Drawnion (multiplayer)

20akshay00 2024-04-18 21:12

I quite like the concept of making an io-like game for the jam since it does get pretty intense when there's multiple players. It would be better if there was some audio though and perhaps if the art was just a little more coherent (the actual players vs. various elements of the UI like the energy bar and the element buttons all are styled differently and feel out of place). Otherwise, its a fun entry and its neat that you managed to make a simple online game in this duration!

thetatautau 2024-04-19 13:02

Making a multiplayer in a jam is impressive. But getting several players to play the game at once is almost impossible. Although there was another player (bot?) when I played, but they offered no challenge.

The mecanics are simple but interesting and original compared to other io games. But they are poorly explained in-game and require to read the description (for example I had no idea that the 3 colors correspond to pokemon-ish types).

It feels like the idea have potential but the game needs more polish.

paul-maxime 2024-04-19 15:11

@20akshay00 Yes, we spent too much time actually implementing the features and not enough time polishing the UI or drawing coherent graphics. :(

@thetatautau There's no bot, so it must have been me or another player! Yes, I'm pretty bad at my game. :> I definitely agree with the game being unclear, we should have spent more time making the UI easy to understand.

I don't know if we'll make a multiplayer game again for a Ludum Dare: even tho I really enjoy making them, they are very difficult for people to test since they have to send the link to someone else to actually test the gameplay. Especially for games like this where it becomes fun when there's at least 3 players, otherwise the first player can dominate the field pretty easily.

baluj 2024-04-25 15:31

It's an interesting concept, nice game. Good job!

jimbly 2024-04-26 04:02

I played this with a friend... and 2 others joined moments later? That seems like too much of a coincidence, are there bots? :D It was pretty neat, I liked making my own avatar. We had a hard time feeling like we were making any progress, it would have been nice to have a "score" of some kind (just total mana value for each player? My friend, who had more, insisted that was the score...). Mad props for making a multiplayer game in a jam!

jeanbon 2024-04-26 06:15

@jimbly We were both on voice chat when we received a notification about people being online so we joined. ;)

The game is definitely lacking a score, the mana is just the mana, although killing units gives you more mana so it's not entirely wrong to say that.

I agree with you there is a lack of a feeling of progress. We spent too much time on the technical aspect of the game to think about the core mechanics long enough. Lesson learned.

jimbly 2024-04-26 16:01

Makes sense! I kinda thought that might be the case with it being a developer dropping in (I do that with some of my multiplayer games too ^_^). We thought your avatars were very nice =).

dubiousduck 2024-04-28 01:56

Interesting concept! I was playing alone but it was pretty satisfying seeing my minions chipping away the mana circles. Like others said, the game would be even more awesome if there's some sort of audio. One more thing is that maybe add a prompt in the first stage that says it's for drawing your avatar. Even though I looked over the instructions in you LD page I was slightly confused by the first page as I just drew random blocks lol. Overall, a really cool and fun game!