Awesome game, simple yet difficult, stimulates one's brain cells! I love this pixel style and music is really relaxing. I still didn't beat the desert level :)
I am a huge fan of the Dying Earth genre and the melancholy atmosphere of this game is just fantastic. The art, music, and dialogue really enhance that feeling.
Thank you so much, i'm so glad it worked out. Dying earth is super interesting to me too, i didn't know there is a name for that genre. Sometimes we think and act like we are immortal, and i like how that genre reminds us we are not, so we can use the time we have better :)
I hope we can continue development at some point. Right now, we are still hard at work on making a full game out of our previous game jam game "Dome Romantik". Thank you for the note with the sound, i'll soften that with the next update, when i get around to it.
Beautiful game. The gameplay concept, art, soundtrack -- everything fits together very nicely. The tiling and graphics reminded me of... Sid Meier's Civilization II (the good and old) -- which hints at my age :).
The three levels seem very fit for a proof of concept, as they force the player to adopt distinct strategies (and therefore learn about the mechanics of the game) in order to succeed. The developer must have put a lot of thought into it, as even commercial often fail at this aspect. Bear with me: how many games haven't we played in which we learn how to exploit a very small subset of techniques which we repeatedly use and beat the game without learning about its mechanics? More explicitly, Gaia tolerates a more leisurable gameplay, where we can balance harvesting and exploration, Desert forces us to think very strategically and Crater makes the player use a magus.
I don't know about other people, but I would gladly pay to play more levels of this game on my Android phone.
I wasn't sure what to expect going into the game and was extremely pleasantly surprised by how much fun i had.
Its a really great idea with a lot of room to grow, its fun to explore and try to figure out where to go and what supply's are going to be the most important.
I hope to see this game grow and improve over time
Great Game! Felt clean and original. It gave me Oregon Trail meets Space vibes, but alot more fun. I played through all 3 levels in about 30 minutes. I would love to see more levels one day when the team has time, or dare I ask... a custom lvl creator. I read your interview on IndieGameOfTheWeek so I understand you are working on a different game at the moment. Looking forward to your future Projects!
I'd also love to expand on this too, later. Custom level editor sounds great - i did the same thing for our first game. At some point i build an ingame level editor to create the levels, which i can also make available to the player with minimal effort. I also have the logic for publishing and playing these community levels ready from our first game, so this is a no brainer :)
This is a great game. I'm not a strategist, and had to play through the first map several times to finally escape, but I had a fun time! There were a few bugs I ran into, for instance not being able to move or the game would crash in the middle of playing. Unfortunately I don't have a bug log so I can't really get into the specifics.
Anyhow, I loved the graphics and the music. I definitely felt a chill run up my spine the first time I ran out of food and the consequences that followed. I feel like there's definitely a master strategy to get everyone to the end and safely, but I don't know how.
I created and continue to run a website called IndieGameOfTheWeek, and we were hoping you'd be interested in contacting us either via email or over twitter! :D We really enjoyed playing this game and we'd like to request a small interview and offer you our humble award.
Have you ever played the board game "The Quest for El Dorado"? It's a hex tile based game that might be interesting to look at for inspiration if you wanted to take this project further (which I really think you should). El Dorado is a board game with a modular map system where you can build "maps" which are essentially race courses out of these hex clusters. It might be a good way to think about how to do procedural generation: have hand crafted areas that are stuck together procedurally by less intentional "hall way" paths.
Haven't heard of it, but i checked it out after your suggestion. Looks very interesting, thank you! I agree, especially for a procedural generation the combination and variation of pre made areas might be interesting. El Dorado also has varied costs for traversing tiles - a mechanic i initially planned, but scrapped because it would work a bit strange with the caravan. Now that i think of it, maybe the movement across some special tiles could require an extra food or ore. That's why it's good to look for inspriation, so thank you for suggesting it :)
This is amazing, I love it so much! Enjoyed world and atmosphere, would play more. I played at least for an hour, but how do I beat Desert? I can build only one farmer cart.
Oh thank you, that's great to hear! Sorry about the desert, i broke it while changing how the level is set up in the code. I missed adding some wood. I fixed that and it should play fine again. It is not a super interesting level in any case, was more like a last minute quick idea in the jam, about another scenario.
Really enjoyed this. I like the snake-like mechanics. I think it would be fun to use a system where the villagers automatically do actions rather than having to manually assign them, and the focus is more on where you go and what villagers you take. Would love to see this expanded. Great job!
