flightless 2022-10-03 18:07
The game worked well - I tried hard to get 5 items loaded on the same ship, but failed :smile:. My best score was 110.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Freight Frenzy
By lbrande
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 327 | 3.23 | 36 | |
| Fun | 301 | 3.17 | 36 | |
| Innovation | 213 | 3.36 | 36 | |
| Theme | 368 | 3.25 | 36 | |
| Graphics | 444 | 2.54 | 36 | |
| Audio | 1 | |||
| Humor | 347 | 1.92 | 30 | |
| Mood | 429 | 2.34 | 34 |
The game worked well - I tried hard to get 5 items loaded on the same ship, but failed :smile:. My best score was 110.
This was really fun to play. It was actually my first idea of what to make myself, but I went for another idea. But in my case it would be a train that would be taking the cargo. Nice to see that the gameplay worked. Well done!
The boats coming in and out is a nice twist on block placement games. I found it pretty difficult. I managed 4 pieces about half the time. The game could really use some sound. Had fun.
Wow. It took a couple of tries to get hang of it. A bit like Tetris and at the same time the use of the mouse makes it quite different. Well done!
Nice one!
Nice job, but didn't really like the control scheme switch between mouse and keyboard for a casual game. Fun use of the tetrominoes though!
Pretty cool game, reminds me of that packing mini-game in Satisfactory. Only issue is that I never really wrapped my head around the rotation but I think thats on me more then you. So regardless cool game, I could see this translating well into one of those mobile games that people can play for hours.
Having the boats come and go every 0x10 seconds was a nice twist on the theme. Helps make it more playable, as I think 10 seconds would be way too fast. For the initial package placement I would recommend to check whether the empty spaces are all connected and generate a new placement if not. I had a ship where there were 3 empty spots blocked off in a corner. Placing 4 pieces on there was practically impossible.
Absolutely fantastic. I played it for hours. My high score was 1595: freight-frenzy.png
I think the most stunning thing about the design of this game is the balance you chose. Placing 5 tetrominoes on 5x5 ships with 4 available to place at any time is perfect. The amount of time the ships spend at the harbor is perfect. I can tell you gave that some serious thought, given that you chose 0x10 seconds for each ship instead of just saying "a new one arrives every 10 seconds". So now, a new one arrives every 8 seconds, which makes things more frantic, but not too hard once you get the hang of it. A very clever way to bend the theme for the sake of gameplay.
The points system really incentivizes 5-tetrominoe ships. It's nice that the 4-tetrominoe ships give you points, but their true value is keeping the run alive so that you may eventually get another chance at a 5-tetrominoe ship. I can't stress how fun this balance is. I eventually got into a nice rhythm of going for 5 occasionally, and writing off subsequent ships as 4-tetrominoe ships to give myself a mental break. The fact that the 4-tetrominoe ships also varied in points gave the game just one extra layer of optimization that the player could think about.
But the truly inspired piece of the design is that there's 2 ships available instead of 1 or 3. It allows you to think ahead a nice amount, allows you to pick your moments where you're going for 5, it allows you to use one ship as a dumping ground for currently-useless pieces (but you still have to be careful!) It works so, so well. I loved that you could still place pieces on ships that were driving away, it added a nice element of nail-biting luck/skill.
The only complaint that I'll mention here is that the RNG was a bit brutal at times. Many ships were straight-up impossible to place 5 tetrominoes on due to their box rng. The tetrominoe rng was also brutal sometimes, but I think fixing the former would ease the latter enough to be acceptable. When spawning ships, logically place 5 pieces on them ahead of time and fill in the gaps with boxes, just so it's always possible. I don't even think you need to make it the 4/5 pieces that the player has on hand/upcoming; there's enough interoperability with tetrominoe shapes that the player could often make it work with what they have, plus not having a guarantee that they can make it work keeps some luck in the game, which is nice.
The balance really makes or breaks a game like this, and my god, did you make it. This was so much fun. Yell-at-my-screen fun. I give it 5 stars in "fun" and 5 stars in "theme". It'll definitely land among my favorites of the jam. Now, give it some sound/music, adjust the rng, give it a leaderboard, polish it up, and release it.
@trouv Really cool that you liked it, it warms my heart. I will try to release a post-jam version with those fixes this coming weekend.
Such a simple concept but actually very clever puzzle mechanic that, as you can see from @trouv's comment above, can lend itself easily to long-term "flow state" gameplay. I felt so good when I had my first 5-tetronimo ship! Only nitpick was that sometimes I would get a ship that had blocked off areas that cannot possibly fit a tetronimo in it.
First I got distracted by trying to get a Tetris but soon abandoned that to just pack the boats.
Great revision of Tetris.
I am bad at that wonderful remix! I think I'd love a boat packing game, but the time constraint is too much for me!
The art is very cool!.
New high score is 3020 :)
Nice compo entry. Had fun with it!
Nice entry! At first, I didn't see about the controls to flip the tretominoes so the game wasn't very fun ahah. It's a simple concept but it works very well.
Well done!
I REALLY enjoyed this game. The controls took a bit for me to master, but I found myself playing over and over. I know its a compo game, so Im okay with no sound, but I'm a huge fan of any game with dock/ocean sounds. I might play again and find a YT video to play in the background haha.
Solid entry, I'd love a full version of this game to play on the bus !
The game idea is golden! What a great type of tetris! It was quite a bit too hectic for my taste, but I still enjoyed it a lot. Good job!
I expected drag/drop to work. I felt it was a bit awkward having to left click again to drop a piece instead of just releasing mouse button on the drop spot. I didn't hear any music or sound on my machine. At least clicking noises to acknowledge mouse actions would have been good. I liked the concept though despite these minor suggestions.
Interesting concept! The gameplay was solid and I had a lot of fun filling the crates. I wish I can place the blocks back to the cart, as there were times where I picked up the wrong item and no where to put it lmao
Nice concept! Good job!
Good idea and good implementation!
Nice way to fit a Tetris-style game into the theme. Also, cleaver use of hexadecimal to give the player more time while still 'keeping' to the 0x10 seconds theme. I didn't think about using a different base from which to count, so I consider that pretty innovative.
Thanks for updating the ship generation. The new sound is a bit harsh, and I'm not sure that the panning is necessary.
Thanks to the new ship generation, I managed a new high score of 7655.