Zanymen: Tiny Town
Let's rebuild this tiny town together, Mayor!
Welcome zany residents, put them to work gathering resources, and create your village from the ground-up! Each minute that passes in the real world is a minute that passes in this tiny town... And there's always a new surprise awaiting you from your denizens. A new face at the gates? Love blossoming in the village, perhaps? A baby...?!
Code by Josh Edwards, art & animation by Cosmo Wegman, and music by wt64.
Welcome zany residents, put them to work gathering resources, and create your village from the ground-up! Each minute that passes in the real world is a minute that passes in this tiny town... And there's always a new surprise awaiting you from your denizens. A new face at the gates? Love blossoming in the village, perhaps? A baby...?!
Code by Josh Edwards, art & animation by Cosmo Wegman, and music by wt64.
Tags: #automation, #cartoon, #casual, #city builder, #cute, #idle, #idle-game, #life simulation, #real-time
Genres: simulation
Comments22
it's a really good concept for a comfy/idle game, gives me some animal crossing vibes
Well done. a bit to much text for me but the mood was on point.
Maybe add automatic interaction.
Great entry
@xparker Thank you! We're definitely hoping to spruce up the page soon. Curse you, external responsibilities...
Love the talking-sounds!
I assume the game keeps going on for ever - I currently have 3 little guys harvesting each of the 3 resources, another 3 who handle each building project, and the final few just wander around with nothing to assign him to. Over 3k in every resource :P
Imho, I think it would be nice if you didn't have to click on people to tell them what to do, and that was instead just the conversation/child mechanic. Since I basically just have 3 (seems to be the max) on each resource, and the rest go to my current building, there isn't much strategy there, and I only end up talking to the floaters, and never the resource slaves :P
Given that the people don't actually take any continuous resource to support, and there is nothing to build except houses to bring in new people, I assume I'm in a win state where nothing else happens.
Very nice polished & complete entry though, good job!
@ciaranw Woah thanks for the in-depth feedback! We definitely do want to add more to do overall & change up the way you interact/direct the villagers in some sorta post jam version of the game. You totally exhausted all the content we were able to fit in, we're really glad you enjoyed it! (and we hope you got some funny combos for the children)
Wasn't expecting Snailman and Slop Nook to have a child as well, I'm happy for them
First one is the citizen ordering. Every time you want to order someone to do something, you have to click through quite a lot of the dialogue. To harvest resources you need to click character, skip dialogue, select action, select resource, skip dialogue again. And that's assuming the character doesn't have anything to say about their life at the moment. It feels like it could be optimized somehow, and maybe if a character wants to talk to you about something it could be a separate option in the actions you choose (and maybe you could add something like an exclamation mark over their heads to let you know they want to talk?). Having a list of actions display immediately next to the dialogue box could probably speed it up.
The other one is that building construction gets pretty slow pretty fast. Last two or three buildings in my playthrough took ages, because construction can only be helped by at most three people, and each one of them can add one resource at a time. Maybe the more expensive structures could be built by adding more resources at a time, or some characters could be better at building things with specific resources and they would boost that speed?
Overall it's a pretty cool jam entry, a comfortable game to relax by. And I had a lot of fun with it. :D
@swanboat Thanks for the feedback and for playing! We definitely want to change up some of the dialogue systems in a post-jam version - make it easier to select what's important like work vs. make it more intentional to do stuff like kick people out. We're glad to hear you enjoyed though, and also wish Snailman and Slop Nook a beautiful future together.
@lcstark Thank you for the in-depth feedback, and for playing! We totally agree that the selection system for work, changing tasks, etc is not ideal at the moment and want to change it up in some kind of post-jam release. We also didn't do a great job conveying it, but our initial intention for the game was for it to eventually become a kind of "idle game" where you can leave the game running for longer tasks, or even close it (it'll calculate how much time passes between visits & act as if the resources were being gathered/used for that entire time). Glad you had fun with it, and it's wonderful to see that Snailman and Meltman have started a little family together. We wish them the best.
I agree with all the feedback given by other commenters, notably concerning conversations/orders, but it is nice to feel like you're genuinely talking with your lil goobers; so although I do wish for something more ergonomic, I'm glad it isn't just impersonal hotkeys.
like some others said I wish going commands was a bit more streamlined, but other than that I liked it, it's cozy and chill.
great entry!