A game made by Milan "Micito" Trajković in 48 hours for LudumDare 39 Compo.
Power Planner is a game about managing your city's power levels. In the game player has multiple generators that they can power on and off at will, and they provide power. While powered generators are getting damaged, and if they are destroyed, player can't use them until they are fully repaired.
Buildings generate tasks that need to be done. Tasks require power to be executed, some will lose the progress, if they lose power access. In order for building to perform tasks player needs to click on them, to power them. While they are powered they will consume power to progress the task. Task progression is scaled by the efficiency (amount of power you are producing/ amount of power required) so if your efficiency is low, tasks will progress slower, and also the generators will struggle and get damaged even more. So try to keep the efficiency high.
If you fail 3 tasks, the game ends and you are presented with the score you achieved.
The game has 3 level types that are randomly generated with predefined power generators (each level type uses different generators). Sadly didn't get the chance to make it so the player can pick which generators they want to play with.
Move the camera using WASD and zoom in and out with numpad + and -, or scroll wheel.
The game might not be balanced, I didn't have much time to play and balance the game properly.
Game was made with: -Unity2D (GameEngine) -Blender (All building images were generated using blender) -Photoshop (Mostly for tutorial images) -Bfxr (The game has only one sound that is played on click :D. Yeah, I know I'm bad with sounds, somehow never have the time for them)
The game is pretty fun and quite replayable. I really like the art style. However I dont feel the levels are balanced enough since I found the larger level much easier than the smaller one. I would have also liked some sort of ability to upgrade the generators to add an extra level of interest. Overall a pretty fun game.
This is my favorite game that I've played so far. Looks very nice and managing the tasks and power generators are very rewarding. I did have to read the tutorial a couple of times and at first I thought I was meant to distribute power generators to the actual buildings, but after I declared myself stupid and tried again I realized how it worked and I went from being confused to having a lot of fun. Very innovative and it felt balanced! Great work :)
Simple mechanics with a lot of polish and balancing applied. There are a lot of resource management games, and not a lot of them understand what makes the mechanic enticing as much as this one does.
The graphics all look very nice; the cities are gorgeous, the generators are also well done, and the UI is very clear. The components just don't seem to work together too well. On the one hand you have the flat shaded pastels of the city (which look stunning and have a ton of variety), on the other the colorful cartoonish generators, and then the UI which simultaneously tries to be minimalist and have the weirdly fancy red X's up top. Each of the 4 components would work really well in its own artstyle, I just wish they were a bit more consistent between each other.
I felt like I had a much easier time on the larger map, but enjoyed the small one more. Main reason for this was that on the large map, at least for the first couple dozen tasks, I had the freedom to give the city exactly how much power it needed, making everything run at 100% efficiency with no overflow. On the smaller map I usually had to overproduce, which gave me incentive not to power a building until something else popped up. If you could recreate that same inability to match power demand to supply on the larger map, it would've made that map more fun I feel.
My final score on the large map was 44.
I really enjoyed this game. As mentioned, I feel like it's really well balanced and the UI communicates everything very clearly while still managing to fit some flavor and aesthetics in. It's a pretty literal and maybe unexciting interpretation of the theme, but the mechanical design and polish more than justifies that. Great work. Keep it up.
Thanks everyone for the great feedback, especially @amras0000 (I really liked your detailed criticism)
I must admit, I kind of forgot about the generator image, and I had to rush them in the end. I would liked to have made them maybe more like a power plants, than generators but this works as well.
The X's could have been just drawn (I rendered them in blender as I did with all graphics, just though about adding more "pop" to it. But you are right, since everything was minimalist, they should have been as well.
I didn't get much time to playtest the game, and I would like to have made some different system for task generation. As it is now, there is a timer that ticks (different time for every map) and every tick it just finds a random building and tells it to generate any of the possible tasks for that building type. It was made just for testing, and because the lack of time, it ended up in the game.
Maybe a better system would be the one that is aware of all the current tasks and creates tasks based on them (for example sometimes after catching criminals (police station task) the hospital would get a surgery task, or something similar). Also more tasks would be interesting.
Also I don't think the generator types were all that interesting, I would like to have made them more "unique" as the risky generator.
For some reason, my description keeps changing, and removes the screenshot, I don't know what is going on with that. If anyone knows please post answer in the comments.
