Game Off 2020

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A jam submission

AbaddonView game page

Control the Terrabot fleet, make this harsh hellscape your home.

Submitted by ruinthread-games — 1 hour, 37 minutes before the deadline

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Abaddon's itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Innovation	#1	4.636	4.636
Theme interpretation	#11	4.091	4.091
Overall	#11	4.000	4.000
Gameplay	#36	3.636	3.636
Graphics	#109	3.455	3.455
Audio	#302	1.909	1.909

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/ruinthread-games/abaddon

Theme interpretation
A literal moonshot: Sending Terrabots to colonise and ferraform a moon. Metaphorically: Analyse the moon, devise a plan and program the bots in advance, everything must to go right in order to stand a chance at survival.

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Comments

PepperBoiSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

Gameplay: This game was very complicated and impressive. It was nice that you included the tutorial, that helped a bit.

Graphics: The textures could be improved but I think its good for a game jam.

Audio: Having sound would have been really nice. If you're ok with paying a bit you can use this for easy music.

Innovation: There aren't many games like this because its hard to make.

Theme: A literal moonshot: Sending Terrabots to colonise and ferraform a moon. Metaphorically: Analyse the moon, devise a plan and program the bots in advance, everything must to go right in order to stand a chance at survival.

Overall: Really impressive game, it sucks that I couldnt play more because my computer is bad :(

Can you try (and review) my game?

Submitted

Move With Moons

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper3 years ago (1 edit)

Thanks for the review, and the music thing look interesting, I'll have a look!

I'm sorry that you weren't able to play more because of your computer, was it due to a low framerate? Decreasing the fleet size in the settings might be a possible way of improving it if you're limited by your CPU (in that case I'd advise playing with fewer Leviathans and a slower charge rate to compensate for the difficulty of having a smaller fleet). If you're limited by your GPU there is probably no easy fix. I'd love to hear about what framerates you were experiencing and the specs of your PC.

I'd also be happy to try your game!

PepperBoiSubmitted3 years ago(+1)

Yeah it was my gpu, this computer is super old and im saving to get a new one soon.

sintechSubmitted4 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

PROS

A detailed complex simulation game (extremely impressive for a game jam!)
Usage of logical/conditional gates adds to the experience
Extremely easy-to-use UI and intuitive controls
Brilliant usage of a node editor in a game environment
Ever think about working for a robotics or a space company ;)

CONS

Casual players might feel overwhelmed
Even on a 1920x1080 monitor, the screen felt cramped
Textures could have been a bit more detailed, especially of the stars and space
No audio (was there audio, because I could not hear anything?)

Like I said, this feels like a piece of simulation software designed and disguised as a computer video game.

Outstanding work!

Submitted

i want to go back

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper3 years ago

Thank you so much!

Aside from the very welcome positive feedback, I am also most grateful for your list of possible improvements! Would you mind telling me if you felt that the entire screen felt cramped in your experience, or the instruction graph specifically? I know that for larger graphs panning and zooming can be a pain, so I'm sure its possible to come up with a better solution for that. I will look into making the textures more detailed, all of them were created using the blender node graph and then baked out, but I imagine that a more hands on approach (and some additional time) would give them some extra appeal. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the missing music/sound effects were not a bug, I simply ran out of time in adding them and I was worried that with my complete lack of experience in that area, bad music and annoying sound effects might do more harm than good.

sintechSubmitted3 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

For the screen

It was bit of both: I would like to see more of the instruction graph, but I would then have to expand it.
But expanding it would mean that I can not see the planet and the Terrabots properly, because a quarter of my monitor is hidden by the instruction graph.
Sure I can zoom out the graph but for some reason (maybe it's my monitor), the text on the nodes of the graph start disappearing (check the image: this is taken on a Dell 1920x1080 monitor). And if I decide to add more instructions to the graph, I would have to expand it more, thereby not seeing more of the planet and the bots.
Perhaps you can use some sort of opacity on the instruction graph? That would make the graph almost transparent, and I can also see the planet. (I'm not sure if that would be visually appealing, though.)

