Had the idea of a tiny planet in space, which you slowly build up, balancing money, happiness and food, too build a strong settlement, before a larger universe of planets opening up to you, allowing you to settle them, and have to balance the risk of settling a new planet, in the face of the danger that one planet's economy brings them all down. This was the result within 48 hours. It's messy to say the least.
I found it really hard to understand what I was doing to be honest. It looked cool but I couldn't get much more out of it. My main issue is that I just wasn't sure what impact selecting the types of buildings was really having?
@lomt1k ye sorry! Wasn't obvious, and ran out of time to put in a good tutorial. You can click the planet's to visit them, and then click the buttons in top right corner to build buildings. Which change the values in the top left as the days go by. Didn't get fleshed out or polished sadly!
I really like the planets, but the lighting was a bit too dark. Are they randomly generated? If so, that's impressive, well done, and if not, they're still very cool looking, well done. If I took some time I'd probably be able to figure out the optimal balance of pop-centers, food-production, factories, and entertainment for each planet. The tooltips for what a planet has on it were a bit squished and hard to read. The music was happy, but a bit repetitive. Perhaps a good bass-line would help. Thanks for the mute button :)
@voxelv Thanks for some encouraging words! The lighting was too dark, noticed it 1 minute after hand in, but then the deadline was also gone by so another lesson for another jam I guess! :D They are randomly generated, thanks to Sebastian Lague's legendary quality youtube tutorials. However, they were randomly generated in editor and hand picked, not generated during runtime! The optimal balance is very strict, there is only really one way to get it perfect. Not intended, just didn't have time to tweak it. Spent 90% of my time on the planets. The music was made and implemented in 5 minutes as I was freaking out, with half an hour till deadline! So, I absolutely agree it was repetitive, mostly coz I only had time to make a 10 second loop haha :D The tooltips are hard to read, I absolutely agree. They were having issues with overflowing text outside canvas, and since I was running out of time I did the very unelegant solution of just decreasing font-size so the information could at least be seen. Also worth noting that originally buildings were supposed to actually fall onto the planets when you build, to create a way more satisfying feedback for that, but ran out of time :/ Each planet were also supposed to take a fee first time you decide to build there, creating a risk / reward with potential of more riches vs financial ruin. However, knew I didn't have time to actually tweak it to not be annoying, so just left it out. Progression of pretty much every number, was also too slow for my taste. Makes the game a lot of just sitting waiting for numbers to move. Plenty of things i'd fix with more time. The more gamejams I do, the more I notice a pattern of making games where I only see all the flaws I didnt have time to fix, that's the harsh nature of it I guess!
A tutorial would be nice in this game but I totally understand the concept of not getting everything in place before the deadline :) Well done on the different planets. The UI buttons should have some sort of feedback when you click them. Sometimes I was not sure if the button worked or not. (And that combined with the fact that I didn't understand at first what I needed to build). Nice music, but it got kind of repetetive after a while.
@ruby-interactive-games Yep! I feel ya! Great job getting it in and the basic game mechanics working. That's something I've struggled with for a long time. Happy Jamming!
TO be honest I have a hard time understanding what's happening. I really like the planet system and thought that was intuitive, but the gameplay was just tough to understando
First of all, the song was driving me crazy so THANK YOU SO MUCH for that mute button haha. But beyond that I am not quite sure what is happening, the days keep passing and I am not sure if I am winning or losing. The planets look cool, but once I go to them I don't know what to do. I clicked on everything, some numbers changed so I guess I built colonies but I don't know if that is good or what it cost either. I would like to see this game again if you plan on polishing it further beyond the 48 hours given by LD.
First of all, I love the idea! The way you describe it here draws me in, colonising different planets, managing the economy, making sure one planet doesn't topple the rest. Sounds very interesting, and definitely something I'd play.
As for the execution, well it's all been said above; unresponsive controls, not having much idea what to do.
Personally I'm just complaining because all of my metrics kept plummeting :D how are you even supposed to keep happiness up!?
But thanks for the experience anyways, and once again, the idea is brilliant, it would be great to take it further!
@tadeas-paule thank you for your encouraging words! The trick to making a planet that steadily goes upwards (the cheese way coz I didnt have time to balance haha), is starting with 1 house, then 2 farms, 3 factories, 2 entertainment complexes, and then just build entertainmenment and factories while watching the numbers, eventually you end up with 16 buildings and 1k plus money, and 10% plus happiness. However, this isn't very satisfying, since you are currently around -30k and have to wait for it to go into plus again forever haha! Definetly not how the design was originally laid out. Game jam's, killers of plans! :P
Nice start on a city builder / 4x! Quite a *big* genre to go for in 48h. I think you should be pretty proud of where you got to, especially if most of it was in 24h rather than 48!
All the elements are here - it's just a bit of polish that needs applying - pretty much as others have said.
I personally didn't mind the music - it was repetetive but it felt like a nice starting point for a piece.
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As for the execution, well it's all been said above; unresponsive controls, not having much idea what to do.
Personally I'm just complaining because all of my metrics kept plummeting :D how are you even supposed to keep happiness up!?
But thanks for the experience anyways, and once again, the idea is brilliant, it would be great to take it further!
@tadeas-paule I just made a video on how stuff went wrong :P Can find it from the same link as the game.
All the elements are here - it's just a bit of polish that needs applying - pretty much as others have said.
I personally didn't mind the music - it was repetetive but it felt like a nice starting point for a piece.
My base build was 4 pops, 5 farms, 1 factory.
@lyghtingwither Thank You, good question, not sure What I was Thinking at the time.
@jedineeson Thank You so Much!
Oh nevermind, after a refreh it loaded.whaaat? Am I an empire?