FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD52 → (we sell) P.E.O.P.L.E.

(we sell) P.E.O.P.L.E.

By nullval

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall7822.6638
Fun8012.2640
Innovation2943.4539
Theme5343.4838
Graphics6642.8339
Humor3403.0634
Mood7012.8935

Comments

hfsevans 2023-01-10 05:31

Very Papers Please. Def interesting

bowen 2023-01-10 05:37

Too Random, and too hard to estimate how long i need

rohanmoon 2023-01-10 11:47

Interesting concept, I found it really challenging though. The feed of messages was a nice touch.

cambryx 2023-01-10 12:01

It took me a while to find out that I could scroll on the right side so I thought I could only ever choose between two people. After finding out I could scroll it got a bit easier and I could finaly get a positive performance score :D Also I didn't look at the chat in the beginning and when I realized that after a while, I had a lot of fun just reading through it. I love games with details like that! Overall it was a great experience playing your game!

cloistered 2023-01-10 12:08

Cool game, The deadline is too close,give me more time:)

maxlin 2023-01-11 11:39

Didn't realize could scroll until after reading the comment, I like the story background.

jack-bingham 2023-01-11 12:55

I love the idea of this! It's such a clever mechanic. Personally I didn't feel like I had enough time between deadlines. I also feel as if the deadline should also automatically sell your current harvest and then have a button to scrap the current one if you've messed up and reached too many red lines. Overall whilst there are some flaws the idea is great and harvesting human data is one of the best uses of this theme I've seen, good job :)

koboldskeep 2023-01-11 15:30

An interesting mechanic, the email subject lines are fun. Would be nice if it showed me how the sliders would change when I mouse over the button.

zbugba 2023-01-11 17:01

Perhaps it's a matter of window size but I had to really squint my eyes in order to determine whether specific bar is an O or any other attribute. If you could improve on readability on this aspect I could fully focus on "solving the puzzle" rather then trying to guess what is what.

Otherwise, I like the idea, take a risk puzzle games are always fun fillers!

kizilejderha 2023-01-11 17:04

Very cool idea, but very difficult. I was basically making an educated guess based on the overall shape of the graph (or maybe that's how it's supposed to be played?). The little chatbox is a nice touch.

Just out of curiosity, does the "one in a million chance" message actually have a one in a million chance of appearing? I was really lucky if so :D

smashcrate 2023-01-11 17:39

I think I understand the concept. The game looks really well made visually . The joker are funny and really enjoyed.

nullval 2023-01-11 19:13

Thank you so much for all the feedback :D there's a lot of great ideas, and honestly I wish I could've included them in this version of the game!

@bowen I def agree, that it is a bit too random and I _really_ wish that I've could have implemented some kind of model that distributed the stats more interestingly/better.

@cloistered no >:D

@jack-bingham Oh I def agree that it should reset or sell the dataset already collected. This was a basically me forgetting.

@zbugba Oh I agree, I messed up the screen size >_> I should just have doubled it up.

@kizilejderha tbf, data science is more an art than a science :P also no, the "one in a million" doesn't sadly appear with a one in a millionth chance :( I'm def keeping that in mind for future projects!

ng-vicious 2023-01-12 00:10

Not sure I understood the game to be honest... You have to get to the green dots but not the red ones? Sounds like work lol

dzejpi 2023-01-12 06:21

Interesting take on the theme! As many, I didn't notice that those boxes were scrollable. Good practice is to make the box a specific side that it cuts the text a litle, which suggest scrollability. Too bad it doesn't scale, would make it easier for me to read everything:

2023-01-12_07-16-44.gif

Otherwise, very interesting idea and once I understood it properly, I had fun. But deadlines are sure brutal, just like in real life. :)

wobbleblocks 2023-01-12 07:27

Pretty awesome concept and simple design! nice work!

pixelcrustpunk 2023-01-12 09:36

a slow mo mode would make me play it again, i really liked it :) sometimes forgot if the harvest button is below or above the human tho

papabirb 2023-01-12 10:02

2 comments to help out with some technical difficulties:

1. You forgot to turn all the serviceworker checks to false as per the [embedding guide](https://ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/), so the LD embed one isn't working. (Edit: It works on Firefox, but not Chrome. Chrome gives me the serviceworker error.)

2. In the Godot project settings under Display -> Window, you need to change the stretch mode to 2D and aspect to one of the "keep" settings: Godot_v3.5.1-stable_win64_uf68keMDCf.png Because otherwise, this is what happens to the web build OR to the downloaded one when trying to make it bigger and therefore readable: people_Twd753ehSh.png I like to call this the "Godot Top Left" problem, lol.

As for the game itself, I think the emails in the top left are taking up a lot of space while the deadline isn't taking up enough space; communication of information is important & too much weight is being given to the funny flavortext that doesn't impact gameplay. It would be better as some kind of bar with one email header at a time, while top left could be used to display more useful information or the whole top half of the screen could be used to show people selection.

It would also be better to limit how many people are available to select from at a time rather than the variable update speed, which causes overwhelm looking for the "right" person to harvest.

