adrien-dittrick 2021-04-26 18:37
I think I recognize those graphicss form an asset pack somewhere!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Into the Forrest
By frompdx
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1738 | 2.86 | 49 | |
| Fun | 1807 | 2.45 | 49 | |
| Innovation | 1316 | 2.91 | 48 | |
| Theme | 1551 | 3.06 | 49 | |
| Humor | 1358 | 2.02 | 35 | |
| Mood | 1557 | 2.90 | 45 |
I think I recognize those graphicss form an asset pack somewhere!
freezes when construction a new building.
@adrien-dittrick Kenney.nl 1-bit assets.
@fozzy Thanks for catching that. Published an update to deal with the freezing.
interesting concept and application of the theme! pathfinding for your units seems to be working, which is awesome. An RTS base building game is an ambitious concept for a game jam, and you made a good amount of progress in it! Congrats :)
You probably had more features in mind, but currency / enemy attacks seem pretty important to have (and/or a reason for exploring the forest)
Very charming game, that uses the theme is a very unique way. Has a very old school vibe to it.
Don't see a lot of RTSes in game jams. Not only did you try it, but you did really well at it!
And I know you mentioned the art came from an asset pack, but the assets you picked complement your game really well.
Thanks for the feedback @stuffedgravy. I definitely had more stuff in mind, but yeah, RTS style was too ambitious to really get all of the way there. In retrospect there were a few things I could have done differently to allow myself to iterate more quickly but learning is part of the fun so I'll remember those next time.
Thank you @poetril
Thanks @somnolentpumpkin. I can't take credit for the art but I placed those trees one by one :)
Really cool concept. I like being able to see so much of the cool forest right from the start
So I see real asset flipping here. When starting the game I didn't know what to do, when quitting the game I thought I wasted my time thinking about what the heck to do. It's a bit hard what I said, but can you do tutorials in your next games, because I see potential anyway here. Cheers
Quite an ambitious take on making an RTS as an entry on a game jam.
It can be done and it's definitely there! ..and you definitely did it!
**Here's a tip or two:** * Please update your entry with instructions! * Please tell us about your units and what they do!
Despite it being Kenney assets, I do find the trees actually pretty irritating on the eyes since there's so much of them... Please darken them if you can.
It's pretty clear you ran out of time, but good work nonetheless!
I love the concept, I'm a huge fan of base building games and I like the interpretation of "deeper and deeper into the woods." You clearly also got a lot done towards what others correctly pointed out is an ambitious scope. My only gripe is that the menus don't offer much feedback. I don't know what any of the buildings are before trying them, I don't get any feedback on unit building progress, and I can't tell if the game is glitched out or not.
Critique aside, I know you didn't make the art and music, but selecting things that fit your theme still isn't easy and you did it well. This game is probably only a couple ours of UI improvements from one of my top games so far, I'd be interested to hear if you ever push out an update
Thank you for the very thoughtful feedback @fiakaiera and @aditya-kumar. I'll let you know if I decide to do anything further with the concept after the jam @aditya-kumar.
Very ambitious project. It was hard for me to find out how to play, but I admire your courage to create something as complex as this for a game jam. Great!
As soon as I made a barracks, another one was hovering on my mouse, like I wanted to build it, but I didn't.
Same happened to me as the comment above =/
Thanks for the feedback @fractal-flower-girl and @doctortm. I'm still trying smooth out the rough patches of placing buildings unfortunately. Sometimes what you saw happens and sometimes it doesn't. Thanks to the way I built it, it has been fairly difficult to debug. It's probably my main regret. In retrospect there was a much simpler approach to the same thing by having dedicated areas a player can place a building and letting the player select the building after clicking on that spot. As you can see there are really just a couple of spots a building can be placed but that was a last minute decision to cope with some of the problems with the building placement.
That was interesting, is there an end? I killed all enemies and nothing happend.
Controls are quite hard, but it seems like a self written engine so it is a miracle to me how anyone can come up with all the code, the drawing/rendering, adding the pathfinding, realtime attack logic and so on.
