Post-Compo Updates

"Your task is simple"... (>w<) It's pretty cool how it all seems a little overwhelming in the beginning but after a while things start to make sense, until it all breaks down again in the end. Good stuff!

I like it. There are a lot of nice built in conflicts that make you have to re-evaluate what is more important at any given time. Nothing is obviously the right thing to be doing at any given time. I like that. I like the art style as well. Nice job.

Interesting game mechanic! Gets hectic pretty quick without being too unmanageable. Strange, but it sort of reminds me of some of the old Game & Watch games!

Also, cool music! I gotta check out this Bosca Ceoil program you listed up below.

This is really well put together. The perspective on the conveyer belts to the green refresh bar on the upgrade machine show you paid good attention to detail. It's a fun little pattern matching industrial sim. game. I enjoyed it, and definitely felt the challenge of having too many ores

Really solid compo entry - yeah, at first glance its a little like a Game & Watch title, but it has a nice layering of mechanics and a dilemma between upgrades and deposits, along with a 'top order' scoring system to add much more to it.

My only real criticism would be that the ore deposit and upgrade machine behave differently - in my first game I could not get upgrades to work at all, as I was trying to deposit single ores and got a message that they needed to be refined first, while the deposit machine would accept any number held.

Given its a Compo Entry so I would expect some flaws here and there anyway due to time constraints, the fact that that was the only thing I noticed is a testament to how solid an entry this really was - good job!

@mrnyarlathotep - I wish the upgrade problem had crossed my mind during the compo. I had forgotten to take into account that someone could be carrying a single ore into the upgrader, and caught it using the "ores don't match pattern" failure message (though undocumented, you can have the upgrade ores in the opposite order too, it just matters that you're holding both of the appropriate color). Once I'm somewhere with a more stable connection I'll create a post-jam version that fixes that. Even better would be to add a small storage on the upgrade machine that could take a single valid ore from the player and hold it for a complete upgrade. Thank you for the feedback!

@michael-feldman, @jjjjason, @bryceltaylor, @instantnoedel - Thank you all very much for the kind words. I'm very glad that you liked the game!

I had to actually pull my self away from this game. Awesome job. I thought at first it wasn't very easy seeing what patterns needed to be matched and which were more valuable but after a few play throughs it became pretty intuitive. A lot of fun. Good job.

Whoa is this a retro classic? Looks and feels like one.

Neat time management game. It's simple and easy to get into. At least in the beginning there's no reason to do any recipes other than the best. It would be cool if there was a combo system where recipes required only 3 ores and the 4th carried piece would start the next recipe and trigger the combo. Then there'd be a reason to use some of the lesser scoring recipes.

I found this game fun, but very challenging. I was terrible at managing my resources correctly and found it very overwhelming, but that's why I like the game. I like the points system too, as it gives a reason to choose between highest earning ores, or the ore which is overflowing.

Overall, a fun game. Good entry!

A great idea. I don't think that having a dozen of alloys to choose from actually benefits the gameplay though. The player just doesn't have enough time to react and change the strategy - the list is too big.

@rasm Thanks for the input! I'll consider adding a mode for that. It sounds like an interesting idea, and could speed up scoring a little bit. Combining that with other feedback has given me an interesting idea for scoring that I'll have to see the feasibility in adding.

@zinkler The purpose of the number of scoring options is to give the player something other than the higher scoring options to aim for -- those options give the player lower-scoring options that might be better for keeping your game going. I do plan on using your feedback to make post-LD enhancements to the game, though.

@twotwentyfour, @one-seed-fruit, @mcjammydodger Thank you very much for the kind words! I'm glad that people are enjoying the game. It was a lot of fun to make!

There is definitely something neat here. The decisions about moving from the different colors and dropping them off works well. I liked looking at the different patterns and the way they changed although I found myself usually just looking at the most valuable pattern, but even that in itself was pretty interesting.

This is a nice game. I like the various decisions you give the player. There was one play-through where I just tried to upgrade everything from the get-go, but that didn't work out so well. Lol. It's a good take on the theme without making the game impossible. I'm curious to see what kind of scores people are getting. Here's mine:


@candlesan Yeah, that's one of the things that could use a little tweaking. My hope was that most users would find a lucrative lower value pattern and use it if they need to stay alive, but in an arcade style game what player wouldn't go for just the highest scoring item? I have a couple ideas on things I might try and implement and change, but I'm going to hold off until after voting so I can keep the HTML5 version the definitive version.

