Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD56 → Small Sands
By zimny11
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 98 | 3.73 | 30 | |
| Fun | 106 | 3.60 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 143 | 3.42 | 30 | |
| Theme | 47 | 4.08 | 30 | |
| Graphics | 130 | 3.67 | 30 | |
| Audio | 1.00 | 6 | ||
| Mood | 135 | 3.48 | 29 |
Good idea of turning the 'people' into the tiny creatures. It did take a bit for me to work out what to do, one I figured out moving the mouse to the edge of the screen to look it became clear. It is a little slow going but it suited what the goal was, also got me excited as the block got closer to the finish. If there was any audio it did't work for me.
A super fun little game, and I really liked playing it. A in game tutorial would have been great. Some music and sound effects would also have been great. Overall a good jam game. Well done.
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Cute game, I liked having to figure out the game mechanics without much guidance - it added to the mysterious feeling.
Wow. this is great!
Interesting progression system. UI is not intuitive and could use some work. Took me a while to realise that it is actually a number (weird font) above the main building.
Their god has been pleased and so do I :) I think I love games where your see a crowd of creatures working on different tasks :)
Amazing compo entry, congrats! I hope you find some time to add sound effects and music.
I did experience some motion sickness after 10 to 15 minutes of playing, and I had to stop. I think it's because I have to play on 34" full-screen and constantly move the screen left and right. It could be improved by allowing the player to zoom out a bit and perhaps smoothing out the camera movement. Always a tricky issue.
Another improvement I would like is camera controls via keyboard.
I love the small animations, and there is good “Wuselfaktor” at the end, so it's fun to watch the little peeps running around :D
The progression at the start feels well paced, maybe at the end it takes a bit to long to get enough together to get that stone moving. Since you can't improve anything at that point, you end up just watching and feeling a bit stuck.
We really were the tiny creatures all along, weren't we?
Wonderful game! Fantastic effort in such a short amount of time, I loved the last games you've made so I had to find out what you've made this time around! I enjoy the way you make games, and the way you're allowed to figure things out. I dislike long drawn out tutorials. Love the oldschool art and animation style, I appreciate the details like the wheat grains disappearing when harvested. Thank you for the entry <3
@jammygunns Thank you for playing! I completely forgot to add some indicators about ability to move screen around, sorry. No, there sadly is no music. It was a bit too much to make, and I really wanted to add all planned features, so decided to not do music (specially that it is not my strong suit - if there are any XD).
@jk5000 Thank you. I not that big fun of tutorial (at least those explaining everything step by step). For me they kill a bit of fun of discovering, but I get that at least some tutorial would be good, so I absolutely get that feedback. As I mentioned above, it was either music/sound effects or one more feature that I really wanted to add (jugs for water carrying).
@flightless Thanks for playing and commenting! Love the meme :D
@sdcorpse Thanks! Appreciate.
@akacooh UI needs improvements for sure! I wanted to stylized number to look a bit like hieroglyphs, I guess it did not worked out that great, and making same system for free workers with dots would be better. Thanks for the feedback.
@rpgwanderer Yeah! It is so satisfyingly just looking at them running around :) At first I thought about adding some time limit, but then decided against it as it will not allowed to just stop for a moment and look at little workers running around. Thank you for playing!
@kanagg Thank you! Sorry about motion sickness. My screens are way smaller, so I guess I did not noticed that because of that. I thought for a moment about zooming in and out, but I was worried about art scaling and getting some weird graphic artifacts. I do not have much experience with camera yet. Thanks for the feedback.
@belle Thank you so much! Comments like this are really making me happy <3 Yeah, I'm "team no tutorials" too. No one reads them anyway XD
Good to see that you are still creating LD games!
I grew up playing management and strategy games, so I love seeing little people running around doing what I tell them to do! Scratches an itch that never stops itching. Impressive that you're out here doing all this developing on your own!
@langotriel Thanks! Happy to hear that you liked it. I'm quite satisfy with how the game turned out (although my sleeping schedule has probably different opinion XD), so seeing people like it adds a lot of joy.
What a charming game! I loved figuring out the mechanics on my own; it added a nice sense of mystery. 🌟 The animations are delightful, and I appreciate the old-school art style.
Overall, fantastic effort in such a short time! Keep it up! ❤️
Interesting idea, but a bit slow. anyway, I liked the idea of imagining humans as tiny creatures, it makes you think :0
Really nice work here, you did a great job! I was tempted just to get the minimum number of little guys to shift the big rock but maybe that would have literally taken a million years! I love the scale of everything, watching them climb the wheat is really satisfying. Agree with others that it took a little while to figure you can move the camera, but only a minor thing.
Great compo!
I was really confused by the scroll speed and the small size of the viewport. Then I activated my brain and realised your game is zoom dependent on the browser.
Have a look: z1.png z2.png z3.png
From 120% to 80%, the best zoom option for me was about 105% In Godot 3.5, for 2d game exported in WebGL, the best way to avoid this is to set the Project Settings > Mode to 2d and Aspect to Keep zg.png
Other then that, I had fun, it's a fun relax game and showing your stock on item in the building is a great addition to have less UI
Cool concept, fits the theme very well. Simple but very effective gameplay, intuitive enough to not need an explanation - I like it. I'm however not really sold on the idea of limited resources. In theory it's pretty cool, because it'd force you to rearrange your units accordingly and e.g. send only 2/3 of your units to collect grains from the closest points and 3/3 from the furthest, etc. But in the early game it doesn't really matter that much, as it takes time for resources to deplete from the starting values and you don't have that many workers to drain it quickly. Later on you kinda have too many workers and you can harvest everything at max capacity anyway. This way, you just put an artificial limit on the theoretical speed you can gather resources, which really only makes a game longer, because you can't give better job for those workers and there is no "better play". It's a subtle thing that doesn't really matter all that much, because the game is not long enough for it to really be felt. Anyway, really cool game, gj!
A cool game. I like the "control the flow of the system" kinda gameplay. I took me some time to figuare out what was I doing but it was very intuitive and easy to understand as the game goes on even though without much instructions. Very effective teaching of the game there.
@ethernal-tech Thank you! Happy to hear you liked it :D
@anekich Thanks! I wanted it to be a calm experience. This is one reason why it is slow, but of course I could have balanced it better.
@scott-redrup Thanks for playing and commenting! Oh it would take a long time. I think with starting few it moves one pixel every few seconds XD
@togis Thank you so much! I had no idea why the issue exist, but it makes perfect sense now. Thanks for the help and for playing! I'm a huge fan of UIs integrated into the game :)
@lisek-gagatek Thank you for the feedback. And for playing of course. My idea was, that if you have spare workers you just send them to move the stone block, but of course it could have been balanced better. One more time, thanks for the feedback, it is something to think about in the future.
@sphinx Thanks! I'm not a fan of tutorial. Most people don't read them anyway XD Happy to hear you invested your time to figure it out. Hope you had fun time :)
Very cool little game, the art style suits it very well. I like the chill atmosphere and mystery. I went into it without reading any instructions and really enjoyed figuring out what was going on and how the little world works. Ýou managed to put a lot of things in the game for the compo. Great work!
Neat little civilization builder. All of it made sense to me without a description, except for the research bar, which I figured out about half way through was tied to the number of villagers at home. It was cool figuring things out though and watching my population grow and scurry about the map.
I liked that I could look both horizontally and vertically. Only being able to see the top or bottom of the stalk helped it feel taller than it really was.
Towards the end, I recalled all 38 of my busy villagers back to town for a huge meeting. The word? "It's time to summon the giant eyeball in the sky." They all left in a swarm of bodies to join the other workers laboring at the stone. It only took a minute or two. And then...
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Fun idle game with good pacing IMO! It wasn't too bad figuring the UI and gameplay out, but I didn't realize the population count font above the main building was a number until it got to 4 >:D
@fnelix Thank you for your kind words and for playing. My broken sleep schedule really appreciate :D
@sudocoffee Thank you! Happy to hear the game was intuitive enough for it to be pick up without instructions.
@ms-malloc Thanks! Sorry, about the number. I tried to make it look a bit like hieroglyphs, and the readability suffered because of it. Probably using same dot system like everywhere else would have been better.
What a cool and well-crafted game, especially for a compo! It's true that it's a game to take in a relaxed way, but it's really fun to watch how the pyramid is slowly built piece by piece. As others have mentioned, a bit of music and special effects would make the game even more immersive than it already is. However, for a compo game, it's understandable that there wasn't enough time to add more, considering how polished it already feels. Honestly, from what I’ve seen in your previous games, you always aim to innovate, and that's truly appreciated because this game achieves that. It’s a solid entry, great game!
I was very interested in the gameplay, keep it up!