Very fun game. It is nice to have to think in this way, i mean, it is hard, it make you think, it is stressfu, it is great! The graphics are cool too, and it is very intuitive.
The fact that the menus to generate energy were touching the bottom edge make me think that there was a problem with the size of the screen and there was something hidden.
Great game. Took me a few tries to get the hang of it. Even after a few attempts i found the game unforgiving. I think my best score was 40. I found no bugs during any of my game plays. I will definitely be coming back to play this one. Good Job!
Simple resource management fun. The graphics are nice; music is sorely lacking unfortunately.
The difficulty ramp up, especially in the metropolis map is very sudden. For 3 minutes it gives me single tasks and then all of a sudden :boom: 5 concurrent tasks! Some tweaking there would be pertinent.
I was really attracted by the game's cute looks but I don't really get the gameplay... It looks like a simcity-like and I was also a bit disappointed by how little control we have over the city [compared to a simcity-like]. In my opinion, keep the cute looks... improve the rest? Game design is the most lacking area IMO, though a soundtrack also wouldn't hurt. Anyhow, you got me to try your game, that's a start :D
Really nice graphics! I've only played the easy level but it's very hard because it's hard to see when something doesn't have power and because timer go so fast without power, you miss it very quickly.
Comments27
And since mine is in the same ballpark i can say it's much better, way more polish went into this.
You didn't link to you Linux build though, the archive only contains an .exe (which works fine in wine, but that's not really a supported platform).
I have downloaded the modules, built the original game, uploaded and fixed the links. The linux and mac versions should now work.
Have never dabbled with linux and mac, sorry for the inconvenience!
The graphics all look very nice; the cities are gorgeous, the generators are also well done, and the UI is very clear. The components just don't seem to work together too well. On the one hand you have the flat shaded pastels of the city (which look stunning and have a ton of variety), on the other the colorful cartoonish generators, and then the UI which simultaneously tries to be minimalist and have the weirdly fancy red X's up top. Each of the 4 components would work really well in its own artstyle, I just wish they were a bit more consistent between each other.
I felt like I had a much easier time on the larger map, but enjoyed the small one more. Main reason for this was that on the large map, at least for the first couple dozen tasks, I had the freedom to give the city exactly how much power it needed, making everything run at 100% efficiency with no overflow. On the smaller map I usually had to overproduce, which gave me incentive not to power a building until something else popped up. If you could recreate that same inability to match power demand to supply on the larger map, it would've made that map more fun I feel.
My final score on the large map was 44.
I really enjoyed this game. As mentioned, I feel like it's really well balanced and the UI communicates everything very clearly while still managing to fit some flavor and aesthetics in. It's a pretty literal and maybe unexciting interpretation of the theme, but the mechanical design and polish more than justifies that. Great work. Keep it up.
I must admit, I kind of forgot about the generator image, and I had to rush them in the end. I would liked to have made them maybe more like a power plants, than generators but this works as well.
The X's could have been just drawn (I rendered them in blender as I did with all graphics, just though about adding more "pop" to it. But you are right, since everything was minimalist, they should have been as well.
I didn't get much time to playtest the game, and I would like to have made some different system for task generation. As it is now, there is a timer that ticks (different time for every map) and every tick it just finds a random building and tells it to generate any of the possible tasks for that building type. It was made just for testing, and because the lack of time, it ended up in the game.
Maybe a better system would be the one that is aware of all the current tasks and creates tasks based on them (for example sometimes after catching criminals (police station task) the hospital would get a surgery task, or something similar). Also more tasks would be interesting.
Also I don't think the generator types were all that interesting, I would like to have made them more "unique" as the risky generator.
For some reason, my description keeps changing, and removes the screenshot, I don't know what is going on with that. If anyone knows please post answer in the comments.
Anyway, thanks for kind words everyone :)
The fact that the menus to generate energy were touching the bottom edge make me think that there was a problem with the size of the screen and there was something hidden.
My final score on the large map was 104 ;)
The difficulty ramp up, especially in the metropolis map is very sudden. For 3 minutes it gives me single tasks and then all of a sudden :boom: 5 concurrent tasks! Some tweaking there would be pertinent.
Great work for 48 hours!