| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #1 | 4.447 | 4.447 |
| Game Design | #9 | 4.224 | 4.224 |
| Overall | #20 | 3.982 | 3.982 |
| Innovation | #25 | 3.921 | 3.921 |
| Fun | #48 | 3.934 | 3.934 |
| Graphics | #137 | 4.013 | 4.013 |
| Audio | #260 | 3.355 | 3.355 |
Ranked from 76 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
The theme is about the "CALM" as much as the "STORM". The storm cannot exist without the calm to contrast it. Thus the game has two phases:
1) Sunny! You build and gather resources to build your settlement with no danger.
2) Stormy! At the end, your decisions are tested. Watch and see if your civilization can withstand the storm!
The calm phase is drawn out but hints of the approaching storm are given to create anticipation and dread. When the storm finally hits, you bear witness to its destructive powers.
Thus, literally "CALM" before the "STORM".
Did you write all the code and made all the assets from scratch?
No, I did not create the art assets. VFX and music are from the asset store but I did the lighting and post processing to push graphical fidelity to the max. I wrote the gameplay code but used frameworks such as Inventory System/Unity's Third Person Controller/Settings so I could focus on gameplay logic to make the game fun rather than system design. I did not make the music & sounds but did my best to add them in a way that accentuates the atmosphere.
This was pretty fun, all the elements were pulled in quite nicely. I enjoyed the opening cutscene. You were able to fit alot of gameplay into a whole week!
My only wish would be if there was more music with transitions between them, but apart from that well done!
I really like how polished the game is and the gameplay and the theme fits so well. Good work :3
Awesome Game!
- Its working well ( for me )
- the theme fits perfectly
- SKILL TREES -> higher replay value-> nice!
- graphics are good!
- rewards are cool !
-animations are neat
-fan of that dancing lil bird x)
I personally liked the end-screen very much and i was surprised that you had implemented Settings, which is appreciated !!!
A very good submission !
Great Job !
This is a great idea and was really fun to play - I found myself playing it for ages! I also thought the cutscenes were awesome. Great work!
I'm impressed someone was able to make a game like this in a jam! This is super well done and has a lot to it. It got laggy for me near the end when I had tons of stuff going but lots of fun nonetheless. Good work!
Hey here's my long review as promised:
Positives:
Feedback:
Picky Feedback:
Solid 9.436/10
Wow thanks for the organized feedback and even picky feedback haha. Really appreciate it cyberden!
Also 9.436 is oddly specific HAHA
Maybe lock buildings during the storm?
With the apple logo i just think that its just because that logo is already associated with something else , so i would recommend switching it to anything different and it can be any color. And its against the copyright but that doesnt really matter that much.
Thanks for the response!
I assumed that buildings would be locked during the storm, but they can still shift the shields to the front of their bridge right before the storm, so it becomes a chore as people might think they have to keep shifting their shields during the peaceful period, optimizing their expenditure to be as less as possible, rather than making new buildings to make more steel, which might be unfun.
I really love the gameplay you designed and the models you used! The game has great replayability with the research tree and the different difficulty levels, especially for a game jam game!
The only thing I didn't find clear in the first round I played, was that the defense buildings were unlocked from the beginning, and you didn’t have to unlock them with cards like the other buildings. Because of this, I didn’t check the defense tab at the start and ended up playing for a long time without a shield in my first round. It was my own mistake, I know! I initially thought it was a small inconsistency, but if you considered this and have a specific reason for providing the defense buildings from the start, then never mind my comment!
But still, I loveeeee your game!
Thanks for trying the game out! You have a really great point in that some buildings are unlocked by default, such as the Workshop (I thought it was too important to lock it behind RNG), and all the defense buildings which were a last minute addition and had no cards (oops!). I think what I should've done was simply just add a card that simply unlocks the whole tab to make it consistent. I've noted on this and already wrote the code to fix it and will be deployed after the rating period ends. Thank you for the feedback :)
Also just tried your game, really good looking and funny dialogs. Have given you feedback there as well! Good job to your team on your game! :)
This is the best game of the jam that I've played so far. Great Job! The main character is a modern day warrior - mean, mean stride... :)
This game goes beyond the level of a game jam game. It is a fantastic concept, fits perfectly in the theme, feels extremely polished, and even has replayability features. It's pretty, the music sets the right vibe. And your economy system is incredibly interesting! In my head I'm already making an incredibly unfair comparison to the economy system to big indie hits I love like Against the Storm (ha). But for a jam game, that's very high praise.
