My latest idea for this jam is in space as well, but I need to refine it a bit.
Ok, did some more work. 3.5 hours into the project, and I think after the next coding/design session I will be able to start showing some gifs.
Right now its all still very simple, but the framework is there to implement a working, super simple, exploration + economy in there. With enough feedback that I’m building placeholder style as I go along since learning without instructions is core to the design.
After that its about adding some pushback systems against player expansion (internal, passive systems in the form of stability/rebellion/chaos, not alien empires yet). That would include a lose condition and will be the first version where I can test gameplay. Current goal is to have that at 6-8 hours in.
Also, I think that version will be the first one to challenge my no-text, no-instructions approach. I think it’s doable, but it’s going to require some learning from mistakes (or a visual instruction manual with no text).
I have more planned (sort of where I want to take it in terms of alien empires, diplomacy, war and research), but it all might get reevaluated depending on this first implementation.
So, I did some more work.
I am at around 6 hours in and now have all the basic framework and a couple of extra stuff thrown in. Basically I’m at the point where I can start implementing some passive pushback against growth and some lose conditions. Which is the fun part. The plan is to measure how much time does it take to expand and explore against the systems at a reasonable speed and balance things so at 5 minutes or so in you get a good empire size (so that when the other systems and external opposition gets added the time to completion raises to 10 minutes or so).
The problem is the Gif recorder you guys linked does not record UI elements, and most of the game ARE UI elements. So I can’t show anything!!!
Anybody knows a free video recorder I can use?
Not sure what platform you are on, but I’ve been using this on the Mac. It works well.
In on windows, but found a really cool GIF recorder.
Anyway, this is what I have:
The visuals are all over the place as they are placeholders with the wrong size, but you can see how you can select from a list of actions (that’s modular) each of one has certain cost modifiers that influence how expensive it’s to target a certain system (for example, both the build actions above are influenced by distance to the capital, while the explore action isn’t) and when you hover over a system to select it for targeting, you get what each other system adds as a cost (you see the path to the capital when selecting far away systems).
I think with a LOT of cleaning up the mechanics so far could be self explanatory enough. The only issue are the different costs (modifiers) for different actions. I’m thinking in having small drawings below the action (in a drop down or something) to explain them for people who want that info.
As for the mechanics so far:
-Systems can be either empty, admin, production or capital.
-You can grow a system and change it’s type. However, you can only grow systems to the system maximum allowed size (right now the biggish number on the top right corner).
-When paying for an action you need to flip over systems so that their type and size is enough to pay for it (an admin system gives as many admin as its size, a production system gives production and capital systems give both).
-Most actions (all?) can’t be played on flipped over system, so each turn a system can either be the target of an action or pay for one.
-Systems become bigger (able to grow further) the further from the center of the “galaxy” you get.
-Capitals are important. Actions have their cost increased the further you are from a capital, and therefore a (expensive) action to establish new sector capitals will be implemented.
-Right now, everything is payed with admin. Production costs will pay for military and research actions mostly.
What I think are the most interesting mechanics are yet to come (this 6 hours have been framework-building. It’s flexible and should allow really rapid development now), but I will explain them as I progress.
I kind of lost steam on my game, but will try to pick up my game again over Easter. Posting in advance of actually doing the work, as a form of motivation :)
I did make a little bit of progress in February that I never reported on here:
- Changed the shipping rules a bit, to make the strategy space larger. (Previously rules were to always make the shortest shipment. New rules are to compute for each possible target city the shortest shipment, and then pick the city that gives the highest revenue).
- Implemented a browserless mode for unit testing, and to use as a the server-side component.
The shipping changes I found really good; I played through that same “daily” map another two dozen times, finding better and better solutions. But there’s a fundamental problem in the game right now, where the traffic jams make the scoring a bit too swingy. Make a move a frame earlier or later halfway through the game, and it can cause a 5% swing in the final score. It’d be OK if there was an obvious correct timing, but in reality it’s just random. So you can have the perfect plan, and need to play through the scenario 4-5 times for it to randomly work.
So fixing that design defect somehow is the really big thing I need to do. Might require getting rid of the traffic jam mechanism completely, which would be a bummer.
I watched my 11 year old nephew play a game of this, and it was interesting that he did not at all understand the UI convention of click on source, click on target for building track. Instead he just insisted on trying to drag from the source to the target. Kids these days :( So some UI changes are in order.
The random map generation will too often generate maps with just a 1-2 viable paths; need to make that a rare exception. So at a minimum the resource density needs to be sensible, and every resource needs to have a valid target.
And then I really want to implement the high score server, and call this finished.
Yay! I need to do the same. I got a little distracted because I told my daughter that I’d help her make a game, so I’ve been dealing with that. I thought I would do a simple Bit Trip Runner clone for her, using her artwork. She’s already created some background. Scanning, editing the art is the biggest time suck.
