arficord 2023-05-02 06:58
Didn't understand how to play. Some in-game pictures with instructions would be much better than a wall of text. Interesting visual style.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Chalkboard Deliveries
By goldyxen, BurninDreamer and locke8
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1094 | 2.97 | 21 | |
| Fun | 1117 | 2.68 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 695 | 3.21 | 21 | |
| Theme | 462 | 4.02 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 727 | 3.47 | 21 | |
| Audio | 703 | 2.69 | 20 | |
| Mood | 1008 | 2.94 | 21 |
Didn't understand how to play. Some in-game pictures with instructions would be much better than a wall of text. Interesting visual style.
Couldn't get the game to go past the instructional text, unfortunately, since it looked like it could be a lot of fun.
@omrilahav In order to close the tutorial window, you must click the help button in the bottom right of the screen, as the tutorial itself mentions.
really great game, in this time, awesome, i wish you could implement the tutorial smooth into the game!
I didn't get far since my brain is small but for what I did play I enjoyed it! The graphics reminded me of dwarf fortress which is pretty cool!
I enjoyed it quite a bit! Very cool idea. One thing I'd suggest is making the zoom and movement sensitivity adjustable; it was difficult to find a zoom level I was happy with
@chocoland-tv Thanks for the feedback, the tutorial is indeed a bit janky, i wish i had the time to implement a more gradual approach to teaching the player, but unfortunately i was really short on time, and i had to cut that out last-moment to ensure the game wouldn't be a buggy mess.
@space-games Thanks for playing, i actually though of the same thing regarding the graphics when i was putting the map together!.
Good graphics and ambitious concept, always nice to see! I struggled with getting units to pick up objects - I figured out how to move them from the instructions but once they were at buildings they didn't seem to do much.
This game has potential. And i'm probably messing up some of the controls but whenever i clicked i kept making new "steps" in the route and even if i selected new vehicles i kept making new links on the route so my whole screen got filled with routes.
Maybe too much text at start (for people with bad english like me xDD) and maybe it need a better way to close the window (I saw your comment before play and I had no problems hehe).
It's a relaxing game with simple but really cool artstyle and music. I think it's a nice delivery game.
Nice work!
@misterkeefe Ah, i believe i know what you're talking about - unfortunately units only pick up objects when entering a building's effect area, so if they are already inside of it when the building produces items they won't pick them up. Moving them outside the area and then back inside works, though i realize its janky, perhaps got a bit overly-ambitious since i couldn't seem to fix a lot of jank.
Would have liked to play more but unfortunately I ran into a bug that made it close to unplayable. It would work fine initially with just one truck but once more trucks became available it was impossible to set up individual routes for them. Whenever I tried issuing orders to one truck they would be applied to all previously selected trucks as well even when I had specifically selected one specific truck. On that note, a very welcome addition would be some indication on which units are selected. Could be done by just changing their colors slightly or outlining them with a small ring.
Otherwise the game seemed like it would be really fun to play. The art was simple but consistent and clear, the music was relaxing and the premise seems promising. Unfortunate that I was unable to play it more.
@ski11az that's actually really good suggestion! i didn't think of just changing the color of the units, it would of been faster than dealing with a sprite node, i wish i could of had a bit more time to iron out these issues.
Really like the concept of this! It's just very overhelming and there is a lot right at the start. As other mentioned, the tutorial text is a bit much right at the beginning and I missed the part where it mentioned how to close the tutorial text (which also doesn't actually mention the 'Help' button). It would be helpful if there would be some indication which unit is currently selected and I think it would also be really helpful to see, which places is currently asking for materials, as searching for 'Warehouse XY' on the map is also a bit overhelming with that time pressure. EDIT: Looking at the screenshots right now, I guess I also couldn't figure out how to set those path points. It's really a bit much right at the beginning :/.
Excellent strategy game with dark vibes. Well done! I bet the tactics could be fleshed out for many years haha
Interesting concept, but the UI clunkiness made it very difficult to understand what was going on. I think having routes separated from individual vehicles would work better, since I found that I would often want to assign more trucks to a route after drawing it, and multiselection seemed buggy. The lack of any feedback when you accidentally transform a vehicle was also confusing.
If the interface was much more polished I can imagine it being very fun to optimize routes. Depending on what you want the focus of the game to be I think having a separate planning phase and execution phase could work better, where you would need to tightly optimize throughput to meet the time limits. As it is the game is mostly about micromanaging units, which is fine but less interesting to me personally.
