Edge of Entropy by eupde
A charming, rogue-like puzzle strategy game where you play Ell the Elementalist, attempting to power up the Elemental Islands to create a new universe. Be careful! The more you move around the islands, the more entropy is generated in the Chaos Cat’s belly, until he throws shards of entropy at your islands undoing your hard work.
Earn fortune, power your islands, create a universe, and watch out for that cat!!
| Itch | https://thehteam.itch.io/edge-of-entropy |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/edge-of-entropy |
Ratings
| Overall | 884th | 3.422⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1323th | 2.813⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 752th | 3.297⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 845th | 3.438⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 284th | 4.141⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 469th | 3.531⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 945th | 2.621⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 728th | 3.438⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 41🗨️ |
But I loved the lore and worldbuilding, and it's very intriguing! I'd definitely want to see what you folks would achieve with it given more time available.
The gameplay is hard to get into simply because text tutorials are really ineffective in general, and that criticism has nothing to do with your game or implementation specifically.
Clearly there are a lot of mechanics to explain, and you have limited time, so I understand that designing more active, well-paced tutorials would eat up a lot of time. But I think at the end of the day it would be worth it to either come up with tutorials that require players to perform actions in game in order to teach them, or simplify the mechanics, or both.
Another simple change would be to leave a shortened form of the tutorial information on screen as you play the game, so players don't have to remember everything they read.
That being said, I thought the text and presentation of the tutorials was actually really beautiful, which again goes in line with the great audiovisual aesthetic you have going on here.
Anyway, I rambled on enough, good job team!
The art was AWESOME I love Chaos Kitty even if he's a lil mean xD
I think the rng is mostly fine, but I wish that you never lost progress with your upgrades. One idea is to set their fortune equal to what they spent last round if they have less this time
Example (since I don't think I'm explaining it well haha):
Player spends 5 fortune on the staff upgrade and then loses and only has 1 fortune this time. I think just set their fortune back to 5 so they don't lose progress and can try a different strategy
I think the only other suggestion I had was making the orbs have more contrast from their unpowered state. sometimes it was hard to tell which ones was on. And also able to fast forward the rolling animation on the chaos kitty's belly
Clever take to use entropy as the source of instability!
This one was a little confusing at first, but once I got the hang of it I had a great time eventually getting to the win-screen! This game also has fantastic visuals and audio to boot, y'all should be proud!