Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Flight of the Cepheus
By thedashdude
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 485 | 3.47 | 66 | |
| Fun | 710 | 3.06 | 66 | |
| Innovation | 405 | 3.43 | 66 | |
| Theme | 381 | 3.82 | 66 | |
| Graphics | 642 | 3.24 | 66 | |
| Audio | 718 | 2.57 | 62 | |
| Humor | 696 | 2.37 | 54 | |
| Mood | 342 | 3.44 | 61 |
Died to a mutiny! Interesting concept, pretty cool Oregon Trail-Esqe LD submission. Fits very well with the theme. I enjoyed it but I found myself a bit confused what to do, would love to be able to repair the hull. I also really like the tiny graphics
I really enjoyed this and would love to see this fleshed out. Even with text results from actions, I'm reminded of something of a mix of city sims and star trek voyager. Did want to see the crew the whole time.
I enjoyed this a lot!
... but the sounds are too blaring for simple actions. I get it when I get hit but it hurts the ears after a while. This fits very well and the mutiny was a surprise! I don't know what's the sense of a flashlight torch for looking at the whole crew though. Seems unnecessary.
You should expand on this honestly! Reminds me a lot of Oregon trail.
This is very similar to a concept I collaborated on the last time I did LD. This was quite interesting, but I'm afraid the sounds hurt a bit and not all the mechanics are explained well enough in my opinion. The text crawl at the beginning called for images in my opinion. I wanted to see the battle and hidden politicians that led up to these events.
All in all, good concept.
Realy enjoied the Idea)Hope you will continue development from this prototype
Cool concept. I enjoyed it.
Very complex game. Every action is meaningful. Seeing crew and their thoughts is a nice touch.
Congratulations for what you accomplished in just 48h. Really liked the concept, but I think the mask for seeing the tripulants was unnecessary
I died to a mutiny :( Interesting concept, but on a personal note, not really my kind of game.
too complex for me, didn't get it sorry! Maybe some tutorial in the beginning would help
Died to a mutiny (arrgh). I liked the look and feel of the game and the audio effects. The intro to the game was pretty nice (reminded me of Star Wars intro crawl). It took a while for me to get used to the actions/commands in my disposal. I wasn't sure of what to do when inspecting the crew. Pretty nice game overall!
Really nice outcome for the compo, good job! Found myself checking out the crew regularly, nice sim touch and feel. Add more meat to it, like crew dynamics & actions, and I would play it again for sure :)
The ship looks great and I love the writing (especially the little dialogue snippets from the crew members.)
Had fun with it! reminds me a little bit of FTL. Could definitely see myself playing a fully fleshed out version!
Cool little people sprites. Liked the over all look and sound of the game.
The thought reading added character to the game, and could really imagine this as a fully fleshed out game.
woah!! It is a very interesting idea, I liked what you did !!
Very nice! I made it a distance of 193. Got really hard after "entering dangerous area", scavenging found nothing, was losing 9 morale per turn :(. Really enjoyed it, and had a nice feel. It would have been nice to have some more clear indicator of what was at max, and what was low - I didn't discover I could right click on the resources until my second game, but highlighting things red if they were low and maybe slightly grayed out or green if they were at max would have been useful and made the status a lot easier to read. Alternatively, adding some bars filling up behind the text would help.
nice people, good job
Died to Mutiny around 300 people! Really cool though and it makes me want to play again. At first I was clicking to make the three dots disappear on each of the people and didn't realise there were thoughts attached :) Was a nice surprise to find them when holding.
Pros: Really cool idea, great writing, it's fun to watch the inhabitants. Cons: not that much of a challenge, sounds are a little bit loud, local goals are not clear. Overall the concept is great, it's like Sims and Ftl in one.
