Ludum Dare #50compo

Wildfire

by gildar76

Overall★★★★★★★★★★2.24

Fun★★★★★★★★★★1.79

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.50

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.45

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.24

Audio★★★★★★★★★★1.93

Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.07

Your goal is to keep the fires at bay as long as possible.
Use WASD to control the fire truck :)
Space to use your water cannon
An additional option will show up as a button if you get enough money...

inevitably you will loose the yellow houses, and the game.

TOOLS USED:
- Unity 2021.2
- Affinity Photo
- Affinity Designer
- Bfxr

KNOWN ISSUES:

- If houses catches fire, you currently can't put them out. SO try to keep the fires away from them as long as possible :)
- Only the windows build works right now. I'll provide a web link as well for convenience.
- If you buy water with the mouse and click space afterwards, you'll buy more water. Yoou can avoid this by clicking somewhere else on the screen.

UPDATE:
There is a fixed version that adds the missing visual cue for hitting fire (A smoke burst every second or so). That's the only difference between the two versions.

Note that the versions marked as FIXED are added after the compo ended.
Keep that in mind if playing that version.

Genres: strategy

Tools: Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, Bfxr, Unity

Comments22

Nima4 Apr 2022, 18:50

Cool game. The mini map is a really cool feature (interesting to see all the fire spread). I'm not sure if I was able to put out the fires while playing the web version, but still enjoyed driving around. great job!

Gildar76author4 Apr 2022, 18:53

@nima Thank you. I intended to add a visual queue when you actually hit a fire, but didn't have time for it.

cogcomp4 Apr 2022, 18:56

Nice idea! I had some difficulty figuring out how to extinguish the fires with the water cannon. It seemed almost random at first.

LDJam user 2345674 Apr 2022, 19:24

Hard to extinguish the fires.

Hard to extinguish the fires. Maybe somethings to show "the fire health" would have been great.

DevParty7 Apr 2022, 23:01

Fun game, but it is quite difficult to put out the fires. Other than that though, I liked the effects and the mini map was a nice touch!

Kamuniaft8 Apr 2022, 05:08

It takes me about 5 minutes to understand, that i need to extinguish the cabbage itself and not the flame. So in my experince the flames turns out to be a bit misleading in terms of extinguishing collision detection. Also missed "move back" control key. With that fire-hydrant-bug rotation speed, controling it is not an easy task already. Liked main character concept and sfx :) Nice job finishing the game!

Jimbly8 Apr 2022, 19:51

It seems that (at both fullscreen on my 16:10 monitor, and using the default embed resolution in the link provided), there's a bunch of fire off of the side of the screen that I can't get to.

I seem to have a lot of trouble putting out the fire - sometimes it worked, some trees I just could not extinguish. (Playing the fixed version) I would see no visual cue whenever watering the tree in the far lower left, could never put that fire out.

Generally this seemed pretty slow paced - I would have liked to spend less time holding space, and more time running around fighting fires =).

I like the visuals on the trees (those are trees, right? ^_^), and sound was nice and unobtrusive. Mini-map was a great addition. Nice job making a game!

Gildar76author8 Apr 2022, 20:05

@jimbly Thanks for the feedback. All the fires should be visible at 16:10, even though I only tried at 16:9.

The visual cue is basically a smoke burst. I'll check the fixed version again.

Thanks for the feedback.

Jimbly8 Apr 2022, 20:15

See the screenshot above (that's the embed on the itch.io page, which appears to be about 16:10, presumably regardless of what resolution your monitor is), but the map clearly shows 8 columns of fire in the upper right, but I can only see 6 on-screen (can also tell from my player on the minimap, there should be 3 rows of fire to the right, but I can only see 1).

Gildar76author8 Apr 2022, 23:08

@jimbly Yes, I see it. Looks like the camera moved slightly for some reason.

I also agree with you on the slowness after having played my own game a bit more :(

It's a tendency I have in recent jams, making games too slow. Not sure why.

Anyway, thanks again for all the feedback!

Itskdog8 Apr 2022, 23:58

Nice little game. Liked the particle effects and the spreading of the fire. The rotation could have been smoother.

LDJam user 2689349 Apr 2022, 00:01

Resolution issues are forgiven because of the great game idea. I liked your game.

Yeramia9 Apr 2022, 01:29

Good use of the theme. I like the appearance of the minimap. I went up to where there are many burning trees & used water bomb -- nothing really happened.

Steve74119 Apr 2022, 01:40

This inevitability of the fire spreading vs the speed at which I could extinguish creates a strong feeling of impending doom. I think I might need another truck

Jesús González9 Apr 2022, 09:00

I feel it is somewhat inbalanced as the fires appear to quickly and are super hard to put off, but this may be on purpose. The tank controls feels OK to me, I even like them.

Other than that, I really appreciate the simulatio" part of the engineering behind this game, those things take time to program and for a Compo game it is pretty impressive. In my game I missed the Compo deadline because I spend almost two days working on the simulation alone.

sinus9 Apr 2022, 09:07

Nice game! I like the graphics of the trees and the fire truck. I nearly succeeded, but then suddenly the flames spread a lot. (: Loosing was probably inevidable...
What's the effect of the water bombing? I used it multiple times, but never saw an effect.
I would love the option to drive backwards.

Gildar76author9 Apr 2022, 10:48

@sinus

Thank you!

Currently the water bomb removes 6 or so fires randomly. It's efficient for money spent, but you don't have any control over where the fires are extinguished.

lbrande9 Apr 2022, 13:54

I like the core idea and it fits well with the theme. The fire truck is a bit too hard to maneuver however and the fire spreads a bit too slow. Either way, good work overall!

binaryDiv9 Apr 2022, 15:48

I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but extinguishing the fires takes around half a minute per tree keeping the space key pressed... Also, the controls are really sluggish, it's difficult to maneuver through the trees, especially because you can't drive backwards... :/

MartensCedric16 Apr 2022, 17:57

The minimap is a cool feature! I thought the controls were a bit hard. i suggest in a future iteration you space the trees more and make it so our truck can turn faster. Would also be more fun if trees extinguished much faster and the fire spread faster. Because right now the game doesn't have that much action at this speed

commanderstitch16 Apr 2022, 19:57

I'm not sure what's going on here, but I figured out that it takes 10 pulses of water from my fire truck or water truck (whatever it is) before it puts out one fire spot. Then as i put out all the fire spots, i realized that there is trickery a foot. You see i managed to put out all the fires. But! alas. The burnt out areas count as fire tiles and they never stop burning. Thus my disappointment. and my realization that a farmer and this game don't go together very well. At this point I rage quit. Great game, except for the time it took to put out a fire (you empty 1/2 the truck for one fire) I suspect the bomb with water didn't help at all (or at least i didn't notice anything, it just made more fire) When i would click spacebar to use the water truck, it kept purchasing water. So i just evenutally held it down and that bypassed this oddity. :-)