Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → Shelter from the Blight
By yiraa and Guillaume Cleenewerck
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 234 | 3.80 | 42 | |
| Fun | 329 | 3.52 | 41 | |
| Innovation | 196 | 3.67 | 41 | |
| Theme | 229 | 4.01 | 41 | |
| Graphics | 289 | 3.95 | 42 | |
| Audio | 525 | 2.69 | 38 | |
| Humor | 625 | 2.25 | 36 | |
| Mood | 569 | 3.35 | 40 |
The graphics and art style are amazing! The UI seems a bit too cramped in the web build on my 1080p monitor. When I click on stuff I only get "cannot place this here" messages and they overlap with the UI and I cannot click on items in the lower menu. An interesting take on an idle game where you cannot be idle due to time pressure. Cool!
I like your idea! Cool!
Hey, this is a very cool take on the theme! The graphics are great, and once I understood where to place buildings and that the "cannot place this here" notification also occurs when resources are missing, I progressed easily through the first layer. But I got stuck on the second one, as I was suddenly missing wood, but could no longer gather any - which also meant that I could not build any new buildings. If you find a way to fix this or facilitate the progression, I think this would be a fun "idle" game
I liked the game but I think there are some balance issues. I think it's weird that most buildings on depth 1 use lumber that can no longer be gathered. The player doesn't know that in advance and probably doesn't stockpile that much lumber...
I would also prefer if building placement was more strategic: maybe there could be adjacency bonuses or distance to main building could matter in some way.
The trees and farms look great!
hey, thanks for the feedbacks, the game is meant to played with multiple depths at the same time, we will add some description on the page but you can, with arrow key, go up and down a layer to place more lumberjack. And like a rogue like, you need to understand that you need amass more ressources than needed because they are needed down below (die/retry)
@woona adjacency bonuses were planeed but we didn't got the time to add them :( it's only in a txt file for the moment
Really enjoyed what I played but I didn't get far - I just about managed to get to level 1 before the corruption started (I was on 99% dug vs 98% corruption) so my first try was a loss. Second try by the time I had built my first digger the corruption was already at 16%. I'd probably suggest reducing the speed, though I know a big part of the game is the time pressure to keep moving. Still, this was a really impressive game for the short amount of time, great use of the theme too!
I like the idea and how it is executed. However, the gameplay is a bit slow. If you sped it up by ~30% it probably wouldn't impact decision making at all, but it would decrease to down time. It's also really easy to get softlocked between layers if you don't have enough wood to place new wood harvesting buildings before the previous layer gets corrupted. Not sure if that's by design or not, or maybe I'm just bad at the game :sweat_smile:
Also for some reason it's very hard to click on the wood building button in the WebGL build, half of my clicks didn't register. The other two buildings worked fine.
The game seems too complicated to make in 3 days. In Embedded, the UI overlaps. It’s a bit hard to figure out where I can build what, but the graphics and the game itself are generally nice. I got a bit bored while trying to move to the next stage. But with a few improvements in feel (like various effects during interactions, such as punch or shake), the game could become really amazing. Overall, I liked it.
This game hooked me so much. It was so much fun to restart a run and setup things differently to optimize and think long term. Awesome game, well done !
Hexagons are the bestagons.
I will say I was a bit confused at the beginning as to what buildings did and where they were allowed to be placed - it'd be nice to highlight the permitted tiles, or at least make the placement indicator less transparent.
That being said, this was a really ambitious title and I'm very impressed by what you guys accomplished, nice job!
I like the concept - in my first playthrough I did not expect the last level to require goods from above, so I had to repeat it once
it's a little bit difficult for managing the 2nd layer goods (as they are very scarce) and you basically have to restart the game if the stone areas are not enough (had one run with 3 stones)
I got through the game with 3 diamond diggers, 480 wood and 70 stones left, and 1000+ iron and 1000+ diamons
so, if I wasn't too greedy with the iron phase, I would have accomplished 5 diamond diggers
very interesting game, but it needs some more balancing - well done!
