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Terra Forma's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #1722 | 3.520 | 3.520 |
| Overall | #2925 | 3.053 | 3.053 |
| Enjoyment | #3077 | 2.840 | 2.840 |
| Style | #3772 | 2.800 | 2.800 |
Ranked from 25 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
The game's central mechanics involve making large-scale changes to a planet such as raising mountains and digging canyons.
Development Time
96 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Fonts from Font Squirrel, icons from Game-Icons, some art from OpenGameArt, sound from Kenney, Freesound, and OpenGameArt
See description for full credits
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Comments
Good concept and well executed
Thanks for playing!
Has some interesting mechanics! Rain shadows are an inspired choice. It took me a few levels to realise you needed ships to collect resources from a tile. though. That should've maybe been spelled out.
Wish I could take credit for the rain shadows, but it's from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which has a very elaborate terraforming system that I simplified and adjusted to make fit this game.
I agree that I should have made the ships' role explicit. I'm sure better UI design could convey more information with less text than the walls of instructions on the tutorial levels, but I didn't have time to implement many quality-of-life features (such as undo, action preview, resource icons on tiles, or a resources harvested indicator)
Very different puzzle game to any others i've seen
I hope that's a good thing 😅
I liked the concept and was able to beat couple of levels without overworking my fatigued brain. I really appriciate the ability to unlock all levels from the get go, so I can skip to later ones and see the game in full even if I don't have the brain power or time to play through it from the begining. This is very helpful in a jam.
I had a little trouble with undestanding how mountains worked at first, but once I grasped the concept it was easy to exectue.
I would say that the nicest thing about the game is that while it is puzzle to a big extent it isn't a 0/1 puzzle game. What I mean is that beating the level isn't a puzzle it is rather granted that player will be able to do it with some thought, but the real challenge comes from the turn counter.
Cheers and good luck
Thanks for your kind and insightful comments. About the nature of the game, Mark Brown came up with the distinction between puzzle games and problem-solving games in one of the really old GMTK videos, if you haven't seen it and are interested in watching an analysis.
The little secret about this type of game is that the levels are much easier to design. Instead of having to come up with a puzzle that is built around a particular path, I can just plop down some terrain and an objective and say "This level is left as an exercise to the player" (obviously I checked each level to see that it worked and wasn't too annoying, but I didn't have to do any rigorous testing to rule out unintended solutions). I actually didn't get the game working until around 80 hours into the jam, but after that I banged out the full set of levels in just 4 hours.
Fun puzzle game that required my brain to optimize turn counts! I think a turn limit could've helped some stages to prevent brute-forcing, but aside from that, it's a good time!