The Clearing by masterkrepta

Deep in the forests of Brazil lies a small, isolated village. You have been left in charge of Expanding the camp. Keep the fire going and replenish your food stores Watch out for Hungry Monkeys
Walk into the hut to deposit your food and wood into your village inventory, and touch the fire pit to keep it burning. The fire will restock itself if you have at least 30 units of wood stored in the hut, but at the cost of an additional food penalty.
Controls - WASD movement, Space near trees to gather wood. Stand Near water to collect fish (automatic overtime).
When you hear the Monkeys raiding your food stores, head back to the village, they will run when they see you coming.
http://gamejolt.com/games/TheClearing/251217
Tools Blender Unity 5 Photoshop!
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/the-clearing |
Ratings
| Overall | 536th | 2.208⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 539th | 1.667⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 528th | 2.042⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 531th | 2.167⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 392th | 2.875⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 371th | 2.261⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 377th | 2.091⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 504th | 2.292⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
- The camera movement is really not ok this way, half of the time you cant even see your character and the turn around movement makes it hard to walk. Try to first get the basic movement to be smooth before continuing
- Secondly: Focus on making it FUN! Having to walk home everytime with a broken camera to see monkeys and wait for them to go is not particularly fun. Try starting from an existing game concept and work from there.
I wish you the best of luck in your next endeavour
Some issues I found:
- Fire effect spins with a character itself
- Sometimes monkeys stuck near the hut even if the character is nearby.
- Minimap is fliped by 90 or 270, so it is hard to navigate using it.
Maybe some sort of craftable "Scarecrow" (with a timer) would help here or an ability to throw rocks :smiley:
Aside from the obvious rushed nature of it all, I really didn't like the way the player controlled. It felt more appropriate to vehicle of some kind than a person. It also really feels like I'm doomed regardless. I need to go to the river to get food, but as soon as I'm not at home to chase monkeys, they're gonna take the little food I have.
- The control is very strange. I think just having the different keys correspond to player movement relative to the camera (i.e W is up, A is left, D is down, and so on) would have been better. Someone else suggested click-to-move, and I agree that could have worked too.
- Character movement feels sluggish. This could be tied to the controls as well, so I think improving that would make the sluggish movement better.
- The monkeys didn't consistently run away when I reached the huts.
The things I liked a lot:
- I actually liked the sounds a lot. The monkey noise got a little grating, but I think that was intentional, since they're supposed to alert the player to their presence. I really like audio cues in games, so this was well done.
- I'm impressed that you made so much 3-d art so quickly. 3-d art is very difficult to pull off, and I think the low-poly art style worked really well.
Keep it up!
You should consider polishing it a bit more and putting a post jam version somewhere.
If you want to see a playthrough of it I have one here: https://youtu.be/QJ8SXiHTvUs
It did not seem well balanced, as once I got enough food I had no trouble survival and things got boring quick. Either make survival harder or add a second objective.
There are some small annoyances with the game.
- The map was weirdly aligned, or maybe the camera was not pointing north. I would have expected to move north on the map when walking up.
- With the chopping animation sometimes the axe and the person were out of sync.
Nice to see that tank controls aren't dead though. :P
Keep making games. ^^
-Skruffye
Keep working on making games and each try will be better :)
The basic idea is fun and the graphics are nice.
However, here's some aspects that need improvement in my opinion:
-The controls felt rather clunky.
-The camera placement is not always optimal (the player becomes invisible a lot of times, maybe trees etc. in line of sight should be transparent so the character doesn't go missing.
-The environment is not very appealing and rather monotonous.
-The monkeys had problems with pathfinding once they noticed me walking back in the camp. They ran into me and each other and it took a while for them to get out of camp again.
-Gathering wood just didn't work a lot of times. I hit the trees with my axe but nothing happened.