futuregamer25 2023-01-10 00:52
Got hoocked on the mechanics really quick, the simple mechanics let you spend all your focus on the strategy!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Tile King
By miltonnh25 and Choco
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 222 | 3.76 | 25 | |
| Fun | 131 | 3.87 | 25 | |
| Innovation | 209 | 3.60 | 25 | |
| Theme | 191 | 4.04 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 679 | 2.73 | 25 | |
| Audio | 495 | 2.26 | 25 | |
| Humor | 671 | 1.91 | 20 | |
| Mood | 481 | 3.33 | 23 |
Got hoocked on the mechanics really quick, the simple mechanics let you spend all your focus on the strategy!
Reminded me of Civilization quite a bit with the different resource farming. The game is easy to understand if you've ever played Civ and revealing the map tile by tile is really rewarding. The graphics are nice and seeing everything produce resources every turn was really satisfying.
I have some criticism though. I think it would be great to have a "Sell all" feature, at some point you have to right click so much that it takes up most of your turn just to sell everything you need to get the money to survive. I also once somehow managed to pay the money I owed even though I didn't have it all and started the next turn with -5 gold. Finally, I think the music takes too much focus away from the game. You have to strategize and make decisions and the music is a bit distracting. Maybe a softer soundtrack or just ambient sounds would work better here.
I went until turn 90. Really nice game, congrats! Gold went to -15 so I should have lost even though nothing happened. The music is good, but maybe some accompaniment makes it even better and a little less repetitive.
Got to turn 130. One of my favorites so far, i quite enjoyed it. Like others have said the clicking gets a bit spammy when you have to sell 100 of a resource. The instructions were pretty clear, with the exception of road placements (I think you could place the first one wherever you wanted, and then roads after that had to be next to it?).
The only thing dragging it down was the music. I think it would be better to have some sound effects for various actions rather than a very bare bones song that you cannot mute.
Well done! :star:
Fun: Had a good time playing this, it was well balanced (maybe a little too hard) and I felt like every turn I had to think and plan what I was going to do in order to reach my goal. I think one thing that would've made this game more fun is a more lenient lose condition like 2/3 strikes. You could then give the player a bronze, silver, gold medal based on how many strikes they had when they won. Losing outright when you had just finally got a decent setup going is frustrating.
Innovation: The fog of war and lighthouse tile were unique, I have definitely played other games similar to this one but I don't recall having this much fog of war, and thus a lighthouse to clear it. One way to make the game more innovative would be to double down on the fog of war and have certain building that don't clear the fog, but gain resources from it.
Theme: Excellent use of the theme, the core of the game was about harvesting resources, and everything in the game helped facilitate harvesting. One idea to make the game more thematic would be to add more mechanisms to improve harvesting like tile upgrades, or boosts to harvest more per turn.
Graphics: The graphics were neat and consistent throughout the game. I think changing the road tiles to be a "+" shape (or ideally a different shape depending on whether it was next to other roads) would look a lot better than filling the whole tile with the stone brick pattern.
Audio: The melody of the song was okay, but the sound the instrument used was very shrill to me and made it difficult to listen to. I would suggest using a softer / quieter instrument for such a simple song, and add more sound effects to the different actions the player takes in the game.
Very fun game! I spent a little while just relaxing with this. The art is clear, the game loop doesn't take long to figure out and after a bit I felt like I couldn't lose which I think is great for a game like this.
I would love to see a volume slider or toggle as I did find it a bit piercing but generally it was nice and chill! Another thing I would like to see is the ability to keep placing the same tile without having to go back and select it again which would help with building roads and such.
Overall, great little game and a nice way to pass the time!
@futuregamer25 @initialposition @noskire @p0l4r @tobius @sarah-alexa Thanks everyone for trying out the game and I really appreciate all the feedback. Music was definitely rushed at the end of the jam and should have been quieter to feel less distracting. The gold going negative sometime instead of losing was an bug I am surprised I missed but should be fixed now. I also agree a sell option would have been a lot more convenient especially later in the game. It is good to see that the instructions were overall pretty clear and not too confusing.
