szieberth-adam 2023-01-08 22:58
Nice solitaire Settlers of Catan game. Thanks, was fun!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Settlement
By corporation
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 11 | 4.27 | 22 | |
| Fun | 10 | 4.25 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 41 | 3.90 | 22 | |
| Theme | 9 | 4.42 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 83 | 3.95 | 22 | |
| Audio | 83 | 3.60 | 22 | |
| Mood | 55 | 3.85 | 22 |
Nice solitaire Settlers of Catan game. Thanks, was fun!
Very nice little game, really enjoyed playing this. Would be nice to get some kind of highligher for resources on the map so I can quickly see where a particular resource is
Easy to understand, a pretty fun challenge and it was nice to have scores to aim for. I got a "good" score on my second try :D
really fun game, I played it way longer than I should have lol my Highest score was 286
@szieberth-adam indeed the game was inspired but them! Glad you enjoyed.
@infinitysamurai thanks for feedback. Good idea with highlighting resource tiles, I only thought about showing the resource gain source to the player.
@mihkelroomet glad it was easy to understand, that's something I can ofter mess up by overcomplicating with all the ideas in my head when the jam starts XD
@cheesehead-games it's always nice to hear someone spent a lot of time in my game. 286 is actually very impressive, more than my highscore of about 230 when I got lucky with my start
As a Catan enjoyed, this was super fun! The graphics are super cute and had a nice scoring system! This game was super fun, I genuinely don't have much feedback and did not run into any issues. The only thing is sometimes I mixed up tobacco and wood tiles, but that's more a vision impairment problem on my part. An overall perfect experience!
I didnt realise the aim was to get as much gold and had 0 gold 8 turns before the end ^^ haha, I got 65 but I also had over a dozen settlements, really fun and addictive game
@lotus-dev thank you for such a possitive feedback, I thought that storage capacity and rolling the merchant didn't feel balanced enough, but I'm glad you didn't find any issues) Yeah, tobacco kinda looks like a wood, but I searched for the photos of plant and couldn't realy produce somthing different) wanter to stick to the colonization of america theme
@rickylee Yeah, I think I didn't state it at the begging as clear as it should be, only in some tooltips. Having a massive settlement in the end should also considered an achivement)
Oh I love Catan, so that game was fun :) I was able to get 231 gold. Great job with the game!
Interesting way to handle random, but it took me multiple tries to start understanding how to grow effectively.
This is super addictive. It is frustrating though when the RNG gods won't let you roll a 7 until turn number 41.
@zimny11 that's a good result! I just improved my best to be a 249, I'm still looking for an optimal strategy here
@zebu Thanks for the feedback) I made my best to implement some balance between settling on expensive resources vs on resources required for development
@wheelsx oh, that's some really unlucky results.. 7 is the most probably outcome from 2 dice. Good that it's open source and you can see that random is fair) I'm using c++ mersenne twister generator, it must be very stable
A very interesting game! Loved the pretty unique core mechanic, although it more or less boils down to knowing the probabilities of various dice outcomes (assuming the dice are fair, of course). Didn't understand what to do in the beginning, but figured it all after several turns thanks to the helpful tips. The font in the tips could be slightly larger, though, - it is a bit hard to read right now. Speaking of probabilities, since the game is all about them, having just 70 turns seems a bit unfair: the random dice outcomes mean more than your own strategy. Maybe if the game lasted way longer the probabilities would average out enough not to feel unfair? The game is pretty fast-paced so I think 300 or even 500 turns would be fine, and would allow for a more developed colony. Maybe it could be a game mode selection thing, e.g. select 100 turns, or 300 turns, or 500 turns if you feel like playing that long (I definitely would, ha-ha).
Extra points for a hex grid and a dual grid used for the settlements. I'm a simple man, I love a good grid :)
2023-01-11-002846_1920x1080_scrot.png
@corporation Oh, I noticed in the comment above that you're using the mersenne twister. It's completely understandable since it's the standard choice from the C++ standard library, but it's really bad for random stuff in games: it is hard (actually impossible) to properly initialize to a truly random state, it's state is just humongous (something around 5000 bytes per a generator!), and it's quite slow. It's mostly designed for cryptographic uses, where you really need huge randomness. What's more, the C++
@lisyarus thanks for detailed feedback, I was playing game lenght, but as an average player would not ever play my game for 500 turns, I desided that 70 is a good balance and I want at least most of the players to finish my game. Random is definitely major part in your success here, but I made feild and numbers generation from shuffled pools to make your start random but even, so the game still relies on your ability to plan what to settle.
Great info about generators, I will look into it more, I know about xor-shift, also Unity is using it, there must be a reason for it. I was just amazed with the math and technical description behind MT so decided to stick with it) will read more about best variants for games.
You definitely got my attention with your game! I must have played 5 or 6 times, but couldn't get a better result than 186.
The game mechanic is really good, but it relies a bit too much on luck in my opinion. The fact that you write what is a good result and what is an amazing result made me want to improve, but I felt a bit powerless. I mean, definitely there are different strategies - but for instance in my last game I had 13 chili peppers to sell at turn 70... And their price was randomly set to 2. If I had been lucky and its price was 8 per unit instead, I would have earned 6x13=78 more, which is the difference between 186 and 264. I guess you get my point :p
I was thinking, maybe an option would be to be able to modify the result of the dice - maybe each turn get +/- 1 that we can either use to change the result of a die, or save for the next turn. That would probably need to be properly balanced as well, but I think it would give an additional strategic dimension.
