Orbles by Rongo Matane
Orbles is a city-building and real-time strategy game. You need to plan your colony, generate goods and lead Orbles in battle. The goal is to keep as much space as possible for your settlement, find Solar Orbs hidden among your enemies, and save the Orble civilization from extinction.
This is not a simple game. You have to put in a bit of effort to understand it at first, but you can figure it out. Click on the buildings to learn how they work, and check the economy chart.
Your Forts will only receive Orblings to make warriors, if you have some to spare in your Solar Chamber. If you send them all to carry resources, you will lack Orriors to defend your settlement.
If you want to rate the game, be sure to download the "game jam" version from itch. There are a few changes to the other versions - see patchnotes on itch.
Ratings
| Overall | 21th | 4.343⭐ | 123🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 77th | 4.095⭐ | 123🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 103th | 3.971⭐ | 124🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 56th | 4.322⭐ | 123🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 31th | 4.641⭐ | 126🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 29th | 4.339⭐ | 123🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 469th | 3.321⭐ | 111🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 122th | 4.139⭐ | 124🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 13🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
- Great idea for the game.
- The mix of mechanics are fun and give the player nice freedom to try different connections and stuff to figure out on its own.
- The monsters are creepy and the suspense in the game is nice.
- Art style is phenomenal! Just jaw drops!
- And great music, as always!
I see Rene was so tired, that he did not set any text or graphic in the LD and itch.io page, yet XD
It was a bit hard to get into, felt a bit frontloaded with info. Perhaps consider locking away some of the options somehow? (like what you did in dome romantik, which was really clever)
Once I understood I had to click the buildings for info (and read all the hover tooltips), it went from confusing to incredibly engaging. I played this for over an hour before I beat it, which almost never happens for me with jam games.
The town center said something about upgrades when you get orbs, which I still don't understand (unfinished feature?).
I love the art-style, and the music is really fitting and easy to listen to.
My favorite game so farm. Great job!
Great work!
The art is a strong suit here. Putting those AoT like creepy monsters next to those cute villagers made me want to protect their potato heads even more (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵)و
Overall I'm very impressed with this game. One of my favorites this season.
think its an awesome game, the art and music and great, and I really like how you have to plan where to place your buildings around the approaching enemies.
I didnt really understand how to get my guys to attack a specific enemy, if thats possible?
but defo one of the best and most polished games ive played this jam
Fantastic work everywhere for such a fitting game for the theme. That your team was able to get everything done in such a short time is testament to your organisational skills, congrats!
Thanks for doing a twitch stream of playing the game too. It was very cool to see the game played all the way through. There was even some live bug fixing and the game kept running after being frozen. Is this the power of Godot? Wow :O
It certainly has the potential to be a full game!
I would suggest adding some instruction in the future though - it took me a while to understand all the rules in game
The art and animations are very cute, I love the little orbles ^^ The Purants are quite scary, I love how you can feel the weight and impact as they get closer, you really conveyed how important their approach is! Very nice music and sound effects, it sounds very cute when your orriors attack.
So far this is the best Ludum Dare game I played, you did an incredible job!
I found it was kinda lopsided in its difficulty. Getting started was very difficult but once you built an economy and secured some land you were pretty set. I think a lot of the difficulty in the beginning was just getting the dang things to do what I wanted. I ended up on my winning run deleting all of the starting buildings to build something more efficient.
At the very end I was having a lot of lag spikes. It wasn't impossible to play but it did make it sort of annoying.
Great job and thank you for sharing!
Audio was really on point and responsive, I liked the naming conventions for everything, and liked the story. Super intimidating to start with such a huge mob surrounding the city.
It had a STEEP learning curve. I had to restart the game 3 times before learning to right click or press esc to exit out of a build state (for example, when I wanted to 'cancel' out of path building, I kept clicking the path building tool thinking that would do it, only to think the game was bugged when it didn't do what I expected.)
I found it a bit slow. The huge mob made me frantically want to build as many soliders as possible but it seemed a bit slow to get them built up, making me feel a tad frustrated...and once the mob circled in on my city 2-3 times I felt like giving up and starting over since there's so little space to work with.
Overall though, SUPER impressive entry, and I'm wanting to keep coming back for more to do better. Can't even imagine how much work this would have taken. Congrats on getting this massive feat pulled off!
Once I got into it, I really enjoyed the strategy. I immediately dumpster most of the beggining stuff and rebuild! lol. I wish there was a pause function.
It took a bit to figure out how the economy worked, never really got it bustling like the gif. Warrior AI sometimes went too deep into the baddies.
On the amount of work - it was a ton. I recorded day 3 for my part https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1445947787 and i know cyangmou worked about as much. Cameron also a ton, 16 minutes of music!
@zimny11 thanks zimny, always love your quality feedback!