Great game with an interesting take on the theme. I really like the way that all of the game's systems intertwine with each other, and the limitations of the tiles makes expansion very satisfying.
I really dig this strategy game play, doing a lot of math in my head to make sure all of my books are going to balance again in another 10 turns was a lot of fun. I hope to see more games like this from you. Honestly the biggest area for improvement would be look and feel. The audio could be better too, but for a jam I'm not complaining there at all. You are on the right path for sure, keep it up.
Wow! Fantastic idea. I really like this game!
I loved this game! Mechanics and strategy elements were easy to learn but had a lot of depth for a jam game. Especially the UI was very nice and clear which I feel is not an easy task in such short time to implement! I went on minus with my gold several times and I couldn't find how that was possible. If that was planned feature and not a bug, you could maybe communicate the logic behind that to the player better. I also found the music irritating so I played the game muted which worked just fine as well. All in all very impressive little stategy game. I find lots of furher development potential for this one.
any chance a linux version comes out?
Is it possible I bricked myself by placing a road and surrounding it with non-roads? Because now I can't place any other roads
The game is a bit too easy. It's a bit slow and it crashed. I got to turn 74 (crashed) but was making more than enough to meet the deadlines. Capture.PNG
The game is very fun though. I think it's quite solid, but needs some tweaking. Avoiding your road getting blocked is a bit annoying. Also you die if you would have enough at the end of your turn. The mechanics are fun and work well together, the lighthouse creates an exploration-exploitation tradeoff. The only useless resource is fish which I converted all the time for gold. It would be cool to have a bulldozer so I could remove my lighthouses or unmess my road.
Very fun game! I died on turn 140. It felt easy for about 100 turns where I had a lot of income but the difficulty curve nicely caught up to me. Very well designed and very great.
Thinking again, I think this game would benefit by being redone in a hexagonal grid. Tiles would have more neighbors. Which would make neighbor interactions less awkward like the town and road and would give more options to the player to snake it around.
@martenscedric I would agree, a hexagonal grid system would be interesting, maybe a bit too settlers of catan, but otherwise it would make it more dynamic.
This was a nice entry. Easy to understand but interesting gameplay (for someone like me who love thinking about where is the best place to put something). The music is... well, it made me want to sleep. The art is... Well, you're a coder! Well done anyways !
Amazing little strategy game! Love the simple mechanics. Well done!
Nice Game.
screenshot-2023-01-16 22_53_03.png
Mecanics are simple, but not so easy to stay alive for a long time.
Good work !
I really enjoyed this game. I played a couple of times and the last time I got over 100 turns. I do think it ramps up a bit quickly though, maybe you could start with like 20 turns and it goes down by 1 or 2 each time until you hit 10 and it stays there. Fairly quickly I found myself not able to actually explore the map anymore and the stone and wood definitely became a bottleneck since they cost money to build, so I ended up not doing much besides selling the resources.
A couple of minor things, it would have been really nice to be able to zoom in/out, if you could purchase multiple buildings in a row without needing to click the buttons again, and I also think the music was a bit ominous sounding for a game like this. Otherwise, great job!
I'm very inexperienced in this genre of game. I got frustrated on my first play thinking the numbers were tuned much too harsh and that it was near impossible to get very far into the game. Coming back to read the comments, I saw a lot of praise and people making it much further.
So I started another round and realized the starting tiles are randomized per run. This might be common for the genre, but may I point out a flaw as a newbie? My first run had no water tiles in the starting area, which meant I had no way to gain fish, which meant I couldn't build a lighthouse to reveal further tiles. Maybe the start area should be static so you can give players an "easy" start, and then randomize as it expands outwards?
On my next playthroughs I kept restarting until I had a gold mine and water in the starting area, which felt like a much more friendly start. After that, the game kept me playing through quite a few restarts, trying out new starting strategies, is it better to go for the town or the gold mine first, etc. Definitely got into it after a while, so I think all the frustration was simply on me not having played games like this before. Thanks for introducing me!