I love the graphics!

Wow, really love the graphics, it's awesome! And the concept is really interesting and very original. Not sure about the theme, but it's a really nice work :)

it's a small world after all!!!
Great idea, beautiful graphics!

interesting concept, if a bit hard to get the hang of. I have to admit I actually laughed when I went to score the theme and said to myself "how does it fit small world, well it is a small world... after all...".

It did seem like the difficulty ramped up pretty quickly, I needed 1 delight in level 1 and 21 in the second level, or do you just need to meet what you got last time?

WOW! Great art, fantastic concept and it's a management game? Really good for a game jam. This can become easy a good mobile game, or even a PC game if you work a lot on it! I would love to see more of this, maybe with thematic variations, like movie themed rides or spooky rides with their own set of designs. Good work on this one!

Sorry for doubting your but is this really a one man work over 48 hours (the rule of Compo)? It looks like A LOT of work has went into this. If it is, WOW, you've done an amazing job!

The graphics is REALLY good, it looks super polished, vibrant and cute. It fits the theme because it is a "small world" exhibition I guess? :p The UI of the game is nicely designed because it is cleaned and informative when needed (The tooltips were very helpful). The gameplay is very original and innovative. However, I found it very hard to 'get' the game mechanics (the price you pay for being innovative I guess). I think a tutorial or a more gradually built up level (with gradual introduction of concepts) would help ease the entry difficulties a lot.

Overall, a really solid game, just need a bit more work to help the player :)

A very impressive game!

The amount of different variants of cards is very impressive - so many different images, and yet stylistically they all mesh perfectly together, giving the game a nice vibrant and positive mood. Some music would have enhanced the mood even more.

The difficult balancing act of considering which cards to keep, and which to reject in any given pitch, really makes the relatively simple core mechanics shine! One thing I found a bit counter-intuitive, is that the background cards applies their delight before the merge, rather than after. So you get penalized for moving a background-card from darkness into the light for instance, whereas I would have expected the reward to be applied as the background would be perceived by the ride guest.

The tooltips were very helpful while playing the game, and the instructions did a good job introducing the various game concepts. Considering the unconventional mechanics it might also be useful to have a "reset pitch" functionality, in case the player make a mistake.

Some miscellaneous feedback: I cannot find the link to the source code on the game page (or is it somewhere else?) I also experienced a few technical difficulties with starting the game. I could not get it to work in Chrome or Internet Explorer (in both cases, it displayed the two firsts cards, and half of the third, on a static dark blue background). It worked in Firefox, however the animations were a bit slow.

This was a very intriguing game to play!

>As the project lead,
>I shall awe and delight you!
>Don't mind the motor...

Really beautifully presented, great UI and artwork. Was a bit confused by the mechanics though I have to say, it took me a couple of reads of the tutorial to understand what the darker shaded cards vs the lighted cards meant. Might be easier for the player to pick up if the tutorials were more in game. Never played one of these card type games before though so maybe to others its more obvious. Interesting use of the theme.

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful comments!

(@mmason) The difficulty ramps up based on how much "overage" you get while playing. Each time through your deck, you need to get more Delight points than the last time through, so if you really jack up your Delight on a pass, then that will be the baseline for the next level.

(@nilead) Glad you like it. I would like to polish up a game based on this for mobile - I think it would work really well, too. I had this idea for a special kind of deck builder where you use all your cards at once, and the "Small World" theme really drove home for me how that could work. I think I can repurpose the mechanics for a different theme, since "people who like the Small World ride's history" is a pretty niche audience. Heh. I've got some other past game jam games I need to finish polishing up first, though!

(@jackyjjc) Glad you like the game, and some good points/suggestions. Yeah, it was all done by me in the 48 hours. I cannibalized some code from other sources and Stack Overflow here and there, but the game logic, UI, rules, graphics, etc., were all done in the 48 hours. The thing that took the most time, probably was the UI and the card designs. The graphics were all done in Flash, which is a terrible coding environment, but a great cartooning environment. It took a while to get the base doll looking right, but once I did, I was able to largely copy-paste it and tweak it to make all the other dolls. Everything else was pretty simple, art-wise. The game mechanics I fleshed out using index cards before sitting down and starting coding, so I had a pretty clear idea of how it would all work before I even got started, which helped immensely.

