Godot Wild Jam #15

Hosted by Bakenshake, Godot Wild Jam · #godotwildjam

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A jam submission

Sky ConquerorsView game page

Living on a floating Island is not simple, especially if you are the small inhabitant of a random generated archipelago.

Submitted by fenix

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Sky Conquerors's itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Fun	#1	3.833	3.833
Theme	#4	4.389	4.389
Graphics	#5	3.556	3.556
Overall	#5	3.648	3.648
Audio	#7	3.556	3.556
Originality	#7	3.278	3.278
Controls	#8	3.278	3.278

Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Godot Version
3.2beta1

Source
Yes of course, at the end of the jam the source code will be cleand up and shared.

Game Description
A minimalistic RTS game, with floating island and limited resources

Discord Username
fenix#2952

Participation Level
This is the second Jam I officially partecipate!

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Comments

ErebornSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

On the one hand this entry feels very well polished: the GUI, the graphics, the music, the amount things there is to do - this is all great! But on the other hand I encountered some bugs that made me stop playing before reaching an end:

- villagers did not "listen" when assigning them to mine resources. I repeatedly had to deselect and reselect them to get to work.

- if i already have a villager selected, then drag an area over other villagers, the villager that was already selected was also added to the selection (not holding down Shift). To me that felt counter-intuitive and more than once I accidentally sent some villager to another island.

- the "ghost" buildings do not appear and refuse to be built. I have not found anything better then deselecting and reselecting villagers repeatedly until the ghost building appears. I see you mentioned that this is a known issue under linux, but I encountered it under windows and with all buildings, not just houses.

- When I finally got to attack the enemy, my soldiers did 0 damage. I suspect that, like with the villagers, they did not really receive the instruction to attack and just walked up to the enemy and stood there? :(

It's a pity to run into these issues, because otherwise the game looks and feels really good!

Submitted

Wavered Worship

fenixDeveloper5 years ago (1 edit)

Thank you very much for your feedback! So sorry you came into all these bugs :(
- about the villagers not listening mine resources, it is really strange. Never had this problem, or at least for the runs I tried on Windows and Browser. It shouldn'd even be supposed to happen since if a villager can reach a resource it just goes.

- yeah, the selecting/deselecting units can be very stressful sometimes. I must change and improve it

- didn't know ghost buildings wouldn't even appear! Never had this bug too, but meaybe there's a way to reproduce it if you can possibly tell me how it happened. Maybe it is something linked to some GUI inputs that are not working as expected and not linked to the game itself (the buttons to build always check and change a true/false variable, so anyway if a ghost building is not appearing clicking on another building button should fix the thing)

- I can see it is somehow linked to the villagers not gathering resources as you said, but cannot really understand how. Really strange bug, plus you are the first one out of some friends that had this problem. Maybe something is not working fine with my game on your platforms.

Could you please tell me more about the platform you are using? I'd really like to investigate more. Windows users who I asked are using Windows 10 to test the game and avarage PC characteristics.

ErebornSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

I delved a bit further to reproduce the bugs:

- Villages not listening: this seems to happen when I (i) select the villager; (ii) select (left-click) resource A; (iii) send the villager (right-click) to resource B. In this case the villager walks to B but does not mine. It does not happen consistently like that, but I'd say at least half the time. It does not seem to happen if A == B. I guess I just have an unusual order of clicking around :-) I guess it could be the same for the soldiers.

- ghost buildings: clicking on another building button does not necessarily fix it; I often need to deselect and reselect the villager itself. I have not been able to figure out exactly what triggers it.

OS: Win 10 Pro; Intel i7, 64bit, AMD Radeon HD6900. It is curious though that the presence/absence of these functional bugs would vary between systems. Unless this functionality relies on some non-standard Godot functionality it should work the same everywhere. Any chance that the export templates you used do not match the Godot dev version you wrote it in?

fenixDeveloper5 years ago (1 edit)

Thank you very much for the paths to reproduce these bugs, I'll work on them.
Really can't tell if it is an export template problem. I did wrote the game in 3.2beta1 version and used the template I got downloading within the Editor. Maybe these are just common bugs that I didn't notice, and with a further test I'll come across running the game in the Editor :)

GreenBeakCrowSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

The game is accessible and easy to learn, each entity is well distinguishable.