For the sound and music, I understand completely. :)

sintechSubmitted3 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

Some examples of windows/desktops using opacity (all taken by a quick google search):

KDE + i3wm, Polybar (top) + Latte Dock (bottom): Any way to keep both bars but save space? : i3wm

How To Add Blur to GNOME Shell - OMG! Ubuntu!

Ubuntu – How to change App Drawer background to be less transparent – iTecTec

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper3 years ago

Thanks for taking the trouble to come back and answer! And I think a semi-transparent background would certainly be worth a try. I also noticed the zooming issue for the instructions graph, I'm afraid there might be no easy way to fix that, but I will look into it.

sintechSubmitted3 years ago

No problem at all!
Good luck :)

jvalenSubmitted4 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Wow! I can tell that you put a lot passion to build the game. It is very detailed and has deep complexity.

I would suggest to create a small sample level with less options and simplify the UI a bit, it was quite difficult for me to understand the mechanics. I give it a few tries but the Windows build keep crashing at some point, I will probably try the Linux build as well to check how it goes :).

Very impressive overall! Well done!

Submitted

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper4 years ago(+1)

Thank you very much for your generous feedback!

I would be very grateful to know where (or in which context) the game was crashing for you, since that is something the other commenters have not mentioned to date. Was it whilst editing the instruction graph or during the simulation part? If you saved your graph, I'd love to take a look at it! (The saves should be under e.g. `C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Godot\app_userdata\MoonshotAttempt2`)

jvalenSubmitted4 years ago(+1)

The crashes happened in my first tries while using the instruction graph, I was connecting nodes all over the place and probably did something wrong. I’m trying to reproduce it again but I cannot, maybe because I’m a bit more careful making the connections now.

I don’t have a graph saved from those crashes but I do have a log that says the following:

**ERROR**: Condition "!node" is true. Returned: __null
   At: scene/main/node.cpp:1381:get_node() - Condition "!node" is true. Returned: __null
num opponents: 10
**ERROR**: Condition "!node" is true. Returned: __null
   At: scene/main/node.cpp:1381:get_node() - Condition "!node" is true. Returned: __null

I hope it helps!

Again, really well done! the game is awesome!

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper4 years ago(+1)

Thanks! I will look into it, but I must admit my precautions against ill-connected graphs are paper thin, its an issue I'd have loved to have addressed with a bit more development time!

AKA YSubmitted4 years ago(+1)

This is a very complex game and surprising to see as a Game Jam entry! The integration of visual programming into the gameplay is really neat and inventive. I would suggest a playable tutorial that takes you through the mechanics step by step, as opposed to the drop down box, but obviously, that takes a lot of extra time in a game jam.

Submitted

Nocturne of Posts

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper4 years ago(+1)

Thanks for the feedback! I will admit that this was a very (perhaps too) ambitious project for my skill level, but despite some of the obvious shortcomings (tutorial, missing music/sound effects) I'm still fairly pleased with how it turned out.

gameshapedSubmitted4 years ago(+1)

This is super cool. As someone who uses shader graph and other tools with node editors pretty frequently, it's awesome to see that style of scripting built into a game. The performance of the node editor was great for me.

I agree with others, that the game would benefit from simple scenarios at first before ramping up to a planet-scale (or moon-scale) simulation with an entire fleet of terraformers. I had fun playing around with it, but the learning curve towards making a graph like the one in your screenshot was a little too steep!

I really hope you stick with the node graph concept as a way of programming AI. I love AI-programming games but most of them lack the depth you can achieve with a system like the one you have here.

Submitted

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper4 years ago (1 edit)

Thanks for playing the game! I'm very happy to hear that the performance on your machine was acceptable, since that was a concern of mine (I actually ended up rewriting the graph evaluation such that it processes all Terrabots in a single pass over all possible branches, which seems to have been the key to make it run at a reasonable framerate). At the moment the graph evaluation is still done completely in GD script, but for more complex graphs a port to C# might be necessary.

