theceases 2020-04-21 02:22
Good game only needs juicy sound effects.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Keep The Spirit Stone Allive
By ausstein
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1058 | 3.56 | 65 | |
| Fun | 1095 | 3.38 | 65 | |
| Innovation | 1254 | 3.27 | 65 | |
| Theme | 875 | 3.80 | 64 | |
| Mood | 1161 | 3.42 | 63 |
Good game only needs juicy sound effects.
I liked this! Enjoyable graphics, decent premise. It's a little slow, but I enjoyed watching my animal soldiers fight a bunch of scary monsters until I was overwhelmed.
The thing I enjoyed about this game, was the graphics, the graphics are nice but the interface isn't as good, and the game could really use some sounds, but the concept is there, and I like it.
Good game. There are some problems that would help to spend more time in it: 1. Sometimes enemies do not appear. We have to change the complexity for the emergence of a new wave. 2. There is not enough timer to understand how much I lasted. 3. Also, the countdown to the next wave would not hurt the button "next wave" 4. It is necessary to optimize the game, as it starts to slow down.
@borodaolen Hmm i have not seen the first bug yet. wave nine and ten take longer on purpouse so your forest has time to replenish
Yes a wave timer and a next wave button are good ideas I will add them when I do the quality of life update. For me the game only starts slowing down noticably if i play a lot past the last wave. But I can check for optimizazions anyway
Thanks a lot for the Feedback :)
Animals are so nicely designed, I really loved the graphics. It feels bad to see the hideous creatures coming from the portals. I set the difficulty to easy right away because I wanted to be able to enjoy the life growing and pump up my skill tree. This alone without the waves of enemies could be an enjoyable game already. Some feedback on the effect of improving the nature tree would be interesting, and I was sad that I couldn't play the little fairy. Nice work
@draelent Thank you I used assets for the graphics tho :)
Also I am planning to add a peaceful mode to the game in a Post LD update :)
Love incremental games ! Hardest difficulty isn't even possible.. Great to see other 3D WebGL game ! We also try this challenge (We done our own 3D models and music).
Gorgeous game, even if you didn't make the assets you definitely used them well. I loved seeing the forest slowly emerging right in front of my eyes. I really enjoyed the gameplay, it felt like a Tower Defense crossed with an Idle Clicker. Some atompsheric music would have added a lot, and I also would have loved to see how the upgrades actually effected stats (damage/health etc) because it was impossible to know what the right decisions are later into the game. :)
Overall, amazing job, keep up the great work.
Pretty enjoyable and quite meditative! Nice job. I found myself just observing the animals, frolicking around :). The graphics is very nice (I know you didn't make it but it's still nice :)) and the sound effect add to the experience. Some background music would be great.
The games lags pretty badly in a browser on a full screen. In a window it's fine.
Love it! The rabbits are the cutest things I've ever seen :rabbit2:! Fun and interesting idea
Are there bonuses for each animal? Are some more effective against certain monsters than others? It's a really fun game. Relaxing yet challenging.
@maximeg hardest difficulty from the start isn't possible. True, but you can prepare a bit on easy then change it to hard if you like :) thanks for your input.
@ohfiddlediddle Sounds come with the next update I started working on it yesterday. Upgrade indicators follow later :) right now, upgrading only effects spawn rate as said in the tutorial, but I plan to expand on that. Thank you for the review
@fabula-rasa Thank you so much for the kind words. As I said sound update with music is coming soon :) Do you know when your game started lagging in fulscreen? From the start? Do you mind sharing your system specs?
@otisdev Thank you so much :)
@hwaet I lost a lot of time trying to get a good fightsystem working but I had to scrap it and do something simple to not run out of time. Currently every Creature and animal just has health and attack points. Some health bars etc are coming in the quality of life update
@ausstein I didn't put it in fullscreen from the start, so it's really hard to say when the lag started happening exactly. But it was pretty early, as I first put it on fullscreen when I barely had bunnies. I was on a pc with intel i5-6600k, geforce 970 (4gb of memory) and 16gb of ram at the time.
