Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Unlucky Town
By tanis
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 299 | 3.29 | 26 | |
| Fun | 392 | 2.87 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 209 | 3.37 | 26 | |
| Theme | 262 | 3.54 | 26 | |
| Graphics | 369 | 2.97 | 26 | |
| Audio | 166 | 3.39 | 26 | |
| Humor | 208 | 2.73 | 21 | |
| Mood | 233 | 3.23 | 25 |
I liked the music and sounds (and creepy blinking guy - that's meant to be me I guess!). It'd be good if the buildings and upgrades did something interesting - from what I can tell they're all identical, and it didn't feel like playing different ones made any difference.
Really enjoyed the art style and music. It was a little hard to decipher the text of the cards, which was unfortunate since I only had 10 seconds to real. I also wish it was easier to tell what the benefits I gain from investing the different buildings. Awesome 48 hour game tho!
@rob6566 thanks! The blinking guy can actually be moved around with the IJKL keys. It was not meant to be there at all, it was just a placeholder from a previous game of mine, actually a platformer. But I kind of felt it would be nice to leave it there. It might even turn into a recurring character in other games at some point :smile: Different buildings have different impact. i.e. houses can be hit by famine while other buildings won't. The same applies to factories that can be hit by strikes and commercials that can be hit by the economic crisis. Upgrades are granting you more survivability as each disaster is only taking away one health from the building it hits. If you upgrade you get more health.
@jaykayey thanks for the kind words. You are right, the font choice is definitely not the best. And I should have worked more on the graphics of the cards to make them stand out more and differentiate them better without having to read the text.
Nice game!
I like the creepy guy as a second game mechanic to play around when you have played all you can in the round. I like this kind of game mechanics, but I think it's too much RNG... there is not really any room to strategize what building to build?
I could maybe anticipate, a tornado I'll play a bit more of one or another. Maybe having card to "look into the future".
Solid game (and the mac version works)
@dhim thanks for trying it out. I was pondering to switch from complete RNG to a set number of each card, just like real card decks. That would make it less random. And either displaying which disaster is coming next pretty much like tetris does for the upcoming brick might make it more strategic
Really enjoyed this, played quite a bit of it! I like the idea of a city builder card game and I think this is a great start and could be developed into something really interesting post-compo. I would have liked if you could view your deck and add cards to it as you progress through the game. But yeah this is entry for the compo, well done!
@linus-lindberg thanks for trying out the game. It's cool that you liked it. And yeah the idea of viewing your deck and add cards to it would be a nice addition, but it would have made the scope grow too much for such a time-constrained compo. But I will keep that in mind if I will work on it later on. Thanks!
My high score: 7:30. Eventually, an earthquake always comes along at a bad time =).
I enjoyed this. Took a little while to grasp all of the mechanics, but by my second game I was having fun =). Music was good, didn't get annoying, and audio cues were nice. The "add energy" card always seemed good, until I saved 2 of them and realized they were useless if you only have 2 other cards ^_^. Would have been nice if extra energy could be saved, or if they were "+1 energy and draw a card" or something. Still, were nice when then _did_ come up, as long as it wasn't 2 on the same turn ^_^. I liked how, once fully upgraded, a building will eventually crumble, creates a nice pacing.
Felt like a mini Cities Skylines. Great job for such a short jam. I feel like I could get pretty far just randomly clicking cards though.
Very nice concept and it would be great to see it developed further! I think having the buildings have effects or letting the player know what disaster is coming next would help a lot and add more strategic thinking!
@jimbly thanks! yes the earthquake is usually the one that will put an end to your town. I was expecting that to be the worst disaster :smile: You are right about the energy cards. If I manage to work some more on this game, I will review the mechanics of the card to make sure there are no occasions where keeping a couple of those cards does not make any sense.
@ismael-rodriguez thanks for playing the game. And yeah you can actually accomplish something just by randomly clicking on the cards, indeed. It does need some more love on the strategy side of things.
@43sam yes I agree that giving to player more awareness of what is coming next would help. Point taken! :wink:
I like the idea and the use of cards, but there doesn't seem to be a reason to not play every single card that you can afford. I also found myself often ignoring the ten seconds event text in order to read the description of the available cards in time. To fix this I guess you could pause the game until user input every ten seconds to allow reading the disaster effect. Nice job anyway!
I love this idea. Beautiful pixel game :heart:
@jackaljk yeah I actually thought about pausing the game in-between turns.. but then I was in a rush to get everything packed up and left that feature out. In retrospective that is something that should have been mandatorily there. Thanks for the feedback!
@adecon thanks a lot!
I like the idea, but it didn't seem like I had a lot of strategic options (unless I was missing something). I really like simple games though, I think it has a lot of potential.