I encountered the same bugs as Houkime and two others on top:

If units die, they still count towards the limit. So in case you have as many units as your houses can support and you lose all your workers, you can't build anything or recruit new workers.
Healing behaved a little odd at times, refilling the health bar completely for a moment before going back to the correct value. Plus if one unit has, say, 18 health any you heal it, it has 22 afterwards.

From the design perspective I found that units clobber too much together, so when in combat you can't reliably pick a certain unit. It would be nice if the workers were able to fight back a bit. And if you have soldiers and workers selected at the same time, right clicking on an enemy did not make the soldiers engage combat it seems.

Submitted

Sam Can II - Valley of Flying Rocks

fenixDeveloper5 years ago

Hi and thank you for your feedback.
- for the first bug it is intendend-ish, even though I just forgot about a better implementation and so it is just confusing, as you found out and I can totally understand.
Here's a better explenation: only simple villagers are supposed to build stuff and gather resources, and soldiers are supposed to fight only. In this way you should balance as you prefer the number of soldiers and workers you decide to spawn.
If you lose all of your workers it is an indirect 'game over', as I intended... but I didn't implement it right, and maybe I forgot to actually make a game over screen if this condition happens, or at least explain this in the "tutorial" section. So thank you very much for pointing this out.

- the healing part was very rushed and didn't even notice this bug. Thank you for letting me notice it, just have to add a little 'if condition' and everything will work fine... I'll for sure do it as a first fix after the jam :P

The units managing part was very hard for me to develop and I'm totally aware that it can be quite tricky and stressful to select some units. It is hard to manage an Isometric perspective in a 2D world with several areas, collisions and navigations path.
Actually the "right click on enemy" feature is not something that I implemented, even though it is a basic part, due to several facts. You can just move units towards the eniemies clicking on the closer spot to them and they will start fighting. I will of course add this little simple feature.

Anyway thank you very much, I'm going to add these bugs to the page too! :)

@houkime@translunar.academySubmitted5 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Nice atmosphere, clean crispy graphics and small touches, like colored collars.

Good selection of music theme, wish there was other ingame sound as well.

Design:

Balance is rather bad.
There is no real reason for example to have more than one farm at all times, so you just build it, assign someone to it, and forget about this game mechanics altogether because building houses for a ton of soldiers is a far more taxing task then getting food for them.
So this is essentialy a non-mech.

Fog of war in this game is very strange. It is there, but you can see the number of enemy units through it, which kind of ruins the purpose. Fog should at the very least hide enemies to be a useful mech.

Battle is flawed in a sense that enemy units don't behave as a whole but rather as individuals so you actually can beat opponents easily with a much smaller number of your forces.
I believe nobody of my soldiers ever died.
Probably if enemies were at least territorial - i.e get angry at any of your units going on their island, that would be a bit more interesting.

Enemy buildings are not capturable, which makes islands with enemies just islands with enemies - there is no extra reward associated wih them - you can use their farms but again you don't need a lot of farms in the first place.
Unless you go with a small but frequent groups of disposable attackers tactics.

What you REALLY need is housing, but alas you can't capture those "sombody's house"s

(you can force player to use small squads approach by limiting resources to build housing)

Bugs:

[On Linux]

Main technical issue i encountered is when building houses, the house ghost is not always there (even when info tab pops up) and when you click on earth with no ghost nothing happens.
So basically you need to try to build a house multiple times which makes it a tiresome process.

[On web]

Web version ended up unplayable for me. Each time a worker does sth, the game glitches out with resource numbers flickering until the worker is done.

