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So I am very confused about a lot of things.

The game seemingly runs normally, at 40-50 fps on my 1080 Ti. Unless I look at the God-rays of the sun there aren’t a lot of frame drops.

I burned some stuff, I placed a town, spawning 3 dragoons. I see 200 something stone and lots of wood on the bottom right bar and assume the game is asking me to gather those.

At this point I am scared of leaving my town because I might not find my way back but I manage to carefully collect all the resources and I hit B around one of my guys that didn’t move at all and I manage to remove all the relevant items from my inventory, but nothing happens so I have no idea what is going on. At some point I realize I have some items like houses in my inventory. I try to place them around, they disappear from my inventory but there is no visual indication of where they are supposed to go or what total materials I need. The bottom-right menu shows me a list of materials related to the very last construction related item I placed but when I deliver those items to the town nothing happens probably because they already have an invisible queue of all the other items. I don’t remember where any of the items I “placed” is supposed to go because there is no visual indication.

Night falls, I try to walk around and explore and gather materials because there is nothing else to do. One of my guys have wandered pretty far away at this point so I find him and build a dirt tower to mark his location. I find a river but there is nothing of interest there so I keep wandering and gathering stuff till morning.

At morning, Mint is here and she is inside a little crater with the “town” guy and she SCREAMS and gives me some items that I can’t tell what they are and when I right click the items disappear one by one.

The dragoon that wandered off is properly lost and the other dragoon is stuck seemingly placing yellow leaf blocks? I try to deliver some items to the town but it changes nothing with his progress. I try to place other structure items, nothing changes. I have no way of seeing what the next thing I’m supposed to do is at this point. If I’m supposed to deliver a specific item, the game doesn’t tell me. It instead tells me on the bottom right that I need 1 wood because the last item I placed was a fence.

At night I was starting to experience chunk errors, where a chunk would transform in front of my eyes, appear higher or lower or rotated. On the 2nd day the chunks were transforming right under my feet.

So there are a lot of cool ideas in the game and it was great chill vibes in the first day while I was just farming for materials but I am unable to make any actual progress in the game.

Some suggestions:

  • The game should let the player only place 1 build order at a time OR let the player see the details of every build order and cancel them individually.

  • There should be a way to easily “find” the location of the town as well as each build and npc.

  • Please have a hover text or something on the inventory letting the player know what the item actually is. It is difficult to tell based on the art for some of them.

  • Speaking of text, the tutorial voice is fine but it is a lot to take in every time so I wish it was also displayed as text somewhere on the screen that the player can read and remember what to do next at any time.

  • Instead of having drop items to town as a button, it would be much easier if, for example, when the player is not in placing mode, right and left click instead interacted with the npc’s and opened up menus where you could see the details of what they were doing and what they need etc.

  • Minor nitpick but for items like logs, instead of counting the number of atoms in the block broken, the inventory slot should already know how many atoms make up 1 block of “log” and should do the atom to block conversion and display the number of whole logs it would make. I understand dirt blocks and such but clicking a log and only getting like 60-75% of a log doesn’t make sense.

I know all this is asking a lot for an already very complex game.

I love a lot of the ideas you have here. But unfortunately there are a lot of things that made it really hard to actually keep playing the game as intended.

(+1)

Hi, first, thank you for playing the game.

1.) Thank you for the performance numbers, the 1080 Ti was not tested at all, so I'm glad it was playable.
2.) The builder is rather slow -- we can increase his break/place rate for clarity of "what" he is doing.
3.) Yes, this stacks them on the queue, thank you for finding a bug here -- it should display the resources of the first structure that needs built, not the last. We will correct this.
4.) The crater exists because a raider spawned and was not defended -- he does damage the player when he explodes at the town spawn.
5.) Mint gives you Boba Tea, which is a good healing item, if you were at max HP it does nothing
6.) Yeah the farmer places "crops" which were intended to be food for your town, and it would be important to protect him such that your town didn't starve. There's a lot of "it could've been better if we had more time" going on in this jam, considering the scale and difficulty (technical and otherwise) of the project as a solo-programmer.
6.) The chunk error is strange, that behavior hasn't really been encountered. Perhaps if you're near (0, 0) there is a known bug which happens due to lacking a "null" entry for chunk entries on the GPU

Regarding the ideas for additions:
1.) Yes, this was a planned feature but time reasons became an issue, thank you for the bug report though earlier, displaying the first in the queue is correct, not the last.
2.) I understand the desire for a minimap or some sort of location, that's a good idea, but I'm not sure that can be implemented under the scope of the jam "bugfix/optimizations"
3.) Tooltips were a planned feature, time reasons once again
4.) Subtitles were also considered, but the tutorial was added in the last 2 hours of the jam.
5.) Yeah, that's a great idea, I think we planned to have some interface with the villager (if not directly, through some sort of worker hut block), but that also just suffers from "time constraint"
6.) The hardest thing is converting atoms to blocks, and stenciled unique blocks like logs and leaves were definitely the hardest to figure out -- we opted for very simple logic there, but you're right on the whole of how it should work.

R6 Now released with bugfix to builder current orders, rain spawning on reload, and increased farmer / builder movement rate for clarity.

For the chunk errors, when I looked at the console window I saw some errors about not being able to load chunks but those errors were seemingly always popping up but the actual visible chunk errors only started appearing after time passed. When I found a chunk mutated, the npc’s that were on them were still there and burnt ground was sometimes still burnt although these chunks would sometimes come with new fresh trees in locations where I had already cut down all the trees.

I hope my message did not come across as aggressive or demanding. I understand there are lots of limitations to what can be done in 2 weeks and I just tried to be as thorough as possible while explaining my experience.

I think the concept of atoms is so sick. I see a lot of interesting gameplay potential in a game where the understanding of all blocks being made of atoms becomes relevant to gameplay. If it needs to become second nature for players to understand atoms and incorporate that understanding into gameplay I think it could be very cool. So maybe scratch that about showing 1 logs worth of log per unit in the inventory and embrace atoms as a unit within inventory? If you want though.

1.) One of the "could not load world/x_y.chk" is a normal message, that's the save/loader having issues. Interesting about the weird chunk errors, I will have to figure that one out because I've not yet encountered that. I've seen visibly that chunks may glitch near (0, 0) but yeah, that's odd.

No problem, I didn't consider it demanding, I just wanted to make sure I addressed every point. I really did want to expand on the simulation, and I have a lot of ideas on how to, but as of right now it would take significant change. One idea was the "saturatedness" of a block, absorbing water from rain or water flow, and that growing crops actually requires irrigation of some sort.

For the inventory stuff, I initially wanted to do the raw count but at least it didn't look good on UI so I made it look nicer, but yeah you're right on that it needs to be more clear.