How do I play it tho, looks fun C:

It's not done yet - I hit publish by mistake!

Try finish it for jam. Idea looks fun

I like the idea. But it would've been fun if you experimented a little bit more with the logs. Maybe you could just stand on logs? Idk, but great concept!

Looks nice overall. But needs a challange.

At first I wasn't too into it, but after the first few the AI started actually being tricky, staying away and trying to wait for opportunities where I was distracted or get me to chase them which was pretty neat. That said, after a few minutes of not losing any logs, I eventually gave up interest. Thanks for the game :smile:

I think I had exactly the same experience as @ilseroth . Game looks nice, first I didnt really get the goal and lost about 3-4 logs, but then figured out how to defeat the beavers. The AI is nice, however I think with the game progressing the time they need to gather the logs schould be decreased, so you actually have to decide what beavers to leave and which to attack. Good entry.

This felt a bit aimless, which isn't surprising given that it's unfinished. Barnaby could swim in this version, but the player could pretend that he can't. There was a distinct lack of challenge, which maybe could have been quickly partly resolved by a simple timer?

I could see a lot of potential with the ideas you didn't have time to implement.
The beavers are cute though.
Nice work.

@team-on @falk-bruskeland @j0ye @ilseroth @jackou @frank-gevaerts @hakro thanks so much for your feedback!

I'm pleased just to have submitted something that you can actually play.

Barnaby was actually not able to swim originally, and could only walk on the logs - this was really the core of the "running out of space" idea. But the AI tries to avoid Barnaby in preference to stealing a log, so the game would end up with Barnaby sitting on the last one or two logs, surrounded by beavers that couldn't go near him!

I let Barnaby swim so that I could test the Game Over screen, and then forgot to turn that off before I submitted :disappointed:

Since it seems that your biggest concern is that you ran out of time, my feedback will be focused on time saving;

- Plan ahead with what's vital and what are enhancements; last time I didn't and forgot to add sound effects until it was too late. If you're not comfortable with your planning, try to get your minimum viable product as soon as possible instead.

- If you're not familiar/comfortable with creating music, use opengameart! There's no problem with that (The people there love knowing people are using their music), and even if it doesn't allow you to participate in the Audio category, a good choice of music can do great things for your Mood, Overall, and even Fun categories. If you're doing that, I'd recommend choosing the song early and having it on hand as you make the game.

- Art-wise, it's important to choose, for tile-based games, the size of tiles correctly. You want them to be big enough so that you can draw what you want... But make them too big and then all assets are significantly bigger. This is multiplicative and squared; doing 32x32 instead of 16x16 suddenly has you do 4 times the work! The beavers you did are super cute and awesome at that size, but the logs, grass, etc seemed like a lot of work. It's even more work if you want to do animations! So: a lot of tiles, animations --> smaller size; Static images, few of them --> you can choose a bigger size to make them nicer

Having said that, I'm quite impressed that you managed to do as much with LISP; it isn't a language I'd expect someone to use for a game; but you make it seem as if it were a game written in any other language. (EDIT: Btw, thanks a lot for the Linux version!)

And the beavers are really cute!

Considering the fact that it is unfinished it is quite good. I is definitely playable and quite fun too. I do not know if that was a bug but I always got just one beaver trying to eat the log and the next one spawned only after I got rid of him. I would love to see them come in bigger and bigger waves. But well done :)

You have a nice base of a game here, the main problem at the moment being that it is too easy, too bad you didn't had enough time!
Kudos for the Linux version by the way

@teo989 @ever thanks for the feedback! I definitely want the beavers to come in bigger waves - it's on my list!

@agecaf thanks for your detailed comments! Good advice. I did intend to follow a schedule, but I didn't stick to it. I was aiming to have the basic gameplay done by the end of the first day, and then focus on art, audio and polish on the second day, but watching my timelapse video (which I'll be publishing soon) shows me I wasted quite a lot of time just looking at what other people were doing on the LDJam feed!

I think next time, I'll be more strict with myself and use the Pomodoro technique or something.

Ahah !
I like the beaver.
The AI is very great ! It's simply to differentiate our character.
Maybe it needs a challenge ? But I know we can't make all in 48h. :)

So, great game !

Amazing job on the AI. After some time it really gets hard. I liked the art. Overal well done!

Same experience here, I think a rhythm of the game a bit more aggressive with a score or a timer would have been enough to make it aimful. The graphism part is very clean, good job!