Submitted

Nights With Junk

fenixDeveloper5 years ago (1 edit)

Thank you very much for your feedback!
I know perfectly well that the game is not balanced, I would say that it is even too easy!
Shortly before publishing it for the jam I voluntarily lowered the difficulty of the game, more than anything else because I still wanted to provide a game that could be tried and played in a short time, and that could give the opportunity to do more matches to try the random generation . My intent was not to build too complex mechanics like a real RTS, also because physically it was impossible, having worked alone on the graphics, music and logic in about 5 days, all by myself without reusing existing personal projects/musics.

I think that what really could make the difference was having the opportunity and the time to make people try the game before releasing it to balance the difficulty. But since I didn't have time I just rushed decreasing the overall difficulty.
Many mechanics of using resources and artificial intelligence you suggested me are absolutely the same ones that I thought for this jam, unfortunately I simply didn't have the time to implement them!
I also intended to vary the type of unit and adjust each price of each structure and unit as well, but it will be for the after-jam.

Lastly, you are totally right about enemies' AI, they are really static and indipendent.
One of the ideas I wanted to develop was a real threat both by enemies and limited resources, but it was a little too much for the time I had :)

Ps. Thank you very much for pointing these bugs, I'm going to add them to the game page.
For Linux, I don't have a Linux platform to test games currently, and really didn't had the time to use a VM or a partition... it is something that I'll do in the future for sure (I'm using Windows)
For web, it wuold be more useful if you can tell me the Web platform you used: I tried the game with Opera and Firefox and didn't notice any bug, maybe some audio bugs but they are frequent in webs.

Thank you very much!

fenixDeveloper5 years ago (1 edit)

About the Fog of War: you are totally right.
At first I intended it to completely cover the map (as fow MUST do), but I thought it could confuse people on where to go.
Don't get me wrong: it is the purpose of fow, to explore the unknow and at the same time go cautiously... but since Island are floating, there is no connecting ground at the beginning, and you only see the sky, I wanted to give a little help.
Again, maybe I was just wrong making it easier and more casual... but it is still a Jam! :)

@houkime@translunar.academySubmitted5 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

Web platform i encountered bugs on is QtWebEngine 5.13, which is essentially Chromium.
When building for web the usual trio for testing is:

1.) Something based on Gecko. For example Firefox.

2.) Something based on Chromium, or Chrome itself
3.) Something based on Webkit (Apple Safari and numerous little opensource browsers).

For Linux in VM better go for sth simpler and lighter than Ubuntu. It is recently going in strange directions, got incredibly fat and not always works nice in VM on Windows (had friends having troubles).
Maybe sth like MXLinux, Mint, (Debian-based) or Manjaro (from another family, Arch based) would be a better choice while still being beginner-friendly (unlike stock Arch, Void or Gentoo [which are great, but are rather for actual Linux fans and not just for quick testing]).

fenixDeveloper5 years ago

Ooh thank you! Very helpful advices.
I'll do more web building tests in the future, as you said.
Also (going a little off topic), I can see you are a Linux user or at least have a lot of Linux / Unix world knowledge.
I only have a basic theorical University-knowledge about Linux world, so I've never really used a Unix OS for coding/gaming development purposes.
I recently used Zorin to recover a very old Laptop and I really liked it, and tried Ubuntu on a VM, but exactly as you said it was not a good experience. If I had to create a new partition on my Windows pc, maybe only for coding and game development and no more, what would you suggest out of the OS you presented me?

@houkime@translunar.academySubmitted5 years ago(+1)

Well, for code experiments generally Arch and Arch-based stuff are the best since they have AUR, which allows to make and share packages very easily, which in turn means that there is a literal sea of packages.
Also Arch and Arch based OS's enjoy literally latest versions of everything as soon as they are available (so called rolling release).

