Generally good concept, plays well and is fun. The ui was a little cluttered though, and it took me a while to figure out how to play

Feels claustrophobic, but plays well, nice mechanics

Really cool concept. It's a little tough to see what's going on though. A display of the current rate of production/consumption would help a lot.

@cooperjknapp @nachtwitch @cethin

Thank you for the feedback. It seems like I was brain-AFK during LD, since I've noticed around 5 minutes after submitting that I could have hidden the projects and skills in pop-up-menus, which would have cleared up the UI. Production/Consumption display would have been a good idea too, but I assume that I just never have enough time to playtest and polish to come up with this stuff.

I'm glad to hear that you like the mechanics and seem to find some fun in the game. As solo dev I find it really difficult to objectively judge how fun the game is for others, so feedback on this topic is very welcome :)

I like how much polish you put into the UI, I think the combination of complex UI with simple pixel graphics for the universe works really well, plus I like the font a lot.

Gameplay-wise: I had a real resource crunch on food, which kept shutting down my buildings, and I couldn't figure out how to alleviate that too much (even the farms kept shutting down, and I couldn't rely on exploration to find food regularly enough).

Exploration is a fun mechanic for an activity (and really good, because you can give randomized rewards that help the player build something more sustainable) but in the current version of the UI it is two clicks (one to end the day, another to acknowledge the popup) compared to one click for any other action -- maybe the message would be better moved out of the modal into some kind of scrolling status box so that it doesn't interrupt the flow as much?

Kind of cool. Definitely a little hard to understand how much stuff was consuming etc. but more engaging than I expected. I started out by running into loads of bushes of food, then became really great at woodworking, then couldn't feed everybody :D

the game goes black when i have level 2 or 3 and i click some open dialog - since it's a clicker game, i don't read anyways :smiley: ... is this just the end? i repeated this twice using the web version.

update: all good - just read the dialogs - game ends at 100 days!!!

@misterkeefe

Concerning your food problem: the longer you stay on a planet, the more pollution builds up and negates your food production. The way around this is to put tons of skillpoints into "Green Thumb", since the earnings of this skill are not affected by pollution. Also skill-levels do not need to be fed and are not lost on ship launch. Overall skill-levels are pretty OP, once you got a decent amount.

Concerning Exploration: exploration is in the same spot like farming: it gets increasingly ineffective over time if not countered by skills. Chances of finding something degrade over time, but if your curiosity skill is higher than the sum of completed explorations, it will always stay above 100%.

Concerning the Exploration Popup: actually you do not need to close the popup to end the day. That was a classical instance of the bug-turned-into-feature-pattern. Not closing the window refreshes its content if another exploration is done and leaves the window there if something else is done. No downsides, except that you miss the superb view on your personal ball of slag that once was a thriving planet.

@merkisoft

That does not sound like the end. The game ends after 100 days or after you completed your round trip through the solar system. Which browser are you using, which thing was level 2 or 3 and which dialog were you closing? The Exploration result dialog or the intro texts? Have you tried the download versions?

@kruemelkeksfan ah OK, thanks for the explanations! That makes a lot of sense.

Really cool, really well made! I'm always running out of food and thus my buildings keep shutting down.. I just noticed the comments however, so I'm going at it again with some new learnt wisdom :D I love the mechanics, it's pretty much what I wanted to do, but much more polished and management-heavy. Really nicely done!

@dqmhose Thank you for the kind words :) I actually realized during development that the skill system and its benefits are hard to grasp, but also knowing that people do not tend to read long tutorial texts, I could think of no good way to counteract this. All I did was add the hint, that skills are pretty powerful, which occasionally shows up in the Help Bar.

I love the graphics and concept. Very neat!

Also, I noticed a lot of those planets are nearly tidally locked. Rough times, indeed.

@guardaro yes, I noticed that, too :D but rotating them slower results in annoying aliasing and rotating them faster drew too much attention away from the things that mattered in my opinion. My second alpha-tester did for example not see the tooltips and blamed the planets and background for going too fast, so that its hard to spot the more subtle changes like a tooltip appearance. Thats why I slowed down everything.