But while this is super impressive, it lacks a lot of features from the perspective of a player, such as panning with right or middle mouse button, Text instead of icons would have helped a lot, when attacking enemies, all your units stack up, leading to 1vs1 combat, seemingly no resources, you can produce infinite units.
Still a very impressive entry.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback @leorid. There is supposed to be a win condition after killing all enemies that displays a dialogue box that says you won. It must be broken somehow. Something I need to investigate.
I'd like to take credit for writing my own engine, but I actually built game with Godot. I agree with the lack of important features though. A lot of quality of life things didn't make it in with the time constraints. It was a good learning experience and my first attempt at making anything RTS-like. I'm glad I gave it a shot as I now know a lot more about how to approach building something like this in the future.
I think this would have been cooler if you had to build your base as you went deeper. So you would clear out enemies, venture deeper into the forest, and build your base when/where you thought it was safe. I liked the overall presentation and the gameplay was surprisingly functional for a 72 hour RTS.
The graphics are nice at first, but when you start zooming out and trying to find enemies they become a huge problem. The enemies and base units look way too similar, and its hard to find enemies on the map because they just blend in.
Also, I saw the 30 second tutorial which got me started, but I still had no idea what the different buildings were for and what differentiated the units.
Good job putting this together for the jam.
Thank you for the feedback @skleembof. There is some information on the [game page](https://pdxgames.itch.io/ld48) about the different building and enemy types, but I think part of the game should have included some kind of introduction or walkthrough that explains how to do everything so players don't have to go looking for the information.
@fiakaiera I reduced the contrast of the map to which hopefully the contrast between the trees and background less irritating.
@skleembof I changed the color of the enemy units to make the easier to find and tell apart from the player units. I also made the player units health bars easier to see.
@fractal-flower-girl and @doctortm I think maybe I have fixed the bugs you ran into while placing buildings. The mechanic seems to be working much better now.
@aditya-kumar Made some bug fixes that make the game more playable, see above.
Cool, an RTS in a jam is something you had to try if you spot it in the timeline!
Very good the movement of the unit, I really manage to fight a little war, but then I can't click and select new unit to move my archery into the tower.
Sadly enemy wont come to attack me (if not attacked by me first) and this should be one of the feature that I really would like to see in a further development.
Well done!
Wow an RTS is LD - very cool! Obviously there are a lot of features and QOL stuff missing in a such a big endeavor put together in just 72 hours, but well done for making it playable in that time!!
Thanks for the feedback @dangerblack and thanks for stopping by! Sadly, the archery tower and walls are vestigial. The archery tower can fire arrows without a unit. I hadn't actually considered that they should allow you to add units even though it make sense given how similar the idea is to archery towers in AoE. I had originally intended to have enemy attacks and make it more of a defense oriented RTS (my favorite style), but as I became short on time I opted for seeking and destroying enemies instead. For now I'm focusing on bug fixes, but the effort has gotten a lot of positive feedback so I might think about adding some new features post Ludum Dare to complete the game (too late for LD though). Now that some of the bug fixes are in place things are starting to come together a bit.
Thank you for the feedback @saintchristopher777!
In retrospect I should have opted out of humor since there is no humor. Oh well.
I really wanted to enjoy the game but the controls was a bit of for me when building or just canceling something also the movement AI bugged out for me causing the browser to crash, but the effort is amazing and I would to try an updated version of the game, great job
Nice use of the art :) I like the idea and watching your little guys go out and fight. The controls were a little clunky however and it was very hard to interact with the game. one of the big things was not being able to use the arrow keys to move the camera around the map. The next thing was not being able to deselect the units. I would send my guys out then try to do stuff but they would just be commanded to come back home. I also wish the enemy would come to your base in waves so that you had a better reason to build things like archer towers and walls. I liked the variety of music. I think this game has potential if you keep working on it.
It's cool that you made an RTS for the jam. I wasn't really sure what to do beyond what you posted in your 30 seconds tutorial though. Again impressive and good job on making an RTS in such a limited time.
