Really cool! The pixel art is amazing
I just beat the level 7
Tricky on start but once the machine launched it works well :smile:
Maybe more explanation could be useful!

Alter should be clear that it is 0.25 pop each neighbor tile. Also after you reach the last research it repeats researching it to no effect.

The art direction is really nice! I like the pixelart rendering you made, it really suits your managing ressources game. I didn't understood everything first, but managed to beat many levels, I just didn't quite caught how to keep the population ok. But I liked your idea of tiles and building connected stuff linked to each others.
It was a pretty great job you made here! Good luck on the competition, it was a really pleasant experience.

Love the art but I found the music a bit bland and the sound FX a bit annoying but great game. I found the controls confusing at first but I got it after a while. overall a 4

OK. I love this game. Well done my friend.

Really cool stuff! Loving the pixel art style you guys got going on. All levels until 6 didn't really need any thinking / strategy, so I just slammed stuff around and got past those levels. 6 was a bit more tricky - and I gave up on level 7.

Overall, good job! Looks really polished and this game would probably work well on mobile platforms. You guys should keep on polishing this.

Awesome job! This seems really simple at first, but the real levels begin around lvl 6, and it's crazy how long term it is. I only couldn't beat level 8, which is fine. It's got a unique feeling of uncertainty and anxiety as the economy/population will quickly die if you build too fast. Great work!

I really like this game.
I think the game's biggest flaw is that it's very confusing to begin with. I see that you tried to introduce the player to the various elements in the earlier levels, but I don't think it was very effective. When I reached the first serious level I almost abandoned it due to just dying repeatedly and not knowing why. Also, I found myself sometimes trying to remind myself what each tile type did, but unable to see the descriptions due to the warning messages "need more gold" etc. I would make the description of what each tile type does available at all times. I'm glad I stuck with it though because once I understood the system, I thought the game was really great. The trial and error in figuring out how to balance gold production and population, and where to place the altars strategically was a rewarding experience that forced me to actually consider my choices. I think the graphics and audio are clean and pleasant and lend themselves well to the mood. Great work overall!

Very fun, took a while to figure out what was going on, especially as some of the earlier levels don't fully explain how each building work due to them only needing one building to be made. However, I really like the art style as well as how the tech system works.

Cool game! I like the pixel art graphics. I played a lot I finally I could master the dynamics. I liked the learning curve.

I was kinda hyped for this game, when I saw your earlier blogposts - was expecting an abstract townbuilder of some sorts. Which it *kinda* is. I don't know if I fully grasped the mechanics, because the tutorial levels, which I guess where meant to teach me about the different buildings and the mechanics in general where just way too short. I guess the win-condition of having any building on all the spaces is kinda uninteresting to me...

In the later levels the game played like a clicker, with some added townbuilding to it. Sadly I didnt know what anything did, except for Money and population-generators. Even though I did build all the buildings I couldn't exactly figure out what they did and once I had generated vast amounts of gold and endless population the game could be ended quickly.

However the soundtrack was nice and the artwork, theme and style of this entry are just amazing to me.

cheers~

Your pixelart work is awesome, I like it :) Good work :)

Awesome graphics, nice music

Amazing art, great music, cool UI...

Super cool idea, great graphics and music. Took a little while to figure out how to interact with it. It clicked once I figured out how to place people, before that I was mostly confused. This game could work very well on mobile with some further polish and tuning for pacing (and tutorials). Great work!

Really excellent! I managed to beat the whole thing! The art and sound are both really nice and go together well, the game play was fun and challenging! I think the earlier levels could have been a bit more challenging. And any confusion about pieces would be done away with if you included hover-over text for the lower left piece selection UI.

Maybe it could be fun to have an endless mode? Perhaps you could include tiles in some levels that are just negatives to overcome?

Good job! I really enjoyed your game!

I liked the idea of ​​the game and how big it can grow, we do not have an innovation, but it is something that can spend hours of our time playing this universe.

Super fun and intense game! Reminds me the feeling of the flash zombie game "Rebuild". There is very easy since beginning until level 7.

The only nitpick is the building button's hit-box is kinda smaller then it actually looks like; sometime it's hard to click in this high-pace game.

Big fan of the artwork, and the intensity of the last few levels made my palms sweaty, especially just before i won, scared i might have not seen a tile run out of population and then everything domino effects into rubble..
but i won! fun game overall, though it took a few minutes to really understand what was going on, g'job!

great music too!

my only gripe is that when there were a lot of buildings i feel like the 'population added' sound effect was quite savage on the ears, i guess you could say.

