fabbyrob 2022-04-05 03:19
Love the mechanics, cool idea, felt a bit lost about what was happening and where i should be looking at first, but got into it after a few turns!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Peace Council
By guoboism
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 662 | 3.55 | 22 | |
| Fun | 889 | 3.20 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 54 | 4.10 | 21 | |
| Theme | 525 | 3.80 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 730 | 3.60 | 22 | |
| Audio | 673 | 3.18 | 21 | |
| Humor | 1105 | 2.02 | 19 | |
| Mood | 898 | 3.28 | 21 |
Love the mechanics, cool idea, felt a bit lost about what was happening and where i should be looking at first, but got into it after a few turns!
Lots of apparent depth. Very hard to figure out how to play. Not a bad effort and I really liked the visual aesthetic.
I enjoy this game a lot. Would love to see: 1. better UI to make me understand the situation and all ongoing events easier. 2. more strategic card play that allows me to reserve or foresee incoming cards.
@lqc-atlas Thanks for your kind words, I am still improving the game, be sure to check out later
Very nice! I love the audio!
@guoboism Uh..Not to be a downer, but u can't work on your game after the deadline is up.
Interesting and strategic! I like it, but I gotta say, things like these absolutely need a tutorial in-game. I did read the text here before playing so I did know what to do, but you would be truly surprised how many people don't do that. Overall, nice work!
@sillyman987 Dont worry，I will seperate jam vesion and updated version，reviewers can judge fairly.
It was a bit difficult to understand at the beginning since it's very complex, but after a few minutes I got a good idea of how to play. More work into the UI would have made it even better, but even as it is I think it's really interesting. Good job!
Interesting concept, I think it would be more readable if the game used more color in the palette though. The core Idea of using different colors to represent different concepts/sections etc of the game is to make them easy to distinguish, so you almost don't need to read the text to separate. As it is now, this is not the case and while it looks nice and stylish, I think it's hard to tell what is what.
If you make it easier to read what is going on I think this could become a really nice little game.
Nice work!
Pretty confusing, but still fun to play. Very polished and cool
Such an interesting concept, and very complex. I had a hard time figuring out what I was doing or what the various statistics meant, but it was still impressive and good-looking. I think a tutorial level, maybe with fewer variables and/or fewer nations, might be useful. Nice work!
The style and soundtrack work good, but the amount of information to absorb to be able to understand the game is really high from start! It's a sad because the complexity seem to allow for some really good mindbreaking reflexion and strategic planning!
@dob @ribout-horace Thanks for your feedback! Such game genre does need a careful designed tutorial which I can't do within the jam time...
Innnnteresting. One unfortunate thing is that the random events aren't really apparent unless you check the entire map every turn.
Great game. The graphics and mechanics were very polished. Similar to some other comments but i did struggle to understand how the cards that i was playing changed the different zones each turn and what the random events were. Good effort though and i think with some further development would be a really good game that i would play again.
I like the art concept, and the aplication of the mainly theme, i found a little bit confusing the main mechanic of the game, i dont really know when and how i must to end my turn. I believe have a great potential, only recomendation is add a tutorial.
@oramun @ricardopino Thanks! One thing I learned this time is I should never give up the tutorial part of the game...
I could not go over 7 months. I had some difficulties understanding what I must do to keep going, I tried to reinforce the weakest country, and weaken the powerest one, but this was not sufficent. I will mabye retry later, but good job anyway, I know that strategy games are very difficult to make and you manage to make one that seems to be balanced (even if I didn't understand well how to do better than my actual score)
@lereveur Thanks, such genre of game does require a lot of basic work to even get running, I sarcrifise the tutorial part which is quite a mistake for a jam entry. I had just updated the game on itch.io, please do try again. I have done a lot of improvements.
Great and pretty complex strategy game, though with success being more RNG than skill-based, just like real life. It was really fun. I managed to get the game to crash after a long session, but that may be just a WebGL-specific issue: `ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection. Parameter name: index` < https://pastebin.com/RLKzBPbR >
It seems the optimal strategy for a random game is to hurry up and destroy any adjacent cells as soon as possible, so that the countries can never wage war on each other. I wonder how they perform their global economical business and avoid starvation later on though :thinking:
As part of feedback, I'd really suggest to introduce any random end-game mechanic where we can spend large sums of money & influence, because right now there is a certain point (e.g. 200M+, 200+) beyond which these currencies have no use, and it is almost impossible to lose. And of course, it gets annoying when you have to read all the events after each turn, just to make sure you don't miss anything of importance, but I guess this would work as expected if you continued the development and many new events eventually got added, making it unreasonable for us to automate hiding "only some of them" :) Well, at least the "Locate" zoom-in could be replaced by a brief overview that doesn't do any zoom (which is especially annoying to constantly un-zoom when we use a touchpad).