Thank you Rob! That's a good idea. I thought about that too, but was hesitant as to not remove too much of the players actions. But on the other hand, of course i don't want brainless busywork. Once upon a time you always had to select the caravan leader before moving - now it is automatically selected if no other action is available. Also turned out a good decision to implement, i think :)
I just wanted to comment to disagree with Rob Hoff (no offense Rob). I think the dynamic of picking which places to harvest from was very interesting, especially when you discover that only one area can be farmed by one type of guy (which the desert actually does a great job of teaching me about). I actually think that it might be good to make auto-farming happen right away, and tutorializing the ability to choose targets early in the game instead of making auto-farm an upgrade, because "pro" play will involve saving the 2 wood and 2 food to optimize resource gathering. But I think something of the secret sauce of the game would be lost if you removed having to pick which resources to collect, and would become especially annoying if you had a farmer who selected the least optimal resource to farm every turn for 3 turns in a row and costed you potentially one or two extra farming opportunities.
Another way to teach players about selecting where to farm might be to leave the cheap auto-farming upgrade in the game, but make it a prerequisite for the rest of a skill tree branch, so players didn't feel bad losing resources due to their "laziness" as that upgrade is necessary to get to more powerful upgrades in the future. (You can tell I was repulsed by the idea of paying for that upgrade lol. I'm the type who would rather just do a little extra work to be optimal though.)
Thank you for the extensive feedback! You really hit great points here. The auto picking is important to reduce tedium, as it will be only annoying after you did it a hundred times. Still, i feel like i need the manual bit to really drive home that you have to work on adjacent fields. But pro players shouldn't be incentivized to make the game less enjoyable by saving these resources (which you really do feel in the beginning of the run) - optimizing the fun out of it. The skilltree idea would work great though!
Yea, I imagine it could simply be the first upgrade you have to get, that is literally the base of the skill tree. While I was writing that comment, I did kind of realize that teaching how to target resources in the way you did was actually very elegant. And now that I think about it, the thing that eventually made me buy the auto-picking upgrade was when I bought the sight range upgrade, saw that that unlocked another sight range upgrade, and thought that maybe there was another more interesting upgrade hidden behind the auto-picking one. I think if you were to take this further, probably a skill tree that shows the player "hey, you have to buy auto-picking, but it will be the first in a long line of upgrades" really would be the perfect solution.
Pretty atmospheric one! Management element is really well-executed and sometimes even honourably tough. Needs some polishing, though: game crashed twice upon game over screen; some random events would look exciting too. Love it, thanks for this inspiring experience! :)
Thank you so much, that's great to hear (apart form the crashes). I haven't seen a crash like this, but will keep my eyes open for it and try to test some more.
I'd also like to add random events and more tiles to visit - we just didn't have the time during the game jam.
Great game man, I love the mood it has with the music and all. And the idea is pretty neat.
I gave it 2 tries but I didn't manage to go past the "wood wall ". Do I need 2 woodcutters ?
Thinking about it 2 farmers seems like a good idea given the balance or ressources.
I'll give in another try later.
Also is this for Ludum dare 49 ? I cannot find it in the Jam section.
EDIT:
So I gave it another try, the "purchase map" feature is a good idea I got baited by going through the woods on the SE. I finally finished barely finished the first level and it was really heart-breaking that I needed to abandon all my caravan behind. Which I think is a success 😀
Thank you! Basically, you got several options to deal with the wood wall.
SPOILERS
If you reach it early, one woodcutter might be enough. With 2 it's well doable. You can also get a magus to remove some wood tiles, or delay the crumbling so that you have enough time. There is also a pass through the mountains, so you can circumvent the wall if you have the food for the treck. And finally, you could even bridge around the forest wall on the southwest sea.
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awesome game
Excellent concept and good execution
Fantastic game! great design, graphics, sound. Congrats!
Love it
Verry good Game.
Bro, AWESOME game, great soundtrack and epic strategic elements even though there ain't no fightin, congrats bro.
i really like this game! good work
I feel so lost in space and I love it!
it took me half an hour, but I spent all the worlds
Nice, congrats :) Especially the second one is very difficult, very close.
ALL THE PIXELS
thw style is so perfect for this kinda game and its genuinely really fun!! you actually WANT to keep going to reach the end!
Awesome Game, really loved it!
rad
Awesome game, simple yet difficult, stimulates one's brain cells! I love this pixel style and music is really relaxing. I still didn't beat the desert level :)
Thank you! I'm glad you liked it. Yeah, desert is overly difficult.
aagh i cant even beat gaia
I am a huge fan of the Dying Earth genre and the melancholy atmosphere of this game is just fantastic. The art, music, and dialogue really enhance that feeling.
Thank you so much, i'm so glad it worked out. Dying earth is super interesting to me too, i didn't know there is a name for that genre. Sometimes we think and act like we are immortal, and i like how that genre reminds us we are not, so we can use the time we have better :)
nice game nice idea!
Thank you for the feedback, i appreciate that you took the time to give it and i'll think about how players could be enabled to better plan ahead.
