If I Ran the (Alien) Zoo by UkuleleFury 2025-10-10T09:11:28Z
Cool idea and great completeness. Enjoyed a lot.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → MartianMangka
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | Spyder | jam | 613 | 3.19 | 2.86 | 4.11 | 3.36 | 3.22 | 1.00 | 2.50 | 2.94 |
Cool idea and great completeness. Enjoyed a lot.
Surprised to see an RTSish game during game jam. The pathfinding needs some tweak, units can easily get blocked. Hope we can have a restart function. Nice try!
Have you published the itch page, the link does not work.
@absolushzero Yeah, level 2 requires some luck. The distance metric is very problematic, very hard for player to anticipate the outcome. I gave up on redesigning in the end. Currently I am considering change into a real time interaction, so it can be more intuitive. Thanks for trying!
@aldenwitt Thanks for the advice. It just took me too much time to implement the basics and I also failed to figure out a reasonable distance metric(I think real-time movement might be more intuitive). The enemies are supposed to have different behaviors and stats. Currently they only move randomly, so it feels like you play with pure luck. I might redesign and expand it in the future.
@archaeognathus Thanks, I was thinking about intelligence collection at first , and the word spi(y)der suddenly came LOL. Actually the gameplay design didn't fully use the traits of spider (sorry for you spider lovers). I might redesign the gameplay in the future. I watched some interesting videos on spider's behavior this week and got some inspirations. I hope I can make the game fun to play and reflecting the uniqueness of the spider genre.
@daniel123 Sorry for skipping the sound part :(
@ryusui Thanks, really appreciate your careful thoughts. Level 2 is just far from finished(not just level 2 actually). The blue guy's vision is actually smaller than you. The stats(vision and sense range) is added after the first level. And you can actually know enemy's next move by the direction it's heading (hint needed mb). However, even with larger vision and prediction of enemy's next move, the level still doesn't work because of the weird distance metric. I didn't find a good way to implement grid on the web. With the current grid system, you can hardly predict whether you are going to get discovered next step even you already know enemy's next move. That's why I think real time movement might be better, that we can get around the grid. Though I still want to make it turn based, more puzzle-ish. Maybe one day I can get an elegant grid system after some deep research.
Art is good and the plot seems interesting. But it lacks guidance. I hope at least there is some control tips. And same as another player I find a body, the only thing I can do is to keep clicking it until I get an EOF screen.