johnjoemcbob 2020-04-20 15:04
Cool! I like how many things you have to balance, and the visuals of all the twisting/turning pipes are great! I suffocated because I am a bad person :) Great work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD46 → Feed the Machine
By koemeterion and deathstorm
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1475 | 3.38 | 44 | |
| Fun | 1692 | 3.09 | 44 | |
| Innovation | 806 | 3.48 | 44 | |
| Theme | 499 | 4.01 | 44 | |
| Graphics | 1788 | 3.16 | 44 | |
| Humor | 1262 | 2.80 | 38 | |
| Mood | 1032 | 3.48 | 43 |
Cool! I like how many things you have to balance, and the visuals of all the twisting/turning pipes are great! I suffocated because I am a bad person :) Great work!
Wow.. So much you have done in such a short time. Like the gameplay, found it very hard. And got very annoyed of all the stuff that got in the way. Nice game :thumbsup: great execution :D
It's a really hard game, and I'm a bad bad person. Pros: good graphics, sounds, and the idea is great. Cons: it's hard to understand the task, I think that some visual clues or maybe notifications could make the current goal more clear. Great job overall!
Nice game and quiet catchy. However it is very difficult to locate stuff because there is no visual feedback. Often it takes forever to find leaks and in the meantime you run out of oxygen without noticing. Fair to say, it is really hard but fun! Great job!
I really enjoyed the theme. It felt a little like SS13, running around and fixing things on pain of death. It was difficult to find all the machines, and often I'd die before finding the ones I needed. I think if you revisited this with some visual clues (like arrows on the UI for where things are, a HUD for various stats) it could be really fun to play. Sterling effort.
Thanks so far for the feedback everyone!
@incd021 I feel you! The game annoyes you constantly and I've got so frustrated over playtesting ... I hated it :D
@bereg @slam0 @polyducks - The missing ui was a design choice we made. You all are right that its hard to keep track of everything if you cant see the status of, lets say the amount of oxygen in the dome. But maybe it would be too easy / not that stressfull with all the ui on screen. In retrospective we have probably learned that this type of game should need a ui. You have to make mistakes to gain expierence :D
Really loved this game!! Amazing
I liked the idea and i tried real hard but this game is just to difficult. One time i nearly made it but then i had bad luck and the radio broke all the time. it feels like you need a lot of luck to beat it and that you cant make it with a plan because of the randomness.
Some problems i noticed: sometimes stuff is hidden behind the pipes. One time i could not see that my co was broken because of the pipes.
I would love to replay the game if you could made it a bit easier or less random.
EDIT: i just realised that i played your game for 40 minutes
Thanks everyone for playing our game and your very nice feedback.
Especially playing it for 40 minutes is pretty hardcore.
I love how absolutely creepy the machine is, it reminded me of Sinistar but even worse. Even though the game and tutorial are a bit overwhelming at first, I liked that it required me to explore a bit to learn the ropes and get a feel for where everything is. The lack of UI certainly made me paranoid about all the systems, especially after I died the first time. I totally agree though, you really just have to make design choices and learn from them. That's a good attitude and it's the best way to get better. Ambitious game with an impressive amount of systems.
Nice graphics! Pretty fun game. I was a little annoyed that sometimes I could not move because a piece of paper was blocking my path. I think you have to many screenshots on this page because it took me a while to find your link. Well done! Keep making games!
Nice concept! I didn't get very far, I keep getting lost and then suffocating :) The sound is nice, and I like the machine animation a lot! I'd have a much easier time if the dome was a bit smaller though.
I love that it randomizes the environment every time you play!
Interesting concepts, but it's difficulty to figure out what's to do in the game.
I know this have a tutorial, but a simple tutorial I guess is more great :).
The rest, I really like the environment and the mechanics, manly to take objects and give to the machine. You guys have a good job in short time. Congratz
Nice work, needed a little more guidance on what to do in the game and where to go. Also a little more feedback when the player is dying.
Other than that it was a great concept and looked great, balancing the machines was a lot of fun and it is very impressive how much you made in the time that you had.
I agree with what a lot of other people have said here. I want to add that if you are going to randomize the environment every time, I think it has to be a lot easier to know where to go. Specifically, making the area smaller and the machines bigger would help a lot. I think the oxygen and health bars should be built into the UI and have labels on them, because I really couldn't tell what they were without dying.
The game looks really good though, and the putting stuff in the engine to burn was a satisfying loop. The sounds are fun, the story is fun, the engine is creepy in a cool way, great job!
I was very attracted by the visuals and art direction, feels "dirty" and moody. But then I got lost in the gameplay. Regardless, I think if you keep working, you could make it a final published product - it has potential.
Stressful! That's usually not an emotion I get from... anything really, but here juggling between the different stations, repairing and using them is quite tense. I like that, actually. Annoying user experience issues, not so much.
For instance, interacting with the world requires the feet of the character to be very near the center of the target object. It really should check from the center of the dude instead, or, even better, check both. Repairing should be a priority, so that the character doesn't accidentally pick up objects when trying to repair a pipe. Alternatively, there could be a different key for it to begin with.
