Nimkip! by T C
Harvest friends! Harvest plants! Harvest resources! Harvest the blood of your enemies!
Gain command of an army of Nimkips and brave the wilderness to restore your crashed rocket ship! Build more Nimkips, which allow you to harvest resources and attack enemies! Recall lost Nimkips with your whistle, they need your guidance. But with your brains and their.... labor..... together you can accomplish great things!
With sound assets from OpenGameArt.org https://opengameart.org/content/huh https://opengameart.org/content/rodent-or-alien-speaking-cute-weird-yo-frankie
| Link | https://theworldsquid.itch.io/nimkip-ld52 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/nimkip |
Ratings
| Overall | 177th | 3.845⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 160th | 3.81⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 327th | 3.417⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 92th | 4.226⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 438th | 3.549⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 357th | 3.176⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 182th | 3.464⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 357th | 3.524⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 90🗳️ | 74🗨️ |
I really love the amount of details on the characters, both the bunny and the little plant bois the animations are so neat as well. It took me a second to figure out the mechanics (that is more my own fault though haha) but once I got it all sorted the gameplay was super fun, it was really fun to play.
If I had to give any other feedback I would say if you ever develop this further I would love to see more details in the environment but with all the love that is in the character and npcs it isn't really noticeable at all. Amazing job! :)

The biggest issue really is that the nimkips don't really do what they're told. They have like 20% chance to actually do it and otherwise they just go there and do sweet FA.

Can't recall the non-workers either really as that will also recall the ones who are actually contributing too. Makes the whole gameplay loop absolutely tedious. And it's especially bad on combat cause no matter how many nimkips of what color ever you throw at an enemy, they might just glitch out and get killed and completely lock you from progressing. Finally I tried avoiding combat altogether and that seemed like the best strategy.

Another pretty big issue was nimkips clipping outside the map and getting stuck in the void. And unless you figured out the completely unmentioned secret unit selection functionality, you couldn't even command your nimkips because the if the first acting one was stuck there.

And that selection mechanic was also confusing when I first found it by accident. Obviously I tried to build one but hit the portrait instead and took me quite some time to find out why only reds were doing anything.

The pixel art seemed pretty nice but it was mega blurry. And that green outline just looked weird. I think you did not set the sprite scaling mode to point. Doing that keeps the pixels from blurring out when upscaled. The animations also might have looked good from what I could see but everything kept blinking and flashing which kinda ruined it. And that grass texture was almost seizure inducing on non-fullscreen and moving. This UI color choice was absolutely horrible too, completely unreadable.

The textbox text appearing animation looked weird as the words suddenly wrapped from line to line. I usually tackle this issue by making the full text actually always be there but the not appeared bit just being rendered transparent. There were also some z-ordering issues.

And finally the controls. Well they did work but they didn't really feel great. The movement had this weird laggy inertia. Didn't really bother the gameplay that much though as no precision was really needed. The command and recall both did work but the recall size changing made it a bit inaccurate and prone to accidental recalls.
So yeah... as I told, the idea was pretty sweet but had some major issues in playability. Good job on finishing it though. 👍
Try again and it is most likely more playble.
The audio reminds me a lot of Super Adventure box in guild wars 2.
Only suggestion I'd say is some of the sprites could use a bit more work but other than that great job!
@slantyoj haha, we did have plenty of extra ideas that just couldn't make it in the final game, the rocket ship would be a cool minion to have, hah! Yep, enemy AI was super tricky, and most of my time was spent just getting them to move =(.
@maymay Agree. There's definitely a lot of tweaking to be done for enemies, the player, and your Nimkips to really get that level of polish we were missing. The level came together REALLY late in development, so it's not very fine tuned. I think a minimap is a great idea
@chompdev Thanks for the kind words! We really liked this game idea, and we put a lot of work into it, so I'm glad people appreciate it. It's still super rough around the edges, but hey what can you do, it's a game jam!
i like how they follow
What I don't understand is the Battle-System. The rabit tells me about sacrificing but I wasn't having the feeling that one of the minions would have died while fighting against them ... until that one enemy. One "wusch" and nearly all of my minions have died. Some kind of feedback would be nice. Here I could imagine multiple things:
1. An information about how many minions I currently have (if one dies that would help me)
2. Healthbars on Enemies+Minions. Specially first one because I gave up fighting that one enemy due to that I don't know how much health he has left
3. Can I recover my minions? How?
4. Why should I fight enemies. Haven't tried but I guess I could avoid them. They might should drop something thats important for me.
Also it would be nice to have a tooltip for the minions I can build. I was too fast and didn't got what blue minions are for. But because they were from price-range in the middle I decided to go with the most expensive ones.
Overall a fun game (specially for people like me who likes grinding) ... and I would say the theme is very well met :-)
@tomate-salat Definitely agree that combat-feedback is very important, and is missing in our game! Unfortunately, we were heads down the last like... 20 hours, and it worked "enough" that we had to leave it as is. But I think healthbars on enemies is 100% necessary! And yeah, I wanted to make the level pretty easily beatable, so people could just... explore what we had, so I tried to make as little combat necessary as possible. I see that most people then just skip the combats, which I admit I'd probably do too haha. Maybe I went a little too far there! We also had plans to make enemies have another resource you need, but that didn't make it in either. Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
@beats Thanks for playing! Taking down enemies is really satisfying when you have a full squad, but I agree that the best way to a reliable victory is to skip fighting when you can. Maybe better enemy/resource/terrain placement could change that a bit.
@nvrskipgameday your username is excellent! Thanks for playing the game and the kind words.
Really well done!
It took me time to figure out you could issue command to only a type of Nimkips.
Well Actually i figured it out only after reading the description after finishing the game.
-- Bug but not game breaking: Nimkipsget stuck into map borders
Would have been nice to have death animations, cant figure out when ennemy dies but when he disappears, same for Nimkips. Maybe make them explode or something?
Great game and awesome work

That was somewhere to the right, where my nimkips walked along the wall and fell out of the map...
@piko yeah, we tried multiple times to get Nimkips to not get pushed into the terrain, it used to be much worse! But it can still happen, sorry about that!
@marton technologies were definitely high on our list of features to add! There's so much cool stuff you could do with an upgrade system and I agree, it wouldn't have been too hard. It's a shame we couldn't get to it.
Thanks all for the compliments and for playing!
@hfsevans Definitely! I tried to kind of give a similar feel to maps you'd find in Pikmin, but I think that game having a much wider camera angle, and destructible terrain really makes it work. I tried to make the current map still relatively straightforward, but I never had the ability to play it without having made it, so it I always knew where everything was haha. Maybe something a minimap could fix. Thanks for playing!
Seems like with a bit of polish it can be really good though I would suggest making them have other abilities if you expand it further (the reason that they have the different ones is that you need to have all of them to finish the game.) and I felt like after getting the purple ones they were the only one I ever made. Though this could be fixed also buy having them deal different "elements" of damage as well.
All in all, fun game if not a bit buggy sometimes.
@substain Yeah, that bug was tough to track down, we didn't have time for it. Same with balancing/completing enemies. Thanks for the kind words!
@fullheartgames Absolutely! Enemy attack/health/dealing damage feedback I think is absolutely necessary for combat, and its absence is VERY noticeable. Thanks for playing!
@harmofish Thanks! It appeals a bunch to me too, so I'm glad to see others enjoy it.
@ninnec Thanks for the nice comment on the character design. We tried to get a lot in, definitely gave ourselves a ton of work with this project haha. Always too ambitious.
@frozenfire92 haha that is excellent! Thanks for sharing that story, and for the kind words!