This game was pretty good, took me a few tries to get a station setup I liked, killed a few astronauts in the discovery that electricity matters.

A Fantastic game! I love these types of games, and you've done a really good job on a lot of fronts. Firstly I thought the music was well chosen and matched the game well.

The tutorial was short, non complicated and taught the basics well then left me to my own devices. Good job on that point. The voice recordings and the effect added to them added an extra bit of awesomeness. I also liked the little 'daily' pondering of your captain as his time in space advances.

Game core mechanic was brilliant, and I could see this really being expanded with more things to do. You have a really good base here for further expansion. One of my favorite games I've played via LD so far. Well polished, and feels very complete.

Sorry I haven't really got any constructive criticism on stuff I'd improve as this hits all the right spots with me. Maybe replace 'carrots' with a more general food? I dunno I'm just trying to think of something helpful to put :D

Thanks for creating this and good job!

Edit - OH just checked my notes I made while playing and I forgot to comment on how well the construction felt for the space station. I loved the snap together building process for the space station. Worked really well!

Great game! I'm trying to play a bunch of games over my lunchbreak but I'll definitely be returning to this when I get home to play it some more, the music is great, the concept is ace and I love any kind of construction game so I was always going to love this! Solid mechanics, well put together and a pleasure to play. really well done :smiley:

Very nice! I'm going to be coming back to this one to play with the systems a bit more. I really liked the way the astronauts moved around and I'm interested to see how the later-game optimization goes.

My only small complaint is that it was easy to forget to hit cancel after building a room and accidentally build another copy of it when trying to click on the command station to order supplies. Either auto-canceling after building or using a separate menu item for ordering supplies would have helped me.

I'm also not a fan of voice-over for text that's on the screen, but that's just a personal preference.

Overall, great game!

Great game! I didn't know how to build stuff at first(because i'm dumb) but after i found out i had a lot of fun building and designing my base.

That was pretty cool! I didn't last very long (maybe I should have held off on that second solar panel on Day 1) but that's a really clever idea that was well executed. Keep up the good work!

I really enjoyed this game, and I thought the resource model was well done. The building process is pretty cool an intuitive, although I had some trouble with the solar panels.

However, I found that it was annoying to have to add up my resource usage in my head each turn to know what I needed. It would be nice if the UI showed you what your modules were using or something. I didn't enjoy the voice-overs, perhaps because they are much louder than anything else.

Reminds me of a really really old game I played in a web games page when I was little. This isn't as polished as that one, but it could make a pretty neat little game in the future if you keep working on it.

@bentglasstube We noticed that we probably should add the information you mentioned with the combined resource usage. Unfortunately we didn't have any time to implement this and that part of the game wasn't implemented that well so it would have taken quite some time. But should we further develop this game we would certainly include it.

Btw. you can disable the voice overs with `m`.

I like it, obviously not as polished as it could be but pretty darn good for a jam game! My biggest gripe for the longest time was that I wished I could move the menu out of the way! Then i figured out i could move the space station and all was well :grinning:

Awesome game. Spent literally hours on this just now.

The first couple of moves in this game are super difficult, the rest (once you have your mining established) are a bit easier. Ideally the opposite should be true. Nonetheless I enjoyed the challenge and so forth.

There were some small bugs - like I found that if you ask for a shipment before building a storage place at the start, you actually get one - but they weren't serious. Graphics were good. I liked the effects around the planet. Pixel art for the station was near professional-quality, and the music built the atmosphere well. I like how the game has an underlying story, too. Voice acting was fine. Could have been more sound effects. The UI was ok, nothing special. +/- for adding resources could sometimes be a bit temperamental. I liked the building system but felt like it would have been much easier if the game didn't automatically assume I wanted to build infinite numbers of something. Mechanically, the game had a solid number of resources to manage which never felt overwhelming but had a good amount of complexity.

Overall this is a high-calibre game, tons of potential, and a good job by all the team members.

It's a really good game, and I wished that I could have played more of it, but I can't seem to get past a couple of days. The deliveries almost always stop after three shipments and I die rapidly. Maybe I built something I wasn't supposed to, but when I do nothing after the tutorial and keep ordering food and water, it lasts for days before the shipments stop.

Really impressed with how much you got done. Its rare to see tutorials in game for jam entries but always appreciated. The voice acting was a nice bit of polish as well. If you get a chance check out our entry https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/down-the-rabbit-hole

Holy shit was writing a long detailed comment and accidentally hit back in browser... A more concise version to follow...

Stuff I liked:
- Great voice narration and sound overall
- Alot of gameplay, I don't even know how long I spent building my spacestation
- Awesome somber feeling
- Seems well balanced
- Great story

Stuff I didn't like as much:
- Could not get a response on the Radio? Is it possible? I scanned alot of times with the same response
- Did not like the speedup buttons
- Chrashed quite far in (Web version, screenshot of error)


Overall great game and I will probably come back and play this more later.

An interesting game and an impressive genre to try in a LD -- but I ran into some issues. Most notably, getting past the 1st day seems unnecessarily difficult. Perhaps it would have been better to start the space station off with the basics for basic survival?

