Elon-zo (Colony management + Interplanetary Shipping)

forevertrash 2020-04-22 18:00

One of the best Ludum Dare games I have ever played, no question. Had me captivated for hours and hours even solo after everyone got offline. THATS RIGHT, ITS MULTIPLAYER! Definitely takes a little to get used to, but it takes the insane difficulties of games like Star Citizen and Eve with all the fun and roles. And the fact you made it within 72 hours and you're not a professional game dev is insane This should win. I will willing take a loss this dare just for you to win. This is fantastic. The detail and quality immersive experience. Reminds me a little of old school text games too but the fact you can literally have a inner planetary ecosystem and a wider multi-planetary ecosystem and have people on each planet stabilizing ecosystems and making materials for other ecosystems and we all work together is super cool. You can even fly around space. I wish the had a concurrent database because it's pretty difficult solo, it's meant to be multiplayer! We need to get a group of 5-20 stable players for sure. I LOVE IT. I wish it could be continued into development. 1500000000/10 stars. Keep up the good work whatever you do bro, I know you'll succeed.

tolmera 2020-04-22 22:43

Thank you so much @forevertrash

I've been thinking about it, and I will see if I can launch it on Itch.io and any other game sites I can find, so we can see if I can create a player-base, so we can really experience the multiplayer power of this.

Again, thank you so much, your feedback is awesome!

marcusnystrand 2020-04-23 10:43

What an ambitious project! A little bit clunky when clicking around but probably fixable. Well done!

gamescodedogs 2020-04-23 10:45

It's huge! Just wow. I like how ambitious project for Ludum Dare is. Wish you the best of luck.

shigor 2020-04-23 11:05

Kudos for thinking big and trying to make something big. I doubt you'll score high, but I really appreciated the attempt. This is first entry this LD that might get stuck in my mind for a while and first that I'd like to see being worked on more. (If you do, some more clear instructions for the ship would be nice)

convg 2020-04-23 11:05

This is an amazing concept, and its implemented well. All you need is a larger player base and it would be really enjoyable. Brilliant job!

llewellyn-and-michael 2020-04-23 11:17

Pretty cool, but probably too time consuming for a game jam entry, maybe you could expand it and release it properly, if you could build up a big enough community of players, a playable tutorial would also be nice, but well done for making such a big game! :thumbsup:

iasper 2020-04-23 11:45

Very interesting take on the theme, and clearly extremely ambitious. The main thing is that it's rather hard to judge this properly if there's not an active player base to maintain the balance, which is evidently hard during a Ludum Dare where people tend to give a game a go once and then never look back at it again. In terms of actual design, it would be incredibly helpful if the chat window could be collapsed, as it regularly ended up being in the way of other interfaces for me. While it makes sense that the "insufficient wealth" notifications are red, having the same look for the "transaction complete" messages felt a bit odd, since the red exclamation mark parses as an error message. Additionally, when you game over, the notifications just spam the entire page uncontrollably... As simple as the graphics are, I felt like some of them were needlessly large - when I chose Mars for example, it took 10 seconds for the background image to load, leading to a rather undesired scanline effect. Overall a simulator with potential, but not the most appropriate game for a Ludum Dare I think. Congratulations on this achievement though!

firefluid 2020-04-23 14:04

This game is huge :thumbsup:! I wonder how you managed to make a game with MULTIPLAYER in 3 days. However, when I started my journey and chose Mars as my first destination, it suddenly started jittering until it unwrapped itself lol :laughing:. And I am not sure whether that's a bug or just not implemented yet, but the supply requests were shown in JSON and the population as undefined. Anyways, I then bought some stuff and started flying. It took me a while to notice, but the ship moves further away from the center of the screen the faster you go, so that's cool. But the yellow arrow always changed direction (because of lag I think), and I gave up exploring and chose Mars as my destination again. That's when I noticed how hard it was to land on it, and sadly my frustrations had to end with a message saying I ran out of fuel :sob:. This game has lots of content but it needs a bigger player base (it felt lonely) and patience on the player side.

deathray 2020-04-24 05:30

Like others have said - this is really ambitious and it's amazing to get a multiplayer game done in a game jam! No one was online so I couldn't do too much, and sadly I couldn't log back in with a character I started... but I would love to play this game more (and possibly contribute if it's open source). A multiplayer space game that's more casual than Eve is what I've been craving for years.

trigueiro 2020-04-24 12:42

Just finished playing a bit. I enjoyed it very much but the UI was a bit messy. Don't know if this is because something on my side but some stuff was overlapping. The chat prevented me from clicking the water factory.

tolmera 2020-04-24 14:25

XD :'( I just spent an hour recording some game play to help people play and the stupid Mac I'm on recorded not the browser window that I had open, but the wrong tab on the browser :( So annoying!!!

Sorry y'all I would have loved to give you a demo of a lot of the features and talk about a log of the idea behind the game. I might end up doing a post on the main LD thread, and I'll update the game details for now... I don't know if I'll be able to get time to do another recording. Sorry and thank you to everyone who has played my game, and who has left me some feedback, I really appreciate it and I have taken the feedback and tried to add information for you as players when I did the screen recording... *sad*

2020-04-24 14:54

Nice graphics and audio! A ton done in 72 hours by one person! Their was too much text in game, and the game kept freezing on me. Over all good game,and keep it up!

rojola 2020-04-28 10:28

Wow hands on I could not get any grip on this game :D Looks and sounds very interesting nevertheless. The music is quite catching in its own way :D I wish all the best for this project, never know where it can go.

tolmera 2020-04-29 00:34

Haha, thanks @rojola - I need to do the tutorial video so it's easier for people, right now it seems a lot of people have had trouble flying, and earth is the 'only' place we can have a colony because there's no trade happening to the other planets.

marie-launhardt 2020-05-05 10:52

Good game.

tolmera 2020-05-05 11:14

Thank you @marie-launhardt

Anything particular you liked?

marie-launhardt 2020-05-05 12:04

@tolmera I like the concept and how much you did in a short time. a multiplayer game in a jam? thats amazing.

tolmera 2020-05-05 22:18

Thank you @marie-launhardt I really appreciate that :)

samuli 2020-05-07 15:27

Such a crazy entry! Good job on making something at this scale alone.

divadyugi 2020-05-07 20:47

I really like the concept, and I find it amazing that you were able to create such a game in such as short time. Amazing job on the game.

tolmera 2020-05-08 11:59

Thank you @samuli @divadyugi - your feedback is awesome :). I'm still amazed I managed to clobber so many elements together :)

tolmera 2020-05-08 12:57

For anyone else who's hosting their game via AWS behind a loadbalancer, I have to say, oh my good grief! That shit's expensive! Just got my AWS bill, and it's painful. :-/. Lesson learned.

Better solution, use one of your free 5 AWS Elastic IPs I've still got to learn how to make the elastic IP automatically jump from one machine to another if the first one shuts itself down.. But yea, I'll see about that another time.