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Subterranean Capital's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #13 | 3.913 | 3.913 |
| Enjoyment | #34 | 3.217 | 3.217 |
| Overall | #43 | 2.957 | 2.957 |
| Audio | #77 | 2.391 | 2.391 |
| Theming | #78 | 2.913 | 2.913 |
| Artwork | #116 | 2.348 | 2.348 |
Ranked from 23 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
GitHub Repository
https://github.com/Muyao-Lu/Subterranean-Capital/tree/main
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Comments
Such a cool take on the theme! I love how it names all of the citizens its such a fire feature. I think it'd be cool if the HUD (like the stats and economy stuff) matched the game's color scheme. Genuinely can't stop playing lol. Also check out our game Deep Dive if you get the chance!
Thank you. Will check out your game once I finish badminton practice.
HUD was loosely themed off this finance website: https://www.investopedia.com/. I get where you’re coming from though. Maybe customizable themes would be a good idea (Especially for those dark mode enjoyers)
tuff (my assets were seized very quickly)
The Hamstapol is not merciful to small kittenz.
But hey, at least you're higher on the food chain. What can a bunch of hamsters do against an apex predator?
I honestly like the idea of your game, I am pretty sure its the only city builder game in this jam and probably hacksclubs past game jams, there's also a lot of attention to detail by giving each building a description with levels. I would recommend allowing the player to place specific buildings though, instead of it just being kind of random.
That's how you can tell I was addicted to Simcity as a child (in my case, the Pay-to-win version that EA released [Simcity Buildit, I think it's called])
The random pattern is part of the game. This game hits beneath the surface both in the physical sense (as in a city underground), as well as the metaphorical sense (with economics being considered "beneath the surface" when it comes to city building). Of course, the player has some control. Once you get to 15 hamsters, you can decide how much to spend on housing and utilities, with these sliders:
If you don't like your city layout, you can always delete buildings (what gets rebuilt is random though, so it might take a bit of luck). Zoning might also come if I decide to pursue this game after the jam :)
Also, first person to notice my flavor text. Yippeee.
Guess the tutorial helped!
this is so cool! maybe I'd add some speed slider, because sometimes it's too fast and confusing (but that can also be the intention) so I guess just depends on you ;) but very cool game
Glad you liked my game :)
To me, the speed is part of the fun of the game, forcing you to think on your feet rather than just crank speed down when something happens. Giving the ability isn't a bad idea for people who are just starting the game and want to experiment though, so something like "Minecraft Peaceful Mode" with speed controls and some other controls might be possible (If you aren't familiar with Minecraft, Peaceful Mode is where no enemies spawn and the ones that do don't attack you)
Unique game! It was a bit confusing at the start but started to make sense after tweaking those tax sliders for a while. It would be even better if you add give more controls to the user when they reach another milestone after a population of 100, e.g.: maybe when they reach 5k population.
If it helps, I could make a walkthrough of the early game. Already made a trailer, but that's more showing off what's possible, rather than walking people through.
5k population is the cap, so if anything, I'd add a trophy when you get there ;)
In terms of additional controls, I think most major macroeconomic things are already in (or at least the ones that don't need a textbook page of explanation). I was thinking of allowing players to manage hamsters on a more micro level, being able to see the companies they work for and give certain companies monopolies/breaking them up, but that would have been a whole other can of worms. Tell me if you're interested in seeing that feature in the future
I guess a walkthrough is the major need for now. For psople who don't know much about macroeconomics (like me), its just moving a bunch of sliders till the population starts to grow blazingly fast. So a walkthrough would truly help for users starting out.
As the population starts increasing, the houses occupy all the places and in order to fix that I had to keep spamming clicking on lvl1 houses and delete all lvl1 type house from a button. That kind of starts to get annoying at some point maybe fix that, if it was not intended.
And yes, the feature that you mentioned, managing hamsters at a micro level sounds great! It allows users to dive deep into the city they built and learn the role played by companies in the economy of a city. This may even turn out to make the game a bit more complex but it surely adds a new dimension to the game.
I'll throw in some GIFs in a "how to play" section.
For the house deletion, my trick is to turn down housing spending to 0, wait a while (cause it takes a while for the housing money reserves to deplete), then mass delete lv 1 houses. Probably should have thrown in a more visible indicator, since rezoning is quite gimmicky right now.
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback :)
Oh that seems quite easy now, once you have said it. I struggled with the part of deleting the houses and had to keep spamming delete lvl1 houses till I noticed the housing expenses slider. lol
No worries mate. All the best!
At the start it was kind of hard to understand what affect my choices were actually having on the city but once I figured it out I had an actually good time fiddling and trying to make the fastest growing city.
Glad to hear you enjoyed it. Would there be anything I could add to the description (since I can't really do anything with the gameg) that would have improved your experience? Perhaps a video ;)
Love the creativity and the idea that you thought of for the jam theme! I think you should add an interactive tutorial instead of text tutorial, since beginners (like me) are really dumb to sometimes understand text! Overall, a really great JS game, if not, probably the best I've ever seen!
Thank you :). Was thinking of adding a tutorial, and would have probably done so if I was aware of the 6 hour extension. If I decide to pursue further, I will definitely include something like an interactive tutorial, or a hamster that sits in a corner and answers questions (not a bad idea, actually... )
It's such a nice refresher to see a proper JS game with a unique mechanic, fun gameplay and strategies you can implement!
I love the detail put into the mechanics of it and I really feel like this surpasses a number of games in the same genre by quite a bit in terms of difficulty and attention to detail.
By detail I also mean the dialogue in the hamster tab to show the state of your city, it keeps the balance between being really funny and also informative about the population.
Definitely one of the best games in many aspects and by far the best JS game I have seen yet!
This feedback means a lot coming from the maker of that insane submarine racer game (like how did you even get the competing AI to work? Was it a preplanned route or was it an actual ML model that you trained?) Just don't look at the spaghetti code for my game, and you'll be fine...
1.6k lines of JS in a single file ;(
Spaghetti code is the bane of us all, and I would think that mine is just as bad if not worse!!
Yeah the AI is actually really simple, its just the same code as the player sub, but it follows a "target point" instead! This target point is just a PathFollow3D node(what it does is pretty self-explanatory, it follows a path). As the AI gets closer to the target point, it moves further along the path, and the cycle continues!!
The reason it doesn't just move along a path is cause I wanted it to be a bit dynamic if the player sub crashes into it(wobbles and eventually re-aligns itself).
I thought about godot rl-agents for actually training it, but the last time I checked(a few years back tbf), it wasn't as stable and you would have to ask players to run python in their terminal which was ABSOLUTELY not game jam friendly!
Love your game's twist mechanic for the game jam theme! Very creative :)
i figured it out
What's your strategy? Interested to see what others have come up with
sorry for the very late reply -
okay, my strat is to first start off with 10-15% tax and 3% interest rate. after it booms, lower tax to 5 then and turn on inheritance tax (housing -25% and utilities- 70%) wait until theres about 500 of them and then raise taxes for a lil while and make sure not too many people get rich or employment plummets - that's what i have so far
Honestly, very solid strategy. I find that housing to 5 or even 0% to be beneficial in midgame, since housing grows quite quickly and will take up all possible utility squares. Unlike utilities, housing doesn't decay (disappear when there's not enough money). Knowing to raise taxes to reduce the rich is crazy good intuition though.
Creative man. Hats off 🫡
very unique! I imposed a 100% tax and now my city is thriving
Shhh! Don’t leak the secret strategy…
very creative game, I like it
Thank you. Art's not as good as yours tho ;)
Amazing game!!!
Thank you :)