Make Me Rich by jk5000 2021-10-04T20:57:02Z
Huge file size and escape quits without confirmation. Couldn't get into it, so I don't think it's fair to rate it, but those two things were my first impressions of the game.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Michael Faragher
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 49 | Unstable | 👥 | Trenchmouth | jam | 1047 | 3.29 | 2.66 | 3.06 | 2.70 | 4.31 | 3.98 | 2.15 | 4.26 |
Huge file size and escape quits without confirmation. Couldn't get into it, so I don't think it's fair to rate it, but those two things were my first impressions of the game.
I love games like this, but the interface needed more work. I clicked and started making a pipe. And things went downhill from there. I couldn't stop making pipes. The instruction screen wouldn't close. None of the buttons worked. I can't rate something I can't really play, but I'd love to play something more polished after the jam.
I'll give it another shot.
Alright, I like the game. It's a jam game, and UI was one of my biggest "why is it doing that?" hurdles. It's neat, but since you can only have one pipe and the town keeps growing, destroying old pipes is really important. I don't know what you have going on under the hood, but if I was doing this, I'd have a function I'd call every time an object was added or deleted. Start with each power plant and run through each attached child. Then have those children keep running until they reach a consumer. With this small number of nodes, rebuilding a network shouldn't take long.
Ah, a VA11 Hall-A fan? It's a nice little game. I can click through to add bases and stabilize the potion after I start mixing, although it doesn't seem to help mixing instability.
I just get a bad batch of HTML. Is it my network security, or is this no longer functioning?
I love the concept, I love the art, and the music is great. The ladder gets me stuck in the floor, so I just jump off of it. I do seem to just be able to set speed three and make a sandwich, though. Does the explosion get faster later? It seems 3 is a safe steady-state.
I guess the game jam's over, so nobody's going to be mad at me, but I think this is going to be my entire day now. Have all the stars.
I really enjoyed your game. It made me laugh a few times. FYI, it didn't hang when I hit X, but it did hang with the auto-close. My network is pretty aggressive about security, so if it was just hanging due to waiting for analytics, you can ignore that problem.
@honest-dan Some people rate to be trolls or to be nice. Others rate without playing to help their own game be more visible. Anyway, I'll see if I can get the game to run and rate it.
Okay, long one. Got it to run, random talking king's open mouth is faintly stuck behind his animated mouth . . . which is fading each frame? Okay, game loop. I commiserate. Most of the problems you have, including being overwhelming, I had or have. Once I understood movement, it was pretty solid, but you can click on the top bar buttons during a battle. And the battles are slow. If I press escape, it opens the option menu sometimes. Then it closes it. Then it never works again.
I want to clearly state this is a huge amount of work for a game like this, and I love it so far, but I know from experience how these UI things can stack up.
Certainly interesting. Quite attractive. The ear falling on my computer was really, really slow. Don't know if that's as intended.
Finally, all those hours in the arcade suffering have paid off! Great work, fun beginning to end.
Some feedback: Voice effects usually only work well for mechanical actors, I had a bunch of floor detail sprites on top of me and the enemies, and at one point my screen went black, I hit escape and the game turned tiny in the middle of the screen and the mouse no longer lined up. It's neat, and you managed to actually get your voice acting into the game, so that's something we didn't manage. Good work, just try to check your mechanics constantly to make sure nothing goes funny.
I love the concept. However, the game does have some interface issues, including "next line" playing the previous line and clicking for testimony after it's complete throws a Java memory error (probably array index out of bounds) and crashes the game. Still an oddly interesting little concept. Great work.
Delivers a nice little pinball game. Good gameplay, solid sound. Nice work.
Heh. One "Trench" to another, of course I'll play it.
Edit - That was fun. Best game I've played so far. Thanks!
Not my style of gameplay loop, but it's presented exceptionally well. Love it.
Your link is broken. Did you mean https://bflatinteractive.itch.io/the-niland-incident ?
Javascript error and crash at the end of the opening conversation.
I get that. My HTML5 build was utterly non-functional. I'll give the Windows version a shot.
The music reminds me a bit of the 16 bit Shadowrun games. Anyway, it runs pretty well. Good loop. Kept going after I beat it, but I think the 75 turn limit if you run out of time is really too short to get anywhere. Glad you got a working build up.