@fiakaiera The sounds were added in the very last stretch, so I didn't have time to balance them. Definitely needed doing. I didn't like the look of the floor plan of the ship, which is why I covered it up with an actual spaceship. Also, I wanted the spaceship to have meters on parts of it that acted as further indicators of fuel/ armour/ammo and the such. ( also pertaining to @jimbly ) Just an idea that didn't pan out.
@whitefox The inspecting the crew didn't go as deep as I wanted, but the dialogue they give does indicate some things. They have different comments depending on morale and the hidden "evilness" stat. I think they're still nice just to keep the game feeling a little more lively. Also, I love idea of images in the background of the intro. It was tossed together pretty quickly just to give some context to what the crew were saying.
@bereg @bigquacko I wasn't planning on the FTL comparison initially. I only realized I was making a game like FTL after a few hours. Kind of disappointing as I was really pleased with my originality. It was actually more inspired by a text based game I made years and years when I first started learning to code. That and Infinite Ryvius.
I appreciate the comparison, though. It's a good game :)
Definitely needs a volume slider, but all in all, I had a lot of fun with this one! Reminds me of FTL and Oregon Trail. Very impressive that you put this together in 48h; great job!
I like the idea of crew (?) member feedback. The cutaway to inspect the ship was also very neat but not sure if there was any gameplay reason for it? Is there any reason to interact with the people on board other than to see the thoughts?
I dont think I fully understood all the interactions, would benefit a lot from a tutorial (even just on the game page). Intent behind the sounds seems ok but I did not like how it played out - too tinny and full on.
Interesting approach, felt a bit FTLish with almost a hint of Rimworld (character dispositions etc) Interesting little submission.
This takes me back to that little old gray computer... with a huge fish-tank of a monitor on top running win 95. Trying to find something fun to do on these old school "CD's " with games and demo's. Just like back then I enjoy these strategy games ! The intricacies are worth while, but it might be just me... In other words, I can't say if this game is just my niche, but that won't matter for the ratings I'll give you ;) Thanks for making this !
I love the graphics and the details in this game. All the sounds were very loud, but themselves good. Took a bit for me to understand it, but when I did I had a very enjoyable time.
There are too many objects of attention to watch and too many actions to choose. All these reduce player emotional involving. And there is too much text to read. At the same time you made amazing graphics. I love that tiny people - why not to express ongoing action with their reactions and visual effects (not only with text)? Nevertheless I like an idea. It reminds me FTL.
Nice concept.
Cool idea. A bit of an overload of stats from start, but quickly got the hang of it. Think the sound could do with some normalization. Was very loud. Would be nice with something more than a red blink when engaged. I ended up dying in a "dangerous" area because I couldn't find food. Lost me a bit there. Would've played more given some more detail, but all in all well done for a compo entry!
Hey! Thanks for rating 'Oops, He's Dead!', I'm now here to rate your game!
First of all, I liked the feeling of it a lot! I think you did a great setup for it and that's what I look for the most in a game. The graphics and the sound, even if simple, go well with the gameplay and writing.
It came to me as a surprise that I couldn't repair the HULL. Since there are a lot of different resources, it just looked like another one of them. When I realized it was too late, it would have been great to have a way to familiarize with the various resources before the inevitable.
I also feel like the game advances slowly and you need to do a lot of similar turns, would have been great to be able to do more with each of my actions. I found myself spamming clicks on the same action without thinking just to see how things advanced.
About the art - I'm aware of the time constraints, something you could easily improve on in a future scenario is the use of colors. I see you use some 'typical' tones, sometimes tweaking those a little bit can help define your style. For this game in particular I feel like bright colors don't fit the atmosphere, I would have gone for less saturated, darker tones.
Happy to have played this, and hope you continue to make more games!
The game dumps a lot of information on you, some of which I think could've been removed from the game without sacrificing anything (like Hull and Armour being two different stats). I think the console should colour code certain keywords so it's easier to pick out what happened. Like, ammunition is orange, food is green, morale is purple, etc. So when you glance at the console you can tell what happened without shifting through the dump of information. I also couldn't figure out how to fix Hull, so I only travelled 100 distance. Some more information on what the actions are supposed to do would be nice. But I did like it overall, it just tried to do too much without polishing what it had. Sometimes, less is more.