Also not sure if this is just a godot problem or if you could fix it, but the html version on firefox just showed black after the loading screen.
@kaliuresis Hi, thanks for playing. Currently the HTML godot export doesn't seem to be fully debugged, i managed to get it to work on my end but i do believe that it can break quite easily. Thinking back to it, i think that making routes separate from individual vehicles would of indeed of been a better choice, perhaps allowing players to move each separate waypoint individually would of also make it better, but unfortunately we didn't have much time for polishing.
Cool game and ambitious entry! Had some small annoyances: - Units loading up with wrong materials, can't dump them. - Units on top of each other - Units not loading when materials got delivered after they arrived. - no selection indication.
Besides this, kept me entertained for a while. Well done!
Some tutorial and ui poilishing would be nice. reat idea but hard to figure out.
Others have already mentioned some problems with the tutorial, so I'll just add to that a problem with the UI in general - you're using a pretty stylized font, which makes it difficult to read when the text is too small. Even at full screen, the text isn't big enough for me to read comfortably, so focusing on reading through that entire tutorial is especially difficult.
chalkboard_deliveries.png
Also - what version of Godot are you using? I've noticed this jam that most (if not all) Godot 4 games have problems with the WebGL version, as they don't start for me at all when played in an iframe (like on itch.io), returning an error "The following features required to run Godot projects on the Web are missing: Cross Origin Isolation - Check web server configuration (send correct headers) SharedArrayBuffer - Check web server configuration (send correct headers)". Depending on the game, it can sometimes work when opened in a separate tab.
There are also occasional problems with unit selection and orders. At one point, I had the same issue ski11az had - it looked like trucks were not "unselected" and trying to issue orders for one truck issued it for all previously selected trucks. The other issue is the trucks don't wait for the order to be confirmed. The tutorial text says you can shift-click a path, then either confirm it with Q, or mark it to be looped with E. My problem is the trucks don't wait for "Q" and start moving immediately, which means if I want to make a looping path, I have to move quickly and finish the entire path before the truck reaches its first point.
Other than these issues, I think it's a great game. It feels a bit like a simplified Transport Tycoon, where your main focus is on just transporting the goods, without worrying about stuff like building roads between locations. The art style is simple, but that works in the game's favor. It also looks pretty good. :) One thing I think could be changed is to lose the transparency on the truck and buildings - the grass being visible through them looks a bit odd, and I think if they weren't transparent it would make everything look much clearer.
The mellow music worked pretty well. The game feels like the music should be faster, but it being so chill actually helped me relax enough to set up some proper pathing on multiple trucks and progress further. ;)
@lcstark We have indeed used Godot 4, at the time of making this choice i didn't know that support for WebGL was not yet complete, and there wasn't much i could do about it by the end. I should of indeed have made the tutorial window larger, that would of probably helped a lot.
I think this game is neat! It definitely could use a lot of help on the player experience aspect though. It might be better to split up the intro tutorial to have it tell you little things as you do them (for example, highlight my new ships and tell me how they're different, or highlight the refill station and tell me how it works. Controls are also finicky as there were instances where selecting multiple trucks at once did nothing (some more feedback for us on what is selected by highlighting could be cool!). I also picked up the wrong resource once and could not unload it anywhere in time to keep progressing the game.
The music is okay, but it lacks a lot of polish and humanity. As a concept, this game has promise, but I think it needs a lot more work on the player experience to keep it fun and engaging without overloading the player with 200 concepts at once and hoping that they remember it!
Found this really fun.
Cute art style, and I found the music fine.
The way the information was delivered to you was rather difficult, and I had to mess around for a couple minutes.
I liked plotting paths throughout the map, but the way you put down paths was wonky at times. Sometimes the truck would move unintentionally while I was plotting a loop, making it quite messy as it deletes the waypoints. I think looping would be more effective if you didn't have to trace a path twice over. Instead, just drawing a single line, and a vehicle would just go to one endpoint to the other.
I wish I could have used vehicles in conjunction: like a ship dropping off materials at a port, and a truck driving it the rest of the way.
I think a 'pickup' order could be useful. Vehicles picking up materials accidentally on a route was annoying, as I had to drive it to the proper place to dispose of it.
The UI could use information updates like how many materials were left in an order. Also, it was a bit confusing to find all of the necessary resources and collection points, as not all names told you where the place was.