If you look at it from a scientific point of view, the people on these planets should be glad that their sun does magically fuse hydrogen at temperatures below 1000°C, so they do not instantly burn up on their planet orbiting around 1/4 of the planet radius above the sun.

nice nice. realy great management game that fit the theme quite well.

Really cool idea, loved the litteral interpero of the theme

Also, space game are just xool

Running this in Chrome crashes Chrome for me but it runs fine in Firefox. Nice clean design, nice execution too. I made it to Earth. Does the 100 day timer reset when you reach another planet? Very nice effort overall.

Really nice, great job on the compo! I love this kind of numeric/clicker game.

Stretch goals post-jam would be to make a bit more clear what does what, costs and consequences and whatnot.

I couldn't figure out how to get wood and the woodcutter seemed to require wood?

@locomule Thank you for the report, I have to install Chrome to look into that and I'm not really experienced in debugging WebGL builds. I didn't really expect the WebGL running smooth at all, because I'm always developing a downloadable game primarily and build my realease version additionally for WebGL without testing, just to have it for people who don't like to download. Up to now nobody ever reported an issue, so the startegy seemed pretty viable to me :D the timer is not meant to reset between planets, did it for you? Design-wise your planet timer is the pollution you caused (although thats irrelevant, because skills are OP) and the time pressure from the global timer.

@vfqd You need to start of with explorations, until you find at least some wood and some food. That usually requires anywhere between 2 and 20 explorations. RNGesus can beat you up pretty heavily here, so that you bleed of way to many rounds for the tough time limit. But I assumed, that this is part of the fun (at least after it became clear that I had no time left to stop RNG from screwing you up).

Ah so that's what was happening!

@locomule Could not reproduce :/

@kruemelkeksfan Hopefully it is just some weird setting on my end? I tried multiple times and yeah, it crashes Chrome every time while loading. But if no one else has complained that must be a good sign so don't sweat it! Good luck in the competition!!

I liked the graphics with the zoomed in planet. It gives a nice spacey feel. Quite a complex game with all the production and stats. I kept running out of food and losing my buildings. Nice compo game!

@locomule Hopefully...you can try the downloadables, if you want to play the game :)

@kruemelkeksfan Sorry, you missed it in my first post that I got it to run fine in Firefox so alredy played and rated. Thanks though!

I really like resource management games. I disagree with others regarding the UI being too intrusive. The UI here **was the game**. The planet in the center was really just icing graphics that added to the ambiance of the game but not to the gameplay. The gameplay was contained strictly in the UI. However, if other items had been added to the planet such as showing farms and mines being built and shut down, then that is different.

It did take a bit to determine exactly how to balance everything, including the running out of food. I'm not sure why my building levels would decrease permanently (until I build again) when there if not enough food (assuming that means some die from starvation so I do not have the population to run them). Why do they not stay but not produce until the population grows again. Also, why would a farm shut down when food is the problem unless it has to? I had times when the farm shut down but others (like oil) stayed running. It seems that the building priorities are a bit messed up.

I also think that 100 days is a bit too short. Did you play through it and complete it in this amount of time? It took me way too long on the first planet to be able to complete it in 100 days, and I am not even sure that it is possible.

Great start, though, and a great idea.

@james-dunlap

Thank you for your detailed feedback!

The buildings get demolished, because I wanted running out of food to be very punishing. I did not think about it realism-wise, just gameplay-wise. Now that you mention it and I thought about it, I guess you might be right and it was a bit too harsh even from a gameplay perspective. Buildings get demolished in random order, that was just quick and dirty. If I do a post-LD version, I would definitely fix farms getting shut down during famines.

The 100 days are a very strict deadline, which requires a dose of luck and solid knowledge of the mechanics, but its doable. I wanted a round figure and 200 was way too much to pose any challenge. I have to admit that I did not even play through the game once before submitting, so I am pretty surprised how accurate the 100 day estimate was.

It was very nice to play. Especially for Compo this is a very cool project. And the colors are pretty good. Good luck to you!

I land on second planet after 80 days. Nice game