I personally use Arch both as a daily driver and a developer workbench.
However, that incredible flexibility and bleeding edge comes with a cost - even Manjaro in the long run may need a significant maintenance effort (unfortunately again have friends which had troubles with maintaining it).
It is not just sth you can install and forget about it.
And stock Arch is not even meant to be installed by an installer but instead you do it manually (quite easy, takes 10 min when you're used to it, but helps understanding how things work).

If you want almost all the coding stuff and godot (except for maybe some more esoteric and/or youngest unstable tools) without having to go into how Linux actually works and how to maintain it, i think you can easily go for any of Mint (though i haven't checked it for a while) or MXLinux. Maintainance and stability-wise Fedora is also pretty ok though it is a bit more "professional" kind of OS.

@houkime@translunar.academySubmitted5 years ago(+1)

Note:
Linux'es generally go in different flavors, mainly in terms of default Desktop Environment, like KDE, XFCE and LXQT.
While amog DE's KDE is probably the best in terms of HiDPI scaling and touchpad support (useful for laptops), it is also quite resouce-heavy and can be more easily broken because of its complexity.
The lightest DE's on the ther hand, have varying degrees of touchpad support.
On my personal laptop though i hacked life and just use a DE which DOESN'T REQUIRE MOUSE AT ALL ^_^ (dwm). And it is probably _the_ lightest DE (comprised of around 4 .c files.)

JuneKimSubmitted5 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

lot fun. it can be released if you add more units and unit graphics. haha. But I felt little hard to control to use skills. It was hard to click each unit if there were many units. and I found a bug villagers gathering sources ranged that they cannot reach.

Submitted

Make the Island Float Again

fenixDeveloper5 years ago

Thank you very much for you feedback!
I'm planning to update this little game after the jam with more units, structures and some AI, even though I'd like to keep it open source so people can eventually use it as a base and don't push it too much as a personal game.
Yeah I know that controlling more units is a little bit tricky since you can just select and deselect them, but can't use their skills. I could just add some little buttons under each unit in the "multiple selection tab", but maybe the current UI isn't just the best.
I was not sure about the last bug, since I encountered only one time when I tested the game, but you gave me the confirmation of this, thanks.
I'm going to add these issues in the game page.

Chaitanya/chinu/chinuonSubmitted5 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

cool..how did u fade the flash screen?

And the title screen text were also have the fading effect.. How did u implement that?

I like the GUI of the game

Submitted

fenixDeveloper5 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Hi! Thank you very much for your feedback!
As soon as I can, and at the end of the jam ,I'll clean the source code since it is REALLY messy... but you can find it in my github page.
Since I didn't find lots of tutorials out there about the things you asked me, I'm really glad you posted your questions.
The fading effect of texts, buttons and images in the titlescreen is created via the AnimationPlayer node.
Actually to fade things you could simply use a tween and change the modulate property of node, but since I also wanted to displace things and add more background effects I decided to change properties like position, modulation and sizes via AnimationPlayer.

The changing scene effect with the circle changing size is a little bit tricky:
I think that the youtuber GDquest did something similar, but I had to use another solution because I needed to load and even edit different things at the same time.
The black circle is just a ColorRect with a random color and a shader with a mask applied. With some parameters of the shader I change the size of the circle, and to change these parameters I use an animation player.
The circles are actually two: one is used just to open the view in the title screen, the other circle is an indipendent Scene which I use as a singleton and animate separately. In this scene I use an AnimationPlayer too, because I call some functions from the animation player itself to load the level which is procedurally generated every time.

I know that a practical example of these things could be useful, but it is really hard to explain some mechanics in a simple comment and I'm not good at tutorials. Take my answare as technical , there is a lot of stuff on internet that could help you do the same things, and if you want check out my source code (I just don't recommend it since it is hard to understand something that is not written by us or commented to explain things).

Chaitanya/chinu/chinuonSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

thanks 😊...I need to learn more about tween and procedural generation in godot..but the progress is slow because i m also learning other skills...I will study more about animation node too

HowYouDoingSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

Looks good!

Submitted

fenixDeveloper5 years ago

Thank you very much!