Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Empire Under the Clock
By juxipolo
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 459 | 3.63 | 21 | |
| Fun | 473 | 3.50 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 472 | 3.44 | 21 | |
| Theme | 946 | 3.23 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 739 | 3.39 | 21 | |
| Humor | 612 | 2.78 | 16 | |
| Mood | 700 | 3.32 | 19 |
I like the idea as a fan of Civ games but few issues:
- Somehow can't move units after founding a new city. - An enemy was moving troops next to my city and tried to move a unit to battle but nothing would happen, the red arrow would never stick anywhere. - Same with founding more city.
Wow This felt like a very nicely made and nicely polished game. And I played it for quite a lot investing in my army and technology to outgrow the others. The graphics are simple but work really well and the implementation of the theme was great. One of the better ones I played so far!
Gosh, it is indeed a game that is pretty long but not in a bad way, overall pretty enjoyable!
I love how ambitious in scope this is for a solo entry!
There are a bunch of cool systems going on here, and the art is very nice.
I did experience a lot of confusion interacting with the UI. I know this kind of stuff can be hard to detect for yourself as the developer, so I tried to screencap specific examples of me being confused.
I hope this is helpful! I wouldn't go into detail like this if it wasn't a very cool entry, so plz don't take this as negative feedback!
In this example I am trying to place my first fort. I am confused because I keep clicking but nothing happens! The message that I need to select a city doesn't go away. As I keep clicking the countdown timer turns angry-red and I am harried. What am I doing wrong?
Empre-Build.png
Answer: I did successfully build the fort, and the message that telling me I need to select is misleading, because it doesn't disappear once I do select. The game has changed state but I have not noticed. My failure was that I did not see the few pixels hidden behind the LVL UI that indicated I was already successful. (I don't figure out that it worked until I restart the game and play again 3-4 times)
In the next example it's turn 2 and the tutorial has told me to select what I should research.
Empre-Research.png
I click Granary. It highlights granary but nothing else happens. It still says I need to select research. Have I selected it? Do I need to hit an OK button? There isn't one, but there is a button called "Dismiss". That sounds more like a cancel than an ok. I spam click granary while the countdown gets angry. My turn ends and I see no change. I guess I didn't research it right. I quit and restart the game 2 more times and experiment with whether clicking "dismiss" does something different. No. I try hitting enter. Oh woops that's the key for End Turn. I never figure it out... until I give up and play on and then a bunch of turns later it says "You researched Granary!" I can't remember if that was a run I hit Dismiss or not, so I still don't know what is right.
In this next example I am trying to expand to a new city:
Empre-Expand.png
It says to click a city (left) and then I do, and it slightly highlights the region. So I feel like I did make a choice. But nothing ever happens. Is it that I couldn't pay the cost? I think the popups in the "select a region" are telling me a cost. I check that I have the right resources. This is difficult in realtime because the resource cost display lists the resources in a slightly different order than the resource inventory display at the top of the screen.
I actually never figured this one out.
But I did play on a bit more and after figuring out that I did indeed build a fort, I was able to raise an army, and while I could not expand myself I did defeat some intruders and expand that way. I guess I misunderstood something really fundamental.
I bet there are things that signal the state changes I'm not following (such as the fort pixels, and now looking at the screenshot, do I see Granary pixels too?), so sorry for not having a sharper eye!
So I feel like I didn't connect with your intended player experience, but I did spend some time with the game restarting and playing around a bunch. I think this is a cool entry even though I struggled, and I see you have a bunch of other interesting-looking games in your history. I'll add you to my follow list and keep an eye out for what you do next time!
Thanks for the detailed feedback, @pkenney! These are all great friction points I didn't consider - thank you!
Maybe I can fill in some of the blanks for you and other folks. Each 10-second turn you are queueing up orders, and then all orders for all players are run at once in between turns. Each zone can have 1 domestic order per turn (build or recruit) and 1 military order (move or attack).
It sounds like there isn't enough feedback when you queue up one of those - which I was totally blind to. This is particularly confusing because clicking again will cancel the order. It keeps you in that state so you can queue up multiple orders. That is somewhat important when you have a bunch of territory in the late game, but it looks like I need to revisit that behavior.
The tech popup works a bit like the orders, where you're selecting what to research, but it's only locked in at the end of the turn (or if you click dismiss). I should probably change it so that the popup just closes when you click one.
You can only build a city on a territory you control that doesn't have a city. (There's also a hammer cost that increases based on the number of cities you have, but it isn't displayed anywhere)
While I'm pointing out hidden mechanics - if you don't have enough money to pay your troops, some will desert. If happiness is low enough, troops will also desert. These combined means expanding too aggressively early can cause your army to just crumble.
The game has a lot of sharp edges, but obviously more than I knew about. Thank you!
So many contents for a jam game, you really did a great job. I found it troublesome to make my troops to the frontline during I expand, cause I have to control troops raised in every territory manually every turn.
I always like to see strategy games in Ludum Dare. You executed well! The game is fun to play and invokes that "just one more turn" feeling. Played it until I conquered about half the world. I did not really understand when I can build armies or buildings. I assume they have a resource cost, but which resource? In the end I seemed to have almost every resource but still could not always build something. It might also help to display some information when clicking on a region. The pause bar is a nice feature, but I also felt a bit like cheating and playing against the theme when using it.
Wow, very impressive for a solo entry! It took a while to get the hang of it since there is a lot to think about! I like the fast turn times though. I find most games that try to do a lot like this end up being unreasonably confusing, but I felt like I caught on to the game fairly quickly since it's similar enough to a lot of other 4x games. Well done!
@juxipolo
I encountered a lot of the same confusion as pkenney. I was especially stumped by not knowing how to settle a city. It showed me all of these places that look settlable but the city was not settled, and the tutorial didn't seem to be giving me any new instructions on how to do it.
After reading your comments I realize that I needed to recruit some soldiers and move them into empty territory in order for it to become settlable. You might want to copy paste all of the info from your reply to pkenney into the game description in order to help other new players.
Another huge point of confusion for me is what to do with my resources. Is food consumed over time? Are smiley faces population or happiness? I don't see any cost indicators for recruiting troops or settling cities, or any of the other buildings.
Probably a good way for the game to communicate some of this info would be that if the player tries to perform an illegal action like settling outside of your territory, the game could say why it is not possible "You can't settle outside your borders" or "You need more food to do that" or "You are already at the population limit"
This game is really good and is reminiscent of old school civ. Love the diversity of starting nations - reminds me of mods like Lekmod where you're just like "what the hell? This game has Ireland" lol. The procedurally generated terrain seemed fine, and the AI for nations also seemed to be pretty solid. My main complain really comes from the UI. A lack of labels slightly hinders the initial experience - but once I got used to it I had a good time. Something as small as just adding labels to some stuff (like the building icons) would go a long way,
Overall great game, and good job!
Really ambitious! Also considering this is the first game of its kind I've seen in the jam so far, extremely innovative. Did get confused by the tutorial somewhat, but once getting past that initial confusion, really cool. UI is simple, but fits considering the 10s intended turn timer limiting time to get the information to the player. Could do with a little more clarification here and there though. Really reminds me of the days of Civ 2/3 too, though can't say it has quite the same level of "One more turn..." energy as then, but it's close. Overall extremely fun though. Good job!
Man, you really build a functionnal strategic game in a game jam ! Congratulation for that nice result, it's a little bit complicated for me but all seems to be functionnal.