I already have some ideas for implementing a step-by-step 'campaign' style tutorial, which should be much more manageable without the pressure of a game jam deadline :)

shrekella4 years ago

gg

Domain314Submitted4 years ago(+1)

You build this in 1 month? wow!
Great job on the high complexity, you have created! With a good stpe-by-step tutorial this could easily consume a few hours on tinkering in the game!
I enjoyed it :)

Submitted

BREEZE OF CHEEZE

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper4 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

Thank you, I appreciate the feedback :)

I realised just how powerful the Godot engine is by making this project, programming the base instruction graph actually only took a few days, which allowed me to waste a lot of time on making art. In retrospect this time could have been better spent on a tutorial (but my goal was to brush up on my blender skills as well).

ilbarbogioSubmitted4 years ago(+1)

I can see this scaring away casual players... but then again, its beauty is in the technicality and intricacy. At this time, and with only a month of work on it, the only thing I can point out is the screen (playing on a 15.6 laptop) is a bit cramped for me. A snappier node editor would come a long long way in making it a nice game to come back and swiftly test out an idea, but as it is I'm still going get me some time to come back and play some more.

Really love the idea of the node editor AI behaviours in game, I'm definitely going to steal it! And I want to see how much it can take before crashing: for now it seems pretty stable, and that's not easy feat with kind of system, so bravo!

Submitted

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper4 years ago(+1)

Thank you very much for your nice review and I'm really glad you are enjoying the game! I agree that the UI needs a lot of attention, and that it would probably also be more player-friendly if it were organised better. I think for smaller screens some UI-scaling setting should be easy to implement.

As for the nodes, yes, default placement of new nodes has to be improved and I thought about some kind of system for combining nodes into functions/macros (if that's what you mean by snappier) but the latter would have been beyond the scope of what I would be able to make in a month :). As for the stability: I'm not sure how much one can throw at it, by some miracle it never actually crashed for me with graphs of high complexity (provided all the connections were valid). Of course eventually GDscript reaches its limit in terms of performance and the framerate starts tanking (try 625 Terrabots). For the long term it would probably be best to move the instruction graph to C# and look at some kind of node-compilation techniques, but there was no chance of that happening by the jam deadline of course! Feel free to look at the source code and steal any parts you like (I'm hoping its possible to just import it into Godot, if that's not the case I'll look into it)

rumbledotSubmitted4 years ago(+1)

The mechanic and technicality you shown just blew me away. I love the instruction panel, tutorial check-boxes and the concept behind it.

I feel the game could use more colour. Could be great if the player can generate the planet and its unique biomes.

The tutorial was quite explanatory, but could be more friendly. You should gently introduce one function at a time to the player. Maybe with missions.

I'm sure you will keep expanding and fixing it to its true potential in the future. Well done.

Submitted

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper4 years ago

Wow, thank you so much! I'm very glad you enjoyed the game despite its shortcomings. You have certainly motivated me to keep working at it and add new features after the jam has concluded!

snuffysamSubmitted4 years ago(+1)

The game looks great, but it's waaay too complicated too quickly.

Like, I get that there's a tutorial, and a mode that lets you change things on the fly which helps for practice. But even still, why do I have to look at the tutorial just to find out how many resources each building costs?

There's also barely any feedback to the player - like, there's the "fleet status" bar, but no indication as to what each color means.

It would be nice if there were simpler missions that could be completed with simpler commands before working up to the big ones. I know the game's theme is that you only have one shot, but maybe there could be multiple moons of varying complexity?

Submitted

Lunar Demolition Force

ruinthread-gamesDeveloper4 years ago(+1)

Thanks for the comment and thanks for playing! And I absolutely agree with you that the learning curve is too steep. Unfortunately I only realised this way too late and ended up running out of time whilst working on the tutorial. Breaking it up into individual missions would have been the way to go, I just didn't come up with a way of implementing that in a technically feasible way in time for submission. I hope you were still able to somewhat enjoy the game though!