@mickm No reason to interact with people besides thoughts, but the thoughts do have some meaning, as I explained above. Good idea on the tutorial page, though. I do think it's fun to piece together interactions, but not everyone does, and putting the time in isn't something everyone feels like doing.
@javasaurus I'm glad you like it! That's exactly the sort of thing I was going for. Even though that sort of game is actually before my time.
@renrith Balancing the speed/magnitude of the actions was the last thing on the list, and the list got a little truncated with a few hours to go. Definitely needs to be improved on. Could you elaborate on the art? I'm not an artist by any means, but I ended up putting a bunch of effort into making the art look good. I knew not much was going to be going on movement wise, and I still wanted to keep the player engaged visually. I'm really curious where I need to improve most.
@finn-truman Color-coding the console is a great idea! Never even crossed my mind, but that is exactly what is called for. I disagree with the assessment of Hull/Armour, although I may not have explained it well game. (Really, I know for a fact I didn't.) Armour is the stat that you can control, repair, and it changes up and down a fair amount. Hull was intended to be a slowly decreasing stat that served as a kind of ticking clock, encouraging you to keep up the pace to the safehaven, although you can keep it high up if you manage the Armour right. It might not have played out quite how I intended, but I think that having them separate adds a neat dynamic.
played the web version, really liked it, very engaging, with all the actions you can make its not an easy decision after some time, at first play didnt notice the description of actions on right click so the second play went better, very nice :D !
@thedashdude For sure! Please know that this will be very subjective - I'm an artist, but I'm self taught, so maybe someone who's actually gone to an art school would tell you something different.
The thing that bothers me the most are the jumper colors: They remind me so much of the colors I could choose from back when I sold t-shirts - http://www.valento.es/?service=CatalogConsult&function=show_article&article_ref=CAVABAS . This is why I consider them standard colors. We've seen these kind of tones so much that they're a bit boring.
Some of the colors you're using are also too saturated. The blue for example, it sits almost at the top right corner of my color picker. I don't know why it happens, but people often prefer less saturated colors. With some screens, they even hurt people's eyes. When using a color picker, I recommend avoiding the top right corner the most.
There's also the fact that they're in a space ship, how come are their clothes so bright? I'd expect their clothes to be a little dirty, so again, less saturated tones - It's probably not easy to keep clothes sparkling clear under those circumstances. Moreover, the colors are a bit too bright for what I'd expect from ship crew. I think darker, less colorful tones would help.
Finally I tried a couple of color filters on a screenshot, this is the result:
colder.png
You've got some blue highlights on the game already, and I think that overall the blue filter helps your game's atmosphere. It makes it feel colder, so the atmosphere seems a little harsher. Of course, I'm not suggesting these are the exact colors you should use, this was a quick test.
I hope this was helpful!
@thedashdude For sure! Please know that this will be very subjective - I'm an artist, but I'm self taught, so maybe someone who's actually gone to an art school would tell you something different.
The thing that bothers me the most are the jumper colors: They remind me so much of the colors I could choose from back when I sold t-shirts - http://www.valento.es/?service=CatalogConsult&function=show_article&article_ref=CAVABAS . This is why I consider them standard colors. We've seen these kind of tones so much that they're a bit boring.
Some of the colors you're using are also too saturated. The blue for example, it sits almost at the top right corner of my color picker. I don't know why it happens, but people often prefer less saturated colors. With some screens, they even hurt people's eyes. When using a color picker, I recommend avoiding the top right corner the most.
There's also the fact that they're in a space ship, how come are their clothes so bright? I'd expect their clothes to be a little dirty, so again, less saturated tones - It's probably not%2LS
@thedashdude For sure! Please know that this will be very subjective - I'm an artist, but I'm self taught, so maybe someone who's actually gone to an art school would tell you something different.