@fabula-rasa hmm that is odd, I have nearly an Identical system and for me it starts lagging (like below 30fps lagging) only about 5 min after the win screen. Did you go for a lot of grass early? and what browser did you use?I will try to reproduce it so I can fix it.
@ausstein I did indeed go for a lot of grass early. Quite a lot of grass actually. I am of Firefox. And I also have uBlock - maybe that could be causing lag? I always make sure to unblock relevant scrips but sometimes hell knows what the uBlock is screwing with :wink:
@fabula-rasa I have uBlock active as well but on chrome. I will try firefox later.
On a side note:
Actully going for a lot of grass is not as viable as it seems, there are diminishing returns on the np generation, so more than 1-2 upgrades are mostly useless. (It counts the log of the number of grass spawned, to prevent exponential growth)
Took me quite some time playing to realize why I am always loosing when going for lots of plants early :D
Looks cool. I found my browser locked up. You may want to try reducing the build size or turning down the lighting quality (more based on other peoples comments). You could also try putting out a desktop build and see if that helps. I froze up after showing unity loading and then about 10 seconds later received this: (attached image). Could be you have a bug or are using too much ram for chrome.
Let me know if you fix it and I will have another look. Looks fun! CrashBug_SpiritStone.PNG
It looks nice, but I'm not sure if something was suppose to happen, I watched grass grow for a while but there were no enemies.
@codexus don't be so impatient the first enemies show up after 45 seconds on default difficulty. So you have enough time to Grow some plants and get your first animals to defend ;)
Cool game, spend quite some time playing. Loved seeing the world grow, and the skill tree is really well done!
took a sec to understand but i really enjoyed this game!
Really nice game. Could use more sounds.
Honestly... oldly addicting. The only reason I stopped was the 'YOU WIN'. haha. However, near the end, frames were dropping because of how animals were moving at once haha. Good job!
@ausstein Is it based on difficulty? I immediately put the game on lowest difficulty so I guess it was way more than 45 seconds...
@codexus yes the difficulty changes how often enemies spawn on the lowest setting they spawn every 2 minutes I think :)
Maybe try again and put the slider somewhat in the center. Then it is not too hard but you also don't have to wait forever
alternatively start with low dificulty until you have enough animals and then change it to high so you can see them fight in an epic battle ;)
Cool concept, I like the RTS feel of it without needing to actually control the units. It took me a few minutes / tries to truly understand what was happening and how it all worked, but I enjoyed play it :)
A few things to note, some of which I see other people have already mentioned: - More sounds would definitely add a lot more to this. It would be nice to hear some sounds when waves spawn, or the enemies are fighting, as well as some ambient music in the background. For a decent amount of time I didn't actually hear anything, as I was up to high. - The concept of the forest growing was really cool and a nice visual touch, but it might be nice if the trees didn't spawn in the path that the enemies would take. After my forest grew a good amount, I could really see where the animals or enemies were, so I was kind of in the dark of what was happening. - The `Keep playing` button did allow me to continue growing my forest, but no new enemies spawned? (Maybe that's on purpose?)
Overall though great game jam game :) Very nice job, especially for working on this solo
@dylan-fries Hmm the build size is not so large with roughly 85 MB, it uses roughly 1GB of Ram on my Computer.
I'll have a look into performance in general soon, but the lighting quality settings are not too high either. But since this procedually spawns more and more objects there will be lags at some point sooner or later.
A Windows Build is up right now, but I haven't tested it for bugs
@prothean Thanks for the detailed feedback, I apreciate it a lot.
- I ran out of time for the sounds but I am working on a Post LD sound update right now - Hmm i might play around with that, although there are no given paths, the enemies are pathfinding on the fly right now - yeah the keep playing button is supposed to transition this into a forest sandbox, i should have made that more clear
Me gustan los graficos pero no llego a entender que hay que hacer. Tan solo es un mapa sin apenas animacion. I like the graphics but i dont know what i need to do, no action, i dont like a lot, no music...