I do have feedback, but I don't think it's really fair for me to rate you any lower than 5*. The feedback would just be for things I think you should think about before you go for a release, and very obviously it would have been absolutely impossible to get everything perfect in a week in the first place. Know that I think the game is fantastic, and none of this is meant harshly! And besides, you asked me for feedback, and you gave me wall of feedback, so here is your own wall of feedback :D
Feedback:
The new player experience is a little bit of a mess. The tutorial helps, but a lot of resources get thrown at you fast, and I felt veeery overwhelmed. Each choice not directly guided by the tutorial is very hard to evaluate "correctly", until you get a sense of where things are going.
Maybe it would be a good idea to slightly more reduce the possible "incorrect" choices a player can make at the start of the game for the initial cards. Wood is a great resource to get at the start, but getting a building that helps you accelerate is more important, so the player needs to be helped to take one early.
One of the things I struggled with is that it's too hard to differentiate between items you can acquire through buildings and only through the cards system (sand, titanium). I learned this pretty late, even though sand is an incredibly important resource early! Currently I think it's almost the most important one, because it activates so much accelerating/scaling. Perhaps it would help to show these two resources with a different icon shape, or different icon color, to immediately notify the player that these resources are slightly different from the others, and maybe it's a good idea to mouse over and read the tooltip.
I played three runs of your game (all on the recommended difficulty). In my first play I tried following the tutorial, and somehow ended up not unlocking the wood farm until super late. This felt REALLY bad, because this building is so imperative, so needed, to succeed. I almost feel like the game should be a LITTLE more intelligent/helpful in offering me what I need to even stand a chance of winning.
In my third and winning run, i picked it incredibly early, built a lot of them early, and it allowed me to snowball and gain a whole lot more building cards due to not having to pick wood early every time.
Essentially, it feels really bad when you do not get buildings unlocked, card after card, that are paramount to progress to the win condition. Is there a system in place that decides when you get a new building choice? Or is it fully random?
The same goes for citizens too. In my winning run, it felt weird having to build 50~ lighthouses because the cards would not offer me citizens. I expected the victory would come from continuously getting citizens from cards, but they just dried up. With lighthouse only giving one citizen, and the building being a lighthouse besides (what kind of bridge needs dozens of lighthouses!), it doesn't make sense for the player to be expected to make so many to get to the victory condition.
It took me a long time to figure out how to evaluate citizens. Maybe it would help to set more goals for your player to guide them to the right way to think about how to get a successful run. A % increase on your production buildings is great, but it only makes sense to do after a certain amount of production facilities are made.
Happiness and hunger are thrown at you quite early, but are essentially inconsequential early/mid game unless you really purposefully steer away from food for some reason. This really contributes to the overwhelming feeling.
Okay that's all the time I have for now, so I'll stop here. I haven't even talked about workshops yet. Anyway, fantastic game.
Thanks for the feedback and outlining your playthrough! I do wish I could've known some of these beforehand haha.
The cards are currently fully random. Am thinking if it should weight some buildings higher at the beginning. I tried to negate some of the building unlock RNG (randomness from the card) through the permanent upgrades for now as I am aware how it would feel really bad for farms to unlock super late.
I also intend to add some additional goals to help players prepare for the storm! (Get 20 settlers, stockpile teriyaki, build 100 meters)
I am thinking of how to make it less overwhelming for the player at the beginning. Perhaps not having settlers unlocked for the first 2 minutes of gameplay? As settlers will unlock hunger/happiness requirements. Hmm...
It's so good, already a full finished game :D I hope you get featured!
I don't know what to say. The game looks like ready to publish in a store. It's the best game I have ever seen in a game jam so far. Nice work!
Super great job on this. I played all they way through and logged my thoughts throughout to give you more detailed feedback. Usually I don't unless someone asks but I feel like you might apricate it :) I am really amazed by what you made in just 7 days and it certainly deserves more attention!
Good:
- I really like the visuals, music and the vibe of the game, it felt super chill and something I would boot up after a day of work.
- A LOT of content it seems like, not sure how you managed this in 7 days but you did a great job. Most of the things are really polished.
- The tutorial is a large plus, without it the game would be quite unplayable.
- The whole card mechanic in a city builder is quite unique and cool!
- Plus point for disco light and disco floor.
- There was something very satisfying about the building aspect and just walking back over the bridge looking at everything that you build.
- I really like the storm mechanic, it forces you to think about your unit placement as you will be losing some of them later on.
