Radio Nation by pro4

Gameplay
Radio Nation is a minimalistic city-building puzzle game, where you try to grow your city while maximizing the city's coverage with radio signals.
Houses give points worth the amount of radio signal reception they are receiving. Placing a house next to other houses also gives you extra point bonuses. Every 100 points you will level up and receive additional buildings. Keep in mind that radio stations cannot emit signals onto each other, but they can overlap multiple signals on top of houses to significantly increase the houses point value!
As some have mentioned, exploring with land rewards a little too much on the point approach. The intended way to play the game is by having houses as dense as possible.
Developer best score: 8542
Controls
Controls use keyboard and mouse.
- WASD: Move Camera
- Left Click: Place building
- Shift: Assisted snap while building
- Scroll Wheel/Q/E: Rotate building
Credits
- Profour: Programmer, Artist, SFX, Game Design
Attribution
Radio Nation was created in the span of 2 days for Ludum Dare 59 using Godot 4.7-dev5, Blender 5.0.1, Aseprite, and Audacity. All code, artwork, and game design were created during the game jam. No AI was used in the making of this game or any related content.
| Link | https://profour.itch.io/radionation |
| Link | https://profour.itch.io/radionation |
| Link | https://profour.itch.io/radionation |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/radio-nation |
Ratings
| Overall | 538th | 3.423⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 491th | 3.288⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 428th | 3.385⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 372th | 3.846⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 654th | 3.173⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 636th | 3.26⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 19🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
The first one is that the games seems to be hungry for resources, it was fine at the beginning, but as I played, it dropped to about 5FPS, making it hard to enjoy.
The second one, is that at first I played the game as intended, but then I realized it was way more efficient to become an explorer. As you earn 10 points per tile revealed, and the game seems to have an infinite (or at least very huge) playground, you can put something on a new tile to reveal 3 new tiles, earning 30 points, and keep going, sometimes placing a signal to get extra points. You will earn buildings faster than you spend them, and you can keep going on and on. I stopped at 10 000 points, and had still more than 50 houses left in my inventory. So I must admit the process became pretty repetitive, and not really fun.
That being said, if you intend to keep working on this game after the jam, I think the problem can easily be solved. One way would be to reduce points from new tiles, or give more points to the signal system. But what I'd recommend would be to set limits in the playground. You can make them look natural with mountains or forest that take up the whole tile. That way, the player would have a finite space to work with, leading to more strategy. That also would reduce the resources needed, as the game would have to handle less tiles. I would definitely enjoy that game.
Because I don't want you to think the game is a failure or anything! As I said, I really enjoy the concept. The animations when discovering tiles are also great, and add to the good pressure of hoping the tiles you will uncover will suit your plan, as well as the buildings you get. I don't want to sound harsh, I'm just trying to write a constructive criticism. Because I think you have very nice foundations, and with just a few tweaks, your game would genuinely become great! :)
It was a lot of fun, though it was a bit easy to figure out how to not run out of buildings. Great entry!
I enjoy Radio Nation, conceptually its very easy to hop into and actually playing and expanding outward is really fun.