This was a really cool little game! Its definitely cool to watch a garden/mana machine build up. One thing that's kind of a shame is because because there was really no reason for me to close the nature tree UI, it spent almost the whole game hiding the beautiful scene. Maybe it could be always up just off to one side? Also, performance does start to chug for me on the web version, but I assume the desktop download runs a lot better.
I really liked this game, me and my partner have been playing it for ages! the graphics are really lovely and concept is fun. Would be good to have more clarity on the final wave/duration of survival throughout the game and if played on easy mode then could quickly get full and a bit glitchy on my laptop at least!
@ramonsimarro Press the NatureTree Tab, then Press on the Icons of the plants and animals and they will start spawning. Monsters will spawn every 45s if you do not change the difficulty slider on the top.
Presiona la pestaña "NatureTree", luego presiona los iconos de las plantas y animales y comenzarán a desovar. Los monstruos desovarán cada 45s si no cambias el deslizador de dificultad de la parte superior. (deepl Translate)
@avek That is a good point. I myself have the Nature Tree open very often. I will redesign the Tree in one of the coming updates and I will definetly take that into consideration, Thank you ! For the performance. IN my experience the windows build is not mut better unfortunately. However, In the current dev build I have switched to GPU instancing for plants which keeps my fps close to 200 constantly.
@anthony-pengelly Thank you for the Kind words, I will notify you when the quality of life update is out. Also the current dev build already has much better performance :)
@fabula-rasa The problem seemed to indeed have been the huge amounts of grass. I have switched to GPU instancing for plants, which will help alot with lag. Thx for your help!
First off, I really liked the direction this game took. I made a similar rts styled game in a previous ludum. So as someone who likes RTS and strategy games in general, this game made me smile since it strayed from the norm. I liked the overall premise of the game and the execution was done. However, polish is something this game really could of benefited from, particularly because of its genera. Little details become huge. For example, the players main game loop involves watching the situation and making a choice, the choice involves what upgrade to pick, how to invest his points. This is a fun game loop in its own right. However, since the player knows nothing about these upgrades, except their costs, his decision making is rendered less important. Should I save up for a bear or am I better served upgrading my boar? The combat not being visually explicative is and should be a minor point, especially considering this is a game jam and the genera. But if the only way I can get more info of my upgrades is observing the results, said issue becomes magnified. It’s a simple fix really; just an onhover message telling us the attack and health of each animal upgrade is enough. There are other minor issues such as Animal sometimes not caring about defending the nature stone and the wizard guy getting stuck, but again, the fact the path finding works as well as it does is a feat in its own right given the time and team size. I want to reiterate that the game loop was wonderfully done and have to congratulate you on being able to transmit that o so nice feeling of “ahhh my little kingdom is prospering!”, and in my view, that makes the game a success. The visual information elements are the only downside. When the tutorial is happening, be sure the player cant move the camera or advance the tutorial without following the guide. Also allowing the player to close the nature tree by clicking on the same nature tree button would be nice. Good work.
Some images Animals ignore the enemy: jam.png final stats on a frozen session that didnt advance more final stats.png another sesion where game correctly ended second time.png
@dreamingdice Thank you so much for the in depth feedback I really apreciate it.
The first Post LD update: A Balance, Performance and Sound update is out right now. I will now start working on the quality of life update, which will adress most of the polish problems you mentioned. Currently upgrades only increase the spawn rate, this is briefly mentioned in the tutorial, but will change soon.
Did you play before the last update? Because it fixed issues with the wizard. That would also explain why your session froze. You did make it to the final wave right? Probably a Wizard got stuck in the Trees and was never killed, so you never got the win-screen. both of these were fixed in the last LD patch.
The Animals sometimes not defending is actually intended but needs some rework. They don't have the Task to defend the spirit stone. They only live peacefully in the forest, but if a creature comes into their sight they will try to attack it. In the future there will be abilities bought by Nature Points. One of them will cause all of your creatures to attack the nearest target they can find.
Again much thanks for the detailed review :)
This is really a nice game. It's hard though :) I love the graphics on this. Lacking a bit of sounds and music though. Cheers
@hakro Sound and Music update has just released. Perfect timing ;)
@everyone Somehow on the new update it unseclected the opt out graphics category. This was not intended! It should be fixed again
Nice take on the theme and it sounds you have lots of ideas for this.