Regarding the source code, I don't have a formal GitHub repository or anything, just a .zip file ready to go on my server when there's a place I can enter it in the ldjam.com interface to associate it with my game. (Is there a way to do this yet? I don't see one. But I think I'm missing some stuff, since everyone else's game seems to list their game's platforms on Feedback Friends, and mine just says, "Unknown". I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be specifying this info about my game...) Anyway, as this is an HTML5 game, all the source code is viewable right in your browser - I don't obfuscate it or anything - so if you're interested in peeking under the hood, just "view source".

(@automatonvx) Yeah, I would have liked to get in an interactive tutorial, but, well, 48 hours. The game is a bit difficult to get into because it's so different than most card games - even most "deckbuilder" games - so it really could benefit with some onboarding polish. Maybe in a post-compo version!

That's a lot of polished content for the Compo. Mechanics is not easy to get, but I find it quite innovative.

Awesome graphics, the small world theme is well and innovatively addressed. It is an awesome results, even more so for a compo entry. Playing the game was a bit difficult for me, because I could not figure out if I should optimize for a low results (so not to rise the bar too high for the next round), on research points or money. So I felt a bit lost when selecting and discarding the cards. Regarding the sourcecode, I think there should be more than just the view source possibility, but putting a zip file for download is totally acceptable.

Quite interesting game, really nice art style.

Not very intuitive, but once you get your head around it it's quite fun. Could do with a tutorial.

Really great art! Good job!

(@jackyjjc) (@frodewin) - It doesn't look like there's going to be a way to specifically upload the source in the site interface, so I've added a link to the game description above.

(@invader) (@frodewin) (@geeitsomelaldy) - Yes, if I'd had more than 48 hours, I would definitely have but in some better onboarding and inline strategy tips, because this game works quite differently than other games in its "deck building" genre, so even people familiar with the genre would probably be confused.

As to strategy, not knowing whether to ramp up delight or not is exactly the challenge of the game. Ramp it up too quickly, and you hurt your chances of surviving the following round. Ramp it up too slowly, and you don't stay ahead of the constantly-ticking-forward difficulty. Eventually, the game will get the better of you, because there's only a finite number of cards to buy and as set pieces get diffused through your deck, it gets harder to connect them, so the goal is to just see how far you can get, how high a Delight score you can get, how many cards you can get into your deck, etc.

If I were to flesh this out into a fully-fledged game, it would definitely need the better onboarding mentioned earlier, but it would also need a less brutal difficulty curve and an endgame goal, since just eventually losing to the card draw isn't very satisfying. But again, 48 hours! That wasn't "in the cards", so to speak, for a compo entry.

But it certainly allowed me to explore that particular game mechanic that I had the idea for - this kind of "panoramic deckbuilder". I think it has legs, and I'll probably try to flesh it out into a more polished game. Likely with a different theme and heavily tweaked mechanics.

Anyway, thanks for playing!

Wow, so much content for a compo!! Amazing, I'm really impressed you managed to put something like this together; it's a really nice balance of trying to figure out what your doing at the same rate that the difficulty ramps up, and I found the whole thing quite relaxing! Some good onboarding would help to suss out how the combinations etc work, but if you decide to develop this further (and you definitely should) you're got a really strong footing here to go on. Well done, really very impressive indeed :smiley:

Impressive amount of content; all those graphics and even a lot of explanatory text in the beginning. Innovative type of game, visually pleasing and quite fun too.

Great work! The mechanics are very innovative, presenting a challenge that isn't quite like anything I've seen before. The art style is cohesive and fitting, and the amount of content is impressive. That said, the way scoring is currently rigged makes adds an order of operations element that results in some strange situations. For example, at one point I had a mountain and a light bank next to eachother in darkness. If I approved the mountain first, I'd lose the delight from it because it was in darkness. If I approved the light bank first, I would take the -3 eyesore penalty. What I think should have happened is that when I combined the mountain and light bank, it would recalculate so that I got both the concealment effect and the delight from the mountain. I agree with @nilead that something like this could work really well on mobile.

