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(1 edit)

Wow this definitely seems like one of those game jam games that becomes a popular steam game later down the line. It reminds me of "mini motorways" a lot. I love the ambition and I would say you pulled it off with flying colours.

Though a game made in 96h is always going to have some rough edges. If you plan on working on this more I have some feedback:

1) Changing between road types needs to be smoother. Building a bridge is a bit clunky since it requires 9 inputs:5 mouse drags and 3 button clicks (Drag road, space, Drag ramp, Space, Drag Bridge, Space, Drag Ramp, Space, Drag Road). There's a few ways to go about this, you could make it automatic, ditch the ramp type entirely and just allow roads and bridges to connect, or maybe "click+scroll" can just change the height of the road. Either way I think 9 inputs for 1 bridge is far too much.

2) Remove the "directional roads" mechanic. I'm not sure there's any reason the player would want to place the roads the wrong way around, so just make every road bidirectional. For example in the image below it's not immediately clear what is wrong and why the game says the loops are incomplete when they are clearly complete. What's worse is that finding the problem requires deleting every piece and putting it back to see if it's the one that's backwards. The graphics give no indication which way the roads are facing.

3) Lastly I would probably make the "erase" just erase tiles of all types. Since if I want to rethink a section it's a bit tedious to delete every type one at a time.

With all this negative feedback I don't want to give the impression that the game is bad, I actually think it's one of the best games in the jam.

I've been thinking about all the points you just made. People have been pointing them out to some capacity.

  1. Ramp: I'm going to experiment with some different ideas, including the ones you mentioned. Although I really want to keep the ramp, because it adds an extra level of difficulty to planning, which I like. One of the reasons I allowed bridges to go directly into nodes was kind of because of this slight clunkiness you mentioned.
  2. Directional roads: I'm probably not going to get rid of directional roads, but I have some ideas to at least improve some of the issues people have with them. First of all, some way to check for incorrect paths, either not connected to any node or directly facing a path going the opposite way. And secondly, probably some kind of way to see what direction the roads are going visually. I do like not being able to tell and having to keep track of them, or debug them if I mess up. I'm probably in the minority given some of the feedback I've received.
  3. Erasing: I'll implement a button and a double right-click shortcut to swap to a state where you can clear all paths. I'll also have a setting to make that the default, since it might be more intuitive for some people. Maybe it's better to make "erase all" the default, and allow players to toggle into a more precise, path-specific deletion mode. I'll need to experiment. But path-specific deletion is what I liked using, and is very necessary in the larger, messier levels, so getting rid of it is not something I'll do.

Thank you so much for the feedback! As you can see I have been thinking about it.