Beautiful game, very relaxing. The art, the music, the gameplay just all went so well together. Amazing job.
Great game idea!
I really enjoyed it. Are you still developing this game? Would play the full version :)
the only minus is the "dead sound" which is to noisy and I always needed to mute the speakers :P
I hope we can continue development at some point. Right now, we are still hard at work on making a full game out of our previous game jam game "Dome Romantik". Thank you for the note with the sound, i'll soften that with the next update, when i get around to it.
thanks for the reply!
Beautiful game. The gameplay concept, art, soundtrack -- everything fits together very nicely. The tiling and graphics reminded me of... Sid Meier's Civilization II (the good and old) -- which hints at my age :).
The three levels seem very fit for a proof of concept, as they force the player to adopt distinct strategies (and therefore learn about the mechanics of the game) in order to succeed. The developer must have put a lot of thought into it, as even commercial often fail at this aspect. Bear with me: how many games haven't we played in which we learn how to exploit a very small subset of techniques which we repeatedly use and beat the game without learning about its mechanics? More explicitly, Gaia tolerates a more leisurable gameplay, where we can balance harvesting and exploration, Desert forces us to think very strategically and Crater makes the player use a magus.
I don't know about other people, but I would gladly pay to play more levels of this game on my Android phone.
Thank you so much! I'm very glad to see that the ideas translated well to you, and that you could appreciate the different styles of the levels :)
Would be great if you add an icon to the game instead of godot logo.
Will do, with the next update, whenever that will be :)
а в этой игре можно грабить корованы?
i like the music
Thank you! It's a free download and includes a bonus track here: https://cameronpaxton.bandcamp.com/album/karawan-ost
Really appreciate the comment :)
I wasn't sure what to expect going into the game and was extremely pleasantly surprised by how much fun i had.
Its a really great idea with a lot of room to grow, its fun to explore and try to figure out where to go and what supply's are going to be the most important.
I hope to see this game grow and improve over time
Thank you so much, your video was a fun watch :)
Great Game! Felt clean and original. It gave me Oregon Trail meets Space vibes, but alot more fun. I played through all 3 levels in about 30 minutes. I would love to see more levels one day when the team has time, or dare I ask... a custom lvl creator. I read your interview on IndieGameOfTheWeek so I understand you are working on a different game at the moment. Looking forward to your future Projects!
Thank you :)
I'd also love to expand on this too, later. Custom level editor sounds great - i did the same thing for our first game. At some point i build an ingame level editor to create the levels, which i can also make available to the player with minimal effort. I also have the logic for publishing and playing these community levels ready from our first game, so this is a no brainer :)
This is a great game. I'm not a strategist, and had to play through the first map several times to finally escape, but I had a fun time! There were a few bugs I ran into, for instance not being able to move or the game would crash in the middle of playing. Unfortunately I don't have a bug log so I can't really get into the specifics.
Anyhow, I loved the graphics and the music. I definitely felt a chill run up my spine the first time I ran out of food and the consequences that followed. I feel like there's definitely a master strategy to get everyone to the end and safely, but I don't know how.
All in all, a great game!
Great job, I really liked this game
Pick the magnus they said, casting spells is fun they said. (Cast 2 spells in the whole game to play it through lol)
so cool.
Hi there!
I created and continue to run a website called IndieGameOfTheWeek, and we were hoping you'd be interested in contacting us either via email or over twitter! :D We really enjoyed playing this game and we'd like to request a small interview and offer you our humble award.
Thanks!
Wow, we feel honored! Wrote to you via twitter :)
Have you ever played the board game "The Quest for El Dorado"? It's a hex tile based game that might be interesting to look at for inspiration if you wanted to take this project further (which I really think you should). El Dorado is a board game with a modular map system where you can build "maps" which are essentially race courses out of these hex clusters. It might be a good way to think about how to do procedural generation: have hand crafted areas that are stuck together procedurally by less intentional "hall way" paths.
Haven't heard of it, but i checked it out after your suggestion. Looks very interesting, thank you! I agree, especially for a procedural generation the combination and variation of pre made areas might be interesting. El Dorado also has varied costs for traversing tiles - a mechanic i initially planned, but scrapped because it would work a bit strange with the caravan. Now that i think of it, maybe the movement across some special tiles could require an extra food or ore. That's why it's good to look for inspriation, so thank you for suggesting it :)
Incredible, so well done. Cant believe you did it in 72 hours!
Thank you :)
I described a little bit how we did it in a short Post Mortem https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/karawan/karawan-post-mortem
Great fun.
Such a nice game, the mechanics are simple yet entertaining, the graphics and music are lovely. Well done!
