koalanalle 2022-04-01 18:06
Enjoy!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Salvation From The Alien Planet
By tomssuli, Unbugged, duckman, Turgunen, A4po and koalanalle
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1176 | 3.09 | 33 | |
| Fun | 1167 | 2.88 | 33 | |
| Innovation | 1198 | 2.69 | 33 | |
| Theme | 1249 | 2.98 | 32 | |
| Graphics | 1227 | 2.61 | 33 | |
| Audio | 801 | 2.91 | 32 | |
| Humor | 934 | 2.53 | 30 | |
| Mood | 1226 | 2.83 | 32 |
Enjoy!
Ambitious entry! So much work clearly went into this.
Game seems pretty solid, I like the play style and artwork that went into it.
This could be such a good game with enough time! Please keep it up and let me know when it's finished!
Really cool to see a leaderboard! This is a great Jam game - it can be a bit slow, but the core is there and I'm glad to see a game like this in the mix. Great work!
Nice little RTS style game! Has a good bit of challenge, mostly introduced by the intense waves of enemies and managing health pools so your characters don't die. Has leaderboards, though I can't seem to get on them even though I seem to have beat the high score a few times. Really cool, cute pixel graphics. Great job!
This has a lot of depth for a jam entry, I'm seriously impressed by how much you managed to get done!
When I first started playing it was pretty overwhelming, I had no clue what half the numbers did and even by the end (when I felt I understood it pretty well) I had no clue what half the numbers were. I think cutting out and streamlining the info fed to the player would help a ton.
Also, more feedback for the player would be great.Whether it be information on incoming enemy waves, or that Sometimes I would do something wrong (or something would die), and I wouldn't know what happened until I guessed it out.
That aside, I had a ton of fun moving around my human units and strategizing the best locations to put them around the map. Good job, I hope you continue and finish this game :)
Incredibly fun, I like the idea of managing the resources and deploying the units. The turrets are awesome, not sure if it's intentional, but the game didn't seem to mind that I had -5 electricity from building them. I felt like I could have defended the fort indefinitely after like 10 resource drops. For some reason though when I deployed to pickup a drop, the guy just ran in circles around the drop, and everyone stopped shooting, but I guess defeat was inevitable. Happened just after I hit 1TB of data. Needless to say, I greatly enjoyed this game. Keep up the good work!
**Thank you everyone for the praises!** :slight_smile:
I managed now making the description so you can read the plot of the game. We had planned to make a proper intro but as we were running out of time, we decided to use the remaining time to make the game more playable.
@therealmoebius @sacredbacon @jonathan-ray-pollard @zah Thank you very much for playing and giving positive feedback!
We repaired the broken Leaderboards. Re-download the game and they should work now!
@mopifish Thanks for the constructive feedback!
We had a tutorial texts and generated speech but we didn't have time to implement them. The placeholder is the "speaking" doctor on the bottom of the screen.
I put the instructions now to the Ludum Page description. The menu balloons are also explained there.
@sacredbacon We sadly didn't have the time to properly implement power. Also we didn't find the running-in-circles bug until the very end so we couldn't fix it in time. I still haven't been able to repeat it consistently to debug it.
EDIT: Actually we fixed the game breaking bug of running in circles. It was one addition of "<" to a if-clause. I think it's still in the spirit of competition to fix it as it was game breaking as in "unable to get more than ~1000 GB score in score based game".
Nicely done! An RTS like game is hard to pull off and this worked well as sort of an RTS tower defense hybrid.
I'm currently 4th on the leaderboard!
A couple suggestions: - Knowing the health of the guys would be great. - I kept trying to move the guys around in response to new threats. It took me a little while to realize I needed to send them back home first. I read the directions beforehand, but they didn't make sense to me until I struggled through it in the game. - The music might be a little too low key for this type game. It was almost relaxing :)
@minibobbo Thanks for the feedback and suggestions!
An advanced version is planned and among other things there will be: - Health bars - A short ingame tutorial telling you how to place and recall infantry and build stuff
About the music - it actually changes according to how dire the situation is. At first attack it changes to jamming and then when base is damaged, it goes even more actiony and near the end it becomes desperate.
nice game what was this made in?
I really liked the sci-fi feel to this game. X files, rimworld, whatever. Played it for awhile, but eventually it felt a bit too easy! In any case, I liked the control system, though unconventional. Made it feel more personal. Like a family in a hut in a desert holding off against an alien attack.
@6smith Thanks, we used Clickteam Fusion for this one.
Nicely done! A lot of fun and even though I dind't 100% get the numbers (the power was -11 to me at some point) it's simple enough to understand and grow your base. Also, when there's a drop you can send a lot of men to get it and each of them will come back with more supplies, though I don't know if it's a bug or a feature I did use this quite a lot lol
@silverlybee Thanks for the review and thank you for reporting the multiple use of the same drop bug. We hadn't noticed it. It is definitely not intended mechanic as it breaks the balance. We sadly ran out of time and didn't implement power generators and the consequenses for using more power than you have.
Nice game, a bit confusing at first, but pretty interesting once you know what's going on.
The RTS genre is very close at heart, and it's incredibly rare to find one in a game jam (and for good reason, they are not easy to develop, specially under time pressure).
Apart from being difficult to make, they usually require a fair amount of time invested before you can play them well. Here is where you made the smartest move, turning it into almost a pseudo "turn based" game lowers the skill floor and makes it instantly enjoyable. The first game I did die fairly quickly, probably only uploaded some 100Gig of data. But after that initial first run, I got the hang of it.
I derped though, pressed Escape and killed my second run when I had some 300gig :monkey_face:
My third round I did even better, and I managed 1642 gigs, 4th place on the leaderboards, quite happy with that :sweat_smile:
score.jpg
I think that this would do really well as a mobile game, or even better on a tablet. The controls would translate over really well.
Apart from the great gameplay, I enjoyed the audio and the graphics, both go really well together and make for a good coherent experience.
Well done to your entire team, it's not easy to get such a large group of people on the same page and working efficiently! Hyvä peli!
Tower defense games can be a bit ambitious for a game jam. That being said, congrats on submitting a finished game! The Leaderboard feature is really cool and unique, I don't think I've ever seen a game jam game with one before. I'm sure with more time, you could add some polish to this game to make it a bit easier to understand the UI.
So I believe I discovered an extremely cheesy strategy here. In particular, if you click the hand icon on the resource drop a bunch of times, you get a bunch of resource boxes--I can't imagine this is entirely intended, as it makes the game very easy very fast.
Here is what my game began looking like as I kept getting piles of resource boxes: Screenshot, with lots of turrets
That said, I think there was a lot of fun gameplay before I discovered this strategy (and, admittedly, I had a lot of fun building a ridiculous base as well).
In particular, I think that having a small number of human characters in your base, that can be juggled between a bunch of different tasks, is a super cool way to build a game like this. It was fun trying to send out the shotgun and a couple pistols each time there was a new attack, and then sending them back in to heal.
I think it would be interesting if the game dove into the narrative a bit more. It seems to me that the humans are very much in the wrong here, and it would be cool if the game played with that a bit as the player progresses. (Maybe the game could simply reveal more of the story as the player moves through it? Something like video logs that the player watches slowly through the game?)
Overall, a fun, pretty novel take on this kind of defense game.
Edit: I left the game on for a while and it did start getting harder after around ~6000 GB. I decided to try quitting at 6969 GB for fun then. :smile:
@simon-rahnasto kiitos paljon for the very thorough review!
We actually changed the controls mid developement. First we had basic command & conquer style moving and we suddenly had an idea of menu blobs. After I slept on it, it was so clear in my mind, We dumped the classic rts contols alltogether and changed to the blob menu.
...when we looked at what we had made, we realized only as afterthought that those controls would translate straight for a mobile game 😄
@honey-pony Thanks for the review, nice to hear about the feel of the game.
Great idea about the story unfolding as we play! I'll see if we could implement something along those lines for the advanced edition after we have first made all the planned and promised features :)
@kickononnell We are in progress of making an advanced edition where among other stuff we add some tutorial. Actually there was already kind of AI-voice-overed tutorial that we just had no time to implement.
I like it a lot. Seems very polished for a game jam entry, so color me impressed! Love the music.
This is surprisingly in-depth for a Ludum Dare entry, with plenty of mechanics and things to juggle. Unfortunately, I feel like this works against it, as without much of a tutorial, it ends up being quite overwhelming and you don't really understand what to do. It took me ages to figure out that, in order to pick up a resource drop, you had to send someone back into the base.
There are other strong points, though, like the global leaderboard and the soundstrack. I especially like the dual interpretation of the theme: you're *delaying the inevitability* of your base's destruction, in order to send as much data as possible so scientists can *delay the inevitability* of death. Very clever!
Overall, though, I feel like this is a bit too ambitious for its own good, and the time restraints of Ludum Dare mean it's not quite there yet. I'd love to see a more polished, upgraded post-jam version of this.
Like some others have suggested, I felt like a very brief tutorial could have helped me. I placed my first minigun in the bottom of the screen as I was clicking on the other UI elements. :smile:
It's a cutesy game with a simple goal, and I enjoyed the simple graphics. I just think the game could have been a bit more interactive.
Oh, and the calming audio definitely helped with eradicating those "space slugs".
this one is very fun
You can see that time and will was invested in this game, it's simple but dificult, i just fell the lack of helth bars or indicators of damage in the player's soldiers.
@honey-pony @jozgames @xedur @f1krazy @peter-sc @kickononnell @simon-rahnasto @silverlybee @mrevilguy @therealmoebius @sacredbacon @jonathan-ray-pollard @zah @mopifish
Advanced edition 1.107 released [Download Salvation From The Alien Planet **advanced edition**](https://www.blackenter.com/files/salvation_adv.zip)
**Advanced edition features** - Some game breaking bugs and exploits fixed - Separate scoreboard - Health Bars - Voice overed tutorial - Power works now - New buildables: Power station, Metal mine, Radio Tower - Boss waves - Unlimited pistols
We'll release updates still for a while. Follow me or ask me to tag you if you want to stay informed.
Awesome, please tag me in future updates :)
Quick fix [advanced edition](https://www.blackenter.com/files/salvation_adv.zip) 1.111 - Reset scores - Fixed bug where turret stands are left on the ground when destroyed - Added images to tutorial - Fixed volume control resetting when minimized
(all download links for the advanced edition always lead to the latest build)
tags: @simon-rahnasto @therealmoebius
a well made functioning game. took me a little while to figure out how to pick up supply. wish there could be more features.
@vivyhasadream
Thanks for the feedback! We ran out of time badly, I wasted so much time fighting some bugs that wouldn't allow the developement going forward... We had to leave out lots of stuff that we had graphics and sounds made for, just because time ran out to code them in.
Did you also try the [advanced edition](https://www.blackenter.com/files/salvation_adv.zip)? We're updating it for a while still after the jam and we have added many of the missing features to it already :slight_smile:
loved the game, great job!
Update [advanced edition](https://www.blackenter.com/files/salvation_adv.zip) 1.114 - Escape opens pause-menu and does not quit the game - You can now repair damaged buildings - Health bars show colors - You can now upgrade generators - Balanced building healths and prices and power consumption - Fixed some bugs - Caused some new bugs
(all download links for the advanced edition always lead to the latest build)
tags: @simon-rahnasto @therealmoebius
Update [advanced edition](https://www.blackenter.com/files/salvation_adv.zip) 1.115 - Fixed high scores breaking if saved with empty name