I loved the music and the dude hanging out at the bottom left :smile: Gameplay wise it felt like I had too little control because the disasters were too random and the plays were pretty much determined by the cards you get. Still I figured it was best to diversify the kinds of buildings and had some fun following this strategy. Maybe some kind of win condition (like e.g. fillig all building slots) would have been cool.
One thing that I think could be useful is to add icons to the card to distinguish them more easily, especially when you are in hurry :smile:
The audio on this is fantastic. The only thing that felt slighly out of place is one of the disasters has an effect that sounds similar to a "coin" effect for many other games.
I think there may be a resource leakage of some sort in the game. It gradually runs slower as I keep playing. Tested on both Firefox and Chromium.
And as others have mentioned, the strategy in this strategy game could use a lot of love. Given the game mechanics, I think you could prototype the strategy for this game entirely with pen and paper.
It took me a few minutes to get how the game is supposed to be played, at first I randomly clicked cards. But now it's really clever, I love how this simple game contains that much strategy. The only problem is that I sometimes missed the disaster text, may you could give damaged buildings some animation before being destroyed so that it's easier to see what happend?
(in a rush to test many; please do not mind the cursory reviewing style)
1. small misspellings "reall unlucky" -> "really unlucky"; "different type" -> "different types" (4x) 2. Ludum Dare embedded version: Emscripten stays in the ‘Preparing...’ phase! I get the following repeated error (and also several other ones) in the console (the French part is about page parameters preventing loading a resource); I am using Firefox: "`warning: browser could not fully decode audio /assets/data/sfx/earthquake.wav, trying slower base64 approach index.html:1:356 Content Security Policy: [French] blob:null/11c0a75a-64eb-4d05-b6fe-096a8fc24192 (« default-src »).`" 3. only on itch.io’s game page, weirdly: extra space before "House" in first bullet point from "Buildings" (yes, this feels like an observation from Rain Man X)) 4. Navigator version **does** work on itch.io; previous problem caused by Ludum Dare’s restrictions? (I also could not get my own game running that way, possibly for a similar reason, also getting a console error while loading.) 5. Very ironically, little guy’s controls are not layout-independent (I have an AZERTY keyboard), while this is more of an in-game joke and first Ludum Dare 51 game where I run into the classic QWERTY problem (which I commonly encountered in itch.io game jams). XD Just to let you know; this might be useful in case you reuse the code, as you say this is a placeholder. ;) 6. may well be a navigator-specific problem, as this happens for several people for several navigator games: keyboard gets unrecognized (except for my first run!), while the mouse (fortunately!) still works. And the game gets laggier with time (for both music and guy movement and animation), which I suspect is also a navigator issue. (The same happened to acdimalev, I see.) 7. also a navigator problem?: restarting the game seems to generate a new guy in addition to the previous one, so I suspect there will be as many copies as runs! X) 8. Classic sfxr coin sound? :) (I know I abused jsfxr for my own game!) 9. hard to anticipate what kind of building you should prioritise before knowing how disasters affect them, but maybe the game expects you to learn through some trial and error 10. use of the theme focuses on randomness; it looks like many (?) people took this route! Reminds me heavily of the ‘Roll of the dice’ theme 11. I like how the graphics vary depending on the buildings’ levels; reminds me of *Age of Empires* + *Civilization II/III*. 12. looks like I only seldom get upgrade cards, while they are so useful! (This may be the reason… :p) Nevertheless, I have trouble figuring out which building is to be selected by an upgrade card!! Is this totally random? Suggestion: allow the player to select which building will receive the upgrade. 13. Getting better how the disasters work (type-specific ones + harsh global one + random-sample one), I guess a good strategy is to diversify the building types, and not to have too many level-one buildings, saving building them for when you can apply an upgrade.
**Takeaway:** Graphics are to the point (I wish I had some pixel art skills too! I might try dabbling in it :)), and sounds too, although I think some more for selecting a card (and varying according to the card’s nature!) would have given even more life. By the way, I like the mysterious soothing music (how did you create it? :)). I think the use of the theme is fair but classic — and ironically feels like a mix between ‘Delay the inevitable’ and ‘Roll of the dice’. XD The concept is rather clever, this sounds like *SimCity 2000*’s disasters gone frantically mad. X) (By the way, the three building types are **exactly** those for the main coloured areas you can design in this latter game! Did you draw any inspiration from it?) I really feel giving some leeway about the upgrades would make the game more enjoyable, as opposed to have the player a bit too constrained by the randomness, although there is already some strategising involved.
A nice little pixel art experience which can definitely
@jackaljk
> there doesn’t seem to be a reason to not play every single card that you can afford
Actually, it can make sense not to build a building if you think you will not be able to upgrade it right after, and also, you may have to select which type of building to get in order to have a varied enough sample to survive any situation.