(@piscythe) Yes, that situation is a consequence of the fact that you collect your Delight when you approve, not at the end of the pitch.

One of the things I was hoping to get into the game - and just didn't have time in the 48 hours - was to have you collect your Delight at the end of the pitch by showing an animation of a boat going through your ride with visitors in it. As they passed each card, it would compute the delight and award it, showing them ooh-ing and aah-ing as they went, or looking unhappy because it's all in darkness. This was all predicated on getting *animated* cards in there, with the dolls moving, water flowing, etc. The way I built the graphics would have lent themselves to this - I illustrated them in Flash, which makes it easy to animate stuff like this - but I just ran out of time.

Might be possible for a more fleshed-out version, though, although like I said above, if I make a "real" game out of this, it would probably be a different theme.

That sort of post-pitch analysis step would also fix another problem with the game, which is that you can collect Delight by collapsing backgrounds, and then reject the resultant combination card. In early rounds, you can actually have a ride with ZERO cards in it that gains impressive amounts of Delight and Research points, which is of course nonsensical. (Thematically, I pawn it off on the idea that you're still pitching these ideas to the boss "behind the scenes", but they just didn't make it into the accepted blueprints. It's obviously a contrivance, though, and it would be better if the mechanics more naturally supported the narrative in this sense.)

Thanks for playing and taking the time to comment - glad you enjoyed it.

Very nice! Really comprehensive game; a lot of mechanics and cards. Art style is very cool, I knew directly it was inspired by It's A Small World After All :). Because the game is so deep, it was hard to understand the game mechanics, I felt like I was randomly accepting and rejecting cards. It would be nice if the first rounds each introduced a mechanic, so you can practice and understand each part of the game. But I get that time was short :)

Well done!

Great idea! Fit the theme really nice.

I really like the art and the concept. I feel like the need to have a special card in order to move other cards was a bit restrictive though. Any "utilities" I bought were only useful by chance because if that, it seemed to me. With a few tweaks I would love to play some more of this though, as it already seems to have a lot of depth to it.

Very interesting concept and a different take on the theme. The graphics are really colourful (I would LOVE to see this animated). I feel the UX would be improved if the game was zoomed out a bit more and the cards could be selected by clicking on them.

I'd like to say that music/sfx would really improve things here, but then on the other hand this could actually work as a physical card game to.

So all in all: Good job!

(@randomhuman) Yeah, the ability to move cards around was something I definitely struggled with at the design level. At one extreme, not letting the player rearrange cards would put you at the complete mercy of a bad deal. At the other extreme, letting players rearrange them at will would mean the cards being in a deck would be meaningless, defeating the whole purpose of it being a deckbuilder game - you could arbitrarily arrange them for the best score each pitch.

I intended the forklift to be a compromise between the two, but I think you're right that the availability of them was erring on the restrictive side. They probably need rebalancing in the sense that it is too expensive to buy them. The idea was that they would trickle in as you get more earning power - when your deck is small, you don't need as many as when your deck gets large, in other words. But resources are scarce enough that it is pretty painful to buy them!

Originally, I had the forklifts let you SWAP two cards, which felt pretty powerful but involved some UI clunkiness that I thought made things too confusing, but perhaps a more expensive forklift could be introduced later in play that does this, once the player has the other concepts under their belt already.

(@jordgubben) Heh. Yes, the original plan was to have the cards be animated. It just wasn't in the cards for the short timeframe of the competition, sadly.

I like the idea of zooming out and tapping the card you want to interact with. That might be a better UI for the way these are presented.

I also thought briefly about trying to add music during the compo. The obvious choice would be a song along the lines of the ones that inspired the game, but of course that would have a high probability of driving people away from the game if I managed to successfully evoke the spirit of the song too closely, since it really is a polarizing song. People have strong opinions about it!

Anyway, thanks for playing, and for taking the time to leave feedback.