This is a great idea for game, name sounds very familiar, graphics are great and the functionality is prefect. I love music

One of the best entries this LD.
Really.
Sorry, I can't write my comment, gotta play this game some more. :)

Congrats! Very good work. The learning curve was difficult for me to understand. Cool art and great idea.

It really looks like a great game, but I really couldn't figure out how to play it properly. The tutorial levels are just too easy and too short to have the time to assimilate anything, and once the real levels begin, I was at a complete lost. I just tried to fill all the tiles as quickly as possible and it worked.. until level 8.
It's part my fault but I guess some more explanations ingame would be useful.
Anyway.. It's really a game with potential. The presentation and style are rather unique, and it fits the theme pretty well. It doesn't need too much for a real release now! Well done to you :)

I loved the artstyle. One of the best I've seen so far here. The gameplay was a bit loose for me but it might be because I didn't fully understand how to play the game.

It started out pretty simple, but I didn't really learn how the game works from the initial (tutorial?) levels. So when things got more complex, I could not figure out how to keep things afloat.

The art is great, as is the sound. If you make this more accessible, you've got something good going.

Lots of mixed feeling on this one. First and foremost, I feel your 'show, don't tell' early tutorial levels do not work at all. I had no idea what was happening on the first 'real' level (3 or so?).

I really liked the art style until about level 7 where I needed to fish out the tiles that needed pops added. Then it was just this giant puddle of mush. More tiles should stand out like the Altar does.

I liked the look of the isometric UI buttons, but it felt like the 'hit box' for them was far too small and led to many misclicks when things got heated.

I also wasn't a fan of the 'whack-a-mole' style re-popping that dominates late game.

SUPER DUPER KUDOS for putting in mute, pause, and menu buttons! There were such welcome niceties I usually don't see in a LD title.

All that said, it is an interesting experiment and I'm glad I played it. Thanks!

Great game!

The graphics and sound fit very well, the mechanics are interesting and the increasing difficulty keeps them interesting.
A setting for slowing the game down would have been nice, but maybe that would take the challenge away ...

Very cool consistent aesthetic, and nicely balanced for such a quickly made game. Wasn't a fan of having to assign population manually though, it just turned a bit into a random clickfest on the bigger levels. The effect of the altar also wasn't very clear.

I thought that the early simple levels were decent at showing how the game worked, the only thing that was a bit unclear to me around the end of the game was the altar.

I was immediately drawn to your game due to its outstanding graphics and cool idea. When I started it up, I was pleasantly surprised that the music is well up to par with the visuals. After some initial confusion as to what the goal was, I quickly got the hang of it.

Unfortunately there a single thing that really takes the wind out of the game's sails and that is the necessity to click each building type again after building. Adding to that, sometimes clicking on an empty tile did not register so I constantly had to click buildings on the menu which was really frustrating. It's such a shame because I can imagine the game being super-awesome, but this was really breaking it for me.

Some notes: I think you could have done without the icon to increase population, by simply adding population through clicking on a tile. It would be much faster to control, which is important for a game that can become quite hectic.

I enjoyed the fact that you made a tutorial, although I felt it could have been a bit more challenging, by only allowing the player to solve the tutorial level by showing that they mastered the skill you wanted to explain. That way you would have a more challenging early game which currently is a breeze to finish without actually learning anything.

Don't get me wrong: I really love every single thing about your game: The premise, presentation, music, mechanics, everything. But I feel that the few shortcomings it has have a severe impact on making it as much fun to play as it should be. Please consider making a post-LD version, I would definitely want to revisit it after you gave it a little more polish.

Love it

Absolutely gorgeous game. Really loved it. If I had to critique it, I would point out that many of the levels were one/two empty tiles, which were insta-wins, it might also be nice if population was balanced by building layout rather than by assigning population, if that was a mechanic already I wasn't aware of it. I think this is a lovely entry and the polish in it is astounding for a Game Jam. Fantastic job!

I totally agree with everything that have been said before.

But I couldn't just not emphasis the fact that this is without a doubt, and widely, the most beautiful game that I've seen on this jam. You deserve a rain of stars.

This looks and sounds amazing, but sadly the game is very confusing, I have no idea even after all the tutorial levels what is going on as a lot of other people have found. But the art is so good! Hope you do something great with it.

Really beautiful, fun game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iJfrvw7wWA