lomstfer 2022-04-05 09:49
Pretty cool!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → All Lines lead to boom
By peter-ondus
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1328 | 2.78 | 32 | |
| Fun | 1333 | 2.48 | 32 | |
| Innovation | 514 | 3.48 | 33 | |
| Theme | 1214 | 3.04 | 33 | |
| Graphics | 1265 | 2.20 | 31 | |
| Humor | 1125 | 1.89 | 25 | |
| Mood | 1338 | 2.25 | 27 |
Pretty cool!
The idea of the game seems very nice! However, it has been a bit difficult to figure out how to move around and interact with the bomber...
It was kind of hard to figure out the controls at first, but once I got it I realized they were not very complicated. I played a couple of rounds and it never seemed like I was really in much danger of losing. Aside from the first game where I had no idea what was going on and everyone died, I always got everyone out with plenty of time to spare. A harder mode for once you've got the controls down would be great.
I spent around 10 minutes reading the different slides until i figured out what exactly to do. (atleast i think i got it now).
But its really hard to understand how to perform actions and which actions i should perform. It would have really helped me if you had a small tutorial scene just showcasing the different characters and what they could do. for example: my police triangle was on the train with the bomber and i thought that will win me the game. Feedback for the actions would also be great, maybe a UI on the side that i can click that shows me when a action is ready (this also helps understanding the game). i rarely knew why my actions did not work or if they got registered.
The game looks incredibly promising! Loved the idea & mechanics. I tried to catch the bomber with a hacker many times but failed, mostly due to the interface, it is just hard to understand what's going on sometimes.
Nice game. The art match the game. Sometimes pathfind does something unexpected, like trying to walk between two station instead of using trains to reduce the distance first. I had a bit of a hard time understanding the game at first but after that it became pretty fun.
Next time, event if you dont have time to create music, try to find one that suit your game. You wont be rated in audio but you're out of the category anyway if you dont have any sound. It allways make a HUGE difference.
Great game overall. Good job :)
A creative Idea well executed :thumbsup:
@lisyarus @pepnou @ethereal @u-tsang-clan @azhures thanks for the feedback, I updated the itch.io page with some more details on how the game works, hopefully it's helpful :)
Very nice idea! It's a lot of fun as soon as you figure out the controls. It would help to understand if you show small information texts and descriptions while playing (something like "click on a Station to select the Teenager destination" or "use Handbrake") or recall the character roles or key functions during playing. I like the small details, like the teenager running faster than the TfB employee :D That actually saved me one time and allowed me to stop the train. The pathfinding is really fun and amazing, but it would be good if you could stop somebody if he goes offroad.
This was quite hard to understand if I'm honest. Once I understood better, it became clear that there's a fair amount of depth, feels like really promising idea. I'd love to see a version of this with some sort of tutorial/onboarding.
the game is a bit confusing at first, but once you get the idea (and the whole strategie), it would help a bit if there was some kind of text or UI to guide you but I think this game is enjoyable to play! nicely done
I really love the minimalistic graphics choice, it reminds me of mini-metro. But wooah, it's REALLY hard to see what can be done in this game. I feel that characters should be way bigger, I had so much trouble seeing them on the map. And yeah, some UI text like @decosense said could really help too.
Once we've understood how the game works, how to play it, and manage to not loose track of our characters, it works really well. The game is really nice, you just need to help people play it. I would really love to see an expanded version, with a better UI, some music, different maps, other character roles, etc. You really have a fun idea, and it seems to be working pretty well!
Unusual and interesting idea! Although playing it was confusing at first, I think the tutorial during the gameplay itself would've been pretty useful here.
This is a good game. The execution is well done and it is an interesting concept. Agreeing with what some others have mentioned that it can be a bit confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it it's quite fun. Well done.
@chocolat-endive Thanks for the feedback, it was really helpful, and since you complained (:stuck_out_tongue:), I've decided to fix some of the visual UI issues and uploaded a post-jam version of the game.
I'd definitely appreciate some feedback on that, and if you want to play the game some more, I just made it easier ;)
@peter-ondus i'll try the new version this evening or tomorrow! Happy if my "complaints" have been useful. :D
It was really hard for me to understand the game at first, but after a little study it worked out. This one I would call "Special Innovative". Good job!
It took me a while before knowing what to do, and it is a bit hard to gasp how to utilize your characters. I found the fact that you used a teenager to pull the emergency breaks pretty funny btw!
Some thoughts:
- an in-game tutorial would have helped I think - maybe some sound effects to highlight certain efents would have helped too - I like how the start positions differ each time - Maybe the color-contrast between players and lines could have been a bit higher
I love the concept! I could not win though ^^" Is there a way to win? Or is the outcome always 'kaboom'?
@wouter52 thanks for the feedback, and I'm glad you liked the concept and stuff :)
I really wanted to make a tutorial and sounds but alas, coding and debugging the tube system with delays and planning took a loot of time.
I also realised the lack of contrast but shifted focus on other things, as the graphics were at least working. I've fixed that in the post-jam version with a couple visual updates that increase contrast and general visibility (the link is on this page if you want to try it)
You can indeed win, although story wise the outcome is probably boom, just no one dies?
Ingame Text would've helped so much in this game, it isn't that complicated after all, it's just hard to understand that the triangles are characters and not actions. And that you can tell them to do their thing with right click. More than half the game was understanding how things work - which isn't a bad thing, for me, because I like puzzles. xD
But from a game-dev perspective, I'd advice to use ingame text and .. heads for the characters, instead of triangles.
In general game language:
Circle / Round Shapes = selectable.