@johanhelsing hehe, yes, upgrades are actually implemented but i didn't have time to add the upgrade popup actually opening.
@fidrik if you played in the browser, it might have been scrolled outside of the screen. You can direct your Orriors with the watchtowers - they'll go off to fight monsters near them.
@webox going full force 3 days with a great team :D
@pickyburrito49 oh yeah, grabbing to "copy" is a super smart UX thing!
@alex-mulkerrin <3 Yes, the power of Godot. Super fun engine, it can really go wild while the game keeps running.
@davision i had hopeless situations too, but they recovered. When your area shrinks, so shrinks the border you have to defend. Every level of economy has a natural border it can sustain - kind of self balancing. Anyway, i mostly wanted to say again: i love your avatar :D
@nardandas yeah, the most difficult thing is the start. After that, the settlement is not at risk anymore, mostly.
@mechanicallife you can start a path anywhere. Just click the path button and then a free field in the map :)
I liked the settlers-like game mechanics although I couldn't find a balance that would produce steady flow of warriors. Maybe it has to do with the maximum users per road. I tried it several times. Great idea and implementation of a strategy game in so little time (We made an RTS too and didn't get even nearly that much content in :open_mouth:).
This entry had very professional overall impression about it. Great job!
The game is super deep and insanely polished, great job !
The description drives home this point - but this is a game that will take a bit to fully understand. But once you get past that learning curve the gameplay is really nice.
The strongest point I would give this game is how it sets up such a cool mood. The character design dichotomy of the little orblings compared to the scare big (AoT-esque) giants, coupled with music that gives off a vibe that says "shit is serious, but if you play it smart and you'll make it".
This game rocks, and I strongly encourage the devs to keep with it after the jam.
My advice for anyone struggling: pay attention to your resources and how they pile up. From there try to figure out what would be an efficient way to move all your resources along and keep things occupied. The mistake I made was treating this not like a supply chain game. I was taken in by the theming and spectacle, but ultimately your strategy fundamentals will save you here.
Since I played 40m+, needless to say I thought this game was amazing. The turnbased movement of the titans works extremely well here. They are able to move in more predictable ways which keeps you calm while at the same time imposing huge threat onto the player. This concept was done in They Are Billions, but I think this style works much better because you aren't taking constant light damage all the time on your walls and can focus on the grand scheme of things.
Finally, I loved that final stretch of the road when you go for the orbs. Sure by then you probably have an efficient economy going on, but just seeing the flashing titans + your slow, big headed carrier run around gave me a sense of dread that it might fall apart still.
This was a brilliant idea and probably a top 3 entry for me this jam!
(the only problem I have is that although I have sort of economics running, after few tries, I still don't know how to actually push my warriors in areas where I need them...
One of the best entries i've seen so far
Some notes, There were a few bugs I ran into while playing, nothing that killed the game, but it felt like it was struggling towards about the halfway point when I was working towards my second orb. The game would freeze and stutter a lot, especially if I tried to increase the speed. I was playing the web version, so this may partially why. It froze once and I thought it was going to crash, but it recovered okay.
Another bug I noticed with my orriors, unless I wasn't understanding the mechanics, I had a few watchtowers setup in the top right to go for the last orb, but no one was coming to attack, the towers said they had a bunch of guys garrisoned as well. When the enemies were really close to me the flood gates opened and all the orriors that should have been there flooded out and once and slaughtered haha It was funny to watch, and I'm glad they came to the rescue, but a little weird they took so long.
It's totally understandable to have bugs like this for a jam game. The bugs didn't really affect my experience and won't affect the rating at all.
For anyone struggling I found that just getting a ton of farms and huts out early was really important, once you're flowing with little guys you can more easily get orriors out of them. The mine areas seem to put out plenty of recourses, I could have 3-4 forts from one mine and my bottleneck was just waiting on the slow orblings to show up, they move really slowly, so if you have a big flow that helps. Don't go for the first orb to early, the enemies come in really hard when you start and harder when you get one, so wait until you have a good amount of space before attempting it. Finally, use the watchtowers, place them where you need your orriors to go, and delete the ones you no longer need. The guys seem to spread out to the watchtowers, so if I needed more on one spot I would place a few there to encourage them to go in that direction.
Took me quite a few tries, but I'm glad I got it. Nicely done!
I think that the key to winning is to understand the production ratios and the fact that you can remove and add Bearers. 2 farms 1 house, 1 mine 2 barracks (I read the logs, I know these are barracks and not forts, you can't fool me ;^] )
## Voidsay's gameplay remarks :tm:
- Didn't feel like the watchtowers did anything. Oriors just ran wherever they wanted anyway
- I sometimes wished that they would attack the enemies that was closest to the buildings and posed the most risk, but they ususally went off into the thicket
- After I got about 100 Orbals I removed most of the houses to combat the lag. I noticed that you put a limit of 80 Oriors, is there a limit on Orbals?