Don't get me wrong though, I really loved the concept, and I was impressed by the idea of a strategy game like this one that matches the theme so well.
The visuals and music are nice too!
Great entry!
Since I've played a lot of Catan, I had to check this one out :eyes:
I like the familiar mechanics, and the relaxed vibe of it all. The lack of other players trying to beat you to a good location contributes positively to it. The art is consistent, with the animated ship being a nice touch.
The downside to being the only player is that depending on your luck, nothing might be happening for longer stretches of time, if you're getting poor rolls. It's an issue in the original boardgame as well, but you can at least negotiate/trade. But I suppose that's kind of part of the course, and expected, not a big deal.
What could definitely be improved though, is the storage system, at least in my opinion. When you hit the cap you're essentially just waiting for a 7 to roll to be able to do anything else. The boardgame does punish players for going over the cap, but leaves them with a bit more options.
Anyways, I did enjoy it for a while. Also, good job on making it in your own custom engine ^^
@rolly thank you for such an amazing feedback!) Agree about luck, I was hoping I can make balance so it would make sence to store resources and sell when the price is good, so having low is not just random that fails you the game, but more like a variable you have to take in consideration. You have quit an original idea about storing +-for the dice, interesting, but not sure how it would affect the game balance. I was aiming to keep core game loop as simple as possible.
@hexstart glad you liked my game, it was inspired by Catan indeed. Agree that rolling the merchant is the weakest point in gameplay and balance, at some point you just sitting with full storage. Maybe if I had more time for playtesting, I would come with a good solution. Also, you might be surprised, but at the start I was planning to make it for 3-4 players with custom AI, but luckily I made it singleplayer, as there's no way I could write AI in time)
This is one of the best games I played so far! The connection with Catan/Settlers was evident.
At first I was discouraged by the fact that the game has a fixed duration and I just need to wait for it to end... but then I realized how fun it is anyway. If there is anything to suggest it would be to add a different goal in the game that is not just a highscore. Also maybe a dice rolling sound :)
Good job!
I derped a bit in the first run, building along useless tiles.. so had to wait ~30 turns to actually proceed :sweat_smile: But hey, nice game... really brings back the old catan days.
This was a lot of fun! I have not played that much Catan before and I forgot that some numbers were better than others, so the first run I just but my ranch a bit randomly on numbers that did not come up very often :/ I got a terrible score of 20 something, while it said that anything above 100 was good XD I decided to play a second time, keeping those numbers in mind, and this time I had a score of 121. A lot more passable I would say :D
Figuring out what was the best place to put your ranches, and deciding whether or not to sell/buy something were the most interesting decision I had to make in this game. Often these had pretty big consequences as well, which I liked a lot. Randomly rolling the dice was also exciting, but sometimes a bit frustrating. Especially when my inventory was full and I was just randomly rolling for a merchant to sell all my stuff, while there was nothing I could do about all the stuff I was losing out on. On the other hand, I guess this plays a bit into the risk/reward decisions you have to make when placing your ranch, so it is not all bad.
I really liked your take on the theme and I think it was very well executed. I had a lot of fun with this one! Thanks a lot for making it :D
Neat game. Understanding how rolling for resources worked and realizing the buildings go on corners of hexes(thought they just were placed weirdly high above the hex they're on) took me a bit. I was expecting to get more options to build or at least some use for other resources than just selling them as the game went on.
@christian-zommerfelds thank you very much for the kind words, glad you liked it! I was planning to add dice sounds, but forgot at some point. @xparker thanks for feedback, yeah, initial location really matters) @wuppos 121 is a good score) yeah I made numbers like 6 and 8 red to show that they are a more likely outcome. The case when you are full and just rolling for 7 is in my opinion the weakest part of gameplay, should've come with some solution. Thanks for playing the game) @unentokku thank you) I was trying to not make a lot of different buildings to keep the gameplay simple
Nice simple game flow, but it offers a nice amount of depth to strategize on when to focus on certain commodities. The graphics had nice polish and the interface was very clean! All in all a very satisfying game to play. Just a couple points of feedback:
- Sometimes, I'll get stuck with a full inventory but don't have the gold / resources to build anything. At this point, I'm just waiting to roll a 7 for the merchant, which can stink when it takes 10 rolls to get one and in the meantime I'm missing out on the other resources. It could be cool to have some sort of trade-in mechanism that is always present where you can sell resources for less than the trader would offer or trade in resources at a bad rate (e.g. kind of like the 4:1 trades you can do in Catan). That way you could at least clear room in your inventory for the resources you need without depending on the merchant all the time.
- The 70-turn game length seemed too short to take advantage of upgrading the settlements into cities. It felt like storage space was a much more limiting factor for me. Upgrading to a city was both too expensive and maybe not worth it since I didn't have the storage space to handle the 2x resources.
This was a great entry overall! Really enjoyed playing it.
Managed to get 123, I'm happy enough with that! A solid concept executed simply and well. This is the sweet spot for a solitaire game in the compo: lean towards the puzzle-y side rather than the sim side. You can go a pretty long time without rolling a 7, which is rough, so I would have appreciated some way to mitigate bad luck. Maybe spending money to nudge the die roll up or down?
Hi! Happy to share that Settlement is featured on the GitHub Blog in our [Ludum Dare 52 wrap up post](https://github.blog/2023-02-03-ludum-dare-52-staff-picks/).
@lee-reilly I'm really honored to be mentioned in your blog) but I noticed it states that my project is using Unity, which is wrong, I used my engine which can be also seen on github)