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Nimkip!
Nimkip!
By t-c, JackOfCups and CrimOudin
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 177 | 3.84 | 44 | |
| Fun | 160 | 3.81 | 44 | |
| Innovation | 327 | 3.41 | 44 | |
| Theme | 92 | 4.22 | 44 | |
| Graphics | 438 | 3.54 | 43 | |
| Audio | 357 | 3.17 | 39 | |
| Humor | 182 | 3.46 | 44 | |
| Mood | 357 | 3.52 | 43 | |
Comments
This is so cute! I really love the amount of details on the characters, both the bunny and the little plant bois the animations are so neat as well. It took me a second to figure out the mechanics (that is more my own fault though haha) but once I got it all sorted the gameplay was super fun, it was really fun to play. If I had to give any other feedback I would say if you ever develop this further I would love to see more details in the environment but with all the love that is in the character and npcs it isn't really noticeable at all. Amazing job! :)
whalejam
2023-01-09 17:53
I really liked this, the controlls are pretty simple and its intuitive to figure out what you are supposed to do. Saying that though it was kinda hard to accurately send the nimkips to resources, I mostly just sent a bunch of them and then some of those would definitely get the resource, whereas just sending one they would usually miss the resource point and just stand next to it, so it would be nice if that was easier. I really like the art for the game, its simple but everything is clear, although the grass is really weird when walking diagonally. It would have been better to make the map smaller too I think as there is a lot of walking around and its difficult to tell which way you should be going. Overall I had fun with this, a nice mechanic that is very cute and easy to use, good job :)
@whalejam We just pushed some fixes up that should address some of the issues you had.
Neat idea but too bad the execution breaks in almost every way possible. I did manage to beat it though after soft locking myself few times first.
Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.20.31.png
The biggest issue really is that the nimkips don't really do what they're told. They have like 20% chance to actually do it and otherwise they just go there and do sweet FA.
nimkips.gif
Can't recall the non-workers either really as that will also recall the ones who are actually contributing too. Makes the whole gameplay loop absolutely tedious. And it's especially bad on combat cause no matter how many nimkips of what color ever you throw at an enemy, they might just glitch out and get killed and completely lock you from progressing. Finally I tried avoiding combat altogether and that seemed like the best strategy.
Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.18.29.png
Another pretty big issue was nimkips clipping outside the map and getting stuck in the void. And unless you figured out the completely unmentioned secret unit selection functionality, you couldn't even command your nimkips because the if the first acting one was stuck there.
Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.13.41.png
And that selection mechanic was also confusing when I first found it by accident. Obviously I tried to build one but hit the portrait instead and took me quite some time to find out why only reds were doing anything.
Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.11.11.png
The pixel art seemed pretty nice but it was mega blurry. And that green outline just looked weird. I think you did not set the sprite scaling mode to point. Doing that keeps the pixels from blurring out when upscaled. The animations also might have looked good from what I could see but everything kept blinking and flashing which kinda ruined it. And that grass texture was almost seizure inducing on non-fullscreen and moving. This UI color choice was absolutely horrible too, completely unreadable.
Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.00.57.png
The textbox text appearing animation looked weird as the words suddenly wrapped from line to line. I usually tackle this issue by making the full text actually always be there but the not appeared bit just being rendered transparent. There were also some z-ordering issues.
Screenshot 2023-01-09 at 20.07.06.png
And finally the controls. Well they did work but they didn't really feel great. The movement had this weird laggy inertia. Didn't really bother the gameplay that much though as no precision was really needed. The command and recall both did work but the recall size changing made it a bit inaccurate and prone to accidental recalls.
So yeah... as I told, the idea was pretty sweet but had some major issues in playability. Good job on finishing it though. 👍
@antti-haavikko It seems like you were playing the first build which had fixed a bunch of the issues you stated. Try again and it is most likely more playble.
Yeah, seems so. At least on a quick try now they seem to be actually doing what they should. And there is sound too!
