Sails by ping78
Description and other descriptiony things coming "soon".
| Link | https://ping78.itch.io/sails?secret=qdbvSm0IQp2C5fep5nYcHOscRFo |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/sails |
Ratings
| Given | 0🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
Description and other descriptiony things coming "soon".
| Link | https://ping78.itch.io/sails?secret=qdbvSm0IQp2C5fep5nYcHOscRFo |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/sails |
| Given | 0🗳️ | 0🗨️ |
Couple notes:
- No hand-holding or tutorial made it difficult to onboard - that is tough to include in just 48 hours. It wasn't obvious right away that I could fire back at enemies by pressing Q/E. However, that was a really interesting feature.
- The buying/selling of goods didn't seem intuitive for me at first. I didn't mess around with the menu at all until my second play through. I found that I could cheat the market by buying goods and immediately selling them back. Perhaps it isn't supposed to be a capitalism sim! :)
- No idea of where I was going. A map or compass indicator would be a big help.
Great work on:
- Picking up scraps from enemy ships totally changed my attitude towards fighting them. I really like that little details.
- What I imagine is a procedural map generation. My second gameplay appeared to have very different terrain.
- Visuals for the water and wind was really nice and help sell the reason why the ship moved slower in some directions than others.
Very nice!
And that is why goods disappear when you sell them.
Yes, world is procedurally generated.
As for the map...
Update:
I'm proud to announce the "Map DLC". Also updated the onboarding text.
I really like that the terrain is procedurally generated, it's a very nice touch. The map is also really nice! (Although I think the player's color could be a bit brighter, so it's easier to see where you are)
I did feel that the enemy count was slightly high, I ended up getting swarmed quite often. Instead of many ships that do a little damage, I feel it might make more sense to have fewer ships which deal more damage? So that their individual danger is higher.
However, the game lacks some extra music and sounds. And I got stuck in the town menu for a little while before figuring out how to exit it.
Very cool game :)
I'm a good player, but unfortunately not a good captain haha.
It's a really cool game with beautiful environments. I really like one design aspect in this game: the fact that enemy ship cannons can damage other enemy ships, so players can use tactics and positioning to make them destroy each other. (It's a great defensive strategy when I'm not good at turning and firing.)
Sailing feels great, and is much more intuitive than I thought it would be by reading the intro. I would do away with the mouse controls for steering/firing, and you just need 1 key each for main menu/toggle full screen.
Agree with some other commentators that the UI and onboarding could use a bit of work. Took me quite a while to figure out what was going on initially, and how to start sailing. Perhaps somehow make it clearer which side is "yours" and which is the "towns" (Maybe pictures instead of names). And how to exit the trade screen and start sailing. Also I would pause the game while at port (so that enemies can't keep attacking you) and have a UI button to leave. It would be cool if the average price I'd paid so far for my cargo was displayed, so that I have a better idea of whether or not it would be a good time to sell.
With that said, once I did get it, it made sense and was easy to use.
Polish/aesthetics wise, the graphics were great, the sounds were passable. The writing style and UI sounds don't quite match the style of the game, though.
This is a super impressive prototype which could easily be made into a full fledged game, I think. A bit of polish, tweaking the difficulty curve of enemies, ironing out some kinks in the economy, adding a fitting soundtrack. You'd get a steam wishlist from me!
It's a bit RNG dependent though whether you can progress or not, as sometimes you get towns with cheap cannons straight away, and sometimes the first 10 towns have none, and then every enemy ship becomes a tank.
I unfortunately could not finish the game, despite getting many attempts that were going well, it consistently throws an error when I reach about halfway through the world, which forces me to refresh the page.
I liked that the winds are very strong and push you around, it made the battles less repetitive.
The boat spawn rate felt weird, some games I had no enemy boats, some game I would have them constantly spawning and have a good 4 boats around at all times, it feels dependent on the region too, whatever it is I could benefit from being a little more tame early game, once you get a few cannons it's not as problematic as you can destroy them all.
Negatives
As other people mentioned, the UI could use some work, maybe adding an exit button for the shops could help a lot.
Maybe a way to have trajectories marked in some ways as additional clarity and making the reload bars a bit bigger would be really helpful. Also I cannot take back what I accidentally sell to the same city and that has caused me to lose a game once.
The randomization of the map + the towns done in a compo is pretty impressive and the wind mechanic and the overall movement feel super nice and smooth. I'm more impressed of the graphics done in such a short amount of time because from my experience, it takes many hours to do even 1 model.
The overall mood of the game was fairly fun and I will always love ways to scam cities into giving me more money
my only note is, a lot of ports will buy from you at a higher price than they sell... that's a bit unusual!
One thing that took me longer than expected is how to get out of the port. I didn't think of "just move fowards" while I had a shop menu in front of me.
Also, sea shanties... I get it, you did it alone, time was not on your side... but come on, sea shanties are a must. If anyone who is reading this hasn't played yet, you know what to have playing on another browser window while playing.
I really liked it, and the fact that it's re-playable thanks to Procedural generation. It can get too crowded very quickly though.
Great entry overall ! well done
The physics of the sail of the boat is juicy.
The wind particles are perfectly balanced.
I enjoyed it a lot, thanks!