I spent quite some time in the game because you did manage to make an atmosphere that made me wish spend time in it, but apart from having a bit of fun it was frustrating, with buttons that often don't respond to clicks, inability to deselect troops, and worst of all that movement glitch where a unit gets stuck on the road and goes to slug speed, slowing down all units behind it as well.
You did a lot for a single person, but picked a project too ambitious. Of course in LD you are free to do whatever you want to get your fun, and I hope you learned a lot while making this, but for players to have fun as well you should keep project ambition from growing more than what your process can achieve. RTS involves complicated things like pathfinding, combat rules and whatnot that will eat your time or end up not working well. I did like the idea of the game though.
Unfortunately like a lot of other people, I got stuck with the bug where the building won't leave the cursor. Couldn't proceed any further than that. If you make a bug fixed version, I'd be happy to give it another try.
i like this style of game but unfortunately the units were very wild and made it not as fun as i hoped. the units would get stuck and seem to go in random directions. i give you high marks for trying something like this. thanks for making this game.
The idea is great. I didn't see any game like this one in the game jam, actually. Unfortunately while I was playing I experienced some bugs. I could only build the constructions, but not the units so I fought just with the archery towers for a while. If there's some bug fix for that, I would love to try it again because it's a great concept. Good job making this one!
Great concept! RTS games are quite rare on game jams. I must admit that it's not easy to get comfortable with the game. Controls are not intuitive, and I spend a lot of time to understand how everything works, but I know that it's hard to make strategy with great controls on a game jam (I also tried to make strategy game on this compo ld).
Your game has huge potential. I really enjoyed playing and I would like to see the final game.
@villanelle I wonder if that might have just been bad UX? You have to click on a building to open the units menu. Once you click on a building you can start queuing units. Each one takes a different amount of time to spawn, but it should work (let me know if it doesn't). It's not as obvious as it could be and the game really needs a tutorial (or more intuitive controls).
@smeljey Thanks for the feedback! I agree on the point about the controls. They are nowhere as intuitive as they could be. I was kind of working backwards from RTS games that I've played, but a lot of quality of life controls you'd find in other games are missing here.
Very courageous to try and make an RTS game! The battles work very well and the sounds complete the atmosphere. And I managed to make it towards victory, always feels better when you get there!
There are a lot of bugs, but that is obvious when you make such a game on your own. Most bugs I have already seen in other comments, but I had another one that wasn't mentioned yet. When you are placing a tower, it already starts shooting.
Adding some kind of limited resources could make the game more complete. Not necessarily gathering, just an amount that should allow you to achieve your goal of clearing the woods. Now it just feels unlimited, so it is only a matter of time.
Overall, good effort!
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback @jorne. It was a great learning experience and I've walked a way with a few ideas on how to approach building an RTS in the future that avoids some of the pitfalls that cause the bugginess a lot of people experienced.
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback @jorne. It was a great learning experience and I've walked a way with a few ideas on how to approach building an RTS in the future that avoids some of the pitfalls that cause the bugginess a lot of people experienced.
Cool idea for a game, doing an rts for a game jam sounds like a ton of work. I can see lots of room to improve and add to the game. For starters, I waited for my barracks to spawn melee units but didn't see them pop up anywhere. I think their spawn time is just too long maybe? Instead of them I ended up spamming all of the archery towers, they seem to be pretty powerful. I think money is probably an important thing to add so the player can't throw towers all over the map as much as they want. Besides that, having the enemies attack the player area in the middle would add some challenge to the game. Having a win condition is nice for a jam game though, so nice work!
Congratulations on creating a very ambitious game! It looks promising, but I experienced some serious control problems, which makes it very difficult to play the game. First of all, when I try to click on a user interface button, the armies walk towards that spot on the map. Secondly, there seems no way to scroll the map other than by the tiny cursor buttons, why not have keyboard controls? Overall the controls are confusing and do not seem to follow the usual RTS conventions.