Please allow me to restart from a fail state without refreshing the page. Also, I had a moment where I clipped through the ground when I touched a robot at full stability. Was that intended?
I have zero idea how the mechanics work, but it's fun and adorable!
Okay, so I don't believe this is functioning as intended. There is Russian language text on a sphere that I am inside. All of the lettering is backwards, so I assume I'm inside a sphere. Basically I can make out is if I click on "nothing" it doesn't work, but the other one almost works, then doesn't. Then there's the English line to turn it on. No menu appears and I have to alt+F4 out of the game.
I'm sorry, it looks like I can't access that cdn server. Can you host it on another server? LD has some options: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/hosting-guide
@openfungames I got to the download, but the CDN server's DNS lookup failed.
I disliked the minigames, but enjoyed the rest of the game quite a bit. Great work.
1. Please don't have escape auto-quit the application. 2. Please don't have an unskippable cutscene every death.
A quick restart would be nice, as well as an earlier notification abut a letter limit. Still, quite fun.
@baknik - High praise indeed. I actually was telling people that this reminded me of the Fallout 1 demo. It was mechanically the same as the Fallout game when it released, but had a purpose-built area and plot. Got me hooked on the series.
@yaroslav-kravtsov Thanks! We intend to make this into something great.
@xsangyhix thank you. Your feedback is entirely in line with what I'm hearing. The game fails to communicate effectively. While I can only apologize to those frustrated during the jam (everyone who mentioned it and those who didn't) fixing that is my first priority going forward. The player should never feel confused or lost, it's not that kind of game.
Thank you again. All of you.
@bflatinteractive you're right about the space in the UI. We have room to grow, and we had ideas, but we had the same problem everyone did: big plans, short time.
As the writer, I want to thank you for that feedback. There's a real trick to writing good stories in minimal space. I made it so I could call sound and music from the script, and the tone owes a lot to the music and effects. I want to capture that feeling of watching your team go through a door and losing contact. It's a singular experience, and it fits the narrative.
I wanted to do more, but by the time I started on them, there were only eight hours left. I look forward to making more for the main game.
@erlioniel Yeah, I was afraid of that. I'll see what I can do.
@erlioniel I have a windowed build up. It's not what I want, but they removed the resolution dialog in the last version of Unity, and doing an in-game menu or forcing a window aspect ratio in code would require QA and no longer be the jam version. The perils of sprite graphics.
Linux Windowed build in about 20 minutes. I'll fix the windowed/21:9 problem in the first post jam revision.
@ghubert A fair complaint. The combat system only reports combats in text, and you only win if you have a certain amount of materiel at HQ or lose all your troops. The original loop had more visible enemies but it was one of the corners we had to cut in development. I imagine this doesn't appeal to everyone, and it's something we want to improve upon.
@3mpty Unfortunately, many of those are deliberate design decisions and require fundamental considerations as to what we want the game will be. You don't have constant contact with the units, and the map is less a classic RTS map and more similar to a paper map in a situation room. Similarly, having to deal with reports rather than at a glance UI is part of the design decision. Although the reports need to be refined considerably.
Unfortunately there's a balance here of the game we want to make versus the expectations people have for the game. I'm willing to side with "we haven't communicated our intent clearly enough," but there is a problem with delivering what the player expects while still providing the experience we want versus making "just another" game in a known loop that has a fresh coat of paint. It's a major concern, but I think explaining the game more clearly would advise gamers as to if this is the kind of game they'd enjoy before picking it up. More Civilization and less Starcraft.
Neat. I love difficulty options. The instant restart thing sounds like a good plan. I like it! Even makes me not want to goo *too* fast because of falling rocks.
The UI could be a little more reactive so I know if a click is ignored or if I'm in the wrong place. Love the graphics.
Not usually a fan of these balance games, but everything is put together so nicely and the session time is just right.
Graphically beautiful. Gameplay requires a but more trial and error than I expected, but it feels like if someone made a Commander Keen style game these days. Which is a compliment.
Strudel is a Good Dog. I couldn't find an end game, but I had a positive outcome with everyone!
That reverse paddle is a killer.
The music gets repetitive (does it restart every screen?) and it's very short, but start to finish it's fun! Plus kudos on using Python and making something fun like this.