I don't really understand why I'm losing. My days aren't up yet, but it just stops and says that I lost for some reason. The graphics are really good, the format is right-on for a sim/clicker type game, I'm just having trouble figuring out the mechanics or how to play correctly. Would love to know more, I absolutely adore these kinds of games.

@bugninja

Thanks for your feedback !

You may lose because of starvation. It really isn't explicit when your people are starving or why (although a text should appear on the right screen when it happens).

Some common errors are to build too much field in the beginning, because they cost 20 food to produce. You also have to make sure you allocate workers in your fields so they can grow.

I hope it'll help you. If not, make sure to let us now ! Have fun!

Finished the game on the first try with a score of 59698.

I really love this game. The graphics are certainly programmer art but fully functional and it gets the point across. A wonderful little game with lots of long-term potential. I'd love to see more challenges to it to make it harder to win, as I won in just about half the required time.

@scottgoldsmith

Thanks a lot, and well played !

Yes the challenge is quite unbalanced, that's for sure ! we would have loved to have some more time to fine-tune it but we were really short at the end. I think a game like this would need at least a full day to be balanced properly.

Anyway, thanks again for your feedback!

I like the art for the buildings and the gentle background music. If you had more interesting background art, then the buildings would look fantastic. The game itself is nice, but could have used more of a tutorial.

I like the art and the audio! Really nice game, although it was tough to understand..

Great game! I like graphics and music is very fitting. But GUI is not very convenient =) I sacrificed 100 lives and lost, I guess it's because it was all I had =)

I came for the management I stayed for the chill :D
This game has a special appeal, the music is calm and invites you to keep playing. The game doesn't have any flaw, nor it bugs at any moment, it's easy and unstressful, great for spending some time. I'd only point out that stone was unnecessary, or at least I didn't find it any use :P
Anyway, I starved some people to death but at least I had a good time :)

@move127 @maxkyckling @net3ton @xarras

Thank you a lot for the feedback !

Xarras : The stone is actually useful for evolving your buildings, later in the game. I'm glad you enjoyed the mood !

We're working on a post-ludum dare version, so we'll try to make it a little bit more challenging at the end and easier to understand. THanks again

Hahaha the sounds are they all made by mouth? I find them awesome and hilarious. The game is cool too, enjoyed playing for a little while, very nice entry!

@stratoskakalis Yes they where all made by mouth! I'm glad you like them, We had a lot of fun recording them! Thank you!

Nice game! Good luck!

Nice game. I enjoyed it quite a lot and i finished with a score of 5854 :D. However its sometimes hard to find out wich buildings still need workers because you have to click on every single one of them :D

@sirmichel Thanks and congratulations for the score ! To see which buildings need workers, you can also hover your mouse over them and it will show you the current workers in it

@jeu-embouteillage ah thanks i didn't notice that :D

difficult to understand at the beginning but a very good idea for the game :)

Score of 12798.75! For a while I didn't understand that the building in the center was the church to be upgraded, then my engine really took off. Easy to pick up mechanics, enjoyed the flow and tech tree. Were the sacrificed villagers at each stage selected randomly or in order of creation? Hovering with the mouse to see the number of workers was a little tedious, would be helpful to overlay the number graphically. Very nice game!

I like it conceptually, but there are many UI and other issues.

Resources should be pictures (you can just use Unicode symbols, aka emojis. It is equally as complicated as displaying just text plus finding the correct symbol.). You should use different font, Arial is generally a good choice. Building options should display right next to the building, not on the other side of the screen, since there is so little information.

Also, there are several general RTS conventions every RTS game should follow unless it has a really good reason not to. If you are building a structure, you should build only one and then get back to default mouse mode, unless you are holding shift (in which case it is as it is now). Right click should cancel selected building.

Buildings should definitely have people working in them displayed at all times, not only when you hover over them. Especially since your dudes die over time, and you don't know which buildings they died in, and where they need replacements.

Default HTML buttons look ugly, and it is really simple to have nice looking buttons. Good start is a [button css generator](https://www.bestcssbuttongenerator.com/).

Also, the whole layout is very wide. imho a web game should fit into width of max 1000px. 1600px is just way over the top. You should just scrap the brown panels. Have info from panel on the left on top of the screen, with just resources and worker status (as is conventional). The panel on the right should be below the play area (again, as is conventional). Then, you comfortably fit into 800x600 without any major changes to the play area

Now for the actual game. As it is, it is very easy and there is not much pressure to evolve. You can win just fine (and perhaps it is the optimal way) if you build just the basic buildings without upgrades, get 185 dudes and use them to evolve 3 times. Evolving doesn't feel like "whoa, finally, I cannot wait to see what I just unlocked". As it is now, having much more restricted space could help, as you would have to be much more efficient with it, and evolving certainly helps with that. Or just have evolves unlock something essential for further development. Maybe, if fields unlocked after the first evolve, so at start you would have to live on hunters, and after evolving transfer into more efficient fields.

Also, you can get to infinite state where you just keep sacrificing workers and get potentially infinite score.

Whew, that was a lot to cover. Hope I didn't discourage you and you will work some of my suggestions into post-compo! (I don't see any difference between compo and post-compo?)

nice little strategy, but that's too easy

@boltkey Wow that's a very detailed review ! Thanks for taking the time to play the game and leave such great feedback !

Your comment is a goldmine for future amelioration. I'd say that the most difficult task for us was to try to deliver a finished game. As you pointed out, the UI is terrible, and that's because we did it really quickly without thinking this through. However you gave some pretty useful advice on how exactly to improve it, and improve the game feel in general. (thanks for button css generator)

I like your idea of a more restricted play zone, and yeah, as it is, the evolve mechanic is not rewarding, so thank you for pointing that out.

However the main reason the game doesn't look polished is mainly because we're lazy, so I'm sorry to say that we probably won't include these changes on the post-compo version (but if we do, I'll be sure to let you know).

But I will for sure keep all that in mind for future projects !

To answer your question : post-compo version is slightly more balanced (well i hope at least) than the compo version which is even easier.

Once again, I can only thank you for the great feedback. It doesn't discourage me at all, it makes me realize the importance of a good UI and Ux (and how to make it better for this game). So yeah thank you very much !

P.S. : I checked out your game, I really enjoyed it ! Really cool concepts you've got there !

@vlad11 @mgoadric @tish Thank you for the feedback !

mgoadric : For the sacrificed villagers, we prioritize unemployed ones, and if there's not enough unemployed, we kill random workers. Congrats on your score!

Tish : thank you, may I ask you what version you played on ? (jam or post-jam) ?

@jeu-embouteillage Jam version

Hey samizebigue! Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my livestream!

If you'd like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/346059114?t=02h14m10s

Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D

💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady

https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin