Stucker by Animaster

Stucker is a game where you play as a man, who got stuck in unknown place. Your rocket is broken and you need a lot of resources to repair it. Gather it by hand is too long, but fortunately you have bots, who can repeat routine processes in a loop.
Use WASD and mouse for most interactions. Press Q for shop menu. Place the cursor on object to see its description.
06/10 Fixed bugs with fuser, where you cant grab ingots, and one where you put resources in one fuser but they added in another.

| Youtube | https://animastoure.itch.io/stucker |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/stucker |
Ratings
| Overall | 97th | 4.13⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 91th | 4.076⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 235th | 3.87⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 624th | 3.783⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 378th | 4⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 526th | 3.054⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 578th | 3.602⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 54🗳️ | 71🗨️ |
@nehvis found this bug just now, gonna fix it soon, thank you. Seems like if you upgrade yourself too much you become so fast that you dont collide with fuser properly.
@radgegames don't know yet, maybe it will be plays good on mobile platforms?
Art is really nice, very satisfying animations when gathering recourses too.
I felt like a Warcraft peon!
it took me forever, but i did it, great game, good job!

Wow, this game had me hooked. I don't know how long I played for, but I could've gone on for hours with a little more to go. Something I've never been able to get right in these kind of games is that balance of progression, giving the player just enough to do, and just enough to see over the horizon. And to always give them something to work towards. You totally nailed it.
I've seen a few released games where you program robots to automate tasks, but it always seems like it's aimed at people who enjoy programming. This simplifies the automation process into doing the exact same actions you were doing before, only while controlling the robot. It's brilliant.
I honestly have so much love for this game, and can only think of a couple of small things to be improved. One is that it wasn't clear that the shop menu was now the robot upgrade menu while modifying a robot (since the other shop items were also available). The other is that when I'd go to reprogram a robot, it wouldn't stop moving, so the first few moves would be done for me. I feel like the robot should stop entirely while accepting input.
Fantastic job here, it makes me want to go find games like this to play, I've got the itch now! :smile:
- I didn't realise at the beginning that there were even more islands and that I'd get more bots on them for cheap. I spent a fair whack of boring time making bots at the beginning. I realise this is mainly due to my own stupidity, but it would be nice if this was impossible - like maybe if it was impossible to buy bots until later (if maybe the buildings unlocked in a certain sequence or something).
- There was no middle ground between "automating all the resources once" and "get enough for a rocket". I got everything automated, but nothing really pushed me to add more buildings and robots and not just wait for enough resources to be gathered.
- Having to close the shop to do various things (mainly program robots) was a bit annoying. I didn't see much reason why it couldn't just be open all the time!
These are all fairly small issues and likely due to the time constraints and could defintely be ironed out. Nice job!
Movement could be improved as for the sound of moving that can be annoying when moving a lot.
I liked the feeling of being lost and have to explore, even though it may be not clear you have to find the rocket and repair it (I more or less manage to understand it because I've read the description before playing).
The AI planning idea is cool, but not very intuitive, at first I didn't understand I could replace the initial position by clicking on them, and that I have to upgrade their tools in the record phase.
Also, if you want to change the plan, you have to manage to click on them and wait their loop to end =/
It's nice that you have to carefully plan their movement to not overlap the others, especially at the beginning when you have only one storage.
Maybe you could add numbers to quickly choose the upgrade instead of clicking, especially for bridges!
My biggest complaint is that the pacing is off. It takes a lot to start (gather woods, back, gather woods, back, bridge, bridge, etc…), and even with bots it seems the progression is too slow, I've lost interest after a bit.
At some point I needed to go to lunch and have left the game there, 1 hour after I was not done yet! It is still there lol, I'll let you know when it is completed (I'll not create bots to make it faster at this point, just wait).
The upgrade system is something I like, but the upgrades themselves seem not that much: backpack upgrade seems a bit useless especially for how much it costs compared to 1 only extra slot for upgrade. Tool upgrade was meaningless to me after the second level (I don't know what improves to be honest!).
I liked the way you designed the map so that you can end up finding the rocket without having to create bridge towards nothing. With this I mean that you always put the next islands in a way that at least some tiles are visible from the previous one, so I know I can progress toward that direction.
It does feel a bit linear, but still well done, and probably, since there is not too much to do, if it was not linear it would have been frustrating.
At last, it takes too much to repair the rocket! Maybe this is intended for some reasons, but I see this a mistake I've already done. To drag the game, you could think "If I put <infinite amount> of resources needed, the player will have more fun and it will be so hard to reach the end, so cool" but it is USUALLY not if that breaks the pacing, because the goal is out of reach and the in-between is not fun after a while.
This means a lot of players could close the game before ending. In the end, you usually want your players to experience the game, not to make it hard just to say you made a hard game.
I think this is especially true for a jam game, where the game could be more of a showcase/demo of its true potential.
This is very personal, so if you still like that it takes a lot to repair the rocket for some reasons, it is ok. After all is your game!
I don't want to sound too harsh, those are just suggestions, I liked the idea of your game and I truly think that it could become a very funny one with some improvements! Keep going =)
Edit: after 1 hour and a half I had enough resources to complete the game ahah
You can gather resources very fast, but you must know game well, for example: upgrades is infinite, and actually when you upgrade anything, you level up your character/bot, which upgrades your movement and gather animation speed. Each level up (after 5th level) for tool adds 0.33 to to number of resources you gather per hit. And backpack just adds 1 cell each time.
So if you invest resources to upgrades, your bots will move with extreme speed and gather big amount of resources in shorter time.
I know there is no way you know all that, game doesn't have proper tutorial and many things was done in last hours of jam. Just wanted to say that i not planned to make you gather many resources many hours, i want players to gather enormous amounts of resources in mere seconds by finding some cheesy ways to do it.
Могу отметить пиксель арт, он классный, немного плывет, но мне это не критично. Анимации хорошо вписываются. Про звуки ничего не скажу, их мало и они уместны.
У меня был баг, что случайно построил на себе Fuser и уже не смог перемещаться персонажем, пришлось перезапускать игру. Перезапуск игры был не приятным, потому что пришлось опять всё гриндить. С одной стороны повторять одни и те же действия скучно, но эта и фишка игры, и пока не попробуешь все предметы, то этот геймплей вполне заходит. Мне зашёл.
Долго не мог понять как заставить собирать ботом камень, было очень не интуитивно разобраться в этом, но справился и все потом нормально пошло.
В итоге играл больше получаса и больше всего удивился, что это все работает и никаких видимых багов. Ожидал это увидеть, но нет.
Был рад увидеть такую игру.
For future scope, I would look into the replayability concept of it. Have levels with different objectives, and have more variety of upgrades possibility. I don't know if I would play a level like this again unless there were more challenging upgrades to get. Maybe you can also have the robots break, which would cause more obstacles.
This is just feedback if you want to go further. For the work you did in 48 hours, you should be proud of it! The artwork looks great, the game plays smoothly, and the level was fun trying to find a strategy to build the robots and gather resources. Way to go!