Really good game, was fun to play. Also found that layer 2 (stone) was a bit weird with how much you get compared to other layers. Meant I had to restart a few times until I had good enough rng to take the 200 stone with me to the last layer and create a single miner/digger to break through and beat the game
I really love the concept of the game. It fits really well to the theme.
Neat! The multi layer management was definitely fascinating. It seemed like getting off to a good start is really the trick.
I do think that the linearity of the resources and the fact 99% corruption seems to be just as good as 0% was problematic. The objectively correct way to play was simply to place every possible sawmill followed by every possible farm and then enough drills to get to the next area.
The hex game board reminds me of Catan! I really enjoyed the graphics and had fun playing. Unfortunately I ran into the same problem as @philocode. I made it to the second level but was unable to build anything as I didn't have enough wood. Since the first level was corrupted and I was no longer able to place lumberjacks I got stuck and had to quit. Overall, great job! With a bit more tweaking/balancing this could be a really incredible idle game.
This is a great start to what could be an amazing game. Although the audio was lacking, the level progression felt good. The ending was unfortunate because I was lacking one resource since I did not know that I needed to have a surplus as I played through the game blocking me from the ending. Not sure how you would do this, but it felt like each level was the same with different art, having something that drastically changed the levels would have been nice to see.
great job gettin this done in the timeframe, solid game. Took me 3-4 tries to get to the second layer but after that I was doing good. I agree with the other comments about speeding up the game by some amount but other than that very nice.
Fun idea executed well, great work!
Decided to try it out because art looks lovely and I like games with building :) It's a very nice concept. Interesting combination of the theme and strategic managing city builder. It's cool that you can switch between heights/levels, but the previous one seems useless? I lacked wood to build new structures and still could not build more lumber producing ones in the higher town. It's a very great jam game and it makes me thing about a whole game like that, it's scalable and inspiring.
Once I figured out how the economy works, I won (escape) victory on 2nd try.
This game looks awesome and control between levels was intuitive. The economy system was a bit gotcha, was thinking that could it be better if you could still gather the early game resources further down, but with reduced effectivity, or so that they would reappear at some lower level, but not perhaps each.
Was a fun experience!
Great game. Quite unusual to see a game with this kind of playspan in a game jam, but i gave it a few tries. Reminds me a bit of Civ. Good job, well done
The screenshot made me wanna play the game and I was not disappointed. I had fun playing the game and reach the end. :)
As people mentioned above: The game could be faster and the building placement could be more strategic (for example buffs if you place it in a certain order). It would be nice if I could place the same building type multiple times, so I don't have to click on the build button again.
Here are some things I really liked about the game: + layer system was cool! Switching between layers looked good and the theme was used in a creative way. + new sprites on each layer was a nice touch + sound effects when placing a building + graphics looked good, I like the art style
Cool little game. Congrats for finishing it. :)
A very good strategy game. Initially the visuals reminded me of Dorfromantik, but your game happened to be more dynamic and tense.|
It wasn't clear from the first time how the buildings interacted with each other (how much food does one digger need? Do they need to be placed next to each other?), but through trial and error it worked out intuitively. In the process, it was very surprising that resources from past levels were required, but it helped to build and use resources with more attention and strategy later on!
The game left a good impression and the harpoon sounds just made my day :D Thanks for your work!
Really like the low poly graphics! Having things change up the further down you go but keeping like the core mechanics familiar works really nicely. Impressive managing to make something that feels quite relaxed but quite stressful at the same time :sweat_smile:
Really cool resource management game with multiple levels :wink: . On my first run I didn’t save anything and totally messed up the last level. But on my second? I didn't just survive, I escaped.
The core mechanic is interesting. You have to rush against time and also save the right amount of resources for later, so being efficient matters. I really liked that once I understood it.
