King of the world by Linus
King of the world is a game about a small world with three generals or "wanna be world leaders" that fight to claim the most areas, the objective of the game is to lead your general to victory by taking out all the other generals. The game is inspired by the board game Risk.
This game was created for #LD38 and was made within 72 hours. It was originally intended to be part of the compo but I ran out of time and decided to polish it up a bit and enter the jam instead which I think was a good call.
Controls:
- Drag your mouse or use ASWD to navigate.
- Use mouse wheel to zoom in or out.
- Left click with your mouse to select/execute.
- Press ESC to cancel current active selection.
All the necessary knowledge to play the game is covered in the in-game tutorial. But read the text over at gamejolt for a brief summary on how to play the game (the character limit of 2048 prevents me from including it here).
NOTE: As people have mentioned in the comment section I failed to explain in the jam version how the turn-based system works so to make it clear for future players I'll attempt to explain it here.
Essentially there is a hybrid turnbased/realtime system going on where every 5 second all turns will be processed simultaneously for all three players, so a turn lasts exactly 5 seconds and when one ends the next begins. That means when you attack/move to another country that action will be queued to the turn queue in the bottom left corner. No matter when you enqueue the action, when the turn ends the first action in the queue for all players will be processed which means it might be executed immediately or in a maximum of 5 seconds depending on when the last turn ended. If you don't queue up any action nothing will be done in the end of the turn.
I hope this clears up any confusions, I also added a simple slider to make it extra clear when the turn begins/ends.
Tools used:
- Unity3D
- Monodevelop
- Blender
- Audacity
- Mobile camera
- Microphone
- BFXR
- www.fantasynamegenerators.com/country_names.php
- sverigesradio.se/radioapan (the most childish music creator available in Swedish)
- My brain (probably)
Links
- GAMEJOLT: https://gamejolt.com/games/kotw/252053
- TIMELAPSE: https://youtu.be/6K3Q0HD4h44
- SOURCE CODE: https://github.com/Linkaan/LD38
Changes in 1.01:
- Changed wording in tutorial
- Fixed AI crashing
- Fixed win condition
Changes in 1.02
- Changed wording in tutorial
- Fixed AI not moving properly
- Added simple turn slider
Ratings
| Overall | 491th | 3.179⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 483th | 2.964⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 482th | 2.929⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 368th | 3.464⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 612th | 2.786⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 378th | 2.88⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 512th | 2.238⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 640th | 2.667⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 52🗨️ |
|+ The presentation felt smooth and having a button be able to take you straight to the general for example was a nice touch.
|+ The tutorial was a nice mix of instructions and actions that helped you engage with the game quickly.
|+ The strategy felt rewarding even if it did take ideas strongly from risk/other area control boardgames.
|- The turn based/real time mix didn't feel as intuitive as it could have.
I think if you doubled the time taken per turn and had a countdown timer it could have met a nice balance kind of like tower defense games. It was still fun to try though and the polish was appreciated so well done :)!
Every time I tried to play the game too, I was just killed from somewhere and it was never clear from where because I couldn't tell whose turn it was or how anything worked. I was just suddenly dead and the game was over.
I liked the sound and the concept though, I think with a bit more polish on the system's presentation, it could be a lot more fun.
It is pretty fast which is not negative.
But something was missing..
The faster i spreaded out, the more i got attacked.. what is obvious.
But when i did not.. i had pretty low troops..
Yeah, just couldnt get a good strategy.
But i liked the look of the game and the main principle.
Good work (:
Funny, but I could not turn the globe properly. It was turning too much and unexpectedly, may it happen because of my mouse?
When clicking on the neighbor country I could invade it, but invsion when clicking the overseas country was not always successful, it was not clear. The game action is a little bit too quick, I wish there were more opponents.
Could have made it more clear by adding a blinking effect.
I finally win versus this IA!! But hard to understand what is happening on the other side of the planet. Good good, and fun experience!
Personally, while I thought the timer worked _okay_, it meshed very poorly with the UI for counting units. That is, you have to mouse around and hover over things to figure out where you army is, which eats precious seconds off the timer. So, like @adhesion, I'd say you need to add a visual indicator of unit count, particularly in light of the timer.
Also like @adhesion, I found islands extremely problematic.
The reset-queue button didn't seem to work for me, as far as I could tell.
Other than those three issues, though, I thought the game was quite fun, and not something you usually see in a Jam (strategy games just don't show up that often here).
**Things i thought were done well:**
- Tutorial. It is nice to see tutorials in a game, because most do not bother, so congrats on this.
- World movement, this worked smoothly and consistently.
- The real-time/turn based mesh - reminded me a little of the ATB system in FF7 a little bit, and i enjoy that.
**Things i thought could use improvement:**
- Island interaction felt a little clunky at times, but it worked, and in a 72 hour game jam, how much can we ask for!
- The island to world ratio felt like it could have been designed a touch better to make viewing what was going on a bit better - or perhaps a text log to show when things had happened?
Overall, a really great, fun entry, congratulations and keep it up!
Interesting take on the theme. Nice tutorial. :thumbsup:
I think it's a nice start for a strategy game, but I think it would have been better as a purely turn based game.
Apart from that, I really liked the generals, and trying to corner the other general so he couldn't get away. And good job on the tutorial!
The visuals are fairly simple, but they work well. The different colours are helpful for telling which countries you control. The audio is pretty decent - I quite like the voice lines you get when performing actions.
@palemachine @Veralos thanks for the feedback, couldn't satisfy everyone with the real-time/turn-based strategy but I was willing to give it a try to make it not too similar to Risk. Not sure what was the cause of the game not registering your clicks, did you play on the Web version or downloaded version?
I'm thinking about in a post-jam version adding two game modes where one has the real-time aspect and the other game mode is simply turn-based without a timer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmUpejMpTcM
In any case, though, I think part of the reason it is so hard to think about strategy is because there are no real graphical representations of anything. Troops should probably have a graphical representation - this would allow the player to easily visually figure out whether they could take over another country or whether they should try to retreat. Animation of some sort would also help - troops should move and fight - but I'm not quite sure _when_ the animations would take place given that actions technically don't happen until the five seconds have passed, and at that point the player needs to be able to see the updated state - probably the best way would be to spend about three seconds or so showing what was happening during the turn. (This would also help players see what the new layout was going to be, and maybe help them develop strategy).
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/hype-time