So, I think my playthrough created some kind of beaver paradise where I was happy to let the beavers take what they wanted because eventually they put some back as well. I'm pretty sure this is a bug. It seems like when the beavers can't find a log but know that one should be there, they go some place and create a log underneath them. I had a bunch of phantom logs, that the beavers clearly didn't think existed but were showing up. And one of the beavers had created a log station in the lower right corner. I had walked well off the screen by now to just let them do what they wanted. It was interesting, even if it wasn't intended. Perhaps if you bop a beaver when it's stealing a log, that log gets flagged as being used and never gets flagged as being unused (maybe, I'd start looking there first). I had really wanted to see what happened when I ran out of logs, but apparently I'm just a conscientious log provider with magical logs of ever-growing :)

Great graphics and the audio really helps you get into the game.

I'd really like to play the game, but I'm not sure how to start it, I've downloaded the macOs zip, unzipped it and started the executable in the Terminal, but it says the following, after a window popped up for a millisec:

@quorusa @c0nst4ntin @treizive @awix thanks for your comments!

@incobalt yeah, I can reproduce this bug. I got down to about 20 logs and then the beavers start bringing logs with them to steal? I'll try to squash this as soon as I can.

@edgelord sorry you couldn't run the game. I've tested the Mac download and it works fine for me, so I don't know what I can do to help. I'm pretty sure all the dependencies are bundled with the game, although this is the first time I've used this framework, so I could be wrong. Are you running macOs 10.14 (Mojave)? Because Apple removed support for OpenGL, and that could be the problem.

Nice concept! I know you ran out of time but here's some little improvement ideas for a postjam version :
- You can add scoring system. It's always interesting to comparing score with others
- You can add a dash mechanic to allow Barnaby to quickly catch up his opponents.

Nice job! :)

@arche-san thanks for the suggestions! I thought about having a score based on the number of beavers you bopped, and I like the dash idea - I'll try to get it into a follow up release soon.

You just made a Ludum Dare Compo game in the most unlikely language and engine you could find. A game in 48 hours, in Lisp? You are a brave motherfucker.

Anyway, honestly I think the gameplay stops being fun within some minutes, the difficulty didn't seem to scale much and some beavers seem to have a problem with their AI (they spawn and walk away from the logs, then come back, then run away again). But I gotta give it to you, you made a game in mother freaking Lisp. Congratulations.

@andy-d, no I'm not running any beta of Mojave, will they relly remove the openGl support? Damn. Thats not nice :(.

extra points for using list - honestly this is a simplistic game and i dont understand how it follows the theme - maybe if you could only walk on the logs - still pretty good for the time frame - thanks for making it

I really like the idea of protecting you logs from other beavers, Perhaps the game could have benefited from a few other obstacles like forcing the player to only move on the logs, that way the AI could shape the level and make the player choose how to reach the other beavers, ant the game ends once the flood opens up. I really liked the AI that started running away when I approached them. I am impressed you managed to do all this with a lisp gamekit. Well done! :)

@jegus9 @paulhocker @wildcard thanks for the feedback. I am a massive Lisp fanboy, and my main goal was to get at least something reasonably complete done using Lisp.

@jegus9 you're absolutely correct, the difficulty doesn't scale at all - the beavers just keep coming every few seconds. If I get a chance, I will tweak the settings to have them appear more frequently, and take less time over stealing logs.

@paulhocker that was exactly what I was going to do - Barnaby could only walk on the logs - but I discovered a bug with the AI that meant the game could never finish: when he was standing on the last log, the AI wouldn't go near him to steal it! I turned off the movement clipping and then ran out of time to fix the problem.

@wildcard thanks for the ideas - I love the game over flood idea! That's going on my todo list!

@edgelord this seems to be a bug in the version of lisp I used to compile the game. There's a more recent version with a fix, so I should be able to fix this soon.

Such a cute game! The concept is great, too. Nice job!

However, this game randomly freezed on my PC (windows 10). Every time I had to restart the exe and replay from the start.

@lastleaf sorry about that - I don't have a Windows machine to test on. I'll try to figure out what the problem is. Thanks for trying!

Great concept, and good execution. Great work for a jam game, but missing some features. Still quite impressive! Keen to see what you come up with next time

Nice game, Love how everything is balanced!
Good luck, Don't forget to take a look at ours if you don't mind and see what it's like when we just focused on graphics in this game jam!
Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/spacelab-42a

Nice cover art! I think it would be more fun if you increased the game pace and maybe add some more gameplay elements, maybe powerups or different enemies. One big problem though, it crashed for me after a while.

@predominant @rahim-pxr @erikkire thanks for the comments!

@erikkire - sorry about that. Which OS did you play on?