Triangle / Spiky Shapes = Danger/Action to perform.
So what do I mean by ingame text: Have a box, somewhere at the edge of your screen and when you click on a person, it tells you the name and what ability this person has. "Currently selected"-text above the box. Same with stations: Station name (can be "Red-Line Station 3") & status (no effect / ongoing evacuation / trains don't stop here). To move the person, maybe add a dedicated move-button inside the box, same for the action. All the different keybindings for making things bigger on screen, changing colors & visibility of objects -> put them into an options menu that can be expanded. When the game is paused - there should be a pause icon or just the text "Game is Paused" somewhere at the top of the screen.
And with this one box of text and the options menu, you wouldn't need a tutorial at all, players can jump into the game and learn it as they play. If they click on things, it tells them exactly what they can do, along with a button to perform the action. All actions are written (inkl. move), if they click on the red box, it tells them that this is the bomber and he is on his way to arm the bomb and so on.
Seems like it was made in godot, so you can think of the box as "Ingame-Inspector-Window".
But as mentioned before, for me, it was fun figuring out all of the above, the hacker, the policeman and so on, how people move, how they perform their actions, remembering who is who, so I had my fun with it. ^^
@leorid thanks for the in-depth feedback, really helpful, and i'm glad you enjoyed it (despite it being confusing?)
I really like the idea of the text description box, but i'm a bit unsure about selecting the bomber, mostly because the selection action is currently reserved for the player characters.
I was thinking of instead displaying a text on mouse hover above character, containing something like - Character name - Basic description - Current destination
and then more detailed information when selected, which could then also display text for the bomber on hover, and avoid being able to select the bomber, which i'm not really a fan of with the game's current state.
I'm also not a big fan of adding a dedicated move button - given it's the main interaction in the game I feel like adding an extra click to set the destination for a character wouldn't be great, I'm not sure what the motivation you see behind this change would be though, could you please explain that?
@peter-ondus "the selection action is currently reserved for the player characters" - I was able to select train stations (anywhere on the map). Do you mean, that players would think they can control the bomber, when they can select him? If he has no action-buttons in the box and the description says "this is the guy you have to delay with all your characters" then there is no way anyone would confuse him for a playable character (also it's another shape (box) and another color).
Hover text was also the first thing I thought of, but you can't hover over moving objects, also you can't click on anything inside the hover box and you might run into the issue of
A) the hover box occluding parts of the map constantly while you move your mouse towards them
B) things overlapping and the hover not displaying the correct thing (which can be solved with selection - click on the same spot again to select the other of the two overlapping things)
Current destination isn't really that important to write, because it's visible on the screen already and there it is much more clear. I'd rather highlight the route of a character when he is selected (same for the route of the bomber - one more reason to make him selectable)
In your current build, the bomber is the only thing that can't be selected, right? (except train tracks and wagons but these are more like "the map" and not really "things", like moving plattforms and their rails)
Hover + Info Box would probably lead to double information, which isn't really needed as your game is not fast paced. You pause and you have all the time in the world to select things, read things, perform and cancel and re-perform actions.
And this is also one of the reasons for the move button. You don't have an RTS or MOBA or Hack&Slash game, you have a simulation / planning game. It might be a "common action" but I finished the game with maybe a total of 10 moves.
But the main reason I suggested it is that I didn't know how to move the characters.
I lost the first round entirely because I had to find out about this one mechanic, I was left clicking, right clicking (with no character selected because I thought the characters are actions and can't be selected but are 1 character standing at a single spot instead), then I unpaused, clicked at a station (selecting it while doing so), then clicked on a character and finally, I was moving something. It was the wrong way around (which might be a bug) and I slowly figured out that I can select a character, with left click and then move the character, with left click again, which was super confusing to me.
Again, this isn't a fast paced RTS (where moving would be with right click when selecting is left click btw), it is a game about planning. Characters only have two actions Move & Special Ability. Those two actions should be visible in the info box so it is easy to understand without thinking about it. I would also add a pause button on the side of the screen and now your game can also be played on Andoid, because you reduced the inputs to their minimum. Just the left mouse button (or touch) and scrolling (or two finger gesture) for zooming.
You can add shortcuts to these buttons on the keyboard MOVE ("A"-key) ACTION ("S"-key) for example, but it is really not needed. Those things are for different genres where you have to be fast, where you need immediate control (and even in those games, the things you can trigger by a shortcut-key have a visual counterpart you can click with your mouse, even things like "MOVE" in RTS-Games).
Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my stream!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1450167991?t=06h50m54s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
ooooh, very interesting game, it remminded me of the board game scotland yards, i hooonestly needed to watch your gameplay to fully understand the game but it was nonetheless really nice, i appreciated the randomly generated subway maps and it's a nice a funny use of the shortest path algorithm ahah :)
@enderswype I'm taking that as an indication that the video was helpful ahah. The algorithm was honestly much harder than i expected (especially trying to make it work with delayed trains) and I had to spend a large chunk of 2 days on making it work properly with delays.
Complex game! It was really hard to get going and understand what kind of interactions were possible and how. It would have been great to have a practical tutorial on a smaller map first. But the premise seems cool, staking out the city and trying to cover multiple angles!
Not really intuitive at first but neat game nonetheless. I'm sure you got some inspiration from Mini Metro :D Good job!
There's a lot of great ideas going on here, but I did feel like I had to watch your walkthrough video to understand how to play/what was going on :) Thank you for including the additional playthrough video to help with that confusion! A lot of creative ideas going on here, would love to see how it feels with some more polish, great job :)