dominium11 2020-10-05 09:44
It really got me hooked once i understood what the credibility meter is! A brilliant idea i think, fits the theme quite nicely, the humour is great, couldn't ask for more, seriously.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD47 → Newster - A Fantasy Social Media Sim
By namidasai
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 380 | 3.30 | 42 | |
| Fun | 464 | 2.92 | 41 | |
| Innovation | 112 | 3.76 | 41 | |
| Theme | 431 | 3.30 | 41 | |
| Graphics | 182 | 3.70 | 41 | |
| Audio | 346 | 2.93 | 40 | |
| Humor | 47 | 3.75 | 41 | |
| Mood | 285 | 3.21 | 40 |
It really got me hooked once i understood what the credibility meter is! A brilliant idea i think, fits the theme quite nicely, the humour is great, couldn't ask for more, seriously.
Great game about spotting fake news:) However the only way to win is to report accurately. I think there should have been an ending for if you share the stories for only one side or the other, and maybe a third ending if you only share the love stories etc. (Or I missed if there is a way to do this)
@ausstein Thank you for playing, appreciate your feedback! I agree on the different endings idea, I'll keep it in mind if I come back to work on this game! Towards the end of the jam, I suddenly had a lot of ideas on how to push the sim aspect a lot more, so once the rating period is over I'll make sure to start working on that =)
@dominium11 thank you so much for your comment, really nice to hear after the jam mayhem and you're there submitting and thinking "what did i even create, what is my life, will anybody actually play this"
Hey, so... Feedback:
I love the idea of this game :heart: This game has the potential for greatness. But as is it's just too narrow. That is nothing to scoff at but I couldn't express myself in the game. Which is precisely why I couldn't truly enjoy it. It needs more axies of measure than just this "credibility meter". It needs something along the lines of what @ausstein suggested. If I had more meters jumping around I could express myself without feeling punished when I shared something the Big Brother disaproved of. That's at least the feeling a get from this.
My own suggestion is that when sharing stuff on social media you can usually write short message above the thing you are sharing, therefore when sharing, add a pop-up with a couple of buttons as "Agree/True", "Disagree/False", "Suspicious"(possible fake news), "Humor", "Love/Share", etc. and let the changes to the meters be different depending on the option you chose.
Personally, I think this is a fine addition to the jam. :thumbsup:
@northman64 thanks so much for your feedback! :smile:
Totally agree, compo is hardcore! Definitely want to play more with additional meters. I was thinking that you would have to manage different audiences, choose your target audience etc. rather than just the credibility meter, but decided to keep it simple to have a core experience that kinda works rather than over-scoping for this jam!
Really like the added expression idea, gonna snatch that and put it on the to-do list. Thanks again! :heart:
Very clean art I love it. I couldn't wrap my head around the concept but it definitely looked good!
Interesting concept!
I wasn't sure what I was doing. I am very anti-social in general! :laughing: Art work is wonderful. The "share" sound effect is a bit annoying.
Well, not much to add to what others have already commented regarding how narrow it is: you basically just have to renewts every post by a newspaper to win. Also, the like and dislike buttons appear to do nothing? But definitely a very solid experience for the compo!
@flopo thank you so much! I can’t believe my art is actually working for people, first time I have to do it myself for a game! Warms my heart. :heartbeat:
@james-joubert thank you for playing! Totally agree, I hate the sfx overall, but my wife thought I was overthinking it and told me to leave them in. :shrug: I should have secured more time to work on em, live and learn!
@indigo thank you for your feedback, appreciate it! One of those cases where you start with a lot of ideas but then the hours fly by and have to cut features. 48h jams, innit? Thanks again!
The artwork and the social experiment core is very well done. This only proves a point of social feed addiction IG, FB and other apps make to us. Great work!
The graphics were great with smooth animations.
The gameplay was excellent. I agree with the others that it was too simple, but the concept is great and I'd love to see this expanded upon. This vaguely reminds me of [a game by Lucas Pope](https://www.dukope.com/trt/play.html) (the developer of Papers Please) where you have to select news stories for a newspaper to influence public opinion about the current dictator or revolutionaries. The cool thing about that is that your actions have an impact on the game world, which I think would be an awesome idea to incorporate into your game if you were to keep working on it.
