Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Morpheus of Mars
By rubixnoob13 and annearkey
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1221 | 3.03 | 28 | |
| Fun | 1211 | 2.82 | 28 | |
| Innovation | 1313 | 2.46 | 28 | |
| Theme | 1200 | 3.07 | 28 | |
| Graphics | 1180 | 2.78 | 28 | |
| Audio | 927 | 2.21 | 25 | |
| Humor | 1067 | 2.15 | 24 | |
| Mood | 1193 | 2.92 | 28 |
Massive respect for doing an RTS. It's not too often you see those here :D
While I liked the concept, I still would've wished for some basic military unit or maybe that the drones can be weaponised. The controls feel intuitive and on point, the flood of enemies feels natural. Well done!
@trexxak Thanks for the review! I actually had plans to add turrets which would shoot at the enemies, but it took me way longer than I expected to get the pathfinding even close to correct, and then I had a few real life duties to attend to, so they had to be cut for time. Since it was supposed to be a research facility in the game's story, I didn't want to have TOO many militarized units. Basically, give the player the ability to build something to slow down the horde of enemies, but not stop them completely
Pretty neat, great job! :) Some military units/buildings would definitely have helped spice things up, but still great work for the amount of time you had!
Great work on building an RTS! Reminded me a little of Dune II way back in the 90s. :D Would love to see a few different drone types or maybe giving exisiting drone type the ability to build a wall to deflect enemies.
It took me a minute to figure out the loop but once I got it. it was fairly satisfying. I like the concept of a nice RTS style game, especially in a jam like this. Would love to see an update with the features and sounds you wanted to do. Overall a good entry!
We attempted to do an RTS a while back for a game concept, but we ran into a ton of issues. RTS games are not easy to make; kudos for pulling one off in a jam! However, I do wish there was a way to fight back at the wave of enemies swarming my base. Maybe there was and I simply missed it. Either way, great job sir!
You can be proud to make an rts in a short time with just 2 people nice job. Dune 2 indeed!
Nice job with this RTS game. I made one by mistake in the last LD event. You had to build a village that was near a Volcano that had lava randomly come near the village.
i could see this being a cool wee RTS puzzle game of efficient resource management. not gonna say how many tries it took buti had fun figuring out the optimal order of doing things.
It took a while until I got the hang of it, but it's a nice small game! I don't fully understand why the Y + A/D phase in the beginning is needed.
Delightful and very different experience as others have said! One piece of feedback I have not yet seen from other commenters is that I felt the info-window was a bit underused. I found some functionalities and loops slightly unintuitive and I think displaying information about the selected object at the bottom-center/top-right while leaving the text box open for some hints/humour could be an easy way to make the game a bit more accessible, appealing and interactive. Amazing job though, and definitely a memorable game in this jam. RTS is a hard genre and we royally failed creating one for the last LD... impressive!
Nice game, please go on! Its great to see a RTS game here on ludum.
Good game. The instant call for enemies once you start repairing communications is a little weird, though. A little tower defense would have been nice, but I assume that's in the works with more time.
I'm always amazed at how much other people are able to do 72 hours. There's not much I can say about it that you don't already know as you had more features planned.
However, a simple thing is that when you have a drone selected there could be an icon whenever you mouse over something that would show you what the drone can do at that location.
Well done!
Was a bit confusing how repairing the dome didn't always work (didn't realize at first that you need resources to repair), and how repairing comms didn't always work (maybe it was you need the dome to be repaired first?). Also wasn't clear what repairing comms did for you.
Really liked how you did the startup sequence. Very clever and gave some character to the world.