It seems I can't beat desert. :/
This is amazing, I love it so much! Enjoyed world and atmosphere, would play more. I played at least for an hour, but how do I beat Desert? I can build only one farmer cart.
Oh thank you, that's great to hear! Sorry about the desert, i broke it while changing how the level is set up in the code. I missed adding some wood. I fixed that and it should play fine again. It is not a super interesting level in any case, was more like a last minute quick idea in the jam, about another scenario.
Ok, got it, it happens! Thank you for fixing it!
Really enjoyed this. I like the snake-like mechanics. I think it would be fun to use a system where the villagers automatically do actions rather than having to manually assign them, and the focus is more on where you go and what villagers you take. Would love to see this expanded. Great job!
Thank you Rob! That's a good idea. I thought about that too, but was hesitant as to not remove too much of the players actions. But on the other hand, of course i don't want brainless busywork. Once upon a time you always had to select the caravan leader before moving - now it is automatically selected if no other action is available. Also turned out a good decision to implement, i think :)
I just wanted to comment to disagree with Rob Hoff (no offense Rob). I think the dynamic of picking which places to harvest from was very interesting, especially when you discover that only one area can be farmed by one type of guy (which the desert actually does a great job of teaching me about). I actually think that it might be good to make auto-farming happen right away, and tutorializing the ability to choose targets early in the game instead of making auto-farm an upgrade, because "pro" play will involve saving the 2 wood and 2 food to optimize resource gathering. But I think something of the secret sauce of the game would be lost if you removed having to pick which resources to collect, and would become especially annoying if you had a farmer who selected the least optimal resource to farm every turn for 3 turns in a row and costed you potentially one or two extra farming opportunities.
Another way to teach players about selecting where to farm might be to leave the cheap auto-farming upgrade in the game, but make it a prerequisite for the rest of a skill tree branch, so players didn't feel bad losing resources due to their "laziness" as that upgrade is necessary to get to more powerful upgrades in the future. (You can tell I was repulsed by the idea of paying for that upgrade lol. I'm the type who would rather just do a little extra work to be optimal though.)
Thank you for the extensive feedback! You really hit great points here. The auto picking is important to reduce tedium, as it will be only annoying after you did it a hundred times. Still, i feel like i need the manual bit to really drive home that you have to work on adjacent fields. But pro players shouldn't be incentivized to make the game less enjoyable by saving these resources (which you really do feel in the beginning of the run) - optimizing the fun out of it. The skilltree idea would work great though!
Yea, I imagine it could simply be the first upgrade you have to get, that is literally the base of the skill tree. While I was writing that comment, I did kind of realize that teaching how to target resources in the way you did was actually very elegant. And now that I think about it, the thing that eventually made me buy the auto-picking upgrade was when I bought the sight range upgrade, saw that that unlocked another sight range upgrade, and thought that maybe there was another more interesting upgrade hidden behind the auto-picking one. I think if you were to take this further, probably a skill tree that shows the player "hey, you have to buy auto-picking, but it will be the first in a long line of upgrades" really would be the perfect solution.
Pretty atmospheric one! Management element is really well-executed and sometimes even honourably tough. Needs some polishing, though: game crashed twice upon game over screen; some random events would look exciting too.
Love it, thanks for this inspiring experience! :)
Thank you so much, that's great to hear (apart form the crashes). I haven't seen a crash like this, but will keep my eyes open for it and try to test some more.
I'd also like to add random events and more tiles to visit - we just didn't have the time during the game jam.
Great game man, I love the mood it has with the music and all.
And the idea is pretty neat.
I gave it 2 tries but I didn't manage to go past the "wood wall ". Do I need 2 woodcutters ?
Thinking about it 2 farmers seems like a good idea given the balance or ressources.
I'll give in another try later.
Also is this for Ludum dare 49 ? I cannot find it in the Jam section.
EDIT:
So I gave it another try, the "purchase map" feature is a good idea I got baited by going through the woods on the SE. I finally finished barely finished the first level and it was really heart-breaking that I needed to abandon all my caravan behind. Which I think is a success 😀
Didn't see message on the top of the page NEVERMIND.
By the way I loved "Dome Romantik" and I'de be very interested in having your feedback on my JAM game as well : https://dekajoo.itch.io/among-the-monolyths
😀
Oh will do, i love The Witness :)
Thank you! Basically, you got several options to deal with the wood wall.
SPOILERS
If you reach it early, one woodcutter might be enough. With 2 it's well doable. You can also get a magus to remove some wood tiles, or delay the crumbling so that you have enough time. There is also a pass through the mountains, so you can circumvent the wall if you have the food for the treck. And finally, you could even bridge around the forest wall on the southwest sea.
Yeah I ended-up going through the mountain and barely made it. I wish the second map was less of a "Puzzle" and more like the first one!