I feared the game would be too confusing/difficult for people to enjoy.
If you managed to get to the end, feel free to mention it and how many people you won with here!
Thank you so much for playing our LD38 game.
Very enjoyable experience. Biggest gripe was the sounds, just not mixed very well, some stuff was a little abrasive (I think the food noise not sure). Almost everything was destroyed because I didn't build any towers. Eventually built back up making sure everything was covered - it doesn't seem like you'd ever need the 4 worker (!) tower upgrade. It actually seems really hard to lose but that's not what I was playing for and I guess you've got the difficulty slider in there. Overall fun, visually beautiful game. Congrats :)
edit: 57 people!
I definitely agree with you on the sound, I had a lot of trouble just trying to get it realtively balanced in-game, from all kinds of crazy varying volume. I suppose it's my fault for throwing Billy in the deep end, asking him to crank out sounds before the game jam ended.
I'm very much so wanting to do a lot more with the audio in a future update, when the judging is over, I think it's really important towards how fun a game feels; so I'll probably go over balancing it when we manage to get around to that.
I'm very glad you had fun with the game! And I definitely appreciate the feedback.
57 People is pretty much the same as what I win with, Billy's highest score was 1111 people, but he's painfully talented at these types of games.
Thanks!
Loved the game and would be thrilled to see more of it!
After a couple complete playthroughs, trying to maximize the size of my city before launching my spaceship, I still couldn't really figure out what the walls were for? I found that the arrow towers were more than enough to defend my island.
I was really liked the song at the end. I wish that the game would calculate a score or something based on how long it took for me to launch my spaceship and how many people I had on it.
We're hoping to get an update out soon-ish, and having a final score at the end would definitely be something I'd be happy to include!
In terms of the walls, they were originally designed to mostly help against pirate footsoldiers, but we didn't have enough time to get the ground-based combat in the game. The barracks was also supposed to be where you made your own footsoldiers from.
I'm glad you enjoyed the game! And thank you for the feedback.
Played it and won with 107 people. Took me a while to realize that you needed to click the farms and orchards to get the food. I was definitely expecting the pirate attacks to get increasingly more difficult, but didn't seem so? Really cool game. I liked the art and music, the sound effects weren't too annoying, reminded me of Game Dev Tycoon's bubbles, haha. Good atmosphere and I was hoping for a new level at the end! I've been kinda thinking of making something similar, because I love to do map generation and city builders.
Came across this today from a RockPaperShotgun article and have to say it's simplicity while being strategic is great, love it! My first game just playing to get through it, I managed to save 94 people. I decided to play again and finally got tired of waiting for new land to spawn and saved 823 people.
My biggest 2 "complaints" right now are a lack of ability to pause (and/or save) the game as well as to adjust audio/music volume.
Overall super fun though, thanks!
Really loved the game. Hope you'll develop it further as it's quite amazing. I did beat it on my first try with 80 people, but almost lost it all when my wood / stone production cratered. That caught me by surprise. I wasn't expecting the forests / mines to give out, but I guess the game would have been too easy if those were everlasting.
If you ever do a final score at the end, I hope you'll have it weighed in two directions, or give two different scores. One measuring how big & complicated your settlement was, and one rewarding the minimalists who managed to survive X number of turns with relatively few. I could see both strategies being viable challenges.
Hi,
I sing up for itch.io just to leave this comment. Thank you for this beautiful game, I really enjoyed it :)
Do you have any ETA for next update ? Where I can follow development of next update ?
Edit: I was lucky that I finished game at first run, I managed to leave island with 89 people. Took me some time to realize that mine/lumberjack can destroy land. Some stats about income would be useful.
I feel honoured that you like the game this much! Thank you.
We're not too sure exactly when the next update will be ready, we're hoping to get a smaller update out soon after the Ludum Dare judging ends. If we're lucky, we might be able to fit some of the bigger stuff we had in mind in there too, like the blood moon.
(To be honest, I'm a bit scared of ruining the game by accident.)
There's currently no way to follow development, but it seems like it'd be a really cool idea! I'll make sure I talk to Billy about it when I can.
Thank you very much for the comment.
Just finished the game and I really enjoyed it! Finished with 46 people. My main complaints would be around the combat/defense. The first time a ship showed up I felt like there wasn't much warning, and I didn't have the resources to build a tower at the time so I lost a large chunk of the land while waiting for enough resources to generate to build a tower. After that first ship though I built a few towers and it felt like there was never a threat again. The walls weren't really necessary and I though the building for speeding up towers would be necessary later but it wasn't. Maybe give more warning for the first ship, and have harder ships later as a solution? The game's interface was mostly good, but it took me a bit to figure out you could right click to unselect something, always having something selected early on while trying to click resources was a bit frustrating. Also the highlight for which tiles you can collect resources from are occasionally hard to spot behind buildings. One last suggestion is that I wish I could see my finished town after completing the game. Showing it at the end or having a screenshot/share feature at the end of the game would be neat. Despite mainly mentioning my few complaints though I don't want to leave the wrong impression. I liked the game quite a bit, keep up the good work!
Beat it and really enjoyed it. It took a few tries but I feel like I figured out "the system" eventually after which it became quite easy. The pirates never seem to become much of a threat, and placing an archery tower as soon as they turn up is usually enough to deter them succesfully.
It would be nice if there was a way to see how many of each building you have - the lumber and mining shacks are not always easy to see and it's useful to know how many you have generating income for you.
EDIT: Beat it multiple times, lowest was around 85 people and highest 110+, but it could be higher I suppose - there is a point after which you could conceivably expand infinitely.
A well balanced and fun little game for short play (i.e. aiming to complete the ship as quickly as possible).
Not so well balanced for long play (i.e. aiming to maximise population) because of the slow rate of land area growth. If aiming to support long play maybe make tweaks such as resource and built tiles becoming blank instead of being deleted when the resource is depleted or the building destroyed, or making the tile spawn rate proportional to population.
Pitching in to call this a great game. IT's just so well polished and rounded, everything synergizes together, from the UI to mechanics to "lore" (whatever little there is). It does seem too easy, as others pointed, but it definitely comes off as a "relax and build" game rather than a "I want a challenge."
The only criticism is that I would not care to reply it again as it does not have enough complexity to warrant multiple playthroughs. Which is totally fine for a small LD game, and it doesn't necessarily need to be replayable.
Cheers!