Courier Crusaders

frelude 2023-05-03 15:55

I really like the concept of your game.

I was a little confuse at start by the different menus, but figure it out later. Despite my tries, I keep loosing money. There is a lot of things to manage. Every day I loose more and more money (under next day), what is it ? Sometimes my crew is dying. We can upgrade our crew, etc... Some feedback will be welcomed, when we loose money, earn money, a character die, an event occurs. Would be great to see on the map where are our crews, etc...

Once this is said, I like the graphics, and the mood you manage to install. The little stories for each travels. Keep it up. I encourage you to continue it, with some effort on ergonomics and feedback, it will make a great game.

prakkus 2023-05-14 23:05

I really like this concept! The atmosphere was great, I felt able to pick up the game quickly which is important in games like this, and making money is always fun. Also all the fun descriptions of the events and the deliveries themselves are great.

Losing money each day is a little rough but once I got some deliveries going I was able to outpace it. I agree with the previous fellow that deaths are rather punishing, so it would be nice to have some kind of popup or something for some of the events. Maybe I get to choose for my character to try an agility or a strength solution to whatever problem, that kind of thing. That way even if they fail and die, it feels like I had some input in how that happened.

I did spend a bunch of money on gear but my people were dying anyway which felt kind of like a waste. It might make more sense for the gear to be like...consumables that you buy per delivery based on how difficult it's going to be, rather than permanent boosts for heroes who will likely be temporary?

Those are mostly ideas for expansion though and there's never time to fit everything. I'd say you pulled this off rather well!

fabula-rasa 2023-05-14 23:10

Cool! A nice management game with a lot of depth to it. It was fun to figure out different world events in practice, learn who can be the best on what route, and send my crew accordingly. I really appreciate the lack of "in your face" tutorial and allowing me to figure out the world on my own.

I didn't really see a point of assigning more than two members to a delivery at any time - I was mainly running one-two person teams. But I know that would change in time as the party attribute demands grow. Having all the additional equipment to buy a figure out was a cherry on the cake. I had a lady die at the start (she shall be mourned), but after that my crew was going strong and growing steadily. Everybody got a nice piece of gear and learned their craft well :grin:

The graphics are nice, and the music is very fitting. I see you didn't make those, but they are nonetheless well-chosen and help create the mood of adventure and exploration.

I wish there was some overarching goal to the game. Even a simple one - like earn X money - would give the player something to aim for.

Anyway, well done!

Screenshot_20.jpg

rosymaple 2023-05-15 01:46

I really love the idea.

But during my play through I didn't really understand what the stats did. And I didn't see any event dialog until day 30. which had me wondering if the dialog just wasn't implanted.

I think it would do a great service to the feel of the game to add some amount of travel log to every delivery every day rather then just when events are rolled, or just adding more events.

it also felt a bit aimless, and somewhat easy. Maybe adding a target amount of gold or weekly high costs rather then daily low costs.

sheol 2023-05-15 04:21

Took a couple of playthroughs for me to get the hang of it but once I did, WOW. Such an amazingly fleshed out game for a game jam! I really like the idea and concept and I think the balance is just right. Really amazing work!

honey-pony 2023-05-15 05:31

Really nice graphics and overall layout here. In particular, I love the randomly generated character names, as well as simply the variety of character portraits available, and same for the equippable items--they just have a fun variety of item graphics. The delivery descriptions are fun as well.

I found that the debt was very quickly outpacing the amount of money I could possibly earn, once I got around day 20-30. In particular, the debt is -71 right now on day 34, and it seems like it just linearly increases by 2 every day? This does seem to be fixed in the post jam version, from what I can tell in the above screenshots, but in the jam version it definitely seems like the debt outgrows the amount of money you can possibly earn per day (which is something like 50-60 at best). But if it is fixed already, well, then I guess you already knew that was a problem. :smile:

Having to map out where deliveries go is a fun mechanic. I did find that the character stats themselves were not super meaningful to me, especially with so many. I think it might be worth cutting down the stats to a small number, and then making them have super-clear gameplay implications, and then at that point maybe reintroducing more stats. That way, the stats can mean more than just "I think the bigger number is *probably* better," which is all I can intuit about them in the current game.

One way to do that would be to just have, say, some obstacles on the map that can only be cleared with X stat or higher (or you can take a chance and try to clear it with a lower stat). That would create some obvious risk/reward situations for the player, where they have a couple couriers available but have to plan carefully for which one to send in case they need a different one for tomorrow's delivery.

Either way, I think the overall DND sort of vibes in this game are great, with the map and all the portraits and text descriptions. Good job!

gamescodedogs 2023-05-15 07:11

Great visuals and mood! Game looks complex and could be a big game in future. Don't stop working on it!

nastasya 2023-05-15 07:32

Cool game and design! Interesting and not so hard! Good job!

aile 2023-05-15 08:03

I really like the rpg vibes here, so it was cool. Loved the little quests and their descriptions, the map system was nice, and also the "event log".

What the stats exactly did was unclear, although the "event log" was there to give some information. Something felt off with balance, e.g. I had two strong couriers with good stats in all attributes. Together in a team they had 15+ in every attribute and 20+ in several. Yet, they both died to a mission that did not require high stats? That some negative RNG happens is fine, but it was a shame that I could not find a way to recover / plan for these losses. Since my weaker couriers ALSO managed to die, the money quickly became a problem as I lost 20+ gold per day and could not purchase new couriers nor earn more money before the gold balance was negative, aka game over.

I do like the idea very much though and definitely think you should keep working on it. Will def. check back for updates!

ditam 2023-05-15 09:09

Ah, you actually have a web build, neat! I think you should edit your post to say this in this links section, because you might have people passing on your game seeing only "Windows" listed! (I'd just add the same link under a "HTML5" or "Web Build" label.)

This is a neat little game. Beautiful graphics and layout, so much so that the game loop felt a bit confusingly simply and static. I think some light animations, visual progress indicators and sound effects could do this game wonders!

I think I ran into a confusing bug a few times: new crew members didn't show up on the Delivery tab and I had to switch to an other tab and back to make them appear.

The concept is very nice otherwise, although the complexity is a bit intimidating at first. I think I didn't yet understand all the mechanics, but it's clear that a lot of thought went into the systems.

ludovics 2023-05-15 10:35

Recruit button is quite small, appart from that it was a fun experience.

justking144 2023-05-15 19:12

Love the game's atmosphere, but really struggled in the beginning to figure out what to do. Some of the UI elements were a bit hard to make out as well, which didn't help, but it was still really fun once I got the hang of it

kanity 2023-05-16 14:52

Seems to be a nice strategy game, and I really like the feel of it, art, music, UI, and the concept of the gameplay. However, it wasn't quite clear what is going on, why are we losing money and what stats of the crew do. I suppose considering we only had 3 days, you didn't have time to implement everything you wanted (it seems there should be some text in delivery windows, maybe you wanted to add what happened to the adventurer on their delivery quest; and once the delivery is complete it just disappears, it would be nice to see a pop up with info that we completed it and earned money). It would be cool to see how it looks when everything is complete! ^^