@antti-haavikko @whalejam @weefairyfabi Now since the timer is up our submission is finalized. Sorry for any issues you had. We only had it up early because we were unsure if we would be able to make changes early today. If you could update your ratings to reflect the newest version that would be great! If not thanks for playing our game anyway :)
t-c
2023-01-09 20:28
@antti-haavikko I never thought to do that with the text. If I have time I usually try to use the TextGeneration class to figure out how much width you'd need for words, then set things up beforehand to prevent the wrapping and line movement, but it's far easier to just have all the text out, and just change the color with the color tag to be transparent for a substring! Way faster, same result. Thanks, great idea! Also appreciate all the rest of the feedback. It was a tough one for us for sure.
titos2k
2023-01-09 20:56
game doesnt load on my mac/safari for some reason (unity progress bar freezes close to the end)
Love the game a lot!
The audio reminds me a lot of Super Adventure box in guild wars 2.
Only suggestion I'd say is some of the sprites could use a bit more work but other than that great job!
@titos2k I am sorry to hear that. None of us have macs to test on :(
played it to the end, that's my highest honor
slantyoj
2023-01-10 01:15
Built my spaceship without realizing that's what it was! Was expecting some kind of super awesome battlekin. I'm not sure how you balance it but I just walked around most of the enemies and collected resources.
maymay
2023-01-10 01:15
The controls for ordering around my nimkips worked really well! I thought the game was overall pretty fun. It did drag towards the end a bit though-- the walk speed is a little slow so I spend a long time wandering trying to find the last metal. Something like a minimap or just faster walking would make that better I think
chompdev
2023-01-10 04:07
Great work! I gave this one five stars for humor, mood, art, and theme! Loved all the detailed animations and interactions between the Nimkips and various enemies/resources. The writing was absolute gold, and this concept fit the theme very well. Would love to see more of this one :)
t-c
2023-01-10 04:18
@tycoonbelle thank you very much for the honor! It's the same I feel when I'm playtesting games, I know I like it if I finish it!
@slantyoj haha, we did have plenty of extra ideas that just couldn't make it in the final game, the rocket ship would be a cool minion to have, hah! Yep, enemy AI was super tricky, and most of my time was spent just getting them to move =(.
@maymay Agree. There's definitely a lot of tweaking to be done for enemies, the player, and your Nimkips to really get that level of polish we were missing. The level came together REALLY late in development, so it's not very fine tuned. I think a minimap is a great idea
@chompdev Thanks for the kind words! We really liked this game idea, and we put a lot of work into it, so I'm glad people appreciate it. It's still super rough around the edges, but hey what can you do, it's a game jam!
Screenshot from 2023-01-10 10-29-39.png i like how they follow
nekuake
2023-01-10 08:00
I really love the concept and the design of the Nimkips! Great game ^^
That game is really cute and the tutorial is working well. Also I like that the text-animation is skipable. The minions worked actually very well for me. They did what I've told them and it was understandable when to call them back.
What I don't understand is the Battle-System. The rabit tells me about sacrificing but I wasn't having the feeling that one of the minions would have died while fighting against them ... until that one enemy. One "wusch" and nearly all of my minions have died. Some kind of feedback would be nice. Here I could imagine multiple things: 1. An information about how many minions I currently have (if one dies that would help me) 2. Healthbars on Enemies+Minions. Specially first one because I gave up fighting that one enemy due to that I don't know how much health he has left 3. Can I recover my minions? How? 4. Why should I fight enemies. Haven't tried but I guess I could avoid them. They might should drop something thats important for me.
Also it would be nice to have a tooltip for the minions I can build. I was too fast and didn't got what blue minions are for. But because they were from price-range in the middle I decided to go with the most expensive ones.
Overall a fun game (specially for people like me who likes grinding) ... and I would say the theme is very well met :-)
beats
2023-01-10 09:44
Sad, the dude just ditched the pikmin! Everything works pretty well mechanically, the pathfinding was good, attacking and harvesting stayed with the target. I did find myself avoiding most of the enemies because it wasn't worth losing my pikmin for it. Straightforward all round game.