Amazing ambiant, your game is actually one of my favorite game i tested, please keep updating ! :)
This game has a really nice concept, and it's very well implemented. It needs some performance optimization, but overall is very fun. I like that you are continuing to update it.
GRAPHICS: UI looks pretty good. The animals and environment look amazing.
GAMEPLAY: Controls are fairly nice. I would prefer if the right-click looking was not inverted, but that's personal preference. The progression is really well balanced other then some of the prices(I think you updated that).
BUGS: Shadows cast on the river make the water invisible.
Conclusion: Really nice game. Updates have solved most of the issues I noticed. This is one of the best implementations I've seen so far. Nice work!
@convg Thank you very much for the review. Can you make a screenshot of the water bug by any chance?
@ausstein Sure, here it is(it happens when trees cast shadows as well) Screenshot (97).png
@convg hmm I'll have to take a look at it ingame. The foam is still there on the sides and water looks basically transparent if not lit up. But you are right it looks kind of odd. Thank you, I'll see what i can do :)
Just tried the quality of life update. That is a massive improvement! Nice job fixing the water. I love the fast forward feature. Maybe Make a down arrow for it as well so that the player doesnt have to go all the way up to 8x when they want to get back to normal speed. There are a lot of cool features in this update. Nice work!
@convg Thx for the Review. Just hit the play button to go to normal Speed. Not sure how to indicate that in game tho
@ausstein Thanks, that makes sense. Maybe add it as a side note in the tutorial?
Wow there is a lot here! No wonder you struggled to get it all in the Jam version of the game :D definitely keep working on this and polish it up a bit as it could be a really fun game to play!
I absolutely loved the progression of the unlock system. I forgot how rewarding it is to be able to unlock things in a game :) and including a tutorial was definitely necessary and was a very good choice.
I found the difficulty progression a little off, I didn't need to do much to succeed through a lot of the rounds and I don't think I am a pro at the game quite yet ;), although it definitely made me feel good about myself so maybe that was the intent! Having said that, next time round I lost almost straight away, it looked like the rabbits weren't attacking enemies they were just sitting still.
This game provides a lot of complexity for the time frame that it was developed and that is super impressive.
I really enjoyed the feel of the game and the post jam fixes have made a huge improvement (i could only find a Web GL version of the latest and so it lagged out quite a bit, very soon after the start of the game but that's typical web GL).
Moving around the scene was really the main thing I think you could improve on. Maybe have a typical system which is looking around with the mouse and moving forwards backwards and side stepping with arrow keys/WASD.
The audio needed a little bit of leveling, did you use an Audio Mixer in Unity? This really helped me when I was having this sort of issue in my games. The interaction sounds were a bit high compared with the rest of the audio.
I also found an issue with the Web GL version that you start off the map (when you have the fairy on screen). Capture.PNG
Great entry thanks for sharing :D
@vernalbehemoth thank you so much for the review! There is a difficulty slider in the settings (button in the top right) that you can adjust at any time during the game. In the last update i lowered the default setting because people found it too hard :D
At the moment animals recognize enemies in a 15m radius, in the future there will be abilities (which you also pay with nature Points) that allow you to order your animals around a bit :)
The disadvantage of having the typical setup for the camera in this sort of game is that you cant move your mouse to the buttons without moving the camera which is why i went for this sort of setup which is more like RTS and TBS camera movement (like in CIV)
Yes I am using the Unity audio mixer. Also in the settings you can adjust master volume, music, ambience and sfx to your liking.
That Bug is Odd, I always start close to the spirit stone.
It looks very Good. Nice fix too. :v:
The view is a bit hard, but the graphics are very good and watching the army of animals fight is great, you need juicy sounds effects, good job!!!
@gameovermexico Did you play the Post-LD version? it has many sound effects
ouch yep its too better, great job! very Nice!
This is so beautiful and calming! I played the post-jam version, and unlocked almost every animal (all except the tiger).
