Matt, every time you come out with a new pack or preview like this, I have to fight the urge to immediately start up a new project that would use these assets. Keep it up - eventually I'll have time to make the epic game that I'm imagining.
Defrag
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Thanks for giving it a try. I was definitely trying to go for a digital boardgame feel. The bots were a later addition to make playing by your lonesome a little more entertaining. I have trouble beating the bots, and I know exactly how they work. Turns out that focusing on just constantly delivering the closest cargo to the closest place is generally a winning strategy. I think the most reliable way to beat the bots is to get an early cargo slot upgrade (bottom-right non-city port), and then prioritize delivering two cargos at a time instead of one. The game is meant to be a multiplayer experience first and foremost (mainly for my 3 kid).
This took me a while to understand what was happening, and most of the time I was just clicking the 5 buttons on the panel. I think the buttons themselves could be a little larger (affordance). I also thought there were some UI elements that could have fit nicely into the rest of the environment. Putting the instructions on the wall was an example of diagetic instruction that could have fit the theme you seem to have been going for. A clock on the wall so that I appreciate that time is progressing would have also helped.
I used the original Overworld tileset for an experiment in procedural world-generation using tilemaps. This asset was very robust and required only a small amount of tweaking to get the orientations I needed for my system.
https://jclayton128.itch.io/atw
I'm thinking about using the newer RPG Town Exterior tileset to provide a way to "zoom in" on the procedurally-generated overworld. I think it is doable, and the new asset looks like it will be interesting to play around with.
I really get a ton of use out of your original Overworld Tileset. I am thrilled to see this update on the future of the tileset. I am not currently working on a project that would use it, but just seeing the example images you posted gets my mind spooling up again.
Link to one of my better uses of your work:
https://jclayton128.itch.io/spellswordarena
Ryan, thanks for checking out Spellsword. I agree that the concept is pretty complex - I really wanted to make a combat-focused version of Scrabble. I may circle back to this project again in the future in an effort to refine it and decomplicate things. I've been working on my skillset since I last touched Spellsword in February, and I'll have quite a bit to optimize when I pick it up again.
The game appears to have UI scaling issues. I tried multiple resolutions, but main menu did not appear aesthetically correct, and the in-game tutorial text was not completely visible without jumping around to read it. The music was cute for a few seconds, and then I had to mute it - consider a different theme song if you want people to keep listening. I think the gameplay is focused on jumping around on tables, but they all appeared crooked, as if they were dropped and then had the physics engine takeover, leading them to tip on their side. If in Unity, consider using "constrain Z" on the Rigidbody in order to prevent undesired tips.
I achieved 33 points in this. The gameplay took a moment to figure out since I didn't see any in-game instructions, which is hard to pull off in just 3 hours. Once I got it, however, the rest of the game made sense. You just chase after the people trampling your grass - once close enough, they naturally run away. The gameplay was simple, yet you did a good job scaling the difficulty up. I liked the artwork, though if you had a little more time, a few props might have really sold the scene - like some flowers that get trampled if stepped on?
I think I like the game, but I confess that I didn't quite understand what was causing a particular spell to trigger. I believe there was a really interesting system underneath it all that I should have been paying attention to. However, I ended up just hitting space and clicking on the dice as fast as I could, regardless of what type of spell ended up being cast. I think there may have been more complexity than I was able to handle in what rapidly began to feel like a time-contrained decision space. Perhaps consider adjusting the dice to just show numbers 1 through 4, and the sum of all dice clicked become the power of a single generic spell. It reduces the design space (and likely the fun for you as the creator), but it also lowers the complexity to become just "click the dice such that they show a high number".
This is definitely a big scope for a 3-hour jam. Nice work with what you were able to achieve. I'm sorry that I couldn't fully appreciate it all due to my tiny brain, however.
The game keeps getting stuck at the loading screen. When I've seen something similar, the solution usually is: project settings > player > compression settings - set to disabled (or something other than gzip or brotli. Those not be the exact settings since I don't have Unity in front of me, but this usually has something to do with compression settings when building for WebGL.
This is exactly what I was looking for. I would like to see some of the graphics somehow with transparency in their tiny backgrounds so that I can place some mountains right in front of the a forest. Similarly, buildings with transparent backgrounds and/or with translucent shading might be easier to place on a variety of other surfaces (like the lighter green grass or brown swamp/mud).
Totally unrelated, I would love to see some ruined versions of the buildings. I'm working on a strategy game that will eventually need some kind of visual user feedback that buildings have been destroyed.
Thanks for your effort in making this!