Also, it's frustrating not being able to sell the data anytime or having it be autosold on the deadline, because if you can't meet exactly the green bars (which I have yet to successfully do without going into the red), sometimes the new request is already ruined by your old data. It makes the deadline feel irrelevant rather than like I have a limited time to build up data.

arielsan 2023-01-12 14:25

Nice game, super simple concept but super theme related, I felt a bit wrong harvesting people xD, but it was awesome concept.

nullval 2023-01-12 17:57

@papabirb THANK YOU SO MUCH! YOU'RE THE BEST :D :D I am a noob to Godot and I definitely have A LOT of rough edges with regards to Godot exporting templates.

Concerning the gameplay and design, I definitely agree. There's a lot of things I would do differently, the UI was mostly done on the fly and it totally needs more iterations.

Also thank you to everyone else who've played, rated and left a comment, I read them all and learning a ton! :D

EDIT: and now the bugs have been fixed, I'm not gonna change anything else tho, this is what I managed in 72 hours :P

papabirb 2023-01-12 18:26

@nullval I'm glad I could help! The "Godot Top Left" problem has been a thorn in my side since LD46. It was really hard for me to find out the solution, so I thought I'd pass it along. Likewise, it's kinda hard to find the embedding page lol, so I shared that link too :smile_cat:

The most important thing to remember about Godot exporting templates is that you have to re-download them every time you update Godot, lmao.

Regarding UI, I took a rapid prototyping class in university. It might help you to [look into wireframing](https://tinyurl.com/yx75z2mf) so you can do little doodles on paper to figure out a good layout when you're working on the fly. For example, here's a wireframe version of YouTube: 01-youtube-wireframe-example.png

It's a little bit ["high fidelity" as they say lol,](https://blog.hubspot.com/website/high-fidelity-wireframe) I stick with low fidelity wireframe sketches when I'm planning games personally, since the only person I'm trying to communicate my ideas to is myself so I don't need it to be hi-fi.

cloughd 2023-01-12 23:09

I liked the emails on the side. "Big event, you're not invited" had me laughing to myself. Took a little time to understand what I should be aiming for in regards to which people to harvest and sell but I got the hang of it after a few minutes. Struggling with the idea of getting better at knowing which people sell the best lol.

taikinaaa 2023-01-14 18:48

Great game!

xoreaxeax 2023-01-14 19:43

Very cool style! I also like the idea. But as others mentioned before the randomness makes it too hard especially on the tight deadline. I think the mechanic could definetly work when there are less variables to control and/or one could somehow be a bit selective during harvest.

almax 2023-01-14 20:39

Interesting mechanic but I wasn't sure what my objective was. Does the game end when I reach a certain score?

moondweller 2023-01-14 20:51

The naming made me open the entry :D But it got me some to me to get into what should I do and what is the goal. I didn't expect that actual resource to harvest is data until've read the help. Nice theme interpretation actually and I like the visuals

lintfordpickle 2023-01-15 14:43

Same as a few others mentioned, the mechanic was definitely interesting, and I found myself scrolling through the 'candidates' looking for the best matches. I couldn't always understand why the sell button was disabled (too few people selected?) but after a while it became available. The messages in the thread were cool and made me laugh a few times. I think the only real need of 'improvement' is just general feedback on the controls and some live targets to aim for (getting a minus performance score didn't end the game or anything). I didn't have any issues with the Ui or scrolling

bigjam 2023-01-16 14:12

It was a little overwealming... It took me a while to understand whats the point of the game, but it's a cool interpretation of the theme and the graphics/style are really nice.

minjutin 2023-01-16 21:50

Luckily, I realized there was a help button, helped a lot. The messages were a joy. DON'T LICK BUTTONS. DELICIOUS DELICIOUS BUTTONS. That line moved me bro

jakejet 2023-01-17 18:13

Cool concept, liked the little messages to the left.

better-half 2023-01-18 22:23

I really liked the idea, and the UI really took me in the mood. The deadline is a little faster than it should be, and i had some troubles understanding the controls at the beginning, next time maybe put them in the Description.

P.S. The messages at the left really made me laugh.

egorexw 2023-01-20 15:15

I really like the concept, Scrolling is really bad on mac's touch pad, but I guess that's not the issue on your side. Different sliders are kinda difficult to distinguish, maybe make them have unique colours. Over all nice concept. Does it ever end? Because I think that it should at some point

porcus-pie 2023-01-21 06:29

This was an interesting concept. I liked the idea behind selling data and trying to balance all the different elements. Having to build up all the bars and search for the right one was a neat take and I felt it had a lot of potential! It was a balancing act and it was rewarding to get close to the goal.

I did find myself just getting more frustrated however with certain aspects of the game. As everyone has already said the deadline is just too short, I'd almost have it perfect and then boom, it changed. It was really rough as well as I could not find anyway to actually get rid of any of the stats, so if I missed the first deadline I was just screwed. Let me know if there was a way but I'd just miss the deadline, and have to restart the entire game or wait fingers crossed a similar goal would come around.

I did enjoy the humour of the game, it was interesting looking at the stats of the people and the emails that would be coming in, that was a nice touch. I think with a few tweaks, UX changes and a bit more time this could be a really frantic and fun game, you have a nice concept here!

antoniothereis 2023-01-22 02:35

A really neat idea, wish there was just a bit more to motivate me to keep playing. Also it might be a good idea to make the left box with the text messages auto scroll down with every new message. Love that you used "data harvesting", I would have never thought of that lol.