The final wave bugged out so I didn't get to reach the ending (the enemies never started moving towards my jungle). Might have something to do with 4x speed and the WebGL version. I think 4x speed simulation is too heavy for WebGL, but I found no downloadable version for the post-jam version.
I still enjoyed the whole concept and gameplay, music, sounds & graphics!
Overall 10/10, would play again if there's a release in the future :D
ps: I would have loved to see more of the fairy :D
(Follow-up after reading your Known Bugs section):
You could have the enemies register to an event in `OnEnable()` and unregister on `OnDisable()`, some sort of `RegainPathFindingTarget()` method, which could be called even on demand (by UI) or every 30 seconds or so in-game.
```cs public static System.Action FixPathfinding; // To be called every 30 seconds or so. void OnEnable() => FixPathfinding += RegainPathfindingTarget; void OnDisable() => FixPathfinding -= RegainPathfindingTarget;
void RegainPathFindingTarget() { if (!hasValidTarget) { ... } } ```
Sorry if I'm stepping out of line by posting this, but I just love adding small bad-practice hacks like this in jam games, since they can save so much time ^^
@lyrcaxis Thank you very much for the kind words. The Bug with the final wave is very annoying and I am aware of it. I hope I can fix it with the next update :) Also Performance is the next big point I want to tackle :)
@lyrcaxis if this was a bug in the jam I would have gone for something like that :D but since I have all the time in the world now I will find the root cause and will get rid of it once and for all ;)
Impressive looking game! I like the overall theme of nature defending itself. Gameplay wise, it's a nice idea to combine an incremental game with a tower defense, it worked out really well.
Most of the issues I had with it you've already fixed in post-LD updates. There are, however, several still there:
#### Enemy units get stuck often, seemingly on nothing.
This one occured in one of earlier waves:
spiritStone1.png
And this one is the final wave. Almost all the units in this screen are not moving. Notice the units from the first screenshot are still there:
spiritStone4.png
#### The units spawned by wizards bug out horribly
When they're spawned they glitch in the ground for a moment, before being shot into the sky. They fall back down after a while, but they always fly back up with even greater speed.
Here you can see one just a second after being spawned, already flying off:
spiritStone3.png
#### HP bars are not visible through the trees
There's a snake behind that tree, but you can't tell, since its health bar is not visible.
spiritStone2.png
Also, overall the healthbars aren't really that visible to me. Might be due to my color blindness, but I also think they should be much bigger, not requiring you to fully zoom in to be able to see them. Also, perhaps showing them all the time isn't really necessary - just show them if a unit isn't fully healthy.
#### Plant and animal spawn location is (mostly) restricted to the area behind the stone
Most plants and animals spawn behind the stone, which causes some issues - the enemies can reach the stone without entering engagement range of your animals. Occasionally, a plant will spawn somewhere else (even on the other side of the river), but the animals are still tightly packed in one area.
Though it might seem like I'm overly critical, I really enjoyed this game. The idea itself is great, and the execution amazingly well done for such a short time. Nicely done! ;)
@lcstark Thank you so much for the in depth review this means a lot!
> **Enemy units get stuck often, seemingly on nothing.**
Hmm this was a known issue only for spawned in units like the small spiders not for the wave units like the Cobra stuck in your image. I will have to further investigate. Fixing this is one of the top priorities for sure.
> **The units spawned by wizards bug out horribly**
Yes I am aware of this and it is also on the top of the priority for fixes! This seems to happen only in webGL and not my editor so it will be a tough one.
> **HP bars are not visible through the trees**
In general I am not very happy with the health bars at the moment. I tried a few different things and was not really happy with either of them. So I just opted to get the best of the bunch in for the update, but this will recieve further work for sure!
> **Plant and animal spawn location is (mostly) restricted to the area behind the stone**
At the moment all Spawns are tied to grass: everything spawns where grass spawns. So if your first bunch of grass generates behind the stone the rest will also generate in that area. This ensures a natural growth of everything. But you can get unlucky and have everything behind of the stone as has happened for you. There are no plans on changing this, because in a future update there will be abilites that you can buy for Nature Points like "rally at the stone" or "look for enemies" to deal with these kind of situations. There is one thing that I will change that might help this somewhat: I want to increase the closet distance that two grass plants can spawn next to each other which will force the grass to spread out more, faster.
