Awesome game! I love the puzzle design. Jigsaw (third level) already gave me quite a headache. The tutorial could be a little bit more fleshed out, e.g. show the buttons available etc. No other complaints :)
This game is tough as nails! Love the pixel art, very well done. Controlls via keyboard are OK, but i think this could benefit from controller support. The "wall glue" mechanic is pretty neat. I like shooting with pizzas :D
I have to be honest, i was a bit overwhelmed with this game. I couldn't quite figure out what's going on. However, i really like the presentation, and the UI seemed also very functional. The UI animation gave it quite a polished feel!
I would never have thought that i'd ever see a programming game made with libGDX. glatt eis did just that here. I love how the theme was incorporated. And the number of simple commands is just enough to make the game fun. I have not yet solved the riddles and unlocked additional commands. Great idea!
Just wow! The level of polish in this game is amazing. Where to start? The menu UI is super intuitive (unlike the UIs of some other games of the jam), looks great and animates. The game doesn't just throw you into the cold water, but introduces new concepts piece after the piece. All of that is done via amazing voice acting (!). The core game mechanics are kept to the absolute minimum required for a turn based game like this, while retaining a ton of strategic depth. The game even saves your progress on the web build. Which is awesome, because i had a little hiccup in level 2 and didn't want to restart. Really impressed with this game!
When you play the first level, you may think "meh, just a boring arcade shooter". But once you figure out the updates AND the data logger, it gets really awesome. The data logger was what kept me playing, as i wanted to see all the descriptions of the different races. Great spin on classic arcade shmups.
Very polished match-3 (match-2? :)) game. It took me a bit to figure out how things collapse. It gets really really hectic for me at about level 20, but that's probably because i'm old :)
I appear to be to dumb for strategy games. It took me way to long to figure out what the mechanics are. Once i got it, the game was quite enjoyable. I agree with Broken Shotgun that the flag mechanics could be a bit better. I really loved the background music!
This game impersonates the futility of life. If i was stranded on Mars, i hope i'd not have to press a red button until my mouse finger bleeds :D It took me a while to figure out what's going on, but once it clicked (...) i was surprised how addictive it actually is. I always wanted MORE. Cool idea!
This game gave me vertigo :D Super cool variation on classical point and click adventures. The crew on the ship feels alive, not only because they have a day/night cycle, but also due to the animations which are neat. The movement could be faster.
Woah, this got stressful fast. Having to collect energy manually makes this game quite frantic in later stages when you are hurting for energy! The radial layout of things is a very cool take on the classic path based TD genre.
Solid TD game. The resource mechanics via generators was quite cool and added an additional balancing aspect to the game. The graphical representation was more than adequat, albeit a tiny bit bland. Not complaining, i couldn't have done it any better :D
I LOVED the music in this one! The mechanics were quite interesting. I had a bit of a hard time initially figuring out that initial tiles appear to represent a room. The random events like bay doors opening added quite a bit of atmosphere.
Extremely polished game, very cool puzzle ideas. I think i also so the companion mechanic in some other game :D The box2d based movement can sometimes be a bit cumbersome on elevators, especially if you have to move boxes around. Top notch otherwise!
Welp, after throwing away my initial tile set and sprites. I settled on the following. On-wards to map generation! Which i'll fail at! Cause auto-tiling is hard!
Just back from the car wash for the anual "Get your car shiny so dad doesn't get a heart attack" event. I'll try to structure my thoughts.
Backstory
The empire has fallen. You are captain of a mostly defunct battle cruiser with minimal crew. War changed you. You are sick of fighting, sick of the deaths of the men and women you lead into battle. In your last ambush, you managed to get a hold of jump coordinates to an uncolonized planet. To get there, you need to restore the functionality of your ship and survive long enough to make the jump.
Mechanics
The world consists of a top-down view of your immense ship which is shaped like a pyramid from top to bottom. At the top of the ship, you find the bridge, where the captain monitors all ship functions and crew. With your minimal crew, you restore parts of your ship step by step until it's fully functional to make the jump. You have the following tasks:
Restore the ship by restoring power and building rooms
Reactor chambers. These power an area surrounding them, allowing to build other rooms
Matter chambers. These gather material from surrounding space used to construct rooms and provide resources for cloning
Crew quaters. The number of quarters puts a limit on your maximum crew
Hydroponics kitchen. These produce food. The number of hydroponics puts a limit on your maximum crew
Cloning lab. Your crew has no time to make love. This is how you create new crew
Research lab. Increases your shield and weapon power. They will also unlock new room types
Battle stations. The more stations, the better you can defend yourself from external menaces
Security stations. Man these to defend against enemies that boarded your ship. Security stations only cover the area around them, so strategic placement is important
Assign crew to the various rooms you build. Only manned rooms are functional. Assignment works via selecting a crew member by a left click, then left clicking the target room. I want a bit of micro management. Assigning multiple people to a room will increase its output.
Defend against internal and external problems. These occur randomly such that you're always busy :) A few examples
Space pirates/aliens/... can board your ship and wreck havoc and kill crew and destroy rooms. Use security against them or play a mini game
Other space ships may attack you. Use battle stations or play a mini game
Navigate asteroid/mine fields mini game
Rooms may randomly break, because your crew are dorks. Fire in the kitchen!
...
Reclaim rooms. In case of resource shortage, e.g. because all matter chambers are destroyed, you can reclaim the materials used for a room and build something else.
Train your crew. Each crew member is an individual with a name and experience. The longer a crew member is assigned to a specific room, the more experience they get doing whatever they do there.
Once the entire ship is powered up, the game is won.
If all crew dies or there aren't any more resources left, you lose the game.
Atmosphere
The game will features cut scenes that introduce new features once they are unlocked. It starts off with the minimal crew on the bridge. The captain explains what's happening next and assigns crew one after another to the basic rooms.
Crew will take on room specific uniforms once they entered the room. Can you say red shirt?
Crew will also document their doings with little speech bubbles. I hope to come up with a metric ton of one liners.
Sound effects will be mostly chip tunes, except when crew dies :D
Graphics will be whatever i can do with my non-existant pixel art skills. I hope to add a little lighting engine to make things look a little more interesting. Non-powered areas will be hidden behind a kind of fog of war. Powered rooms will illuminate accordingly.
Still haven't started working on anything. We'll see if i want to spend my hard earned vaccation on coding :)
Anyways, the idea that's roaming around in my head so far is as follows:
You are the manager of a generation ship with a crew. Your spaceship has specific areas: kitchen, engines, attack towers, navigation, quarters for reproduction, hydroponics, ...
Your goal is it to reach a planet far away to restart civilization. Along the way you will encounter various obstacles, e.g. engine break downs, radiation leaks, sanitation problems, food shortages, fuel shortages, etc. You have to combat the obstacles by assigning your crew to one of the areas. You can't directly control each crew member, but simply assign n crew to a specific task. Since it's a generation ship, crew members will also die, either naturally or due to one of the problems. Your goal is it to strike a balance between the different tasks.
I'm not sure yet if i want to allow extending the ships #rooms by building stuff. We'll see. I'd like to keep it as simple as possible.
The game is pretty much a 4x in that sense. To reach the planet, you'll have to survive a specific amount of time and get at least 2 crew onto the new planet.
The whole thing will be a top-down view with super low-res pixel art. I hope i can give the crew a bit of a character as well. The biggest issue i see is balancing the whole thing.
i'm Mario, benevolent dictator of libGDX. I'll oversee the jam and help with whatever you need (except writting your games).
Introduce yourself below! Give a little insight into what tools you are going to use, wether you'll work alone or in a team, what your favorite color is, and so on.
