Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Hoomans vs. Deemons
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 3.37 | 10 | ||
| Fun | 3.50 | 10 | ||
| Innovation | 2.56 | 10 | ||
| Theme | 3.00 | 10 | ||
| Graphics | 4.00 | 11 | ||
| Humor | 2.64 | 9 | ||
| Mood | 2.75 | 10 |
I love Galcon and I love your take on it! Especially the nice pixel graphics. I found even the easy AI to be quite challenging, definitively kept my on my toes. One minor nitpick: not everyone knows what a `.7z` file is, maybe upload a `.zip` too? The continue button on the Victory is also not functional (I wouldnt know what it should do after defeating all enemies)
The AI was pretty resilient, so with that as your goal you definitely achieved it! More sound effects would have helped a ton - sometime the enemy backcapped one of my settlements and I didn't notice until it started attacking my other ones lol. There's also a music volume slider in the settings, but I didn't hear any music. Did that just not make the cut or did I install it wrong? Overall, fun game! I played it a couple times and left on a win (let's not discuss the other times)
visually i like this game a lot, it reminds me of old rts games. initially it was hard to remember whose units were whose and it would help if the units were colored by team in some way, like the flags are.
it feels very difficult to recover from a major loss or counter enemies once they have amassed huge amounts of units. that's not inherently a bad thing but i eventually found myself wanting to restart mid-game every time as i felt it was practically impossible to win at that point and starting over and trying a different strategy from the get-go would be easier.
that said, after a bit of trial and error i did manage to win a game and it felt very satisfying after all the losses that had come before it. the AI is difficult to beat but it's usually at least easy to understand *why* it beat you so i never got too frustrated. cool game!
(minor technical issue: the pause menu doesn't seem to actually pause the game)
@vinzbad Thanks for playing. I never got far enough to test the continue button in the victory screen :grin:, I was planning on just having it go back to the screen so you can mess about with the armies. I'll pack up a version in .zip as per your suggestion, I hadn't thought about people maybe not knowing 7z - good call
@judjudson Thanks for playing. Yeah, unfortunately I didn't (and in 15 LD's never have) get around to making any sounds or music. The options are there from my empty project template, I just forgot to removing the audio options. Well done on the win!
@jm2k First off, thanks for playing. You are correct about the difficulty when recovering from major loss, there is definitely a tipping point, beyond which there is no recovery. There are also some balancing issues (growth rates need a lot of work), which I realized would take more time that I had unfortunately. There are also some issues with the AI that I noticed - an AI with no castle will not attack, more of the attacks focus on the 'closest settlements' - so depending on the random spawns at the start, you may have it very easy or very hard etc. etc.
I like the idea about the flags on the units, liek a standard-bearer.
About the pause menu - thats a pretty glaring bug, I'll fix it after work sometime this week.
Timelapse is super cool, thanks for sharing. What plugin do you use to draw in obsidian like this?
@thiefviolinist Hey, thanks for watching. The obsidian plugin is called 'Exclidraw' - its one of the community plugins.
Looks amazing, and the menuing alone is pretty great - is this handled by a custom engine? The gameplay was fun and challenging, and amazing that you've managed to incorporate sliders for resources and difficulty. It would have been even more immersive with some music in the background or sound effects in-game.
I had a really fun time playing this! I lost the first time (The single remaining enemy had thousands of population, and it was growing much faster than I could kill them), but the next time I learned to keep their populations in check so that didn't happen! I enjoyed it, so I played another couple of times at a higher difficulty, and that was fun too. I liked the difference in AI. Not sure if I was imagining it, but each of the enemies seemed to have a different personality. I found it quite fun to pick up on how they were playing and then react to it.
I think I would have liked to know how the population expansion worked so I could base decisions off it (i.e. do 2 settlements with 50 population grow at the same rate as 1 settlement with 100 population?), and some audio would have been nice - but regardless, I had a great time playing, nice one!
Never played Galcon, but the gameplay reminded me a lot of Auralux, which I've always liked. I really enjoyed the sprites, the bouncing heads were pretty funny, even when they were coming from an AI bum-rushing me for an easy win. I think the difficulty level was pretty well balanced, and I definitely felt like my initial losses were more from a lack of practice than any in-game issues, and I honestly don't have any negative feedback, really well done!
Tried this a couple of times before I could win the computer. Nice small strategy game! Enjoyed playing. Graphics are fine, but some sounds and music would have worked wonders for mood that was now mostly missing. Good work with the AI, it seemed that it was seeking for my weak points and hitting them.
Good job!