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Incremental Game Jam 2

Hosted by FBDW, BLAFFE

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A jam submission

Light the City!View game page

Create an energy company that can provide the electricity to light up the bustling city.

Submitted by Semenar — 21 hours, 24 minutes before the deadline

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Light the City!'s itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Fun (Overall enjoyment)	#6	3.568	3.568
Theme (How well it fit the jam)	#9	4.000	4.000
Balance (Speed of the game)	#11	3.170	3.170
Uniqueness (Originality of the game)	#13	3.648	3.648

Ranked from 88 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Arcanestomper3 years ago

I got stuck a few times when I left my city power too high and it ended up draining everything. Eventually I managed to get it to the point where I unlocked alternate power sources at which point I just abandoned the nonrenewable ones and let it sit until I had enough research and money to build the spaceship.

The main problem was that there's no good way to tell if you're power plants are working or not. You can't see how much power you are actually generating only direct it. And if you have more than one engineer buying resources it's hard to tell if one of them is not making a profit or not.

Plus the market seems to imply that the prices will go down with population, and that never seemed to happen. Prices only went down once I stopped buying them.

One actual bug I saw is that the geothermal plants get covered up by the credits.

SemenarDeveloper3 years ago

The prices do go down with the population amount, but maybe I picked a function that is too slow. It should be most noticeable with electronics.

Geothermal plants being covered in credits is a bug that shouldn't actually happen. Would you mind telling me what is the resolution of your screen?

Arcanestomper3 years ago

1920x1080. It worked at the start, but when I reloaded later it was kind of covered up.

Thebossmann3 years ago

THERES A SPACESHIP!

Arcanestomper3 years ago

I probably should have marked that for spoilers.

blackreign3 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

I was sceptical at first, as it was a bit of a bite-through, but it was totally worth it. This is not your standard linear click stuff number go up incremental, but a real challenge where you unlock new unique elements brilliantly woven together forcing you to come up with new and evolving strategies. The game is suprisingly well balanced although for some clearly a little too heavy on the challenge side, especially with the resource market kicking your ass sometimes. Overall this was an epic experience for me.

Icqa3 years ago

Probably not the worst game I've ever played, but definitely the least fun. Everything about this game seems tailor-made to make you hate your time with it. I genuinely cannot find a single positive.

The market idea, while possibly decent in concept, is an atrocity to actually play with, same with the city. They just scale to "Screw you for trying to play" heights way too quickly. The whole experience just felt like an exercise in scarcity where you never will enough money, energy, engineers, or anything really to do what you want to do, which if intentional, then yeah you have a fine art piece, but that doesn't save it as a game.

I wanted to play through every game in the jam to 'completion' even if I hated them just in case they get fun at a certain point, but this game broke me. I just can't keep going. Currently I'm stuck grinding research for the 8000 research upgrade that makes coal plants produce more. If the games gets fun after this, I'm sorry, but I just cannot fathom that happening, so I'm jumping ship here.

SemenarDeveloper3 years ago

Thanks for the comment!

Several other people have already mentioned that it is too easy to start losing, and the negative loop fed by market prices makes it harder to get back if this happens. I think it is a major cause of situations when the game becomes un-fun for people, and yes, this is my fault. The engineers in the early game are likely too far and few to allow for decent running builds (and the engineer count in the endgame is too high by comparison, so I should have dropped the initial prices in favor of faster scaling after some point). The jam deadline is over, so it would be improper to actually go and fix balance issues; but you can try and give it another go tomorrow (if you had the stock exchange upgrade for 600 research, it would clear the upwards trend in the market, so the prices would start to fall after a significant amount of time spent offline). The game would continue to screw you up after that point, but less and less with each passing upgrade, until the market becomes completely irrelevant around e6 research or so.

Icqa3 years ago (1 edit)

I took your advice and gave it a day off, and after two more days of playing, I've finally finished this game off once and for all. I can also safely say it never got fun and even if the market becomes less of a hurdle in the later parts of the game, it is still beyond a crawl and there was still enough randomness to have made my time with this absolutely miserable. Although, the final research did bring up the scarcity bit I had previously talked about, so if all this misery was intended, you did make a pretty decent art piece. I'll give you that much.

Antidjagger3 years ago

Best clicker in 2021 (mb and in a later year too).

Gameplay >24h

I'm stuck, really stuck.

Ikognitox3 years ago(+2)

This is really good, I like it! One thing I missed dearly was some form of chart where I can see my current energy generation, ideally even how much of it comes from what generator, so I see how much energy I can afford to send to the city, when to switch engineers etc. But apart from that, very nice game and very good execution.

PeachTreeOath3 years ago(+2)

Whoa there is a lot to unpack for this game. This is a game with a learning curve but I'm glad I powered through it.

First off, I want to bring up the worker system. The worker system is brilliant. I've seen worker placement mechanics in a handful of incrementals, but not in the way you implemented them. Here they are flexible upgrades to your systems, whether it's a resource gen buff, selling automation, or research.