Again many thanks for the review!
I liked the game. I think the updates realy helped it feel more polished but still the actual "raw" version was interesting. The techtree is nice and makes it an tactical game. We actually also made a save the nature themed game but a tree was the main focus. It is funny to see how different but also similar ideas were developed. Keep it up, nice to see the game being updated!
I played the post jam version. It's pretty good, peaceful game. A harder difficulty can be added. A major issue with it is that once we play for a long time there's so much of spawning/instantiating going on that it lags a lot. Idk how much polling can help. Maybe DOTS can help, but it has its own cons. My laptop isnt a gaming laptop but it runs games like csgo decently. Towards the end I had 2.5GB RAM used with a max of 3 i guess (But RAM is 8GB and taskmanager shows like that) and also a lot of cpu usage. GPU was relatively free, around 20% at times or 5%
Also i saw that the grass spawn delay was buyable even after it was 0 seconds!
@joamd higher difficulty is available in the settings! (Top right)
The next update will be a performance upgrade, I think the major offenders are the path finding for so many enteties at once.
For the grass spawn delay, it still has an effect if you buy it, the menu just does not show decimals which will be fixed soon. Thx for the review!
This is an interesting and in someways a bit weird game. It kinda feel like a updated tower defence game, and that is good. For me the upgrade system is a bit over complicated, but okay it is not bad. Overall is this a good jam game. Well done.
Didn't really get what I was supposed to do. I just spawned flower, trees and animals randomly and my tree of life never lost a single health point. However, this was a relaxing experience and even if there was no challenge, I had fun just upgrading the nature and watching it. So good gamefeel but needs more challenge imo. Nice work!
@jonathan Lorentz. If you played the post jam version the difficulty slider is in the settings on the top right. ON the LD-version it is on the top left
Hooo, didn't saw it. It changes everything! Thanks for the tips :)
Nice! Cool little experience, was fun to try out the different plants/animals and see how everything grew. Initial difficulty on the jam version was a bit hard, so I readjusted for my next playthrough and made it a bit too easy. IMO it would be better to have a single well-designed difficulty setting, or maybe 3 options like easy/medium/hard, rather than a slider, which is a bit tweaky for a player to have to deal with. Still an interesting game, nice work!
This was tons of fun, great job with the ambience and atmosphere. I noticed the screen panning a lot after clicking UI elements, you may want to add a Not Over UI check in your camera controller code.
I like the concept but it could definitely use more balance. I found that the most cost-efficient strategy was to simply upgrade the spawn rate and attack damage of rabbits and ignore everything else. It may be a good idea (technically and gameplay wise) to limit the # of each type of entity that may spawn. That will force the player to unlock new types and will reduce the load for running so many entities.
Nice job!
@adhesion Thank you for Playing and thx for the input. I am still thinking about the best way to do difficulty. I think I will have presets as well as sliders in the future as well as indicators on the sliders what the current value means!
@loginaut agreed with the UI, this is already on my Priority list and will come with the next update I think. The current best strategy is indeed to just pick one animal and upgrade the hell out of it. I have the follwing change in mind: Every upgrade increases the cost of all other upgrades on the same animal. So you need to choose more carefully what you want to upgrade. The next update is a performance Update. I hope I can find other solutions than limiting the entities, but if that has to be done then so be it.
Thank you for playing and the review!
Good idle game. The visual feedback makes it much more interesting to play(I was wondering how long it would take to cover the whole area with trees and mushrooms). I can see that the post LD has some features that would have helped the entry a lot(the next wave button and speed increase).
Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my livestream!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/615937007?t=2h34m25s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
Damn that's a lot of game for such a short time! Well done! :) Really liked to play, was pretty fun
@elysiagriffin you will love the button feedback on the post-LD version ;)
@convg @patrickjr @loginaut @joamd @lcstark @loveapplegames @lyrcaxis @dreamingdice @vernalbehemoth
#### 10.5. Minor Bugfix&Performance + Mothers Day Update
- Name Changed to "Nature Defense - The Spirit Stone"
- Added Mothers Day Suprise - Upgrading one thing on an Animal now increases the cost of all upgrades for that animal. (OP Bunnies are no longer a thing :( )
- Fixed bouncing Terants
- Panning now disabled if the mouse is over any UI element
- Fixed Creatures getting stuck
- Added Info on how much NP every Plant currently Generates
- Performance Should be slightly Better (The main offenders are animation updates tied to FixedUpdate (animate Physics setting) and later there are serveral fixedUpdates for each Update. I increased fixed Update timestep and did minor optimizations in other places But if anyone knows a solution for this please let me know. (Other than Switching away from root motion and not using the physics system, which I want to avoid))
Edit: just got some stuck creatures again god dammit
@ausstein Wow! That's a cool update. I'll try it out tomorrow. Annoying about the stuck creatures tho :(
3-D strategy game with a "game of life" theme. The player must keep nudging nature in the right direction so as to nurture the ecosystem to produce enough top predators to defeat a bunch of awesome enemies - "corrupted creatures" - who arrive in waves.
The clever game mechanic allows you to manage an evolving microcosm rich in great graphics and awesome motion. Excellent icons (with help of Freepik acknowledged).
A pity the audio wasn't finished in time for the deadline. (Though I was hearing continuous low level noise: hiss and what sounded like games sounds in the making, eg bunny hopping sound..)
That said, I found this game totally addictive. I really like the "keep playing" feature when you lose - you get a chance at a leisurely learning experience as you explore the extent of the food chain (who eats who) within the goodies, and discover the death chain (who can kill who) in goodies Vs baddies.
Great game, thanks! Looking forward to playing the post LD version...
@loveapplegames Thank you for the great review, :) Can't wait for you to play the Post-LD version. You will love it ;)
Congratulations on your results @ausstein! I played your post-LD version as well now... Nice!
The post-LD version got some nice updates, I see. ;) The Terants no longer bounce, which is great. The NP generation info along with number of plants is great, I'd add similar info to your animals, showing how many of each type have spawned already. As for the creatures getting stuck...
natureDefense2.png
Still happens. :( Usually it starts happening a few waves in, several first waves move on through without a hitch. One time a group of spiders got stuck some distance from their spawn portal, but a few moments later one of my boars approached and started attacking them. When it got close enough, the stuck spiders started moving again.
Sometimes I've noticed the enemies look like they're following some invisible target moving around them. One of the later waves moved away from the portal a bit, then they all started turning towards the river like they were targeting something there. Moments later they were stuck in the ground.
Also, there seems to be a problem with UI layers. I've opened the settings menu when I had the nature tree menu open, and both menus glitched through each other:
natureDefense1.png
A simple change to sorting order of your canvases should fix that. ;)
Also, I think I've figured out one reason why your health bars are so difficult to see and read. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you're scaling their width based on creature hitpoints - the more HP a creature has, the wider the health bar. It would be great to add some minimal width to all of them. You can see on the first screenshot those spiders have HP bars so thin they look like they were meant to go vertically (but they don't). The larger spawner spider has a little bit better bar, though it is still too small in my opinion.
One quality of life feature I'd like to see is to have the mouse scroll direction reversed. I'm used to having mouse scroll up mean going up and mouse scroll down mean going down. I get that it was probably supposed to imitate zoom, with scroll up zooming in and scroll down zooming out, but it's pretty disorienting at times. If you don't want to reverse it permanently in game, adding an option to reverse it in settings would be nice. ;)
It's great to see you're working on improving your game after LD is done. ;)
@lcstark Thank you again for the review!
> As for the creatures getting stuck… Still happens. :(
I have localized the error with the stuck creatures, but my attempted fix did not work. The path finding system has problems with the low poly terrain at certain points. I used a third party animal controller that I had and it seems to try to put the creatures in a climbing state once it thinks the creatures are off the traversable path (which helps some of the animals recover from falling in the river). However for the enemy creatures, they just stop doing anything at all. I think I might write my own animal controller, since I don't need much of the advanced functionality and it is hard to debug third party code.