Hey. I recorded a video about the Ludum Dare jam and included your game in it. If you want to cut your game out of the video, let me know. However, if you like the video, I make similar videos every day. I will be happy if you subscribe. Anyway, I enjoyed playing your game. https://youtu.be/Yf64E8w6lTw
Very cool backstories that kept me scrolling to find out how they end! The high pitched SFX are a bit annoying but that is clearly a detail :)
Cool idea! And the design is very nice. I didn't win, but I enjoyed reading stories! It felt like I'm scrolling a fantasy twitter :D Good job!
@ynk @syudzius @mikoziq @vlad-mgc thank you all so much for the kind words, really appreciate it! Glad my little satire worked for you, I’m looking forward to expand both the concept and the world of Eias!
Re. The sfx: yes, I hate them. Also just realised that I accidentally removed the code that sets the volumes at start. Folks, never leave SFX for two hours before deadline! Live and learn!
@ale thank you for your feedback! I love Lucas Pope’s games, yet did not think of that. Imma snatch that idea for the to-do list. I think it could work well to impact the world, but I’d see it as a late-game kinda thing, once you’ve built your number of followers maybe? Thanks again!
I guess I need to stay off twitter, I was too gullible. But I sure did laugh the whole way through.
Love the art style, great job 👌
Very interesting concept. I like the fantasy world that the newts imply.
Great minds think alike :v:
@tinykidtoo @eugenik @ramble-house-games @jeremyoduber thank you the nice words, means a lot! :heartbeat:
Interesting contemporary spin in a fantasy context , good art style. Funny content as well, I like the satirical nature of the 'newts', I've only played it once so far but be interesting to see how replyable it is after a amount of time, though it seems the developers have a lot of 'newts' the game draws from. I think an interesting take on the theme too.
Great compo entry! It kind of reminded me of reigns. Lots of possibilities to iterate, keep it up!
Great concept. I tried a number of tactics, and it seems that the correct one - is to just trust preselected media of this world. Um, unsure if that's the meaning you wanted to put in the game.)) Also it seems there is some current US politics parallels there. Kinda rubs me the wrong way, even though I'm quite far from it. Kinda hoped for a bit more depth - soomething like crossreferencing, etc. As it is now, some post from DwarvenPress seem to be fine(they just citations of particular people with attributions - genueinly puzzling that games considers them fake) as well as some non-news emotional posts.
The idea of telling the story in background of actual gameplay is really cool, hoped that the story will unfold further.
Art style is really nice for compo.
Nice concept!
A well done game when it comes to the graphics and interface etc but it required quite a lot of reading to play that got a bit tedious. Good job!
Really nice art style, and really well written. I think that including a soundtrack would definitely benefit the game's atmosphere. I think at it's core, this is a really interesting concept with an absolute wealth of possibilities for storytelling if you choose to keep working on it :)
@drnoir thank you for the kind words, really appreciate it! In terms of replayability, I think it will be somewhat limited depending on how far you went and the RNG. There are 165 spread across 4 different storylines. Each storyline is split into 8 "collections" of newts. If you press the refresh button, it will randomly pick which of the 4 storylines progresses and pull the next collection in that story's sequence.
@frozenfire92 thank you! I definitely was thinking of Reigns whilst making it. Team Nerial FTW!
@steambrain thank you for your feedback, appreciate it! I was originally thinking of making the cross-referencing more subtle, but due to the time limit and that I would not have time to thoroughly test for balance, preferred to cut some of those features and stick to a simple system. A lot to play with in that concept and I'm looking forward to expand it further!
@gilad-bar-ilan @gettingrekt thank you so much for playing, glad you enjoyed the experience!
@thesedatedprince thank you, I definitely will! I actually hesitated adding a soundtrack or not. I definitely see the final product as a mobile game a la Reigns, and if I am simulating Twitter, would the music take away from the sim aspect? But if you think it should be added, I'll definitely get more opinions on that topic to see what the final product's soundscape should look like!
Once again, thank you all for playing, really appreciate the feedback. Keep it coming! :thumbsup:
It was very tempting to like and share some of the funny posts, but the score and that sound really made me hesitate! Social media needs this feature. Quite a bit of story for such a short time. Nice entry, and entertaining characters!
A very polished compo game, definitely an interesting take :-) I liked that there was a lot of consistency in each refresh, getting to follow all of the narratives was more engaging than I expected! It is a bit repetitive but the amount of different posts kept me playing until the end :-)
Nice game with addicting gameplay and a clear message!
Although, gameplay could use a little more flavor. For example, I guess like/dislike buttons don't actually do anything, which is a shame.
