Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → Gridlock: A Tiny RTS
By hare-software and langotriel
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 250 | 3.88 | 28 | |
| Fun | 69 | 4.13 | 28 | |
| Innovation | 577 | 3.34 | 27 | |
| Theme | 811 | 3.26 | 28 | |
| Graphics | 574 | 3.61 | 28 | |
| Audio | 56 | 4.15 | 28 | |
| Humor | 140 | 3.83 | 26 | |
| Mood | 352 | 3.78 | 27 |
Wow, the voice acting here is incredible! This is just a solid RTS. Good art, enough different units to make interesting compositions, and reasonably aggressive enemies. One of my few gripes is that I found it difficult to tell different types of units apart at a glance, particularly scouts and soldiers. I also got a lot of spamming lines like "Okay!" if I was microing units around very quickly.
太棒了，它几乎拥有一个RTS游戏该有的一切，这让我玩起来非常沉迷其中，它的配音如此出色让我回忆起了我孩童时期的一些rts游戏的感觉！
First time I get to play an RTS in a game jam, it is my favourite genre of games! There is a reason you don't see RTS games in jams, they are difficult to make. So it is extra impressive to see how well this game works. I love the voice acting, which was phenomenal as usual. I like the fact that it felt like there was a lot of strategy you had to use.
As always, your entries are more than a simple game, it's an experience that you remember long after the jam ends.
Fantastic job! :star:
The game is very fun to play. The graphics and simple and clean, and do their job. Voice acting is great, and the intro narration made me laugh.
I'm not a rts aficionado (I played several, but not a lot), so I'm probably not the best person to talk about balance here - but it seemed fine to me. The enemies gave you reasonable time to build up your strength but kept you on your toes as well. There was a good variety of units to build squads for various tasks.
It would be nice to have some more detailed descriptions of units (both mechanically and flavor-wise).
I actually managed to crash the game once :grin:. I think it's because the enemies took over the position while I was in the process of building (didn't finish before they took over).
Screenshot_1.jpg
Anyway, awesome jam entry!
@fabula-rasa Thank you so much for playing and also thank you for the bug report. It has been fixed now and I added a quick way to skip the intro if you wanna give it another try. The descriptions you mentioned were certainly planned but were not added due to time constraints, so I very much agree.
Pretty fun and funny. I liked the voice acting, did you guys do any of it? The polish is impressive for 72 hours. I do wish that the map was a little more complex, though, that may be going against the nostalgic rts vibes haha.
@masterofcheese Glad you liked it! All voice acting is done by voice actors on the team, except the sniper/sharpshooter/scout character which I voiced. All credits are in the game :)
The graphics strongly remind me of Command & Conquer! The concept art seems very similar. I'm surprised that it hasn't reached the required 20 votes. It would be great if, in case the web version doesn't work well, the game was released for GNU/Linux. There are many players here on Ludum Dare who use GNU/Linux. While I also use Windows, there are indeed people who exclusively use GNU/Linux. Perhaps this would boost the votes!
Nice game, it's great that you added voice acting!
Awesome! Really enjoyed the game, even though I'm not usually a fan of RTS Evertything's smooth and simple, non-stop shooting action with satysfying tactical choices And the voice acting is superb! Would love to see this turn into a complete game
One of the minor issues I encountered was distinguishing between various unit types at first glance, especially between scouts and soldiers. It's not often for me to play an RTS, game balancing of RTS is hard to do, I'm glad you guys are trying this type of game in jam!
Your game has brought me back to the good old days! There are minor bugs in the game, but nevertheless the game leaves a pleasant impression!
the game is very interesting, I liked it, the idea is good, continue at the same pace and you will become more professional
Always nice to see someone go for RTSs and less explored genres in jams like this! Other than that, its just what people have said, i.e. it was worth to go the extra mile and put the effort into the voice acting, and the game overall is also really solid, with the units being a bit to similar visually to be distinguished though. Also maybe it was just me, but I practically just spammed Riflemen with a Grenadier here and there for good measure and did just fine, don't know if that was intended though hehe
Either way, good job all!
