Sim Defence by VinegarLove
WARNING: It actually miss a lot of stuff i wanted to do. This is pretty much a barebone game. This is my first LD and i defenitively scoped out (i did a parser for the dialogues for no reason) and had a long lasting problem that took me almost 4 hours away.
Anyway, let's talk about the game. It is a fusion of a dating simulator and tower defence.
You have one round to conquer the girl (i haven't got time to include the man :( ) on the other side. You may lose the game by selecting the wrong answer or by taking to much time to answer.
Ratings
| Overall | 608th | 2.875⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 577th | 2.775⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 404th | 3.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 390th | 3.5⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 642th | 2.375⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 481th | 2.3⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 69th | 3.684⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 321th | 3.075⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 7🗨️ |
The idea vastly surpassed the execution sadly. I had in mind the following feature:
- A good tutorial.
- Reverse Date (The goal would have been to lose after discovering some truth about the other character)
- Having the enemy and player units to interact
Instead of all that, i did a parser for a 25 lines dialogue o/
Awesome idea! The dialogue is great -- of course there could have been more content, but I think what's there is great. If there is some more interaction between the two games, maybe if the dialogue also reacts to the tower-defense game, I imagine this would be really fun! It's of course unfortunate that you've underestimated the complexity of the game, but what you've got here is a good start and a good concept, so I hope you'll continue this project.
I had a look at your source code, and the dialogue parser does seem a little overly complex to implement and debug in a 48 hour game jam... My advice for next time would be: If you really need to use a specialized data format (which may well be the case because it simplifies level design), pick a format that can be parsed with minimal effort. For dialogue trees, you might want to use XML if there's a library for it in your framework. Otherwise, design your own format that can be parsed for example using regular expressions with capture groups. For our game, we used this approach to design platformer-style levels in a simple text format, and managed to parse it in about 10 lines with a regex. It's absolutely ugly, but it works and it's easy to debug. (if you're interested, [here](https://github.com/phigames/ld41/blob/master/web/baselevel.dart)'s the source code with the level string, [here](https://github.com/phigames/ld41/blob/master/web/baselevel.dart#L89)'s the parsing section)
Anyway, I hope you're continuing development on this, and see you next time! :)
Seems like you were probably short on time so you didn't get to get to everything you wanted (like me haha) so maybe game suggestions aren't as useful because you probably would've done more had you had time! BUUUT in terms of the game, I'd say it wasn't super clear which graphic corresponded to what when the game was running. Also a quick polish thing you can do with a short period of time is add in a title screen and some simple in-game instructions, they add more to the game feeling like a full game :)