@beats THE NIMKIP. They left behind the Nimkip. It's a culturally and intellectually distinct idea with no relation to prior IP.
That was really cool! The nimkips are adorable and fun to call out of the ground, too. I liked the additional component of having to spot them if you wanted a free one! Well done game :D
t-c
2023-01-10 17:21
@nekuake Thanks for the kind words and for playing!
@tomate-salat Definitely agree that combat-feedback is very important, and is missing in our game! Unfortunately, we were heads down the last like... 20 hours, and it worked "enough" that we had to leave it as is. But I think healthbars on enemies is 100% necessary! And yeah, I wanted to make the level pretty easily beatable, so people could just... explore what we had, so I tried to make as little combat necessary as possible. I see that most people then just skip the combats, which I admit I'd probably do too haha. Maybe I went a little too far there! We also had plans to make enemies have another resource you need, but that didn't make it in either. Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
@beats Thanks for playing! Taking down enemies is really satisfying when you have a full squad, but I agree that the best way to a reliable victory is to skip fighting when you can. Maybe better enemy/resource/terrain placement could change that a bit.
@nvrskipgameday your username is excellent! Thanks for playing the game and the kind words.
Reminds me a lot of the Overlord games that i used to love as a kid :heart: Really well done!
Amazing game! It is original and the mood is cool. The minions sounds are funny and the mechanics works well. Loved to play it.
@t-c Thank you haha ^_^
marton
2023-01-10 17:32
@titos2k Safari won't load them sometimes but Firefox and Chrome would, try those
gubidubi
2023-01-10 17:36
Enemy death is feels a bit weird without any death animations, they just stand there for a while, but very good game overall. I enjoyed the ~~Pikmin~~ nimkip sounds and animations
Hands down the best entry i have played so far. Cute Graphics, good gameplay, not too hard not too easy. Intuitive commands.
It took me time to figure out you could issue command to only a type of Nimkips.
Well Actually i figured it out only after reading the description after finishing the game.
-- Bug but not game breaking: Nimkipsget stuck into map borders
Would have been nice to have death animations, cant figure out when ennemy dies but when he disappears, same for Nimkips. Maybe make them explode or something?
Great game and awesome work
piko
2023-01-10 17:43
What a nice game! (And it's maybe a little addictive – I very much like how the game escalates) I think i found a glitch: Bildschirmfoto_2023-01-10_18-38-41.png
That was somewhere to the right, where my nimkips walked along the wall and fell out of the map...
marton
2023-01-10 17:54
I enjoyed this submission a lot, I like strategy games and anything where you can gather resources. I think that adding a few technologies we could purchase would be easy to implement and would add one more thing to work toward. I am thinking of stuff like, faster walk speed, more resource gathered from nodes, more nimkip damage. Great game!
t-c
2023-01-10 17:57
@gubidubi @thunderchief Death animations were something we had, but had to get cut cause of the crunch! It's very jarring the way it is now, I definitely agree. Some things- like the tutorial- were so last-minute that I had to just hope people read them in the description haha. Lucky nimkip type selection not necessary to complete the game!
@piko yeah, we tried multiple times to get Nimkips to not get pushed into the terrain, it used to be much worse! But it can still happen, sorry about that!
@marton technologies were definitely high on our list of features to add! There's so much cool stuff you could do with an upgrade system and I agree, it wouldn't have been too hard. It's a shame we couldn't get to it.
Thanks all for the compliments and for playing!
This game is crazy fun! XD I really love the design of everything and the sounds? Great XD unfortunatelly i did encounter a bug where some of these little guys went off map and bugged and this made it a bit harder to play but good job nonetheless!
hfsevans
2023-01-10 20:59
Very Pikmin. I don't think the open-worldness really helps since it needs to a lot of walking around aimlessly, but I still finished it. Nice art that really worked for the style
t-c
2023-01-10 21:08
@jamesboink Thanks for the nice words! It's tough trying to get them to not get stuck in the terrain. We did add some features to at least make it so you could still give commands when others were stuck (it used to softlock your ability to command stuff!) but couldn't nail down all the ways they could get stuck and preventing them.
