gnum 2023-10-03 13:31
Good game
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Refugees of Oblivion
By arzi
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 716 | 3.41 | 32 | |
| Fun | 683 | 3.29 | 31 | |
| Innovation | 168 | 3.89 | 31 | |
| Theme | 314 | 4.00 | 31 | |
| Graphics | 750 | 3.29 | 31 | |
| Humor | 851 | 2.22 | 27 | |
| Mood | 148 | 4.05 | 31 |
Good game
Interesting game. Not sure I've ever played anything like it. It was strangly atmospheric considering the simple graphics. I did find that when the food balance tipped against the player it went too quickly and there was never any time to correct it. That said I could see this being expanded into a mobile clicker game easily enough. I had fun. Good stuff :8ball:
Great visual design and music, but the controls and gameplay are not intuitive enough.
Solid game, I really like the aesthetics. It might become more than a game jam game if you keep working on it I think
Cool game. I really like the atmosphere, the art and the music are all great. I would say mechanically this game has potential but feels not quite complete.
The fact that food and soul dust are variable per person means that you really just want to ignore all the arrivals that don't have max stat in this because it just makes it harder to accept good arrivals later if you don't. It makes the game mostly about waiting for good colonists.
I think the game could be more fun if all migrants gave max food or soul dust but you couldn't reject them but had to shove them in somewhere. You would need some way to mitigate the rng aspect then like maybe moving people around or room upgrades. Also I really wanted the adjacency of the rooms to matter somehow, maybe it does but it's not visible. I feel like making the beliefs integers instead of floats would make it easier to reason about them and make it more fun.
Anyway the core idea was fun but needed some extra development.
Also I wanted to zoom in and see the cultists a bit closer.
Wow, I'm mesmerized by the mechanics of this game. I don't think I've every seen anything like it. I would love to see a refined version of this. Oh, the possibilities! :smiley:
Hard to understand in the beginning. I still did not figure out how tension gets calculated, but luckily it gets displayed before placing a new survivor. Most important tip for me was you can just dismiss as many incoming survivors as you want. Without negative consequences, it gets very easy. The visuals are quite small, as the window cannot be resized. I think it's a very interesting foundation. Even though it's a bit complicated in the beginning, I had fun playing it.
I really enjoyed this, I feel like it has a lot of potential to be made into something a bit larger/more involved.
Cool thing! After figuring out the strategy, I depended mainly on the RNG.
Looked for the most 'valuable' survivors who produced the most and therefore could help me attain the arbitrary goal of 10 rooms... there are some capitalistic undertones here despite the tribal theme. It's a thinker :)
I would have liked it to be a bit more zoomed in because I was almost squinting!
@oddballdave Good point about the food balance! I'm thinking of maybe not having the game over so abrupt when the food runs out. It would actually be more consistent, if without food the survivors started slowly dying and then when there's none left, the game would end.
@hierarch Thanks for the detailed feedback! You're right that the game becomes just about waiting for good colonists easily, but I decided it's better to have it too easy than too hard, and just didn't have time to balance it any better.
The adjacency doesn't matter but it definitely should!
Also you really don't want to see the cultists any closer :sweat_smile:
zoom.png
Though I was thinking of making them walk around etc in the future, but as of yet I'm not sure if that's worth the trouble or not. On the other hand, the abstract nature does lend to the more mysterious atmosphere.
Real cool mood of a game, got addicted quick to trying to break it and becoming an idle game with the perfect balance of rooms (after a lot of dead ones...) Good stuff!
The environment setting really helped keeping the game interesting ! Having some numbers popup from rooms for example could push the need for grind a little more :smiley: Overall, really well laid ! :clap:
It wasn't obvious for me that you need to click on game field tile when you see a newcomer's description. Also, tension counter makes useless characters opinions, you just click on all the spots and choose one, there's less tension.
There's a dense atmosphere and i enjoyed playing, so thanks :)
Incredibly cool take on the theme, some aspects remind me of the game The Final Earth, the music was suspenseful and really nice to listen to. At first I didn't understand how exactly the game worked with the different opinions but after a bit I started to realize how it worked and it went well, I just couldn't find enough people who made food so everyone ended up starving to death which is a shame but that might have been me playing wrong, but I really enjoyed playing the game! Good submission!
Thematically and artistically the game was great, but it was hard to understand the gameplay.
I really love the look of the game and the suspenseful music, however i dont know what this game wants to be because it looks like a colony builder but at the same time its kindof like an incremental. But i love the look keep working on it:))
At first I had no idea what to do. Read your instructions here. Still no idea. after a bit of stumbling, found out you need to open the thing that reads "see next arrival" AND THEN press where it goes.
On the first run, I ended up killing everyone or something :smile:
Second try got further, opened some new tiles and killed everyone on hunger :laughing:
Third time I notice the text about the tension will grow or so. Again run out of food. I see you get some food when you bring people in, but it still goes down.
next tries I keep running out of food.
Then I start dismissing some people who don't bring food to the table :smile:
Can't put anyone in a tile that has people died. destruction is brutal.
Then I start to get it more balanced. slow steady increase of food and soul dust. Waiting for that dust to rise. It's like spice of life in some worlds they say!
music has some mystique in it, atmosphere is spot on.
Propechy of Nalakh has been fulfilled. Thanks for making it!
I read you made this fast. So I'm not harsh on the details. It's interesting, I wonder how could you improve on this where this game could go next?
interesting concept. I would appreciate a tutorial in the game, I had no idea how to play the game for a long time. great entry :)
This was a really interesting idea and I think a good fit for the theme. I didn't understand what "Blood" and "King" and all that were at first, but I guess that's the opinion topic(?) and levels?
The game is interesting, it was quite nice to play it, keep working on it and everything will be cool
Really cool conceptually and the mood and vibes are fantastic, the UI, flavor text, sound and visuals really work together to sell this mysterious universe. Reminds me of cultist simulator. I dig it.
Unfortunately the gameplay itself is a little flat which is a shame, it's mostly just picking the right room repeatedly and the tooltip telling you how tension will grow takes away any thinking anyway, which is a shame.
Really interesting concept and executed pretty well, just needs more depth. I really like it despite the gameplay problems!
Great work!
Cool game! After a few tries I understood that food is precarious and focused on it first. I think with the rate of resources/no other time pressure, the game can become a lot of 'waiting/dismissing' without doing much. I had some fun later in the game just letting rooms collapse while making me soul dust. I think the UI showing characters/rooms' alignments was the coolest/most interesting part of the game. It was also very moody 👍👍