Downsteam by SmelJey
Strategy game, where you need to play as a merchant. Deliver goods from one city to another, gain money and upgrade your vehicle.
How to play:
Move to the closest city with Right mouse button.
As your caravan moves, your fuel decreases. You can refuel your caravan inside the cities.
Upon arriving, press "Current city" button in the right bottom corner to open trade panel. You can repair and refuel your caravan here, buy and sell goods. Press Escape to close this window
Click with Left Mouse Button on other cities and open their trade panels to see where to sell your goods with the most profits. Beware, that once you run out of fuel or health, you will lose.
There is a second tab in the trade menu, to buy upgrades for your caravan. Different cities provide different upgrades.
Continue and become the wealthiest trader in the region.
Controls
- RMB - Move caravan
- WASD - Move camera
- LMB - Select city
- Space - Center camera on caravan
Credits
Programming - SmelJey
Art - KokoBird
Music and Sound effects - MilkaGoat
| Link | https://smeljey.itch.io/downsteam |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/downsteam |
Ratings
| Overall | 663th | 3.5⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 775th | 3.236⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 604th | 3.319⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 531th | 3.958⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 441th | 3.917⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 512th | 3.319⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 908th | 2.516⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 597th | 3.529⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 56🗨️ |
I wanted to echo some of the other commentor's input. Like @manogugas I also found the UI to be hard to read in some parts. E.g. the White text with the road as a background. Or differentiating enabled vs disabled buttons. It was always possible to read stuff, just required effort which feels more jarring in a game like this where you're often reading and comparing text.
I also really like the visuals. The vehicle art is so charming and got me pretty invested it keeping it alive.
Like @rhewid I also felt I got unfair trades sometimes. The game was functioning perfectly and when I examined the buy and sell prices more closely I could have seen that some of the choices I made were silly. However, my expectation as a player when I saw "coal shortage", purchased as much could as I could and then arrive in the town to see they're only paying 50% of my cost ... that made me _feel_ cheated. I felt myself wanting to be heavily rewarded.
It was kinda hard to balance the economy system, and I guess, I'll rebalance it after some time. I also feel, that random events should change prices more drastically.
I understand your annoyance with the UI, there is too much information on the screen and it's not readable enough. Going to add some icons to the UI, change it a bit, and add more visual indicators of the player state (when the fuel is running out, how far you can go with the current amount of fuel, etc.) and how profitable the deals are in the cities.
Going to check your games soon! (if I didn't before)
It felt like I was overwhelmed by the wolves though :D
@zimny11 Actually, you can open price panel for different cities by left clicking on them and pressing the "City" button
@lisek-gagatek Yeah, I always forget about choosing good hotkeys for browser, I'm really sorry about that :D
@retrific Some cities have higher/lower prices for certain resources from the start, and when shortage/surplus event happens it doesn't change the price much. I'll rebalance it later, to make events change the price more drastically.
This reminds me a bit of Escape Velocity, if you've ever played that. One thing it had was each planet had both a numerical value and "High" "Low" "Very High" etc next to the price. That saved you some bookkeeping – I think having to remember exactly how much I bought something for was a bit of a pain here. Similarly, I think selling at a discount makes the game extra hard, you should maybe just make them 1:1 so people have fewer numbers to remember.
I finally figured out how to make a profit but just cheesing it between two towns, did that for awhile so I could finally afford some upgrades, then I forgot to refuel once and lost. :-( I think that's it for me.
I think the thing that would most improve this work making the UI easier to navigate. For example, would easier to open a city by just clicking on it, rather than clicking on it and then clicking the button in the bottom right (I don't think anything else uses the left click?). A way to snap the camera back to your vehicle would be nice, too — there were a bunch of times that I'd move around and then have trouble finding where I was. This game practically cries out for a minimap haha.
All in all great job! Really solid game.