Ultimately the way you place your workers is based on a combination of your current goals + desired level of active play. Like before I stepped away from my pc for a while, I turned on autosell and weakened my nuclear generation. But when I was watching a YT video, I just did all those manually while focusing on research. The result of all this is that workers become extremely valuable resources that are important to your strategy. If you built a future game just doubling down on that mechanic and narrowing the focus, that could be something special.

As you already know, the general game can be confusing. The hardest part is seeing your income drop and not knowing how to dig yourself out of the hole, as there are several sinks and traps that you can fall into. Even now I'm still not entirely sure what's the best energy % to send to the town because it seems like the cons outweigh the pros at some point. Even some of the research ones can bite you if you're not careful.

It does feel good when you can climb out of those holes since this a strategic game. For example, I didn't care about the market prices at first, but once I got to nuclear power plants, I would actually wait for a good price because they are so expensive.

Overall this is a game is a challenging incremental, intended or not. It has a relatively complex economy and I could probably beat the game if I understood it better. I did enjoy trying to figure it all out but alas I'm currently stuck farming research hoping it's the thing I need to get my resource generation profitable again.

Lampada3 years ago (1 edit)

The game is nice but the thigns you can turn on/off are not clear if they are on or off. That is really really frustrating.

Engineers are too expensive.

SemenarDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

I tried to make every thing that can be switched on/off state the effect of pressing the button - maybe this is counterintuitive and I need to make that the other way around, sorry.

Engineers are intended to be very expensive but have a massive cost reduction from the city population, so you actually have an incentive to supply more.

Lampada3 years ago (3 edits)

I don't have a clue if the unprofitable thing is on or off, so its useless, and I understand that I have an incentive to supply more to the city to descrease the cost of engineers but with the cost of resources always going up I can't provide enough energy to get the 4 engineer, it cost 1.6e7 now and I barely have 1e6 money after 1 hour waiting, and the fact that I need to keep selling the energy manually because the cost of batteries and max capacity is low makes impossible to leave the game alone for 10 minutes or my money goes to zero because the autosell is the worst.

And now the cost of the engineer is 1.9e7 again because the costs keeps rising and I need to keep proving less energy for the city. And my money now is only 100k even tough I didn't buy anything.

So now I will stop proving the city and focus only on the research and see if I can get past this part.

SemenarDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

The autosell is actually good, it just sells 100% of energy overflow. The autobuys are ineffective, though, probably even after you unlock the ability to stop them if they are unprofitable (you should have this research done already).

Lampada3 years ago

Then I don't understand anything. I tought the aotobuys we're perfect, so if I buy manually is cheaper? I didn't see that anywhere.

And the autosell is only 100% with and engineer right? I can't spare and engineer for that, I only have 3, I need one to buy coal, one to buy oil and one for research. So I need to sell manually.

SemenarDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

No, autobuys are perfect, they have no running costs - but you as a player can generally buy a lot of something when the price is low and live with that, and that is more effective cost-wise.

If you have 3 engineers, you can automate autosell and have everything running well, if you decide to drop coal or oil. Save the one that gives the most profits; the rise of selling efficiency to 100% should be well worth the drop.

Lampada3 years ago

But then again I need to micromanage the buying of resources.

And the one that gives more profit keeps changing.

Some people may like it, but I hate the stock part of the game.

SemenarDeveloper3 years ago

Well, it might be changing, but it is not like you need the maximum production at any time anyway - I thought you wanted a decent idle build, maybe I'm mistaken, then sorry.

The stock part might be too rough, agreed. Should have pushed the cost restoring upgrade earlier and made it stronger.

Lampada3 years ago

yeah that is what I wanted but I must be missing something because I can't see a way to buy the 4 engineer without days of play.

Maybe when I unlock radioactivity.

SemenarDeveloper3 years ago

Huh, if you mention radioactivity - do you already have the ability to assign engineers to the plants? Because if you do, you definitely want to ditch coal or oil and focus on the other - engineer working on a plant gives it a major production boost.

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Barbitos3 years ago

Pretty fun but the game is way too much on the active side IMO, maybe there should be a way to automate more easily without having to sacrifice that much efficiency.
Also i think research is too slow on the earlygame, with the same problem that you can't research AND automate stuff at the same time

SemenarDeveloper3 years ago(+1)

Thanks for the comment!

You are likely correct and the sell automation should be earlier - I actually wanted to switch the overflow autosell and the second storage expander, but forgot about it.

Regarding slow research - you are probably correct here as well. I did a full run on Saturday prior to submission to iron out balance issues and ended up dividing many research costs by 10, but I might have missed that early research also felt slow. Maybe I was distracted, don't remember right now.

The automation+research problem is definitely on me. I increased the base engineer price since you were able to buy them much before being able to actually use them; by doing so, I forgot that it also made the possibility to hire 2 engineers appear later in the progression, and so the parallel running of both systems was delayed.

Sorry, but I'm not going to fix those balance issues now - this probably doesn't follow the spirit of allowing changes after the submission deadline to fix bugs.