A few more points: some cards are very non-intuitive, as players aren't certain if the effect is just temporary or permanent, maybe some symbol could be used to mark permanent effects. The "advisor vs. population" icons also look very similar, they could at least use a different color. (I also didn't see a number of remaining advisors for the current turn anywhere, this could be a resolution compatibility issue, here is a screenshot.) peace_header.png
\+ I'm quite curious about the difficulty of development of a card-based strategy with so many options, do you have any tips for other developers from implementation standpoint, at least when it comes to high-level design? :) Were there some kind of bugs you've underestimated, and was it straightforward to cover everything on UI? (I'm hoping today's Unity development is becoming more standardized in regards to following some patterns, rather than having the expectation of making basic structure of strategy games ad-hoc without proper planning, which was sadly my experience last time.) Last but not least: are you open-sourcing the project in a future? :)
@scsc Thanks for you review! I am glad you can enjoy from the game. I have to say, you have out-played the game... I haven't designed that far. I merely thought about how the game can ends like seperate countries into islands or let one country take over the rest. Maybe in the future version. Thanks for your feedback about actual playing experience and suggestion. I will take into account for next update. Some actions will change zone status permenently and some will just cast "temporary effect", which always leaves a icon on the zone with "X turns" in zone hover panel, but the description on card should be more clearified.
For tips on the development side, I really can't say such game require any specific technology rather than a lot of basic coding utilities, like Excel importer, dynamic value (a value wrapped with modifiers to allow temporary modifications) and simple grid algorithms(finding nerighbours etc). As a turns based game, compared to action game, in fact, is a lot more easy to code, as everything is predictable. Most of the time I was designing to make the econimic model in game to be simpler and easier to understand. And how to present the data, as it seems is still has room for improve.
Unity doesnt offer too much, but you sure can find solutions in the asset store. I had been using Unity for job for more than 5 years now, I have many wishes for Unity as well. But I really dont expect too much for it.
Lastly, this wont be opensourced, and I plan to work on it to be a real commercial game later, hopefully.
@guoboism Thanks for your reaction, I'm wishing you luck in designing an interesting end-game mechanic and thriving in the fierce market competition between strategy games, so that you won't be attacked when vulnerable against games exceeding double your power ;)
Yeah it makes sense to keep the source closed if you have a vision like this, though just a side note to consider in a far future: I could still imagine maintaining some generic strategy framework as a separate open source project, while keeping only the game (with all the current assets and fine-tuned game logic) behind the closed doors. In a long term, once project's complexity grows, the benefits of being able to collaborate with other strategy developers and offload some work to voluntary maintainers may quickly outweigh the risks of concepts being stolen by parties who don't intend to add anything new anyway. Especially in an open ecosystem like Unity, integration of some mechanics between different types of games (or even inserting one game into another) can get interesting and complex very fast (e.g. you may introduce multiplayer yet still prefer to keep it easily extendable), and there has always been a lack of high quality libraries, especially on Asset Store (with their weird incentive structure of paywall and nonsense licensing that only benefits solo devs, which also harms their collaboration). Keeping any reusable common functionality fully open-source on GitHub and installing it via Unity Package Manager feels like a better option tbh :) But it's often a challenge to find even one library that fits your needs (and isn't neglected).
Regarding the implementation, you've mentioned some good examples: I'm sure some jam visitors would be interested in seeing the Excel data and some of its first iterations right in the project description, along with the process of how or why these choices were made. We all improvise when we have our creative moments, and yet when we're asked to replicate someone else's creative effort, we often can't decide for the life of us even on the starting point :sweat_smile: and what's worse, if something doesn't get standardized, it even gets easy to eventually forget our own solutions. The matter of OOP design patterns also gains on importance at some point, especially for a solo dev who doesn't receive any feedback on simplifying code architecture, often not even after project has been finished. Sustaining a simple yet robust economical model won't get easier later on either. There is also a difference between making Grid/Tiles from scratch vs. using Tilemap, and either you try a first thing that comes to mind, or you build up something that's more time-tested (at least you didn't need A* pathfinding yet :P). Last but not least, as you've noticed with the UI, making it responsive to support various resolutions is something Unity has always neglected helping us with (at least few years ago I've often spent majority of time just tweaking it and wishing to find some HUD library to make it more reasonable to finish a game prototype in 3 days without bugs). In any case, maybe I'm just reading into this too much; it's just that I feel like there is a lot of potential to build upon the concept you've just started, and I'm already worried about how it'll scale :) Have fun with your continued improvements!