@cubeeo You've actually stumbled upon one of the scoring oddities that I didn't realize I had missed. I designed all the mechanics around only giving the multiplier value to patterns on the board, but forgot to actually implement the check in the GameManager's AddScore function. So as a result you could get a big multiplier and then start feeding in No Match or 4-of-a-kind patterns and get bonus points from it. Though in hindsight, aside from the "Last Scored" panel being outright wrong, is that entirely a bad thing? I'm honestly not sure.

While this type of game is not really for me, I have to admit that this is a pretty clever and complete entry.

I felt that the little dude moved a little too slow for my liking, though, and the speed penalty when things got messy made that worse. When I accidentally grabbed the wrong ore for an upgrade, the walk back to the alloy machine felt like a year. That's a time penalty and a score penalty in one because those ores also didn't score many points. I guess I get easily overwhelmed. :smile:

The art has a *lot* of grey. It works well to separate the coloured ore from the background, but it always makes me sad to see so much of it. The upgrade machine sound effects meant I could not play this on my headset in fear of permanent damage. Ouch. :wink:

@flaterectomy Sorry for the sound balance issues. Unfortunately that was one of the last things I implemented and it didn't get the attention it needed. In regard to the grey color problem, I spent most of my time on the gameplay and graphics aren't something I feel I have much talent for. I'll take your input on movement speed and ore disposal for a post-jam version.

This one got pretty exciting pretty quick! I was spilling things left and right.
The sound was definitely harsh, and the controls were a little slow, but I felt like it just needed a bit more polish to make it really good.

@samusoidal @flaterectomy I lowered the volume of the upgrade sounds. I know you've already done your play/rates but hopefully the sounds aren't quite so ear-bleeding inducing now.

Nice one! I managed to get a score of 11394. I really liked the way it forced you to choose between different tactical possibilities, especially since later in the game it was hard to get between the upgrader and the refiner. If there's one thing I'd add, it'd be steadily increasing difficulty.

Very cool game, though I find a bit unfair the speed of the ore vs your own speed. I didn't understand what the "upgrade" machine did also. Very addicting gameplay.

@pcmxms I know it's after the fact and you've done your playing/rating, but upgrades increase bin capacity by 2 for each one you install, and you can see the bin status at the top of the screen. As for the character speed, that is something I'm going to be looking at for the post-LD version, among other things.

@quadtree Nice score! Interesting you mention steadily rising difficulty -- I tried to do that already in the game code. When the game starts out, the average spawn time for ores should be about 8 seconds (+/- 30%). Every ten seconds that time between ores gets lowered by 0.2 seconds, to a 3 second minimum (at which point each spawner is putting out an ore between every 2.1 and 3.9 seconds). I didn't feel like increasing the difficulty any higher than that was very fair so that's where the final numbers ended for the compo. Maybe that's another thing I'll take a look at post-LD.

Nice take on the theme, once I got over my confusion it had a nice build up of intensity - which seems to be the subtext of LD40. LD40 is STRESS!!!

@arron-fowler Thanks! Sorry there was some confusion -- I need to redo the instructions screen. It covers some of the stuff but not enough. I tried to make sure the buildup was a decent speed and mostly controlled, so I'm glad to see the word "nice" in that sentence about the build-up, but admittedly stress was not something I had really considered in the creation of the game.It's hard to come up with a relaxing game where "the more you have the worse it is!"

You really captured the theme well here. Factory inventory management is tricky stuff.

The UX could need a bit of work. I'm not a very smart person. So the fact that the container statues are at the top of the screen and actual containers are at the bottom confuses me a bit. Also being able to upgrade the carrying capacity and movement speed of the little factory worker would be very useful.

@jordgubben When I originally designed the game I was hoping that the filling sprites every few ores would help show that, but added the numeric indicators as an afterthought and didn't have the chance to tinker with adding them to world-coordinated canvases. I'll add that to the list of things I want to try post-LD. As for movement speed, that's another tweak I'm thinking about experimenting with. As for carrying capacity, that might require a bit of a rewrite. There's actually an interesting case wherein you can actually dispose of an ore without using it for scoring by putting 3 ores into the processor, then bringing two with you. It'll score the first one with the four, then when the processor empties your inventory it'll dump the extra ore into the void. So carrying capacity might be a thing. Still though, I've got a couple ideas now that I'll have to try out.

It took some time to figure out the rules, but then I think they are intuitive (especially after I took the time to read the instructions...). Upgrades increasing the container capacity is not visible (though the numbers show it, I didn't notice at first). It certainly gets worse with time. :D Great game, thank you! (Sidenote: cool that you started with QBASIC – me too.)

Overall great work! It took me forever to realize that the ores had to be delivered in the order that they're shown but everything works well, sounds good, and looks great!