Thanks to everyone for all the feedback. Here are some replies / updates to everything that's been commented on so far:
- @travis-bittel @teammonumental Turrets were a feature planned so you could build them and they would attack enemies. The sprites were actually in a folder in the final build, but unfortunately I ran out of time before I could get them implemented and had to submit
- @nikl The Y + A/D sequence was supposed to be you as the player starting up a manual power generator which was to be assisted by 2 bots, "Dyna" and "Mo", as in a "dynamo", which is a type of generator to make electricity. I was also planning to implement then occasionally breaking down, so you would have to "fix" them by spamming their respective buttons of A or D while playing the game. When the power is out, the oxygen would no longer refill, and possibly the turrets would stop firing / drones stop working, as the idea of the drone limit (which I never fully explained in the game) was that the computers inside the base were only strong enough to power a small number of drones, which is why you can only have 5 drones built
- @noirox @codebug I did intend to have the minerals, dome and comms dishes to have a status that will appear when you mouse over them to indicate which actions can be performed there.
- @imaginary In the story that we had about half way fleshed out, in addition to the enemies, there was also going to be radiation clouds which would also damage the dome. So it is INEVITABLE that the dome will collapse. However, to give you a chance at survival, once you repair the comms, you start to send a distress signal. Due to the real world times involved in sending a signal from Earth to Mars and back, we decided it should take some time for the signal to be sent, and when the comms progress bar (top right) is full, it changes to a "Rescue" timer. When THAT bar fills, if you haven't been killed by the enemies and you still have oxygen, you get rescued and win the game. The idea as to WHY this causes enemies to start spawning is that the signal woke them up and they're angry, so they attack you. Was also planning to have them attack the closest of either the antenna or the dome when they spawn, but I didn't get everything implemented as you already know. Fun fact: "Morpheus" was a god of sleep and dreams, which is where the name of the game comes from. The story premise is basically that your signal "wakes up" more sleeping enemies while you're trying to call for help
- @jessekaz I should really include more text in the display to indicate that there are resource costs for repairing. If I remember correctly, the dome takes 25 minerals per 1 HP of repair (it has 100 total health I believe). The comms have 10 health, but I think each point of health takes 250 minerals to repair, so it takes a total of 2,500 minerals per comms dish. However, the dishes DO remember how many minerals were put into them, so they will take a partial repair, then eventually be fully repaired once you've chucked enough minerals into them.
Sounds like you know just what you need to do to improve this, I will say what is here works well, my only hopefully unique addition would be as a research facility, having upgrades they can bash out to help defend/repair/mine would be cool
RTS for a Ludum Dare is super impressive! Good job with the game mechanics. A bit confusing at the start, but after a moment I got it. It was fun to try it out.
Very impressive game! I needed to read through your tutorial under the game to really understand exactly how it works. And it feels like there is one intended way to win, so not much strategizing, just follow the same strategy to trigger all of the comms. But it was a very well done game
Really cool to see a RTS game! The controls were nice and felt intuitive. Pathfinding was great! One big thing I would have liked to see would have been some music in game, that can make a huge difference. Also, it didn't seem super intuitive what to do to win and whatnot. I fixed all three comms and nothing happened, so maybe I did something wrong? Either way, nice job! And I loved the A/D sequence at the start. haha
Thanks again to everyone for all the feedback! I've been working on getting a post-jam version together to basically just "finish" all the things I had wanted to implement for the Jam. To have the pathfinding actually work how I intended, I've had to do a few things to try to get it to run even close to the correct speed, as GDScript gets pretty slow when you start running into a couple of loops. But I'm working on it lol. - @link270 I know it's not super obvious, but once you fix ANY of the 3 comms, you start sending a signal (there's a progress bar on the right. The more you fix, the faster that bar fills. However, once it fills, you still have to survive until the rescue arrives (Same area, the progress bar changes from "Comms" to "Rescue"). I meant to include some popups or something to explain what was going on but again, time constraints lol. I always tend to plan about 10x bigger than what I can realistically accomplish in 3 days, but I still had a ton of fun with this jam!
Oh okay, that makes total sense. We had similar things in our game, where things felt obvious to us, but we didn't have time to put in good enough feedback for the player to actually know what was going on. haha I know what you mean by not getting everything done that you plan, we certainly did the same thing. Awesome job regardless!