) because those things are the satisfying mechanism in the games I named.
Both of us like backend-mechanism to bring complexity into our games. But this brings the struggle of balancing for every LD entry, there is just not enough time. Over time, and this is our 10th LD entry (holy crap), we've gained so much expierence that we can handle the scope relativly tight nowadays. With **From Nothing to Mine** we had our most stressless LD game so far, the only major problem, in retrospective, is that we hadnt a game for nearly two days. So the balancing was only a thing for the last 2 to 3 hours, which was still a lot and more than usual. But you wouldnt add a new feature if there is a major-ish balancing problem from pure game design - which is a thing here if you're nit picky.
The most complex game we ever made would be **Shape Wars** -[on the old LD website](http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=66047)
There is so much stuff going on in the background with the battle system that its simply no fun for people that havnt developed the game xD Its missing a proper tutorial and on-screen help.
If you look closly on all our entries (go here for an overview: [overview on github](https://github.com/koemii/data/blob/master/wiki/ludumdare.md) )
You will find maybe 3 games that arent grid based like this one. (Shape Wars, Towers of Nuclear (kind of), Memory Run (kind of)) Those are mostly turn based games with a lot of complexity in there own topics (fighting skills, features). At the same time we're struggling to come up with gamy-games, or arcadish stuff (hope you understand what I mean). Guess we're the typical german devs that like excel games :D
Uff. This ended up like an overall LD-postmortem.
Concrete Jungle is an unsung hero! It's one of the few deckbuilders on Steam that strays away from typical RPG formulas and I think there's a lot of potential in that space. Thanks for mentioning Product Line and Blueprint Tycoon, those are unfamiliar names to me. I'll definitely check out your other games sometime as well, I remember really liking Towers of Nuclear a while back.
lol I like the way you phrased the end. Yea it's like if euro-board game people were entering competitions where people typically submit Monopoly. It takes skill and teamwork to build a team game w/o anything working for a long time, meaning everyone can hold onto a shared vision of the final game even if there's nothing working.
I am very impressed with the depth of the game mechanics you managed to cram into the game, let alone do it all withing 72 hours! You're right the start is a bit slow (but hey, it's "start from nothing" so it's fitting). I truly enjoyed the moment when my money was out of the red the first time that I could hire additional workers. Just a little bit of polishing and tweaking the progression you really have an addictive product on your hands! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u3BIVgcKdQ
wow this game is cerebral ^^ one of the first other games, that have a concept of debt to fit the theme :dvd:
This game is so DEEP. The reality of mining and taking your timing really comes into play here. I felt like a real miner and waiting for things and getting out of debt was ... uh ... AAAAAAAAAAAa not only Did I start with nothing, I started with less than nothing!!
unknown.png Did it :D I guess I own a mine now. :sunglasses: