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This is really cool and very useful.

Couple of little suggestions... Would it be possible to add a pause/play key for the animation? For example, hitting the space bar. It would make it much easier to stop the rotation animation (instead of using the menu) when it is just right to get a nice view of the settlement. Edit: Scratch that. Just worked out how to use fly mode to get any view I want :)

Also, what about a tree option for mixed conical and ellipsoid trees?

Are you intending to take account of ground elevations at some future point? For example, to generate 3D ground from the ground contours in Village Generator. This is not a feature request, just curious.

I agree with Felipe. Having everything exported would be excellent and a great time saver when trying to recreate and add details to any kind of settlement in, for example, Blender. And yes, I know it is also possible to import a PNG to use as a ground map for the placement of things, but having everyting as 3D objects would be awesome. Having said that, I totally get that time is a resource and you probably have other things to do that you find more interesting!

I think all these random generators you have done are amazing and thank you for making them available to those of us that do not have the skills to create such utilities.

So, as I said, I am a hostage to the nav system in Godot for further droid behaviour improvements. And yes, I am aware of them bumping into walls etc, and they do sometimes getting temporarily stuck. Just have to live with it for now.

Yes, Q and E sounds sensible for left/right camera rotation. Unfortunately, this is not as slick as using the mouse, as for some reason doing this recognises the key press delay from the OS (I have tried it in my two other games that are on itch). However, I have now stopped work on the prototype, and already started on refactoring and adding new/different functionality for a proper demo version. It will take a long time before the first build of that is ready. As well as adding missing functionality, I will also be radically changing the UI/UX functionality - I have thought about that quite a bit since your first bit of feedback and I think I know where I want to go with it now.

Thanks for all the useful feedback. This is what I was hoping for when I joined this jam.

Thanks for trying the game again.

I wasn't going to update the prototype again, but I had a sudden inspiration on how to mitigate the droids getting stuck in the warehouses, and I think this is now solved.

Build 0006 is now uploaded with the "stuck droids" fix, if you feel like giving it a go yet again.

The problem was that the Navigation system was sometimes sending a droid the "wrong way" through the warehouse as a way of avoiding droids coming the other way. If a droid was already moving in the correct direction through the warehouse, they would bump into each other and get stuck. I have simply placed an invisible object so as to make the inside of the warehouse less attractive (to the Navigation system) as an avoidance route. I tested it by using all 8 droids to build the same building at the same time, and none of them got stuck. There might be corner cases where they still get stuck, but this solution will do for the prototype.

As for droids colliding elsewhere, I am a hostage to the Godot devs. As they are all "agents" within the Nav system, they should not be bumping into each other like that. There is dev effort in this direction planned, so hopefully things should improve in future.

Thanks very much for the test/feedback offer. It will be a while before it happens, but I am very likely to take you up on that.

I also watched your uploaded stream of the game on YouTube. It was a very odd experience watching someone else play my game. But... it helped me understand your point about the menus and I have taken that on board for the future. I am not sure I will be able to do what you have suggested for everything, but I will give it a go where it makes sense. Creating this game is still very much a learning experience and it will be good to experiment with alternative ways of doing things.

Apologies for the delay in replying, but I have deliberately delayed my reply so that I can share some good news with you.

So, thank you very much for the enthusiastic feedback. Very much appreciated. I played the main StarCraft campaign quite a bit in the original release. I have to confess that that is one of the inspirations for Raiders Of The Alaments.

I have just uploaded Build 0005 of the game, which includes your suggestion to provide warnings about temperature effects.

On the menus front, please bear in mind that this is still a prototype. My long term objective is to improve the interface elements. For example, using icons for adding buildings, instead of the current building menu. Note that using right-click doesn't actually save you any clicks, it is just how some other folk do things.

The droid capacity of carrying one unit is deliberate (frankly I copied the concept from Surviving Mars). I have adjusted the amounts of resources needed for the buildings so things move along a little bit more quickly. Also, in future there will be other things going on at the same time, such as dealing with various creatures, neighbouring demon lords and so on, which will make the game feel more lively. This first round of prototyping is my first foray into making a game like this, so I wanted to use this phase to make a solid start with the basics: that is the building construction and operations plus the droid mechanics.

And yes, I will bring it back again to another Feedback Quest when I have the next version to share (which will be a more complete demo instead of a prototype). However, that could be quite a while...