@hfsevans Definitely! I tried to kind of give a similar feel to maps you'd find in Pikmin, but I think that game having a much wider camera angle, and destructible terrain really makes it work. I tried to make the current map still relatively straightforward, but I never had the ability to play it without having made it, so it I always knew where everything was haha. Maybe something a minimap could fix. Thanks for playing!
This is totally a new idea and has never been done before amazing! all joking aside bit buggy didn't even know there were blue ones the first time through. got waped buy a green thing? and lost all of my minions had to start over and just avoided those ended up finishing.
Seems like with a bit of polish it can be really good though I would suggest making them have other abilities if you expand it further (the reason that they have the different ones is that you need to have all of them to finish the game.) and I felt like after getting the purple ones they were the only one I ever made. Though this could be fixed also buy having them deal different "elements" of damage as well.
All in all, fun game if not a bit buggy sometimes.
t-c
2023-01-10 22:35
@tristan-doell Thanks for playing our completely original idea! Hah yeah there definitely were some bugs. We were fighting a lot of them during development. Environmental things were also high on the list of things to add, so each Nimkip felt more distinct. Originally we had it so yellows could only harvest, and reds could only attack, but I changed that before having the first level done so people wouldn't get stuck. Now those two colors are just way better at those jobs. It's not the greatest design but based on what we had it was as much variety as we had time for. Being able to only have certain types navigate certain areas like in the original, or have elemental attacks, would have been neat to implement and I agree that would definitely improve the game! Thanks for playing.
hulya
2023-01-11 10:10
Oh, I felt sad for every single nimkip that died in the battle, they are so cute with their tiny voices. I enjoyed the gameplay though some worker nimkips were feeling a bit lazy.
@titos2k @crimoudin Worked on Mac Firefox at least just fine.
substain
2023-01-12 12:15
fun little game. sometimes my minions got stuck, but the game felt pretty polished :) the multi-eyed enemies where pretty tough. Great work all in all!
Love the Pikmin vibes, good job. Wish there was a little feedback on the enemy damage but over all good job
Very enjoyable leisure game. The seeding and harvesting cycle design is excellent. It appeals to me greatly.
ninnec
2023-01-13 04:08
Really well done. Alot of features and the rabbits were very cute :-)
t-c
2023-01-13 05:02
@hulya I agree, it's so satisfying and cute to see them follow you around! @jackofcups did a great job on them! But they do get lazy sometimes! It's DEFINITELY not the fault of the programmers, haha. Thanks for playing!
@substain Yeah, that bug was tough to track down, we didn't have time for it. Same with balancing/completing enemies. Thanks for the kind words!
@fullheartgames Absolutely! Enemy attack/health/dealing damage feedback I think is absolutely necessary for combat, and its absence is VERY noticeable. Thanks for playing!
@harmofish Thanks! It appeals a bunch to me too, so I'm glad to see others enjoy it.
@ninnec Thanks for the nice comment on the character design. We tried to get a lot in, definitely gave ourselves a ton of work with this project haha. Always too ambitious.
I lost all my little soldiers to the plant with tentacles but I managed to escape anyways :) It was fun, good job!
Really fun entry! I had one purple nimkip that survived many battles and I thought of them as "training" the new ones :joy: Keep on making games
t-c
2023-01-19 01:51
@hayricakir Nice work! Those plant enemies are really broken, and need a ton of adjustment to be fair. Good job being able to win despite attacking them! Thanks for playing.
@frozenfire92 haha that is excellent! Thanks for sharing that story, and for the kind words!
lenan
2023-01-19 23:53
Nice game, at first thought it took too long to kill the enemies but at the end it was a nice balance.