Repairing and using the stations is also very slow. It doesn't need to be as you could have just tweaked the other values to be slightly faster as well. The tenseness comes from not being able to do everything at once, not from the slowness.
I didn't actually mind missing some of the information in the HUD. There is always a need to pump in more oxygen, so I pretty quickly learned to just go there whenever I was nearby regardless. Same thing with the engine. Always fed it when going past.
So, I like the design. More polish and UX testing and this would be quite something.
It reminds me of Space Station 13. Good job!
Nice game. Like the graphics and design of the machine. Kind of hard to get in the right position to fix the machine, and it took very long. Nice concept, could make a pretty cool game if worked on a bit more.
Another resource management game that was both far too complex and too stressful for me. I struggled hard with it because there was so much to look out for and to do and the game wasn't throwing me any bones at all and I constantly felt lost. I feel that it could need a bit of polishing and especially player guidance in some easier levels first 😅 Here's my latest stream featuring the game, by the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP012VKTPV8
I really like the concept and the art is quite nice, though, the main character could really use some animations :) I love the machine in the middle, looks awesome! The sound design is really well done as well. The ambiance sound cools and the sound cues help. I read through the tutorial briefly (a lot of text!) and tried my luck with the game. I still had a lot of trouble knowing what to do and why I should do it. Fixing the broken pipes and broken machines was one thing and was kinda self explanatory, but everything else was quite confusing. A little more feedback would've gone a long way. Pressing "e" on the working green house did nothing for me, so I always starved to death. It was also not really clear, what impact it had to feed the machine in the middle. I never know how much I should throw in or when it was time to do it again. Also, everything broke way to fast. I was just constantly running through the level fixing everything. There was no time to really explore the mechanics and understand them thoroughly because my oxygen and hunger meters went down rapidly. After the third death I was quite frustrated. This game would benefit a lot from an in game tutorial and/or progression of available machines while playing. So you can learn each machine one by one before having to deal with all of them directly.
I bet the game is pretty easy to beat if you understand the mechanics, but at least I couldn't grasp them. Still, like I said, I enjoyed the concept and the random nature of the level was a nice touch. Aside from the difficult learning curve, an in game tutorial would really elevate the game play for new players.
Keep it up!
Great game! Quite hard but simple and enjoyable!
The long tutorial makes the game a bit hard to understand when really it's quite simple to understand once you start playing haha. A bit more feedback when performing actions would help understand what's going on (am I pressing the right button? am I actually doing something or should I go to another machine? has something exploded somewhere that I didn't hear?). To me that's been the main problem, but I still kept playing so I guess it's not too big a deal. :)
A pretty fun game! You've managed to create a lot of connected systems for the player to manage. It's pretty enjoyable to be running around, first trying to locate everything, then frantically trying to replenish your resources.
The UI could use a lot more feedback though. Your hunger bar is only visible when you're moving up or down. I usually spent most of the game moving left or right, so most of the time I couldn't see the bars getting low and lost. When a machine breaks, you have no idea it's broken and you have to fix it. It would be a nice idea to at least add some icons or text to the screen, something like "You are hungry" or "The O2 generator broke down". That way you wouldn't have constant access to full information about the state of each system, but at least you would know there is a problem somewhere and you need to take care of it.
Also, a lot more feedback when using things. Right now I can press E and not notice something isn't working. If I'm trying to use a machine and there's no power, play some sort of beeping or clicking noise to let me know it isn't doing anything. When completing the radio call for home, display some information like "message sent" instead of just hiding the interaction text.
While I understand the idea behind having to find each machine every time, I think once the player finds them they should have some sort of markers, letting the player know where they are. It would be better if the game remembered their location instead of forcing the player to do it.
The colliders could use some work, too. Pretty often I'd get stuck on things like the back of the chair, while stuff like broken pipes were very difficult to move to.
Overall it's a really good survival game. A nice jam entry, I've enjoyed playing it. ;)
Solid entry. The game is easy to get into and control. The graphics are fun and, though it could use some more ambient sound or music, the mood is appropriate. I recommend working on some sort of a feedback to let us know if the machine "liked" what was fed to them with possibility some things causing it to go haywire and maybe change colors like it is burning up or dying. Just overall, improvements to the HUD/UI to help guide the player more towards each goal. Honestly, I forgot to repair anything and just kept finding things to feed it and hoped for them best. lol
Ambitious idea, this is very fun.
The tutorial is too long, an interactive tutorial or message on screen when playing will be better. It's too hard to find your way cause the map is big, you should add maker or map that will be updated when player explore. Add GUI to show wich machine is broken.
Good work.
@duke No even if you know what to do, the Game is pretty hard ;)
Thanks to everyone who played, rated and especially Commented our Game. We are always Happy to read so much Comments and good ideas, Feedback and Critic.
Thanks a lot to everyone ;)
There is so much to do in this game and so many things to keep track of. I wish there was an indicator for what is where and what's broken. One of the things was hidden behind some pipes and I wouldn't have found it if I hadn't bumped into it. I can see that there was a lot of ambition for this project and the fact that everything works and there are only a few things that don't work perfectly is amazing. You did a really good job on this game and with a bit of polish and some UI work this could turn out super cool. Really well done!
I love how the sounds were put together. I also like some of the graphics and the interactions.