I have fingerprints all over the TVs in my house from my daughters trying to tap and drag things they see on tv. :(
I finally got off my ass and made a game, thanks to taking a class in educational technology that let me name my own final project as long as it was educational. It’s a single-screen puzzle/roguelike in the vein of Hoplite or 868-HACK, themed around personal finance concepts.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4Sicm94DdPHcjR2N0l5cExJVDQ
It’s fully playable now, though not where I had hoped to be in terms of polish and content before posting it here. But it’s due on Sunday, and waiting longer would run out of time to incorporate any feedback, so here it is!
That is AWESOME! I look forward to checking it out today!
I’ve been up to my eyeballs in after hours work for my fellowship for months, preventing me from finishing my project here. I think about it daily, though.
Wow this thread bump was really apt, I just completed my first exercise into actually finishing things, as opposed to merely starting them and getting bored somewhere in the middle. Since it’s an Asteroids clone, I think most people will finish playing it in under 10 minutes. You’ll certainly have seen all the content in that time. :)
It’s made in Unity, taking their space shooter tutorial assets and repurposing them. A couple more exercises of this kind, and maybe I can think about finishing something of my own design. :)
(As an aside, using Unity’s cloud build and the excellent publishing tools of itch.io made the “getting things out” part of the exercise a breeze. It was a nice change from my work-related experiences with Jenkins builds)
Cool, jostly! I’ve been teaching a summer Unity camp and have been tinkering with a Lame Ball Rolling Game. I’ll see if I can scrape together what I have completed and post it.
-g
Does anyone here have experience with both the UE4 and Unity HTML5 export tools? Any big differences in output quality? Is the build/publish process in UE4 as smooth as Unity appears to have been for @jostly?
I’ve got an initial design written down for another little game, and will definitely code up at least a prototype. A a web version is a must, but it requires enough of an UI that I’d rather use an engine with some existing UI plugins rather than write my own in raw canvas or WebGL. And also there’s some procedural puzzle generation involved that I think would be painful to make perform well enough with Javascript. So I suspect UE4 or Unity are my best options.
(Weak preference for UE4 just due to it being C++ rather than C#, but differences in the ecosystem quality could totally override that preference.)
You could also look at babylon.js or Phaser, etc. If it’s a 2D game, then you can publish to HTML and write in C++ if you use cocos2d-x .
Been playing @Thraeg’s game a bit and chatting with him about it on Slack, good fun! Who can beat $125 million?
I’ve learned that using those special X and O tiles to preemptively grab events helps a lot!
Edit: Make that a billion! I think @Thraeg is gonna tune down the investment income a bit :)
Nice job, @jostly! And thanks for the reminder to check out hosting on itch.io! I checked them out, and it wound up being pretty simple to host there.
Here’s an updated version of mine, now playable in the browser (though I’m not sure if the conversion to HTML5 introduced some extra bugs).
@Thraeg excellent, much easier to take it for a spin in a browser :) It seems like a rather hard game!
Some things I noticed:
- Many of my attempts end with the game crashing in the middle of the event tiles moving. It’s always when a negative event is moving into my space, but I haven’t found any other common factor.
- Every now and then when an event is triggered, my credit score starts plummeting in real time. Like, goes down by a 1000 units / second despite me not clicking on anything, or really anything else happening either.
- It’s strange that you can get the pop-up saying you’re out of cash, even when you have cash. Maybe there’s some kind of ordering issue, where the game checks you have no money, then gives you money from an event, and then shows the popup from the first step?
- The “borrow” button in the bank doesn’t seem to work correctly. You get the cash, but don’t rack up any debt. So it’s infinite money.
- I don’t think you should be allowed to invest in the bank if that’d take you to negative cash.
- It’d be really nice if the UI buttons had some graphical feedback when pressed.
- The “garage sale” should be removed from the shop when bought. Right now it can be bought an arbitrary number of times from the same shop, for infinite money. (Also, it says the cost is $5 and the gain is $100; but that’d mean you get $95 in profit when buying it. Actually you get a profit of $100)
Ok. I fixed some things and got it in a playable state. 4 levels. Way too easy. But it works. Will be adding more challenge, levels, and effects.
Thanks for the feedback! As far as I can tell, the lack of button feedback is the only one of those bugs that happens in the main Windows version (which is also downloadable from the itch page), so I may just need to give up on Game Maker’s HTML5 export as a lost cause. I’ll look into it more tonight, though.
Glad it helped!
I’ve not had time to check out any of the other games posted here since I decided to join Ludum Dare this weekend. I’ve never tried one of these very-time-limited jams before, thinking it would just be stressful and annoying.
And it was.
But I did manage to finish, so there’s that! So here’s another short little game, and I’ll be impressed if anyone actually manages to last 10 minutes in it.
Now I need to take a break from computers for a while I think…