At first, I didn’t quite get how food worked, until I noticed it was going down faster as I built more structures. That was a great touch, but maybe it could be shown more clearly? Like a little popup with stats per building or something? Totally understand that this kind of thing would be for a post-compo version. Feels like you used your time really well.
I enjoyed it, the mechanics are clever, and it made me want to try again. Great job!
I think the random gen. had it out for me on my first playthrough, as the second time I had much more stone in the 1st depth. Making the entire second play through much quicker.
Lovely resource management game. The layer level is done just right. The resource collection system however is a bit unforgiving on a first play through.
That ending sounded quite dark to me :sweat_smile:
I think the game would greatly benefit from more strategic depth (heh) when it comes to building placement. Right now my go-to strategy was just spamming buildings whenever I could without much thought. If you made some interactions between buildings it would really help make game more interesting - e.g. some of them requiring other buildings to be adjecent, getting bonus production from adjacent buildings or even making it so that on certain tiles you could place more than one type of building (so that you'd have to decide which one will be more useful), stuff like that.
Well done, but I found it frustrating to reach depth 5 and see that I can't build the final digger because I have not enough stone anymore. Really good game otherwise.
It's a really cool concept, but I feel like there are some issues with balance. First, the corruption happens so fast that you can only just discover the first depth - or, well, the first time I played I didn't know it will happen so fast so I lost on depth 0 (before I figured out that "can't place the building HERE" also means "not enough resources" I had diggers and had to wait before I had food for them...), on the second run I managed to get to the depth 1, but then the corruption happened immediately afterwards (six (maximum number of) digger workshops is only *slightly* faster than the corruption) and I had not enough lumber, and couldn't gather any, so I couldn't have any food except for what I already gathered, so the game was lost anyway. Also I think that the first time I played I would get 2x per lumberjack and the second time I would get 3x? That was surprising.
Have you used an asset pack? The game seems really polished and seems to have lots of assets for a game jam game made by two people, is one of you the main artist and the other coding? If yes, it's a great job on art as well! I really dig (hehe) the low-poly style.
Thanks everyone for the feedback, we really appreciate it!
There’s definitely still work to do on balancing, and the game is currently missing information about how much each building produces.
@tiar Unless there’s a bug, a lumberjack should produce 3 wood. However, something not explained in the game is that corruption applies a production penalty based on the depth it has reached, starting from 66%. So depending on the corruption’s progression, a lumberjack might end up producing only 2.
We split the work: I handled the coding, and my friend worked exclusively on the assets. I was honestly really impressed by how quickly he was able to produce them, he worked efficiently and made smart choices by reusing parts of some assets to create others. And there’s no animation, since even simple animations would have taken significantly more time to make.
Nice game! I'm not sure that there's much that I can add that wasn't already touched on by others. It really reminded me of a resource management game called "As Far As The Eye." I kinda wish that there were some ways to gain other resources that you lost access to in earlier depths, but obviously the 72 hours creates a pretty stiff limit to content.
This is a very interesting idea, and I would like to see a version of a full implementation of all this!
I could not advance further than the first depth, but it seems to me that it would be possible to create some alternative sources of resources. Because when you lose the surface, you lose access to the reproduction of wood, and the player cannot build 2 of 3 underground buildings because of this.
But I really like the idea of a city-building game, where you lose old buildings with and build new ones in a new place, migrating from danger.
Visually, I lacked feedback on obtaining resources, losing a layer, and also did not quite understand at the beginning where you CAN place buildings. The game says that I can not place a building here, and at first I think that I am putting it somewhere wrong, but in fact I do not have enough resources. Also in the description of lumberjack it was written to put it next to the forest. I poked around the forest until I realized that you need to put it right on the forest (because we usually don't cut down the forest to put a lumberjack there at the beginning, but put it next to it). You can see examples in Warcraft, Age of Darkness.
This is very cool, I would like to see a continuation of your idea!
Really nice game. Made it to the final. I think there is a lack of some sounds and music. Really good graphics and idea with multiple layers. Good realisation. Great job!