ehe 2020-04-18 18:50
Hey!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Exo Keeper
By amarillion, ehe, donall and kongroo
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1204 | 3.50 | 23 | |
| Fun | 1748 | 3.07 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 326 | 3.78 | 23 | |
| Theme | 1266 | 3.64 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 1661 | 3.28 | 23 | |
| Audio | 593 | 3.59 | 23 | |
| Humor | 1193 | 2.86 | 21 | |
| Mood | 1300 | 3.35 | 23 |
Hey!
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hey ^_^
Oh my, this game is a behemoth! There's a lot to learn and figure out, so I'll probably have to come back to it, but the concept is fascinating, good job guys!
This game is like a test: You never know what to do. A tutorial would help a lot
Okay this is an really cool idea and I have some suggestions that might be useful if you decide to make an post jam version: - There's a lot of micros available at the start of the game, I think it will work better if you start with 4-5 and introduce more as you play. Maybe by finding them on grids or when some specific temperatures are reached. - The controls could be simpler, ex drag a microbe to a grid, they could make sounds like in ex world of goo. Or having the mouse over a grid and pressing number keys 1-9. - I also expected the microbes to continue live on the grid, like in game of life, but they would just die some seconds after I placed them.
Anyway, feel free to tag me if you upload a new version, I would like to play more of this :)
Quite a complex game for a game jam for sure! As stated above, this is clearly something that needs some more time from the player to really dive in to the game. Overall a great entry!
There is a lot to figure out in this game. More information with less choice would be a good start. I constantly had to open up the info panel every time because i forgot which one had what i was looking for. Good game, cool concept.
Thanks for the game. Interesting concept and I love the exaplanets theme. Best of luck!
Cool idea. Slightly on the easy side. There seems to be a ton of information that seems completely useless. I would stick to only showing the info relevant to the game mechanics.
Thanks for all the nice feedback! I totally agree with @milano23 and @ristoretto that the way information is presented in the game can be improved, to make it less confusing. For the time being, I've made a video explainer on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1PgdhizHl0
I agree with @nsadie that the game is actually too easy, once you get past the confusing concepts. I'd love to make an updated version with some of the kinks worked out.
@amarillion Hey I tried your game after watching your video, worked a lot better!
I missed two things: that different micros work better in different temperatures and that I could click on a grid (you have to look at the text to see when it changes). It might also work to add bars to visualize temperature and the other values. Maybe also display the microb information as card.
Good luck with your post-jam version!
Nice simulation. But now I'm thinking about digging into the old dos archives and looking for good old sim earth and waste some hours playing with it :/
@shigor, you can actually play online: https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimEarth_-_The_Living_Planet_1990
Must be strong. Must not click. Must rate ludum dare...
I love the idea. Maybe because I always have been a fan of Sim Earth-like games.
I feel like some additional feedback would be nice to have. Just to have better understanding of the ecosystem and it needs. There are bunch of stats, but it is hard to parse it and to understand what exactly is going on and what are my actions supposed to be. So basically I need some information to base my next choice of creature.
Some species got wiped out pretty fast and I had no idea how can I help them :)
i like the concept, good job
An exceptional entry you've got there!
The concept is just awesome.
Species 5 and 7 really got along together in my game. They dominated the ecosystem and spread wildly.
Room for improvement is definitely on user guidance. Everything is just overwhelming the whole time. Even though there are just 3 clickable things and one of them is the info-button :D There appears to be so much going on the screen that it constantly feels that you are not in control. A tiny thing that would help a lot is a small up or down arrow in which direction the parameters on the right are in-/decreasing.
The music was very fitting and relaxing. The graphics of the individual microbes were cute and fitting. The planet itself hurt a little in the eyes though, because of the very hard differences between and the colourfulness of tiles.
Other remarks: - the info button hangs quite often - on my small laptop screen the info box was hard to read. Switching to a monitor with more vertical space resolved the issue
btw: now that I'm writing this comment I see the explanatory video you made. That helps a lot!
@SimonL Thanks for the feedback! I like the idea of adding up/down arrows to the numbers, it's just a little thing that would make a lot of difference.
Really nice approach to the Theme! Fun game, albeit a bit hard to get into, but once you do you can really enjoy the system and become a microbe-farmer taking the game "as far as it goes;)"
I really enjoyed playing this, although it was not difficult at all. It feels like it's impossible to lose. I liked how each microbe had a different role, but it never really felt like it mattered. I just kind of kept placing them, going from left to right, and eventually won.
I like the look of this game, it reminds me of Win95 shareware games or early 2000s HTML4 games. The issues with the scrollbars might be very difficult to fix, though. It might help to make the game only take up about 90% of the viewport, and then have a button to enter fullscreen.
Definitely liked this one, although some of the microbe descriptions were a bit confusing. I was never completely sure why the albedo 0.1 microbes didn't seem to reproduce, and getting the last 4 degrees probably took as long as all the others. Still it was a very relaxing and consistent experience. Nice job!