Fire Swept by Eric Smith
It's fire season! A fire has started somewhere in your town. Dispatch your fire fighting units to out the fire before it spreads!
https://youtu.be/Jjw7kg_Ae1Q
Controls: - 1 - 5 = Hotbar hotkey. - Left Mouse Button = Select Unit / Place Unit / Move Unit. - Scroll Wheel = Zoom in / Out. - Scroll Wheel Click and Drag = Move Map. - Spacebar = Cancel selection. - Del = Send selected unit home. - Backspace = Send ALL units home. - BackQuote or H = Toggle HELP (Pause) panel.
* Hotbar and Units:* Located at the bottom of the screen are the units you can deploy. Click the button or press the corresponding number key to select a unit. Then click the map where you want to deploy the unit.
Unit Types:
1 - Response Company can remove foliage to create fire blocks.
2 - Engine Company use hoses to dowse flames and prevent them from spreading. Must have an Engine nearby.
3 - Engine will provide the Engine Company with water. Engines will fill with water when they are on road.
4 - Fire Chief provides a 25% effectiveness bonus to units within a 4 tile radius. They can also evacuate structures.
5 - Helitanker can drop water on a wide area to dowse flames and prevent fire spreading. Must be sent home to reload with water.
Game Play: When a fire breaks out, dispatch your available units to fight the blaze. Every 3 (three) minutes, new reinforcements MAY arrive depending on the urgency and size of the fire. Use the Fire Chief to give a bonus to units and to evacuate structures of people.
To move units, click the action dot to select the unit and then click a destination to move to. When the unit is selected, the action dot will grow large and flash. You can press the SPACEBAR to cancel the action.
Moving units through fire have a chance of destroying the unit and they become a casualty.
Unit actions are indicated by the color of the action dot: - White = The unit is idle; taking a break. - Green = The unit is moving. - Blue = The unit is working. (i.e. Chopping trees, spraying water, evacuating, etc.)
Enjoy!
| HTML5 (web) | https://zerkywerky.itch.io/fire-swept |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/wild-fire |
Ratings
| Overall | 487th | 3.458⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 674th | 3.069⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 215th | 3.581⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 665th | 3.236⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 473th | 3.583⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 278th | 3.486⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 22🗨️ |
Good
- Love the tile-based design, evokes the feeling of strategy game
- Directional sound is great
Could be improved
- It's not immediately clear that what the different individual units do, or how their actions affect the fire
- The teleport mechanic kinda invalidates the tile-based strategy game design, also it makes the fires too random and its hard to form a strategy to combat it.
Recommendations
- You should lean in towards the tile based strategy design. Make it turn based, and perhaps have a main fire station that generates units every N turns. (maybe collect resources to build more)
- have units of strategical importance: One of the main tools of fighting wildfires is cutting down the vegetation to create a dead zone of no fuel
- Maybe have different units try to evacuate citizens as well
The police cars were added to do the whole evacuation thing but I thought that managing that PLUS trying to battle fires was too hard to play. So I changed it to a fire chief unit that gives the units effectiveness bonus for being in range. Had I more time I would have added a description or tooltip for each unit to describe its job.
I really loved the music, it was very well written. Similarly, I thought the sound effects fit very well (although the fire truck sound did seem a bit off to me).
I would say that the one thing I would suggest would be to add in different types of fires and different types of fire-fighters (beyond what you have). It seemed a bit repetitive, though still quite fun.
Overall, this is an amazing entry. Especially when you include the graphics and the smoothness of the gameplay—I did not notice any major bugs at all.
Great job!
By the way feel free to try my game, feedback is always apreciated!
Maybe you should add animations to the units because one cannot really know if they are doing something or just waiting for the fire to toast them, which can be a little bit frustrating! Good job.
I think a little bit of tutorial text would help (maybe on this page or in game). Just to make it clearer what to do.
The audio makes the gameplay exciting, with the action music and voice work.
Good job!
Though, it ran slow and it was a lot of instructions to internalize at first and the text is really tiny.
The problem is that I think that the helitanker is overpowered. When a fire breaks out, I can just send the Helitanker home and respawn it at the right place and put the fire out before it even had a chance to spread.
Anyway, I really had a lot of fun playing this. Congratulations !
Sounds effect and mechnics are great.
Really cool entry.
it was a bit of a struggle to get into. but once i got the hang of it, it was rather good, I partially like that the units need to stay near the firetruck for water. But it is really annoying if your only character cant reach the fire. furthermore i though i would keep the reinforcements however they kept disappearing each round. anyhow impressive work! BTW if you burn your firetruck you wont be able to send your people home
And with the water-radius of the engine being small, forest fires are hard to deal with. Having the response team clear what you hope the next spreading locations of the fire (which sometimes jump over an empty hex, and sometimes don't) and then twiddling your thumbs as the blaze burns itself out was all I could do.
I found selecting and moving units around also a bit finicky. I often found myself moving the wrong unit because I'd selected the wrong unit and didn't know. The models not ending their move on the center of the hex didn't help with that.
In short, I really like the puzzle concept of this game, but there's currently a bit too many random and/or unclear mechanics that leave me feeling that my failures are beyond my control.
A speed-up option would indeed be a good way to get rid of the wait for an isolated blaze to burn itself out.