Humble Homestead

c64cosmin 2021-10-03 23:33

Lovely idea, this is super ambitious, really love the feeling, waiting for the next day and get a new population round, selling animals to buy more terrain, this should be polished more and the numbers tweaked, it feels good, but it's missing some mechanics.

rolly 2021-10-04 00:42

Sorry but I have a hard time figuring out what to do. As you say, it really feels like it was an ambitious project and it turned out half completed. The values in the bottom left corner moved in a way I couldn't understand (negative or growing very fast). I don't know if it's normal or not... Please let me know if you add some fixes and I will give it another try ;)

iluvatar 2021-10-04 09:19

It's a really ambitious concept for Ludum Dare (especially for Compo!). It was fun to play, but to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing half the time. But I may be just a noob.

jka 2021-10-04 09:42

Cool concept! I think it needs some sort of tutorial though. I had a hard time figuring out that I could sell the animals to make money.

skleembof 2021-10-04 21:43

The idea is good, and the game is well made with some minor issues (listed at end of comment), but I think you need clearer instructions and some balance changes.

From what I understood, the number of grass tiles indicates how much grass currency you have. So at some point you will have more animals than your grass can sustain so you have to sell the surplus animals to make money to buy more grass to support more animals. Animals produce meat which you need to keep villagers alive. Villagers consume 1 meat per day.

The biggest issue is how slowly you get resources. Getting animals is way too slow which is a problem since animals are the only way to get money, and money is the only way to support more animals. Meat isn't an issue since you start off with a lot of it, and you get more every day.

I think animals should produce products than can be sold. Like the chicken produces eggs which you can keep as meat, or sell for some money. Otherwise, the management slows down to a halt and you're just sitting there waiting for more animals to appear so you can sell them to buy more grass. Or maybe you can build settlements that produce money. So that animals aren't the only source of meat and money in the game.

I know you said the scope of the game got away from you, and 48 hours is nowhere near enough time to make a balanced and engaging civilization management simulator. I think you made a good foundation for a game in this short amount of time, and if you wanted to you could turn this into a full fledged game building off of what you've made. Great job

Some minor things I didn't like: - moving the camera is annoying. When I move to the edge of the screen to click on the animals, the camera just starts moving to the left while I'm on the animal management screen. This makes it hard to keep the land plots on screen - The background music makes it hard to concentrate, especially early on when I was trying to figure out where everything is/how the game worked. - You should add some visual indicator, like a progress bar that shows the time of day. The morning/day/night wasn't very helpful

nyxkn 2021-10-07 21:17

Couldn't really figure out what to do! The camera scrolling was also very frustrating. It seemed like it could have been a good game!

tigerfinch 2021-10-07 21:36

As others have noted, I was fairly confused as to what I was doing, but figured it out a bit. Still enjoyed it! Cool idea.