I already love the theme!

Man I love the idea of controlling the top-view camera, it really makes whatever Im doing god-like and everything is awesome. Too bad the game wasnt fully done. Building houses and construction probably takes some resources but that wasnt shown. I think you guys went too big with this, there is a lot more to do, but it seems pretty promising!

There's a ton of content here and I really want to like it, but the camera controls are unbearably bad. :/ It would be more playable if the camera would simply stay put and stop switching modes.

I like the feeling of pressure I get while playing, trying to get all my resources up before the waters rise and undo all my hard work. There's also a sense of escaping to higher ground that the game's mechanics inherently suggest. The strategy I came upon was to build the less efficient low-tier structures closer to the shore so that they're the first to go when the waters rise, leaving me space on the higher ground for the better structures.

The camera felt a little too slow for my liking, and with the time pressure involved, it doesn't feel worth burning precious seconds adjusting the camera to get a nice view of my island. The terrain also starts to disappear if I scroll the camera down even though it's still well within the screen. I would also suggest some indication of how much time I have before the next level of terrain starts getting flooded, and how each type of building available influences that.

But overall, I feel like this could be a really good game once the features are all complete.

This idea is great! It screams to be explored further.
I do love the sense of urgency here, yet I feel it also has to be reflected in the camera movement.
A few issues that are mentioned above, but the most important part is, you finished an early version.

Please continue working on this one. All the best & good luck!

Missing a bit of tutorial and GUI, the camera was a bit uncontrollable for me (too fast wasd) but the concept is promising, a bit too large for a jam, but still, you got it out! GG

The graphics were decent and the overall aim you were going for was well thought out, however what you were aiming for was too large, so you didn't get most of it done. Also, the camera controls were very strange to say the least, with building a building putting me face down into the sea, and when i have built the building it resets be to be facing forward in the center of the island.
There is a painful lacking of a tutorial or full GUI, and it would be useful to have the amount of resources produced and the amount of resources needed to build above each building.
It is a shame that not enough is really there for the game to be fully enjoyable but nice try overall. Maybe think smaller next time.

@nam-nguyen @zeta0134 @cbdevilla @confituur @sankacoffee51 @player-2

Thank you all for your valuable feedback. I've spent the last week on version 0.3 and tried to build in some improvements based on your suggestions. I ironed out one or two issues with the building-cost display, added hints about the "why", when your buildings can't be build, and reworked the camera system from scratch. Unfortunately it didn't work out much better, but at least the automatic camera-switching was abolished and I've added a Camera-Movement-Speed-Slider in the menu. Last but not least I implemented some basic waves (which are basically just the water level going up and down in a sin-function), which took me way too long, but in my opinion add quite a bit to the visuals when zoomed in near the shore.

For more information and download links refer to: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/wetfeet/first-post-ld-version-out

Alright, the game is clearly unfinished so you're getting a poor rating, but let's have a little look at what we can learn here. This actually reminds me a lot about my LD41 entry where I was way too ambitious and tried to make an RTS in a weekend. A game like this would take a whole team of developers a year or more to make. When you're making a game in just a weekend you have to make something simple. Try to complete the game in one day. Then you can spend the rest of the time polishing and balancing the game.

Now, aside from that, here are a few simple tips:
- Your camera movement is wrong. No strategy games move like that. When you move around with WASD you should move the camera relative to the world, not the camera. That means W moves the camera north, A west, S south and D east, no matter what angle my camera is facing. Then you can use the scrollwheel or something like Z and X to zoom in and out, aka moving camera towards the ground.
- Remember to set your canvas settings to scale with screen size. Not constant pixel size. I'm playing on a 4K monitor and the text and buttons were tiny.
- I need button feedback. When I click a button that button should change color and a sound should be played. I understand you ran out of time, but this matters so much.

If you get a bad rating this Ludum Dare, don't get discouraged. Keep participating in game jams and try to beat your last score. Good luck! :)

Clearly unfinished, don't understand what to do and how, keep in mind the others comments for next Ludum ;)

Great game! Very cool and interesting! :D

@luckyfeathers

Thank you for your honest and detailled feedback. Concerning your points:

(Camera) Thank you a lot, you are probably right on that one. While reworking the camera for v0.3 I felt, that it was not intuitive, but I couldn't figure out, how to do it better. Now I got it.

(Canvas) Valuable hint, I will consider this in the future.

(Button Feedback) You are right, that we ran out of time and this was clearly not a priority for me, since every button you can click on performs it's action immediately. Nevertheless I see that it's an important usability feature for post-LD versions.

(Unfinished & poor rating) I understand, that the game is unfinished in many aspects (Research not implemented yet, GUI looks horrible, clicks are sometimes not registered, sound, ...), but in my opinion the core-game-loop is implemented and already fun. This leads me to the question, why everybody is saying, that it is unfinished and needs more work, before it could be any fun. Is this

(a) because the game is only enjoyable for me because I'm biased
or
(b) because other people do have trouble understanding the purpose and objective of the game (as your comment is implying).

To explain the game a bit more detailed than the description:

Your final objective is to build the spaceport (Industry->Space-Spaceport), to escape the sinking island. To build it, you will need a large amount of every one of the 5 Resources (Workforce, Building Materials, Resources, Goods, Food), which are produced by buildings in the respective categories of the industry-menu. Exceptions are Workforce (whose buildings found under "Housing & Social") and the "Hyroponic Farm" found under "Food", which also produces Resources.

The buildings in the categories are arranged left to right ascending from "Low building cost, low output" to "high cost, very high output". To effectively reach the spaceport before running out of space, you will need (almost *balancing winks*) every building tier. The last production building of every production (except Resources), meaning Skyscraper, Sawmill, HighTech-factory and Hydroponic Farm, are CO2-neutral, meaning they stop the sealevel-rise, in case there are no other buildings left.

Therefore you have an objective (spaceport) and various ways of achieving it (many small buildings or only a few big buildings or Skyscraper/Sawmill/HighTech-Rush), which makes for a fun game in my opinion. Did I miss anything breaking this loop? If not, which part of it was not clear enough and would need additional hints for the player in your opinion?

This was something very ambitious for Ludum Dare! Congrats for making a stab at it and I'm looking forward to seeing what you build on top of this. Would love to see this made into a full game. Not much to add on top of what others have said but for me the biggest quality of life improvement would be the ability to keep the camera at the same angle while laying down buildings. Also a little bit of attention to design in the UI goes a long way in Strategy games.

Great game!

good game man, nice gameplay

Nice 3d models !! great job !