Great game. Harsh opening, (I died my first 5 tries) but fun and interesting. Best sound production I've heard thus far this Jam. UI for total daily resource costs would have made this an amazing game. The tutorial and story fit very well. Solid resource management sim.

Great game. Quite a difficult learning curve at first... kept dying on day two, because I could not keep up with the resources needed. Made it a bit easier once I realized that I could remove the previous day's orders. Perhaps a reset on the orders should happen on delivery, as I kept thinking "how do I make more money to buy stuff?".

Either way - this is an impressive amount of stuff for a Jam game, and I'll certainly be looking into this game some more later on.

The web version does not scale up to full screen - so I was playing with a tiny little game window (which is why I had such a hard time understanding the order system). Downloaded it instead and played full screen on my computer which made things a whole lot more fun, and visually pleasing.

Awesome game! I accidentally killed a few astronauts before realizing water was important... Reminds me of dwarf-fortress and FTL. I noticed some issues with the responsiveness of the GUI though. Sometimes it seemed like I need to click a button multiple times for it to register in the shipment screen.

Great concept, great look and feel too. I did encounter GwtException: Task already accepted. I really liked the music too.

Hi @smbe19! About your comment on my game: Well, at first there were a placeholder ALERT telling you that everyone died and it would force the game to start over. Then I disabled it to make my testing easier... and by the end I thought it would be fitting to let it goes endlessly... although people will simply stop showing up later on the game (because the world is pretty done by then). Thanks for playing!

Also, I'm glad you enjoyed the alien/dino dude. It was the one I had the most fun making the voice for, lol. The audios usually take a while to load, but should work on chrome =\

Also, damn... this is way more complicated than my entry! I had to reset the game (or just die) a lot to try a new approach and I still can't get things right. And that's a good thing haha. This type of game should be difficult. Good job!

Wow, this is a very solid game! Very impressive for such a short time. I like the voiceovers, they add to the atmosphere of the game. The music is also very nice. The graphics are basic, but communicate clearly what is going on. it is actually quite challenging to manage the space station, but did still feel fair. My game (web version) also crashed after a short time, something about a task being added that was already accepted - sorry, I closed the tab already. Amazing work, I think this is the best game I have played so far!

Great Jam game. Really solid audio with the voice over tutorials, very impressive. The game mechanics are great and challenging. Really good job!

Very well polished and the mood largely due to the narration was spot on. Best game I've played so far

You basically made a fully functional Spacebase DF-9 kind of game in 72 hours with tutorials and other messages fully voiced. This is nothing short of incredible! Spent a lot of time with this entry. My only gripe is the choice of the font, it was kind of hard to read for me for some reason.

Very good game, probably my favorite LD38 game so far! I crashed once with no error while speeding up time when an audio log came up, couldn't reproduce thought.
* The building felt great, the graphics are simple but very good and portray the needed info like if something is disabled.
* The audio logs are a very nice touch and add a lot to the mood of the game.
* The resources seemed balanced and there wasn't too many that it was overwhelming.

My only complaint, if you can call it that, is that it would have been nice to be able to see your daily +/- for each resource. As it is, you kind of just have to guess or do the math on whether or not you're in the black. All the numbers on production/consumption are given to the player so I see no reason to not also provided stats for them as well.

Also I'm not sure if it was a bug or intended, but you can't disable the hydroponics even though in theory you could realistically stop watering your plants if you needed extra water to survive.

All in all, I really enjoyed playing Commander's Log, it was very difficult but I felt like that was appropriate and definitely added to my overall enjoyment of the game. Excellent work!

@thendash I'm one of the developers and yes, you're absolutely right that you should see your daily +/- balance for each resource. That was the plan, but we unfortunately didn't have time to implement it.

Regarding the plants: We discussed for a while if we should allow the plant modules to be turned off. In the end, we decided to not give the player that option. So it is not a bug, but of course we don't know if it was a good design decision.

Wow awesome game! Played it way longer than I wanted to. :D

I died after 9 days on my first try, and as I felt the game was kind of repetitive I was hesitant to try again. But on the second try WW3 happend, I've never seen something so unexpected happen in a LD game! Very well done! :D

I built the Cryogenics. What do I do now? I cannot interact with it.

Here are some things that you could improve on:
- Once you placed a module (but before it's being built) it would be nice to see some feedback, otherwise you kind of have to guess that it's there.
- It would be nice to see at what rate you are gaining resources per day.
- It wasn't clear to me what certain modules do, especially the magnet and the radar. (I'm aware that they are mainly there for the story, but at least some basic description would be nice.)
- The speed settings are great, but it would be nice to be able to jump to the next day. At the beginning when you are waiting for the deliveries it can be a little bit boring.
- I didn't quite get why I needed more astronauts. On my second go I just stayed with two and that worked fine for me.

The pixelart graphics are well done. However, they don't quite fit the 3D background.

In general: Great story, great music, great mood! I love that you have a voice read the story, greatly improves on the mood!
I also like that you built a module (the Radio) that's only there for the story, kind of fun.

Wow - there is a lot of simulation and depth to this game for the span of the game jam! This is very cool. Reminds me of games like Prison Architect, Dwarf Fortress, and the like. Well done. Bookmarking this to come back and play it later.

Interesting game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcx-zIJDIVM