Feedback:
- The white arrow in the beginning let me believe that that was what I should do first which lead me to be confused for a bit about what I should chose and what the goal was. Just after a bit I noticed the text in the bottom right and the second prompt was related to the arrow.
- I would be nice to point the player towards the first card, as someone who struggles a bit with choices it is hard to know if the wood farm or the cookhouse is good as the first building.
- The "collect" button for resources doesn't seem to light up, but it does for buildings, which is a bit confusing. I think having a different type of indication for new buildings would be better.
- Though there is a lot of content, it was really overwhelming. There are too many choices even if the tutorial leads you through it. I think it would be best to remove all the other choices in the tutorial so that the player doesn't have to think about anything and just follow instructions. I found myself having the urge to just spam click everything that looked fun without really learning what I was doing.
- The timer on the card getting is quite short in the beginning, before I had the time to think about what I wanted to build next I had 5-10 cards stacked up and then went on another spam rampage again haha. It gets better later.
- A bit of performance issues (mainly frame drops) when building.
- I had to build through an island? Maybe its cool to put things on islands but I feel like its a waste and it should just be a walkable spot which is added to your total bridge length.
- Adjusting camera angle caused MAJOR lag spikes sometimes.
- Sometimes you get two cards of the same type which doesn't feel great.
- I think most of the feedback comes down to separating the tutorial in its own little scene where the player is forced to build a certain small bridge and get the hang of the game-loop as it is quite complicated and there is A LOT of stuff happening and to learn.
- It was unclear to me what the storm would do EXACTLY which caused me to not understand that I should think about my unit placement a bit better. I restarted and the second time it went way better!
Wow! Thanks for the detailed feedback, I really appreciate thoughts like these! They're all valid points and it looks like I'm going to have to think about, especially the onboarding/tutorial process.
- Ah, I think the arrow for the card should be linked to the "Take a card" objective now that I think about it, rather than have the arrow already visible by default!
- Regarding the sense of overwhelming and preferring to have less choices, could you elaborate a little bit more on what kind of choices you think can be removed? Just want to understand how your experience/flow was like that led to that overwhelming experience, so I can improve it for future players!
- The collect button only lights up for buildings that the player has yet to unlock. The intention is to show that they're kinda "recommended picks", something like that haha. I see now this is quite inconsistent and probably it needs to be recommended or highlighted some other way perhaps?
- The first five cards had been manually hardcoded to have a shorter than usual timer as I thought the game was pretty slow at the start, but now I realise it's not a bad thing for it to be a little slower paced at the start as it is the phase to learn how the game works afterall, so I will be tweaking that, thanks for this!
- I think some kind of tooltip over the storm timer briefly explaining what the storm does might be cool. I also intend to add a kind of 'checklist' panel to help players prepare for the storm after all objectives have been completed.
I think the main thing was that it was ALOT at the same time in the beginning, even with slight guiding through. I wouldn't remove anything from the game directly but would maybe introduce cards / mechanics a bit slower. As you said, it's not a bad thing to start of really slow and get crazier the further you get / longer you play. Especially if there is a very short tutorial type level with limited amount of cards (removing all the fun things or most of them and only focusing on the core elements).
This game is HUGE. I've never seen this big game in game jam. This game has content like for hours. I feel like I've scratched only a surface.
Some tutorial about the storm would help. I don't know how long it takes in normal mode but it was really long. And I wan't really sure for what to prepare. So I losed.
Thanks for the flattering comment haha. On default difficulty the storm will arrive in exactly 10 minutes, but I'm starting to think that it could come as early as 5 minutes possibly?
Good point, I also agree that some goals would be clear! I just thought of it but maybe some kind of [Quest Objective], like 10/10 settlers raised, 50/100 food stockpiled, 30/50 buildings built, would help guide players to prepare for the storm and also set some clear indicators on what to do! I'll update the game with that as soon as the rating period ends.
Nice refreshing look idle games! I think you could very well port it even to mobile platforms and it would have decent metrics.
Really great storm effects and gameplay. Was fun losing all my food at the same time thanks to my amazing planning skills lol Great game!
I think the standard difficulty is a bit too easy xd and I think it takes too much time to collect the titanium. Overall, a good game with fun gameplay.
Summary:
Gamemodes: nice
Intro: nice
Seeing everything slowly being build in the menu: nice (but laggy not nice)
UI: nice
Voicelines: nice
Using a lot of assets and suff: not so nice but you made a great game with it. Great developer! Lots of potential. Hope to see you at the top games!
Fun gameplay loop, very well polished! Building and managing resources as the timer goes down definitely forces you to plan ahead. Excellent job!
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