> A simple change to sorting order of your canvases should fix that. ;)
Actually I think changing the sorting order would not help since the canvas has to be in world space to allow for 3D elements. So the 3D objects actually stick out and are physically in front (Idk maybe there is a trick for this ). I think I will just close the nature tree whenever you open the options.
> It would be great to add some minimal width to all of them.
You are right about the Health bars, as I said in my last reply I am not happy with the current state either. But I don't think giving a minimum width would be a good choice either since it would look like a rabbit with 30HP might have the same health as a deer with 100HP. I was thinking of maybe scaling both sides so that double the area means double HP. This would make each side scale with the square root of the health and the bars would always keep the same shape. Therfore, each sidelenght is not as different as it is now. Maybe I also just don't use linear scaling. So a twice as longe healthbar would still mean more HP, but not double. This however is less intuitive than the current system.
As I said I need to play around with this, maybe get some inspiration from rts titles. It is just hard to depict a healthbar with 30 HP and one with 5000HP in a graphically cohesive way.
> One quality of life feature I’d like to see is to have the mouse scroll direction reversed.
True, this could be a 5 min fix I can definetly implement as an option.
> Thank you again for the review!
You're welcome! ;)
> Actually I think changing the sorting order would not help since the canvas has to be in world space to allow for 3D elements. So the 3D objects actually stick out and are physically in front (Idk maybe there is a trick for this ). I think I will just close the nature tree whenever you open the options.
Yeah, you're probably right. I don't work with 3D in Unity often, so I didn't consider that possibility. Closing the nature tree will certainly work, and it isn't a bad solution. Since the player won't ever use more than one UI screen at a time, closing the currently open one when opening the settings will be fine.
If you wanted to keep it open, though, I had an idea that could potentially work. Have you considered using render textures to display your 3D models? With render textures you could display your models in a standard screen space canvas using a RawImage component. I don't know what the performance of that would be, but I think if you had a camera set to cull everything but those models before rendering, it shouldn't be that resource intensive.
As for the health bars: yeah, it's a problem that requires a lot of thought. One idea is to have health bars divided into smaller sections, e.g. have your health bars divided into boxes representing 10HP each. That way even if the health bars were exactly the same size, the player could see the rabbit health box had only three sections, while the dear had 10 of them. Or, have a mixed solution, where you're still scaling your health bars, but they have minimal and maximal sizes (probably depending on model size) and are divided into health boxes. You can then use color and/or transparency of these boxes to represent accurately how much of that box is damaged. Something like this:
https://emnh.github.io/rts-blog-screenshots/shots/health-bars.jpg
healthBarMockup.png
Either way, I hope you find a solution that satisfies you.
@lcstark
> If you wanted to keep it open, though, I had an idea that could potentially work. Have you considered using render textures to display your 3D models?
Working with render textures is a pain in the butt. I find using them is very performance hungry and not preferable for larger scales. They are good for small things like a portal effect, but not for many UI elements in my experience.
If as you suggested I only use one raw image for the whole UI instead of one for every 3D Object it might be feasible performance wise, but I don't think it is worth the hustle. If I would want to move a button, I would always have to move the UI object first and then try to match the movement with the 3D object in the scene. Right now the 3D objects are children of the respective button, so if I disable the button it automatically disables the 3D object, which I would have to re-code as well. Furthermore the glow effects on the UI do not work in screen space, since it is unaffected by post-processing.
If I wanted to keep both open at the same time I would make two canvases and make sure the option canvas is physically closer to the camera, so that it can hide the nature tree canvas including the 3D objects that are sticking out.
So thank you for the suggestion, but no :laughing: . (I was fighting a lot with render textures in another project as you can probably guess :sweat_smile: )
>As for the health bars:
Thank you for the suggestion. This is certainly a better solution than the current one. I'll keep it in mind and just try different stuff :)