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A jam submission

Junkyard DroidsView game page

An entry for Summer Incremental Game Jam 2023
Submitted by Frajda Games (@FrajdaGames) — 12 days, 19 hours before the deadline
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Junkyard Droids's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#82.8942.894
Balance (Speed of the game)#82.6002.600
Uniqueness (Originality of the game)#93.2253.225
Fun (Overall enjoyment)#92.7252.725
Theme (How well the game fits the jams theme)#103.0253.025

Ranked from 40 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

(+1)

Alright game. UI is a mess when you get further into the game but asides from that. I might have nissed it but not being able to upgrade the max compute limit is irritating since you have to then stick with 1 fire every 1.57 seconds which when you are trying to get to 100 Laptops which by themselves take 1000 fire collectively, it gets annoying having a unit that at a point ends up being actually useless at that point.

Developer(+1)

Hi, thanks for playing :) what would you say the biggest improvement to the UI could be? One player suggested dividing manufacturing items into tiers, so that you'd have for example 3 items in manufacturing grouped together as "tier 1", etc. I agree that not being able to upgrade max compute limit is annoying. Actually, it was a conscious decision I made because I didn't know if the upgrades would be too powerful or not. But upgrading fire generation to 1 fire every 1.57 seconds doesn't solve the issue that you're getting blocked by slow gathering of wood. Overall, I think that there needs to be a way of speeding up fire generation and wood gathering. One playthrough I won the game in 3.5 hours and about 1 hour into the game it's very clear that you're blocked by slow fire generation. I was thinking of 2 ways I could fix this: adding more upgrades to fire generation or resources gathering and allowing to have more than 1 droid work on a single task, so that you could have 2 or more droids perform fire generation and this would result in faster generation.

(+1)

Decent game. UI definitely turns into a mess as you unlock more items, but the concept is great and fairly well executed for a game jam game.

Developer

Thanks for playing! Yeah, UI is the part I've gotten most feedback about. I think it lacks basic quality of life improvements like right now you might not know where your droids are or what resources you're missing. Somebody in the jam's Discord server mentioned that it might be a good idea to split manufacturing into "tiers", like you'd have manufacturing "tier 1" items, "tier 2" items and they'd be separated. Do you think that would be an improvement, would you like to see some other changes to the UI?

Jam Host(+1)

Nice little game! I found it a bit slow though, with a pretty busy and confusing UI. It didn’t really feel like I was making much progress throughout - everything was the same speed, just increasingly more to do.

Developer

Thanks for playing! I agree that past a certain point the game is slow, especially when you're forced to wait for fire to be generated. Do you think adding an ability to add more than 1 droid to a task would speed things up, or should there be an upgrade like "get 10% more resources when collecting"? If you have any other ideas as for how I could improve the game, please let me know :D

(+1)

I'd have loved to have seen the rate next to each of the resources so I could have better optimized my progression, but it was a really fun game!

Developer(+1)

I'm very happy to hear this!! :D Would a simple "+x/s" be OK for displaying rates like in the screenshot below, or would you prefer something more detailed?

My idea for displaying rates is:
- display rates for resources that are "active" (resources you're gaining or losing)
- show red colour for the resource you're losing (and maybe green for resource you're gaining?)

Here's what it could look like. What do you think?

Submitted(+2)

The start was quite promising with a bit of gradual expansion and some adherence to the theme. After a while energy just stopped being a problem at all and you never really cared about it much, and the sprawling UI after unlocking laptops was a bit daunting. Also turns into a bit of a waiting game with laptops, end is basically waiting 2000 seconds for all laptops to finish. A bit weak on the balance side but the start is quite promising and I would like to see some more expansion with less hectic recipes and generally better automation and abilities to upgrade the speed at which you gain resources in general to avoid very obvious bottlenecks

Developer

Thanks for the feedback! I do agree that energy stops being a problem past getting 3 solar panels and I was thinking of reducing how much energy you get per each solar panel, but I thought that introducing computing, another area that consumes energy is a better alternative but I guess I didn't make the balance right. The biggest bottleneck I've found is the limited wood collection and fire generation. I've added an upgrade for increased fire generation in Computing section, but I don't think it's enough. One of frequent feedbacks I got was to add ability to have more than 1 droids perform a task and I think this could improve gameplay a lot, but I didn't have time to implement it.

May I ask what do you mean by "more expansion with less hectic recipes"? Do you mean that you want simpler recipes and you want more of them, or do you want the recipes to be presented in a better way? I'm asking because I think that in general the more complex recipes are hard to work with and having all the text in a single button without actually knowing which resources you lack is bad and it makes it hard to work with. I was thinking of improving this by moving the requirements out of the button completely and having them be written down below the button, with the resources you lack be highlighted in red to show that this is what you need. I'm wondering if that would be enough and that this is the problem I need to fix, or are the recipes in general too complex and need to be easier and more straightforward?

Submitted

The recipe chains at robots get hard to follow and because of how limited fire is it's not really useful to assign multiple droids to take on each recipe. The end result is that they get dragged out a lot. And also the screen size becomes a problem.

(+1)

Screenshots show white background and black text. I have black background and white text (aka dark mode) on my computer except for the left column with resources. It has white background and unreadable white text. 

Developer (1 edit)

Hi, I've never encountered something like this. I was able to replicate it as well and I just posted an updated version which doesn't support dark mode, so everything should look like in screenshots. Thanks for reporting this!

Edit: For anyone curious why this happened. I used Vite for creating React app and by default it included CSS with support for light and dark modes, but since I changed some CSS styles but didn't update the light/dark mode styles that's why it looked broken when switched to dark mode.