It's a very cute game! I like the visuals a lot and that the creatures are just black. I had a chuckle when i saw these big stalks are just grain. I've set up everything after a few minutes and then it feels more like a waiting game. But i also am not interested in watching as i already know what they will do. I think the game world could have been a bit smaller so i'd need to scroll less. Now it feels like i'm too close and the scrolling gets a bit dizzying. Still i like it a lot :) If you want to improve it, spending an hour on sounds is usually a great investment of time.
super impressed with the graphics and the game itself, kind of reminds me of the early stages of an rts? But funkier. I wish there was a bit of feedback to notify when something been brought back.
@milq Thank you! After some thinking, I probably should have not implement last feature and just add sound effects instead, would then probably felt like more completed game.
@artallester Thanks!
@rongo-matane Thank you! The starting idea was to build whole pyramid and to have way more upgrade, but knowing from previous LDs I cut it down and it still was close... too close. Yes, I got few comments on camera movement motion sickness, so I'm guessing, as you suggested, zooming it a bit out would be better. Kind of worried then wheat would not felt as tall as it is now, but that maybe making it even taller and movement on it fast to compensate... Yes! I regret choosing adding one more feature over some sound effect now. One more time, thank you for playing and for the feedback!
@jajo Thanks for your kind words! I didn't want to make standard menu that displays resources, but I guess some feedback notification for resources gathered still would be nice.
Amazing, it was really engaging, I spent way too long on the game. I don't think I ended up using the ropes to pull the stone, and I made way too many rollers, thinking that they might be used to carry the stones up the levels! I was always pleasantly surprised to see a new mechanic appear just at the moment I was going to all in on the hauling! (ok, it's too late, I'll see myself out)
Maybe a zoom-out would have made the experience more agreeable.
@dhim Thank you for playing my game and for your comment! Happy to gear that you had a good time. I wish I had more time, since moving block up with ropes was a think I wanted to add, but there was just no time at all to do that.
Rereading my comment made me realize how much I downplayed just how amazing the experience was! I couldn't stop playing, even though it was late, and I really needed to get some sleep. The last sentence should read as "even more agreeable," as in "it would have been a nice to have addition to this marvelous game." all of it was a bit lost in translation from French idioms to english!
I strive to be able to create a compo game of this quality! I see on the github you just upload a 7z, ot would be nice for curious people like me to expose your project structure so we can delve into how you made it.
A bit faster progress, especially until the first upgrade, would be great. With so many games to check, making player waiting for minutes looking at nothing new happening is not a great idea.
@dhim Thank you so much! Comments like this one make me really happy :D You should be able to download source code from github, if there is an issue please let me know, I can upload it also to itch.io (just so you know, I'm an amateur in terms of game making and I'm doing it just for fun, so my project structure and code is a bit of a mess).
@baturinsky Thank you for the feedback! I wanted to make it chill experience, but I absolutely get your point!
I am not a big fan of this genre - civilization builder, but I admit that this one is really well done. The main aesthetic is neat. The controls work well as expected. Cute and impressive entry. Thank you ++
@geckoo1337 Thanks! I get that, there are genres of games that I do not like too, so even more appreciate you playing it!
Managed to complete the pyramid! I dread to think how long it must have taken for the initial 3 or so people to build the rest of it :)
Anyway, this was really great! The research mechanic was definitely the highlight for me - the moments when I completed one and suddenly both a new "house" appeared and a previously background element turned into a gatherable resource were awesome. And upgrading the existing ones with ropes and pots and wheels was very cool too. It was also interesting as a gameplay mechanic - usually, in this kind of games leaving workers idle is a bad idea, so you constantly have to find stuff to do for them. But here, it actually helps you, making it both a more relaxed experience, and adding a balancing act of should I focus on gathering more materials to gain more people, or research faster? I really loved it.
In general though, it did feel more fun in the early-game than the late-game (similar to some other games in the genre). Once you complete your research, and have enough workers to stop engaging with the "wheat running out so you have to switch stalks" mechanic, it kind of turns into a maintenance game, where the only thing you do is occasionally replenish the ropes and pots or send more workers to the brick. And that phase did take a bit long, like others have said. Still, it wasn't too bad.
Overall, I really enjoyed it! It was a fun and relaxing experience. The graphics were also nice - I especially liked the very tall wheat stalks and the parallax background. Awesome entry!
@frogman Thank you for playing and for the feedback! Really appreciate! First idea was to have to build whole pyramid, with carving up blocks, moving them and them pulling them up, and to have more upgrades and resources, but it would be way to much to do in such a short about of time (no surprises here :D ). I do not like to have idle workers in game, so I was really happy when I had an idea for research mechanic. I'm really happy to hear you enjoyed it! One more time thanks!