The thing that bothers me the most are the jumper colors: They remind me so much of the colors I could choose from back when I sold t-shirts - http://www.valento.es/?service=CatalogConsult&function=show_article&article_ref=CAVABAS . This is why I consider them standard colors. We've seen these kind of tones so much that they're a bit boring.
Some of the colors you're using are also too saturated. The blue for example, it sits almost at the top right corner of my color picker. I don't know why it happens, but people often prefer less saturated colors. With some screens, they even hurt people's eyes. When using a color picker, I recommend avoiding the top right corner the most.
There's also the fact that they're in a space ship, how come are their clothes so bright? I'd expect their clothes to be a little dirty, so again, less saturated tones - It's probably not easy to keep clothes sparkling clear under those circumstances. Moreover, the colors are a bit too bright for what I'd expect from ship crew. I think darker, less colorful tones would help.
Finally I tried a couple of color filters on a screenshot, this is the result:
colder.png
You've got some blue highlights on the game already, and I think that overall the blue filter helps your game's atmosphere. It makes it feel colder, so the atmosphere seems a little harsher. Of course, I'm not suggesting these are the exact colors you should use, this was a quick test.
I hope this was helpful!
The sound was fitting - amazing job making a resource management game like this in 48 hours.
Cool concept, although a bit too advanced for my stupid brain. Really impressive you pulled this off in under 48h.
One small thing, I think the sound effects are waaay to loud. But it could just be me :)
Well done!
Cute looking and a fairly complicated game for such short development time.
Very complexe game, nice job.
Well my crew didn't make it very far, but nicely done game!
Great job building a management game -- I really liked the concept, and you've definitely built in a good bit of complexity. I would say that the number of resources is quite large and it was never really clear how to make more of them -- food, in particular, I was always running out of no matter which options I tried. Tooltips or instructions for each resource explaining how they can be used/created might be helpful for people jumping in. I don't have color comments on the level of detail of @renrith except that the light blue font was a little hard to read. Nonetheless, and intriguing and well done game!
That was fun! I really liked the visuals. Great work.
@mikouaji Thank You! When I get back to this I'm going to make much more detail into the tooltips, and make sure that the controls are more clearly explained to the player.
@renrith Thanks for the update. I get what you're saying now, and I agree.
@kevin-prehn Yeah, I really liked the sounds I came up with. Can't argue with the people saying they're a little too loud, though.
@baby-dino-herd Tooltips were the last think I made, so they're a little light. Between the tooltips for the resources and the ones for the actions you can get close to a full picture, though.
@blobo Glad you had fun. I worked hard to make sure the game had no WIP graphics.
The sound effects were too loud, and I didn't understand how far you have to go, but the game idea was clever.
good game :)
Nice game. I love the small people in your ship, though I didn't figure out how some option works. Maybe it need some tutorial.
A very interesting concept! The whole thing gave me some serious Battlestar Galactica vibes, having to travel a long distance while managing resources and having to deal with both morale and ship integrity deteriorating.
~~The only thing missing in my opinion is some sort of help screen, describing all the actions and possible things to gain, as well as resource requirement to execute them.~~
As I was writing that I noticed your previous comment about tooltips. I thought the "inspect" button worked only to check the people, not menu options. Perhaps it would be better if those tooltips appeared on their own when you hover over a button instead of having to right-click?
Overall it's a fun little game. I enjoyed playing it. ;)
The graphics are very nice for a compo entry!
It is hard to grasp all the indicators and options. For example, what is traveling good for? It seems that doing military actions + creating more ammo + creating more armor can be done infinitely :)
The sound effects were a bit loud. Maybe some background music would help, to make the contrast of silence/effects lower.
Thanks for uploading!
And thanks for playing my game :)