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Totem's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Developer's Choice | #0 | n/a | n/a |
| Aesthetics | #1 | 4.750 | 4.750 |
| Sound | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Overall | #1 | 4.125 | 4.125 |
| Gameplay | #1 | 4.167 | 4.167 |
| Theme | #3 | 3.583 | 3.583 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Very good presentation. The core gameplay loop is solid for the most part though a player can easily get into a stable state where they've maxed their Karma and Zeal and can pretty much play infinitely with three followers.
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Comments
oh no i'm gonna lose
definitely the best art in the jam, and it have a bunch of mechanics
but i found it repetitive after almost 10 minutes playing and a bit easy too, so i just threw everybody in the volcano to end it faster, cause i got a bit bored (but thats probably just me) :P
also a useless but funny fact: "acre" its the name of a state in Brazil, and we have memes about having dinosaurs on Acre, and coincidently your name is TJ "Acre" and your team is tinyDINOgames lol
reading this comment now after a year i realized how dumb it was
TinydinoGames, the graphics are awesome, the mechanics and menus are very polished, maybe a info panel would help to understand the terrain effects. The mechanics are very good too! I like it. I wish I could choose between different totems to generate differents endings. Great game!! Congrats
Pros: This is one of the most polished games in the jam. It's honestly amazing how you managed to make a game that looks this good in just three days! The aesthetics are top notch and the gameplay is simple but pretty addicting. It feels like a mini Civilisation game, and a very enjoyable one at that!
Cons: There either needs to be a win state or the difficulty and game balance needs to be adjusted. I suck at strategy games, but even I managed to survive for a long time. Eventually though, the game just seems to decide, "You're not allowed to survive any longer" and drops like six invaders on your island at once so it becomes basically impossible to continue. It could also do with some added depth, and an incentive to make better use of zeal. I didn't even notice zeal was a thing the entire time because it barely even matters. Nevertheless, awesome game!
It definitely needs a lot of balancing work, and ideally a better end state than entropic invaders for sure, that was just the easiest one we could make in time provided to make sure people weren't playing the game for an hour per run. The higher your Zeal the easier it is to deal with those Invaders without taking any losses but also the less likely you are to add more followers, we could probably communicate its effects better to the player, but mathematically it does matter. Also the higher you keep your Karma the less likely you are to get a bunch of invaders dropped on you at once so if you're not paying attention to either of those numbers you're likely to feel blindsided by the consequences, which again is part failure on our end to effectively communicate the exact consequences beyond the intro and help text.
Not sure what you felt was surviving a "long time" without any Score reference, but just to share some reference in testing the highest dev score was 856, and post submission the highest score I've seen was 1200.
Thanks for taking time to play and leave some feedback. We appreciate it!
Gonna try and be concise with constructive criticism here. Game is great! Honestly it's incredible that in 72 hours you all were able to make this game that I'm still trying to crack. The biggest thing is that I want to keep playing it. That's key. The art and music make it a very pleasant atmosphere to be in. All the sounds of clicking and UI are really subtle but really nice.
I was confused by seeing the +/-X "variable name" floating text after seeing the summary sheet. Is the text representative of the previous day's earnings? Shouldn't it show that before I see the summary and move on to the next day? Anyway I can work around that. It's just extra flair, and even if it is confusing to me, it might not be confusing to someone else. And it's a nice touch nonetheless! I can look past this.
I really like the idea of exploration of strategy. This game gives you a decent bit of wiggle room. Invest heavily in resources... Ideal ratio... Keep a low following... Aim for a smaller following at first... Lots of different paths, make it fun to try new things and play again, and again...
Some of the introductory text could use some grammar and logic review, but that's normal for a jam. I am still having a hard time determining what actions lead to what outcomes, so maybe some sort of rework of the summary sheep could help with that. They are all currently line items but maybe using lines to section off resources, from followers, from Karma related calculations... This would all make it easier for a noob like myself to learn.
Cheers!