- After establishing 6'ish forts, I felt pretty safe. I wish there was some sort of mechanic that made it harder near the end. Even the speedup when collection the gold didn't have me worried.
## Voidsay's QA corner:
- Oriors (not sure if I should hug or slap whoever came up with this one) sometimes get stuck hitting thin air. You can see two of them in the picture near the bottom mine. The killed the enemy, but didn't update their state for some reason.
- There seems to be a stutter either when building roads or right before the enemies move (it's inconsistent, so I'm not sure)
- Had a glitch that killed the game, not sure if you can make anything of it. It occurred right as the enemies made their step and I think I was collecting the second golden orbal. Here's an image and a link to the log.
https://gist.github.com/Voidsay/f03d19904d3456e126dfbf3fbdcd689c
1. Game is very laggy after a while. I can't say that it is unplayable (because I've won the game), but It is destroying the experience.
2. I don't get how the game relates to the jam theme. You're not delaying the inevitable, you can straight up win the game and the "inevitable" is gone.
3. Some Orbles were just doing nothing instead of moving the materials around. In the end, I've just started to keep the road count as minimal as it could be. Just Fort <-> Mine and Hut <-> Farm.
@unitedfailures awesome, that was really what i was aiming for regarding the dichotomy: Contrasting the cute and pleasant Orbles with overproportionate horror.
@peachtreeoath Nice, the game being about a supply chain is a great observation i didn't put in words before. I wanted a settlers 2 game which is about the strength and output of your economy, with a lot of scaling, not something where you need every building once or twice and then are mostly set. Supply Chain game is a great term for that.
@shigor they'll attack the Purants in the area of their tower. A new Orrior checks which tower has the smallest garrison and checks from there. So ideally, you can remove towers that are safe, as they'll be garrisoned but the Orriors will only idle.
@ursagames my man :) Thank you!
@metzkermeister The Orriors will only stay at the fort, if their tower has no Purants in range. Ideally you delete the towers the are not really relevant anymore, freeing up those Orriors. Sorry to hear there were technical issues - with the complexity of the game it couldn't be made water tight. But it's definitely something that is better in the download version, which is the one that should be considered for this jam (and the only one linked from this page).
@voidsay hello again, thank you for the quality feedback :) The screenshot is epic, really funny seeing them all step. Limit was intentional, as the game surely would not live to see 2000 Orriors walk around. Suttering came from the path finding of the Orriors being slow.
@snowycocoon the idea is that the Purants are inevitable - no matter what you do and how good you fight, they cannot be stopped, only delayed. This is what you do until you can finally escape them by, in a sense, changing the rules of the game. You know you can't stop them, so you flee from their world. I think the other option of ramping them up until they finally crush you might be too disheartening for a building game like that, seeing your nice settlement slowly overrun. But maybe it would be cool, even more fun.
This is nothing no one has mentioned, but the graphics are just great, and the winning screen was also really good, great game, thank you all for making something this good (:
Managed to clear most of the map and win. Didn't experience any lag in the web version.
The only thing that threw me off a bit is that having < 3 orbs had only negative effects, so I just delayed getting them until I controlled most of the map.
Thank you so much for taking the time to appreciate the music and leave such kind reviews! It was definitely a challenge to pump out 15 minutes of music in ~60 hours but it was a ton of fun :D
If you have any interest, I have it up as a free download here: https://cameronpaxton.bandcamp.com/album/orbles-ost
Thanks again, and happy jamming!
but it is incredible
i'm floored
great attack on titan inspiration
fully-fledged gameplay
i could play this for hours :o <3
the travelling bunch get blocked every now and then
it's fantastic you can build as many buildings as you like - pretty novel and fresh
i'd argue it could be a bit better to be able to delete everything you want as soon as you've selected the delete tool
yeah
very very impressive
gg y'all, keep it up :D
So we really like your game and we're streaming Ludum Dare 50 games this week-end both Saturday April 16th & Sunday April 17th starting at 10AM CEST [--> Paris summer time] on our Twitch channel --> https://www.twitch.tv/teamchoochoo
Would you like us to feature your game? This may redirect some traffic to your page for more people to try your LD50 game :smile:
If you would, please e-mails us anecdotes and sneak peeks of your creative process (photos, screenshots, beta/WIP asset renders, mood boards, concept Art, etc.) so we can present them alongside and illustrate your LD50 adventure to our audience :slight_smile:
Here's our e-mail to send us all that good stuff to --> TeamChooChoo.GameJams@gmail.com
Please include your game's name in the e-mail's title
Have a great day, I hope to hear from you soon - thanks for that great moment I spent testing your little nugget of a game, and see you in the chat during the stream, I hope :heart:
Very cool that you are doing that again! Sadly, i don't have any time this time around, as i'm putting all my hours into preparing for PAX. Have fun with the Stream :)