And a little but very important bit of criticism: if you have some sort of abbreviations that are generally unknown, let along specific to your game's world, be sure to explain them to player. I've spent half my game guessing what CMD is.
The biggest issue with these sorts of games is the evident bias that comes from assigning right or wrong to political opinions, and it becomes tiresome to read the to me rather outlandish similes for real-world events, and certainly the strawmen you put on. It becomes very easy to win because the game is really just an "agree with me" simulator. This is why my game doesn't have any upvotes or downvotes that the player can interact with. All of this took the fun out of the game and it made it very uninteresting to refresh the page. I felt like I was the main character of my game.
This is not a fault on you as a game developer. It is programmatically sound, looks pretty good, and has had a lot of effort put into it. However, this is not something you should expand upon into a full release unless you want to rather permanently divide your audience and make yourself a political actor, rather than just a game developer or a storyteller.
I don't think there's much more to it, so I will finish with this. I compare our games because they have a good share in common, but a fundamental difference is the value and role of social media in each game. In mine, it is an oppressive, misleading, unhealthy piece of work that does essentially all harm and no good. This is the clear narrative of the game. In yours, while I find some unhealthy tendencies typical of social media, just as in my own, it is clear that in your game, social media does not receive any blame for this, rather the problem is groups of people who have opinions. I think this misses an opportunity to take a step back and look at just what we're doing and if we truly can justify the abstraction between the real world, especially as it has been in the past, and how social media makes us think and act.
Nice idea! I thought about making a phone game about nonstop scroll loops as well but couldn't thinking of a good premise to do with it. Your game mildly reminds me of the game Orwell in terms of reading and parsing truth and inconsistencies.
It took me a little bit to figure out what was going on. After rereading the instructions did I realize sharing was the only thing that matters, not likes and dislikes. And from there moved on.
I liked that there was some tricky wording placed throughout. Sometimes I'd just glance at a paragraph that looked "official" and share it but lose some points. Only after I read it over again would I catch the hint of bias to it. Serves me right for skimming!
One of the more unique entries this LD. I like seeing new things so it was a breath of fresh air. Good job!
@arkinrev @humnyn @peachtreeoath thanks for playing and the kind words, really appreciate it!
@oneiromancer thank you so much! Yeah, I had an idea for the Like/Dislike buttons, but ran out of time. 48h jam innit! Re. the abbreviations I was trying to replicate that experience I often have on twitter which is to see an abbreviation and have no idea what's going on. I think it'd help if there was a search bar to look for all the newts referencing that abbreviation. Added to the todo list, thanks again!
@wfmg thanks for your comment, I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts! Regarding your comment on the "agree with me" simulator: it does seem odd to me you had this experience since, as @peachtreeoath pointed it out, the goal is to find the unbiased news reported rather than the opinionated ones. However I agree with previous comments that it's a bit shallow as it is (I would have liked to add more cross-referencing options), and if your playing experience resulted in that feeling, I'll make sure to tweak and test plenty during future development. I think we have a fundamental disagreement regarding game design decisions and message we wanted to communicate with our games: that's alright though, we all have different favourite colours after all! I think I'll leave the social media criticism to your entry and stick to political satire, and we can both continue doing what we enjoy. :thumbsup:
Very clever. I didn't get a very high integrity score, but I still really enjoyed the jokes. By the end I was picking things that would obviously make the score go down just to see it happen.
I really like the graphics
As we did social media based game on the previous jam, I had to play this one! It was fun experience and really unique, good job!
Like other social networks, I believe it will be in high demand. After all, this is now a location where people like to not only communicate their feelings, but also to grow their businesses. My Facebook and Instagram pages, too, are just necessary tools that aid in the growth of my business. My Instagram account was recently blocked, and I needed to take immediate action to reinstate it. This tool https://social-me.co.uk/ assisted me in resolving this problem. It took some time, but the most important thing is that everything is legal and fair.
Well, the idea of this game is very interesting. To tell the truth, I don't know of other similar games, which gives it an advantage. I like the idea of distinguishing fake news from real news. This is a useful skill that will come in handy in real life. As a blogger, I know that much fake news is posted on social networks to attract subscribers and increase their popularity. I have never done this, but I bought followers for Instagram on https://1394ta.org/buy-instagram-followers. So, in general, I want to say that if the game is developed in the right direction and does not spoil it, it has every chance of becoming popular. The creators are really cool guys.