It's so cool to see a voiced game in a Jam, and I really like voice acting here! And you even added lines for soldiers to say, it feels nice as well, and having several voices here too. I checked Credits page in game itself and thought it might be nice to also add all the Credits to the itch.io page :)
I read the instructions carefully, took a bit of time to figure out all the controls (since I tried w/o reading instructions at first xD) Have to admit though even after I got it mainly figured out - I wasn't very good at this game :') It seems I have some different types of soldiers, but visually they do not differ? And as far as I can see from descriptions, it's the difference of personality solely? Obviously it's fantastic how much you got done for a Jam game, but for the future updates it would be so cool to see different visuals for soldiers, and different abilities ^^ or maybe they do have different abilities and I didn't realize this? >_>
I find it cool I can position each unit separately, creating any battle formation I could desire, and at the same time it's easy to group them all together again. Overall I think it's a very interesting type of gameplay, I like the strategy angle ^^
I really liked this rts example. I went to the end and finished, of course. I love rts. I wonder how difficult it must be to program an RTS and I've never considered it, even though I really like it. But examples like the game that is in second place in terms of points received, is also a type of tower defense that you have to build and manage things. So you've made a sort of rts here, although I can't really build anywhere and don't know where the enemy hordes are coming from. Still, it's cool. I found it very balanced and easy in the end. You did a great job. Maybe in the future I'll take a chance on this, but for now I'll keep watching. Great job.
RIP tastosis but at least RTS is still alive! This is such a fully-realized but still jam-scoped entry. Really well done. Everything is here, from the plot to the unit controls/types, great voice work for each unit (plus overall story). Dropped me right into the game, let me explore, gave me some moments of feeling like I dominated and some moments of worrying I was about to get overrun... And then just before anything got stale the game was over.
Just right. Excellent work.
**I. Am. Not. JERRY!**
Great game otherwise.
What a fantastic throwback! From the get-go it made me think back to the time I've played Tiberian Dawn for the first time. And it felt like it had a lot of other influences too. One that seems particularly strong to me is from a game I didn't play a lot, but did watch a few people play, by the name of Z. I don't remember much of it, but I can vaguely remember it having a similar system of conquering sectors rather than exploiting resources on the map, which was rather uncommon in RTS games at the time.
You've done great work on implementing a working classic RTS control system. I didn't even need to look at the controls before going into the game, everything was intuitive and worked pretty good. The one small issue I had was that if you right-click your army on a building, they won't move. Several times I found myself ordering troops to move to a sector then realizing I right-clicked on the flag, so they did nothing. Not a big thing, but it would be nice if the units moved to a nearby location.
The graphics look pretty good. I love good pixelart, and the little animations on units are doing great work to make everything feel alive and dynamic. Same goes for the audio part, it's great to see there's a variety of weapons each with its own distinctive sound. The nice tense music in the background feels like a cherry on top of a cake. :)
The voice acting has to be the highlight of the game. The intro/outro sequences are well written, both fun and funny! It would be easy to make these too cringy, but the voice actor has managed perfectly to make them over the top without taking it too far. All the units sound great, too! I've enjoyed clicking through all of them to make sure I've heard all the voice lines. It's nice that you've managed to record more than one line for each unit - it might just be one line more, but it does help reduce the repetition greatly. Hearing that you've done that, I started spam-clicking each unit hoping you've also managed to add some easter-egg lines of units getting angry for being clicked too many times. And while you haven't done that (and who would in the short jam time? :) ), I still enjoyed the lines that were there.
I've found one small bug in several playthroughs, at least it looks like a bug to me. There seems to be a limit on how many units you can control. You can select however many units you like, but if you select too many, right-clicking anywhere doesn't seem to work.
g2.png
In this screenshot you can see that I've also managed to get over the command point limit (I think two buildings created units at exactly the same time). I thought that this might have been the cause of the issue, but it wasn't - in the next game I tested it again without going over the limit and it still happened. It also didn't seem to be a problem with any specific unit, as I was able to select half of the entire army, move it, then do the same with the other half.
Also, while not a bug per se, it's something that made me curious. Is there a specific reason the building queue is limited to 17 units? It feels a bit like it's a reference that I'm missing. Either way, it's good to see you've implemented a good queue system, remembering the order units were queued.
Another thing I liked is that you've made randomly generated maps. The maps might be simple, but having them randomly connected makes several playthroughs not only viable, but pretty fun.
Overall, it's a really impressive jam entry. Bonus points for going for a nostalgia trip and executing it so amazingly well. Great job!
@lcstark Wow, thanks for the indepth review. I hate myself for not including easter eggs when clicking too many times but basically no one ever looks for them so we can't justify spending the time :P Maybe in the future!
We actually had 400 extra words of dialogue written that had to be cut due to time constraints (sadge). Can't always get stuff in.
I didn't program so I can't speak about the bug you discovered but hopefully it didn't take away from the enjoyment too much :)
Your game really impressed me with the great voice acting, which adds depth to the game's atmosphere. The retro feeling also made me go back in time more years than I'd like to admit haha. One good improvement would be to be able to know the difference between each unit, visually, and in gameplay. It's an overall very good entry, you really have something here!
Has some problems but still well done!