lukas-shiley 2020-04-21 09:08
Very cool game. I had no clue what I was doing but I really liked what you made!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Lord of the Packets
By zennith
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 2213 | 2.97 | 26 | |
| Fun | 2263 | 2.68 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 438 | 3.70 | 26 | |
| Theme | 1935 | 3.27 | 26 | |
| Graphics | 2083 | 2.79 | 26 | |
| Humor | 1887 | 2.14 | 23 | |
| Mood | 2194 | 2.68 | 24 |
Very cool game. I had no clue what I was doing but I really liked what you made!
@lukas-shiley - Thanks!! Haha, Yeah, I originally planned on putting in a tutorial or something but that didn't end up happening with my poor time management. I tried to get as many helpful tips put in the description as I could to hopefully make up for that a bit.
Haha this game is great! I havent seen a terminal based game in a while, this one was really cool (though I could have used some tab-completion). Im going to keep playing for a while :)
Love the concept. Need tutorial never made it passed the first package. commands could be shorter also
Cool game, could have use a bit better command line (autocomplete, summon last line with up arrow...). I love your interpretation of the theme !
Interesting concept! Not being able to repeat the last command with up made it feel a bit tedious, but it was still fun.
@ryan-jung, @spawnie, @theconfusedcyborg - Thanks for the feedback!! Yeah, I found myself hitting tab and up to try and auto complete and repeat my commands while testing. I think it would have been pretty easy to implement but I really didn't do so hot on my time management in the end.
@boxcar012 - Thanks for the feedback!! I really wanted to put in a bit of a tutorial but that was left on my list as the last thing to do, and well, time makes fools of us all. Shorter commands, especially for the -data commands, would have been pretty useful too in hind site.
Cool concept. I generally enjoy creative typing games, and this was a good one. I have a couple of minor changes that I believe would improve the game a lot.
Firstly, there needs to be a tutorial here. Yes, you have detailed instructions on the game page, but people either don't read that or forget what they just read. A tutorial doesn't have to be anything complicated, just have the first package be a tutorial level. Disable the timer during the tutorial, and highlight next command the player has to type.
Secondly, there's not really that much gameplay here because you lose after a certain time no matter what. I wish you'd get more time when you send a package, and that the timer runs down faster as the game progresses. Or maybe the packages would come in continously, and the timer is only going down when you have a number of packages in the queue. Like, make it an overheat meter as opposed to a timer.
Thirdly, and this is a minor one, I feel like the commands are unnecessarily difficult to type. Instead of 'extract-data', why not just 'extract', or 'resolve' instead of 'resolve-data'? Also, instead of input fields being named 'inputX' and packages being named 'X' where X are numbers, why not do just inputs as a single letter and packages as a single number? So for example, instead of 'resolve-data input0 0' it would be 'resolve a 0'.
@luckyfeathers - Hey, thanks for your feedback! I had planned to do a lot more with this game, including most of the thing you've listed above, when I was originally starting on it for the jam but I ran out of time pretty quickly. That's what I get for bad time management :þ. I had a nice package queue working early on but later in development I ran into some bugs getting it to work correctly so I scrapped it in order to get a working game out. As for the commands, yeah, not sure what I was thinking when I decided to go with the longer commands to be honest, haha. I agree that making them shorter would be helpful.
A lot of typing practice. May want to be consistent in commands and spaces between numbers. Adding sound would be nice.
I liked the idea. Command line interfaces in games are fun for sure. I think one pitfall of those interfaces, at least when you're showing the game to programmers who know how to use shell commands, is that they'll expect quality of life shell stuff. Tab to finish commands, aliases, stuff like that. It didn't "feel" like a shell to me in the absence of that, instead I felt like I was typing the same pattern repeatedly (I didn't see a reason to have multiple slots since I couldn't affect more than one at a time?). I'm a very fast typist and was able to mostly keep up with the thing dropping by my third try, but I was disappointed to find that nothing really changed there.
So seems like you've got a nugget of something cool here but didn't quite make it all the way.
Looks like the LD website is going to go down. :-P
i like command line and that's good idea! ) but! )
need to add restart button into game - now need to reload page to restart. and at first you realy need to try much, while learning, so you need add some stuff from real command lines here. for example, add return of last command to input by pressing up key.
@eli-delventhal - Thanks for the input. Yeah, as a programmer myself I kept trying to certain things that you'd do in a terminal while programming the game. I just never got to the point to implement them :(. When I originally was planning the game I had multiple packages coming in so I added multiple slots. Things changed and I took out features as I ran out of time. That included things like difficulty scaling, and such. It was fun to make either way. Again, thanks a lot for your feedback!!
@xart2012 - Hey! Thanks for the feedback. A reset button would have been really nice to have and, yeah, I would have loved to add more realistic command line functionality but sadly I didn't have time. Thanks again for you feedback!
Hey, not bad! Not the most fun game in the world for slow-typers like myself, but it's a neat little experience that does what it sets out to do. :smiley:
@criobite - Thanks for the kind words! I'm sure shortening and adding in ways to auto-complete / repeat the commands would have definitely helped. I like to think I can type decently fast and even I was falling behind at times :)
Unsurprisingly, most of the things I have as feedback were already mentioned. But hey, here we go again: - Autocomplete (and shorter commands). You know, you know ;) - I'm not sure why the slots need to be named *input*0..3. Wouldn't 0 to 3 have done the job as well? - The gameplay is extremely repetitive, and many of the steps seem unnecessary as is. I'm looking at you, resolve-repack-send sequence. I think this could've been mitigated a bit by requiring different things to be done to different packages? - A visual state of what each package is currently in would've been nice. - Right now, having multiple input slots feels unneeded, since I can only actively process one anyway. Maybe some commands don't complete immediately and will be run in the background until they come back? (That could also enable a "limited memory" mechanic if you ever feel like adding more mechanics.)
As is, this seems like a game with potential, but it's really repetitive and not much fun *yet*. I'm sure you could get it there though!
Hey @tobiasw, Thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, looking back I'm not quite sure why I went with input0 instead of just 0. Must have been sleep deprivation :þ
As for the repetitiveness and multiple input slots, I had originally planned out some different package types to watch for, kinda give it a 'Papers Please' feel where you'd have to do extra steps for certain packages and while waiting for those you could try and process more. That got tossed out due to lack of time though :(
I like your idea about the visual state. Maybe change it after every command is processed.
Again, thanks for the excellent feedback!