Anyway, please have a look at the main game page and the devlog for build 0005, and I hope you have another go at playing the game.

Edit: Forgot to say, I had already made changes to the warehouse before I read your post, so that the droids don't get stuck as much. They mostly only get stuck now when the time is running at 2x or 4x. In most cases, you can fix it by going back to 1x speed briefly. It that doesn't work, it is necessary to try somthing else, as you have been doing. The warehouses have more room, but need redoing so the droids have even more room to manoeuver around each other. Droid movement is also dependent on the navigation sub-system in the Godot engine itself, so things should also improve when there is some dev effort in that direction.

I totally get it. I am also using the various games I am making to teach myself all sorts of things.

And yes, never assume that something is obvious to a player. Of course, sometimes you want things to be obvious, but other times not.

It also occurs to me that maybe your current first track should be the third or fourth track, after a couple of easier ones. For example, have less hazards (carpet and water) to start with, as well as making the AIs easier to beat. Or maybe have a first track with just a few carpet hazards, a second track with a few water hazards, then start combining them, so there is some sort of progression of difficulty.

Nice game, but as someone else pointed out, make the AIs a bit worse at racing. I am terrible at racing games anyway, but it would be nice to stand a chance on the first track.

Very entertaining. Do you have a long term plan for this? That is, where are you going with it? Anyway, most amusing and it made me smile. My one suggestion might be to vary the music a bit (as well as having control over the volume).

Thanks for giving it a go. It is steadily getting there. I have an update in progress that has greatly improved building placement. Once that is available (on itch) I will also do a demo vid on YouTube. However, I want to get the save/load game functionality done first, as that will also help with testing the game.

As I pointed out in the description (on the game page), a lot of buttons do nothing at the moment. Decommission is one of them, as it will need the corresponding additions to the droid state machine. After placing a building, all you need to do is use the building menu to assign an idle droid to build it, or use a droid menu and assign it to Build instead of doing something else.

I am also dependent on further development of the Godot Engine itself (I do not have the experience to help with this, unfortunately). Once the droids start doing something, the behaviour can go wonky because the navigation server still needs a lot of dev effort to improve the behaviour of navigation agents (the droids in this case).

I totally agree that assigning multiple units to a task will be a good thing to implement, but that is a long way down the list of things that the game needs... However, using the droid barracks menu for multiple unit selection is a great idea. I hadn't considered doing it that way. Getting good feedback like this is why I joined this jam!

By the way, to make Full Screen stick: make sure you have a profile created, then after choosing Full Screen, you need click  Save Changes to save your preferences.  Maybe I should disable the preferences until at least one profile is created.

Hmm, interesting idea about the limited views. I will see how it feels with 45 degree turns (8 views) rather than 4, as being backing into a corner to get furthest away and face the witches is a useful tactic. Or maybe 22.5 degree turns? Worth experimenting anyway.

Anyway, thanks for giving it a go.

Thanks for playing it on YouTube.You were so close to the witch that the curses were hitting you pretty much immediately. You need to keep your distance to see the curses coming towards you, as that also gives you time to type in the counter-curse. Also, don't step backwards after entering the room or it's likely to be game over...

If you have time, please give it another go.

Perhaps give longer to get through Level 1 (2 mins or so?) then reduce the time for each further floor. That would give a player time to get the flavour of the game before the time limit gets too short.

Other than that, nicely implemented. I like the continuous shooting - slightly reminiscent of the original Llamatron.

Got there in the end... if you'll forgive the pun.

Nice job. Just a shame I am so rubbish at platformers.

Good to hear and thanks for playing.

Yeah. One of the perils of doing things at breakneck speed for a jam... I naturally did something that I found worked for me.

Glad you liked it and thanks for the feedback. Sounds like mouse sensitivity needs to be there in a settings screen...

And so it does :)

Nice idea. Are you going to make it longer than just one battle after the jam is over?

So, I toyed with the idea of having 666 levels, but thought that would be a bit too much...

Yes, the controls are a common theme in the feedback here, so I have been giving that a bit of thought. The only thing I can think of is left-click and drag to move, but I have played games that have that mechanic and you end up forever picking up and putting down the mouse, which also interrupts movement.

By the way, the middle-mouse click and drag is how you control the camera in both Blender and the Godot 3D viewport. It just takes a little getting used to.

And thanks for playing and the feedback.

Glad you like it and thanks for the feedback.

I will break up the text into some sort of in-game help after the jam. I was concentrating on other things up to the deadline.

Made me laugh.

Probably a good idea to put a ColorRect or Panel behind the UI elements, as it's hard to see the text without that.

Also, maybe slow down the castle disintegration a bit, or have an easy mode that does that, so it's possible to get a bit more practice picking up and throwing the inhabitants before the floor gives way.

Same experience as the other folk with Windows.

Well, don't pick the "all vowels are y" curse for sure! Made me laugh, anyway.

The old picture in the background is spot on. Is that something you had already seen and wanted to use in a game at some point?

A great idea well executed. It would make a great mini-game inside a larger work.

Daggerfall! That's a blast from the past. I only ever tried that in DOSbox and it ran like a dog. Should maybe give it a go again, now that PCs are a lot faster.

Anyway, glad you liked it. For the "no apparent joins", I simply cheated and pre-loaded all the sections. Before I did that, there was a noticeable bump each time you got to the Devilish Shoppe. The memory footprint is pretty low overall, so pre-loading just helps everything feel smoother.

I put the saving notification in the middle as it appears at a point where it will not interfere with anything happening in the game. But yeah, point taken.

Glad to see that I am not the only one to think of doing a typing game. It just seemed so obvious to me that I thought there would be lots more.

Same again. Windows 10. Crashed before getting to the opening menu. Bit of a shame as I was interested in giving it a go.

Edit: Just an extra thought. I have a similar problem with one of my games. I think it is something to do with an asset from Blender that is too big. It works when exported in DEBUG mode, but not in RELEASE mode. Might be worth trying a DEBUG export and see if that runs OK in Windows.

Liked it. Good fun. Much easier to destroy enemies at range than using melee attacks.

Consider putting in a minimum distance for the enemies on new levels, so they don't spawn right on top of you.

Most amusing, although I was rubbish at figuring out the correct combinations.

Fun. I tried mashing left and right click at the same time. I guess that is very un-boxerly as it didn't work! Nice job.

Hmm. I have seen this blocking problem with at least one other game in this jam. I have to admit, I was quite surprised that a 3D game would work this well in a browser.

Sorry, forgot to add that I really like the game - like an interactive short story. Feels like something that could be the intro to a much bigger horror themed game of some sort. Nicely done.

Yes, I did think that there would be a few people doing typing games, but it was the first (and only) idea that popped into my head as soon as I saw the Curses theme. My first thought was to try 2D, but I don't have much experience with 2D so just went for it in 3D. I am quite pleased with how far I got, given that doing this for a jam is from a standing start. It would have been even more polished, but I lost a chunk of time to giving myself a crash course in Python for something.

Yes, the font is a style choice. I had a good old rummage before settling on this. Maybe I should have another rummage when I come back to the game after the jam is finished.

Thanks for playing and glad you liked it.

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you like it.

Totally agree that it needs an in-game info screen and it's on the list in my head! Great suggestion to re-use the intro text. I will take that on board for whatever comes next.

It's heading in the right direction... needs more work once the jam is complely done.

Same here. Really bad at the end with the HTML so I got stuck and no idea about the actual ending (although I can make an educated guess). Also, attempting to download the Windows build was blocked by my browsers. Are they links to files somewhere else or did you upload them to itch?

It's a good start and I like what you have done so far, but what are the coin things that drop down?

OK. So the HTML games only play in Chrome based browsers. Clever mechanics. Took me a while, but I did get a victory. Nicely done.

Nice game, but I am rubbish at games like this when there is no way to regain health. Snowball's chance indeed...

Very nice graphics. Would have been nice to be able to see a bit more of the map to get a clearer idea of where there are hazards and also where there is safe ground to move to.

Thanks for playing and the feedback. I was going for creepy.

On the controls front: When I have been testing, I found the best thing to do is to get into a good position in  a room with witches, before they start throwing curses, then stay put while typing the counter-curses, then move around again when all the witches have expired. For example, dive through the door then back off into the nearest corner, then stop moving and use both hands to type the counter-curses. It helps if you can touch-type...

Also, make sure you get all the potions that the witches drop, as you can't go back and collect them later (the room won't be there).

Made me smile!

Made me smile!