took me ages to finish but my goodness was it amazing!
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The Alterhistorian's Conquest's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Balance (Speed of the game) | #1 | 3.648 | 3.648 |
| Fun (Overall enjoyment) | #1 | 4.286 | 4.286 |
| Theme (How well the game fits the jams theme) | #2 | 4.514 | 4.514 |
| Uniqueness (Originality of the game) | #4 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
Ranked from 105 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Great prototype. It reminds me a lot of factorio, but without needing to move a character around the world.
The main things missing right now, aside from more content, are QOL features, like:
- Being able to better organize easier, like perhaps:
- Adding corners to the pipes.
- Separate node for merging, sorting, storage, etc.
- Access information easier, like perhaps:
- Popups content being moved to replace the contents of the nodes themselves.
- Keyboard shortcuts to switch to certain views for efficiency, upgrades, stats, etc.
For the performance concerns, you could reduce the number of calculations per second by:
- Adding the ability to create "factories" that will contain whole supply chains that just directly scale the designated outputs relative to the max output contrained and the inputs given to the factory.
- Setting up the update cycle to be limited to certain number of times per second, essentially producing in batches, so say 30 ups (updates per second), 60 ups, 120 ups, etc.
Agree with the others that the limited basic generation can feel a little awkwardly slow at some points, but I really think that 95% worked as intended. I really appreciated that scarcity progression pushing me into making interesting decisions, like focusing my time into upgrades to overall efficiency, vs trying to minmax the money generation to buy upgrades to the basic materials, vs speedrunning higher tier materials and hoping they would solve my problems.
If you could buy infinite of even the base materials with some fixed price like you can with other buildings, that entire carefully balanced scarcity would collapse.
Instead of getting one or two of each new building and making the most of them using your slow trickle from the previous tier, suddenly everything would center around spamming as many as you can of cisterns/quarries, then buying even more smelters, etc to use them all, and so on.
It would be a NIGHTMARE without more "flow control" type buildings like the 3 input merger, and this interface is not built to handle that much spaghetti regardless.
Also this one is definitely a nitpick but:
The upgrades tab is a bit silly containing literally just 3 one time upgrades by the end. But it's definitely the lesser of two evils, compared to trying to make the pipes a building that required upgrades or something unholy like that.
So, overall? Really really well put together and surprisingly tightly balanced for a jam game. Even if some spots end up just a bit awkwardly short, like bricks/glass and other QoL bits like zooming out, it never took away from the fun of a well made alka-like.
The game starts off really strong in the beginning but it slows down real fast once you hit the Essence Purifier. Like hitting a brick wall at 50mph kind of slow. This slowness all hinges around the inability to buy any more cisterns, which I don't understand the purpose of, unless the horrible slowness is the purpose, but I hope not. Such a simple restriction turned what could have been an amazing and fun time into one of the worst slogs I've ever played through. I managed to painstakingly, after three days, make elixir, but I did not enjoy my time doing so.
Also, not sure if I fully understand Fast Time because it never happened to me despite my leaving the game for hours at a time.
Whoops fast time was a bug. Essence purifier being slow is probably an extended version of the bug since I'd expected people to get a bit idle beyond that point. Fast time is supposed to give a x4 boost which will speed things up. (The bit after essence purifier wasn't really that well balanced anyway but fast time should improve it a lot)
Terribly sorry for this, it is fixed now
The game is very interesting. Although the mechanism is very simple, it is very attractive, especially the industrial chain built later. The art is simple and looks comfortable. just still have some problems
The map should be bigger, preferably infinitely spawnable. The start should be at the center of the map and the zoom of the map
When the able is clicked, the able should exist at the top level of the image
Setup and Export and Import
AuToSeller should be able to be upgraded or set to sell after the resource reaches the upper limit
There should be no machine cap
Bricks are useless in later stages
Anyway, I hope you can continue to update this game
The situation with bricks is a bit unfortunate. I tried to revitalise the water mixer later on but exceedingly few things needed water, and I didn't want to just shoehorn in something.
Most of the other things aren't avoidable due to performance overhead. If someone puts down, say, 1000 water mixers then it would crash (Quite literally, since the framework I'm using already broke with too many list renders last time I checked)
Not really sure how the autoseller upgrades would work since it already sells as quickly as possible (No resource production, even at endgame, beats it). The idea of the autoseller as an overflow controllers is neat though.
I really enjoyed this entry. I’ve always been a fan of the first alkahistorian, and this style of gameplay has always been super interesting to me.
I really like the progression in this one, and would’ve loved to see more things like the arc furnace that replace earlier buildings. This is the type of game I could really see being expanded with further content to ridiculous amounts.
Bits of feedback: I’d love to zoom out using the scroll wheel, since scaling the browser affects all webpages and makes the right panel harder to read. I wish the canvas expanded in the up and left directions as well. Towards the end of the game there were certain resources whose production was very hard to increase, like water, stone, and coal. I would’ve preferred to see some sort of (complicated, so it doesn’t trivialize the game) system of nodes that could form a positive feedback loop, so late game starts increasing production through transmutation. Perhaps using some of the other resources to allow it to happen - earth, notably, wasn’t very useful mid-late game.
Overall, I was really happy to be able to play this game and I can’t wait to see what you work on next!
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