Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD60 → DECLIVIS
By b4ux1t3
| Percentile | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | LD60 | Ever | |
| Overall | 15 | |||||
| Fun | 15 | |||||
| Innovation | 15 | |||||
| Theme | 15 | |||||
| Graphics | 15 | |||||
| Audio | 13 | |||||
| Humor | 13 | |||||
| Mood | 15 | |||||
This game felt really unique and it was a great take on the theme! It took me a few tries to get a hang of the elevation/travel cost mechanics, but the resource collection was very intuitive. And I liked the art style - it was really impressive how clear the icons were with so few pixels!
@wormkingboo Thank you! My goal for this jam was to try something that I'd never succeeded at before, and I've always been bad at making puzzle games.
I'm pretty pleased with this one, I've been playing it more than other folks' games. . .a bad habit in the judging period. 😆
All the visuals do their job, and that's cool. It took me a moment to understand how it works. Maybe a tutorial level with fewer tiles would be great to introduce the game? A nice little game made in 48h GJ!
It's kind of hard to get into:
- at first I couldn't understand why, after returning to the camp, I couldn't do anything and kept dying - then I figured out that I had to build aqueducts with the mouse, but the game crashed when I placed an aqueduct to the right of the base
A really original puzzle idea: elevation as the cost of every step, one trip to gather all the stone, and aqueducts that must always flow downhill is a smart, very Roman set of rules. My main struggle was reading the map: heights are shown only by tile color, so it took me a while to see what was higher or lower. A legend, height numbers on hover or a tiny tutorial map would make it click much faster. Cool take on the theme!
@gevernus hitting X will show the actual numbers. I think I should show them by default in the aqueduct phase.
@tweekus ha! You stumbled on a bug I thought I squashed. I know how to fix it though so that’s good. Thanks for playing!
@mugule yeah it definitely needs on screen instructions. I hoped I put enough in the description, but on a jam that’s not always the best place for info when folks are trying to play a bunch of games quickly!
Glad you liked the visuals, I had a bear of a time communicating so much with so little. I think I could have gone a little more abstract to make things a little clearer.
Really cool entry! I played through it and had a great time. Here is a quick breakdown of my thoughts: • Gameplay & Design: The core mechanics feel solid and intuitive right from the start. The gameplay loop is engaging, and the controls feel responsive and fair. • Visuals & Art Style: The visual direction fits the overall mood really well. Everything looks cohesive, and the presentation makes it very clean to follow what's happening on screen. • Audio: The sound effects and audio design add a lot of punch to the experience and help build the atmosphere. • Theme Interpretation: You did a fantastic job incorporating the jam's theme into the core loop in a creative and clever way! Constructive Polish Idea: If you decide to update or expand this after the jam, adding a few extra feedback cues (like juice/particles or subtle screen shake) or expanding on a few mechanics could make it feel even more polished! Overall, awesome job for a jam project! Left you a high score/rating. Keep up the great work! 🚀
Nice concept! Took a bit for me to get it
Really nice entry - it took me a second to the figure out the concept, but not too complicated. One of my runs I sprinted for the little lake... picking up some food on some of the trees. When I landed on the lake I got this error. 2026-10-21_10h23_48.png
an aqueduct engineer in ancient rome is such a fresh take on the theme, and making every step cost food based on elevation is a really clever twist on movement. it turns simple movement into a proper logistics puzzle, which fits the old tech idea perfectly. was the elevation cost the first mechanic you prototyped, or did it come later? really interesting design.
@perrarancino I needed a way to burn food, because I ended u having way too much of it to easily pick up all of the stone. So I settled on food as t he mechanic, ousting a previous concept I had for needing lumber as a way to move stone around. THat's why forests give food instead of lumber 😅
@purpledartfrog Thanks! Yeah I think there's a few weird behaviors around the lake placement.
1.PNG It is not clear how to end the game. After making the aqueduct, I even placed an aqueduct on top of the lake. Nothing seemed to work.
@bushfire It looks like your game got broken somehow. I don't actually see the lake on it, and you shouldn't be able to build over the lake. Hrm. I think some of my last minute changes during submission period may have broken some things. :(
That said, you have one instance where you're dropping from 6 -> 4 which breaks the flow (You can only ever drop at most one level at a time). I'd be curious if you added one more tile on that first four, to make it 5, and othat first 3, to make it 4, if that would work. I'll investigate.
The SNES Civilization game mystified me as a kid. I had no idea what was going on, just that I was moving around the map with my unit, finding resources, and slowly figuring out how the game works piece by piece.
As it goes with text descriptions, sometimes the things taught in the description don't register until I've actually played the game, and can parse all those terms. But I didn't mind here. It was rewarding figuring out the game one mechanic at a time, and it gave me that old Civilization vibe.
Some random thoughts:
* Started with "easy". Tried moving the character to different tiles, and was a bit confused when the character would get stuck on the city, and even more confused when moving the mouse over the grid caused the game over screen. It would probably help here to communicate why the player lost on the game over screen. But eventually, I figured out I needed stone to build the aqueducts, and that the game over screen just appears when I run out (and my city dehydrates). * Eventually figured out the rest of the rules, like the various rules for successful aqueducts, or that aqueduct tiles can't be placed on un-gathered resources, or how to raise and lower terrain. * The game is kind of a cross between a puzzle game and a mountain climbing experience. You have to route your way around the map before you actually go anywhere, and that tends to make for a rewarding adventure. * Sometimes there would be single trees in a valley or on a hill, which usually were net zero on food, but sometimes seemed like they might be useful if you were terraforming in the area. * I've never played a Picotron game before, but it seems like a kind of awesome platform. * The difficulty in the game was mostly added by making the maps larger, but I think the larger maps might have been easier to play, since resources are more plentiful. It would be cool to see maps with a lot less stone and wood, so you have to do more planning/routing to get just the right amount for construction. * If there's one visual indicator that would be handy to see, it might be showing water in aqueducts that are successfully downstream from the lake. Otherwise, there's no feedback to know if you're placing tiles correctly until the win screen.
Overall I thought it was a pretty awesome concept, and I had fun discovering how to play and routing each of the maps. I played all three difficulties. Here's "hard" just before the last tile:
