FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD56 → Comrats in Arms

Comrats in Arms

By Macron, Lisek Gagatek and pierogo

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall924.0922
Fun2683.7123
Innovation2543.6423
Theme924.2323
Graphics2604.1123
Audio2303.7222
Humor1913.6722
Mood1684.0023

Comments

ecaterina 2024-10-08 10:51

Wow! Great job! Initially, I found it difficult because I skipped all the instructions in the tutorial. It was a mistake, as the mechanics are really cool. I went back and read them. The graphics and music are fantastic!

bigwhiteshogun 2024-10-09 22:58

Wow, fantastic entry, and very ambitious. Even though it is a tactics game, it is a very chill experience. Warfare between ground rats and sky rats have never been so zen inducing. Everything works, the graphics, music and gameplay just click together. Other than some minor bugs I have no complaints.

Question, how does thermometer supposed to work? Cause I cannot figure out how to heal my units with it.

lisek-gagatek 2024-10-10 00:12

@bigwhiteshogun Yeah, sky vs ground rats was exactly the idea :D Thermometer should allow you to heal allies by clicking on them (the cursor changes to "+" sign). We however had a bug (just fixed, right before I wrote the answer) that was checking if the unit has full hp and disallowed healing when it did. Due to a very stupid programming mistake, it was checking hp of rat with thermometer and not the one that was supposed to be healed. So, when thermometer rat had full hp, it couldn't heal allies. Easy stuff but also easy to mix in such a rush :)

bigwhiteshogun 2024-10-10 00:27

@lisek-gagatek yeah pretty sure thats what happened to me as well, I went back and played some more and I got to he point were pidgeons stopped progressing towards me. They all would just chill either on the street near the edge of the map, or behind the dumbster. Either way asa fellow Polish dev I really enjoyed playing your game and following the journey since the first blogpost with rats fighting a transformer (is he in the game ? ). Great job once again o7

deantwotwo 2024-10-10 21:42

Great graphics and awesome music :) Great entry!

pachino55 2024-10-10 21:43

Woah, such a cool game! Cool mechanics

daniellochner 2024-10-10 21:45

Haha loved this! Music and graphics are great, and the idea of sky vs ground rats is great! 🤣

ghatazorg 2024-10-10 21:48

Nice game ! Super smooth :) I like the combat system

cliff-coffee 2024-10-10 21:48

Fun strategy game, was a bit confused about when I could attack but once I figured it out I was able to go for a good while. Eventually I hit a bug while trying to buy equipment, the menu never popped up but the game was paused so I could not continue. Great concept and fun game!

cheezegravy 2024-10-10 21:54

Cute game! This is clearly very well made and I had a great time playing it. Good job!

jelch 2024-10-10 21:55

A lot of depth! It took me a while to figure everything out, a tutorial would have been nice. Great job!

lisek-gagatek 2024-10-10 21:59

@bigwhiteshogun He's not in the game. Our first idea was "small rats fighting vs huge enemies like golems etc." in a more boss-rush kind of game. Fortunately we realized in time how terribly overscoped it would be and pivoted to this version.

@cliff-coffee What would a jam game be without a good old race condition, eh? Sorry to hear that, bugs like this are really devastating in a survival game with no check points :/

lisek-gagatek 2024-10-10 22:03

@jelch I agree, ideally we'd add graphics to the tutorial text at the beginning to make it more interesting, since 7 pages of bare bones text are really encouraging people to skip it. But you know, no time and all that... Is there some explanation for game mechanics that you'd like to be told earlier? I might add some info to this ludum dare page for future players' reference.

jelch 2024-10-10 22:13

@lisek-gagatek I feel you on time crunch :laughing: I guess I should have specified *interactive* tutorial. There is the tutorial text at the beginning, and I admit I skipped over it my first time through, I think maybe the green text on a green background is hard to look at?

lisek-gagatek 2024-10-10 22:22

@jelch Text colors might add to that, but tbh I feel that just reading that much text upfront is boring as fuck and I would skip it myself too xd

bigwhiteshogun 2024-10-10 22:40

@lisek-gagatek lol that sounds exactly like a game we ended up making, though in real time :P

infernaton 2024-10-11 12:18

Amazing work. I didn't think I would be absorbed by this game that much. The difficulty was a little high for a first game, but when you can adapt to it and it begins a cool challenge to overcome. It was just a bit annoying when a pigeon could hit 3 times in a row. But it cas clearly a good experience!

elzach 2024-10-13 09:51

awesome work!

loved the little rat artwork. I think it could've ended a little earlier - I felt a like I already solved the game and getting all the cheese felt a little grindy.

But the end screen was completely worth it.

20241013-114911-chrome.png

ellearx 2024-10-14 01:27

What a solid game! The visuals and music/sound effects are great and the color options on the settings are a nice touch. Awesome little game!

zimny11 2024-10-15 19:16

There is an end screen!? I guess I'm just bad at this game XD Great work with the game. Art style, controls and music is great. It is a bit hard to tell the order of movement since each opponent and each rat is quite similar, maybe some random decorative on units and matching decorative on portraits would help? When first time I encountered healer pigeons, I realized how screwed I am :D I had a blast playing, well dome.

lllarso 2024-10-17 14:17

What a cool game. I did not plan to invest so much time, but I really liked the gameplay! :)

The visuals of the game are very good! The visual feedback (where is the enemy movement radius, right click for seeing the stats) is pretty strong. I like the fact, that the upgrades are visible on the rats. Also the six cheese, which you have to get, is shown in the rat base. Cool details! The game menu was nicely designed and the overall battlefield fitted to the theme. I also tried the "non green filter mode" you implemented, which looks also good, but I prefer the green style over it.

As someone mentioned before. The introduction text was a bit too much. You said there was no time left, but in this situation you could have used very short sentences or even keywords, which wouldn't take so much time to achieve.

It's good that tiles can be blocked, but I can still click on them during the movement phase. If I do so the rat just goes a random way.

While I'm shopping the game should pause. Now if I enter a shop there are enemy movements possible, which I can't see, because I'm in the upgrade menu.

The more time passed, the more problems the AI had. There were too many healing-characters at the enemy side, which made the game pretty easy. You can see it in my picture. There were only two attack characters left (green circle on the right side). Screenshot_Rat TBG.jpg

The audio was also implemented nicely. There are sound effects for attacking the enemy or having a "reject sound", when I don't have enough money to buy something. The music was also fitting and has a relaxing vibe to it.

Great entry and it was nice seeing someone also doing a Turn-Based-Strategy game. :)

drgcandle 2024-10-21 07:12

Your game looks a bit rough, but it's really addictive to play. The feedback is spot on, and the gameplay is very interesting. I've spent a lot of time on it, and you did a great job. I hope you can come and try our game as well.