wooooooow! i love pixel style + 3D ! is it also on indiexpo.net?

No, but I will look into getting it there if there is a demand.
EDIT: It's now up there.

This was a pretty interesting game. Unfortunetly I really had no idea what I was doing (even with you giving advice in my stream) I feel this game would be pretty solid if it was better at communicating to the player what was happening. Great job though the graphics looked great!

I love your graphics and the gameplay seems interesting but you should include some kind of tutorial because it's a bit hard guess what you have to do.

Apart from that, very nice work!

The actions/actives are quite confusing, because they don't seem to be doing anything. I think some visual feedback for actions will be helpful to the player :) Very beautiful game and mood!

Visually it is very nicely done! A cool hybrid between 2D and 3D.
The gameplay and controls were very confusing. When I expected to click on a menu item, the character started to move and vice versa. I also had no clue what to do.
Music is very nice! SFX are a bit harsh and loud for my taste.

Overall well done!

A very nice game, though hindered by the UI and camera. The music was good I suppose but please don't make it full volume and auto-playing.

Main +) Mechanics and design.

Main -) UI or lack thereof.

I like that tune that plays throughout the game, game is complicated but with the instructions I figured it out, got the 4 beacons lit but then my main character disappeared but game didn't end. Another thing the character can move after turn ends it seems, was annoying to experience. Anyway interesting take on the theme and good art design/animation.

It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to do. But after that, I had a lot of fun with this game. It's looks really beautiful and it sounds really beautiful. I still think it needs a better tutorial or some more in-depth tooltips but apart from that, I really enjoyed it!

Interesting concept, the art looks quite appealing

But I had no idea if what i was doing was well doing anything to progress the game
or what Action or Interact did for each of the characters.

I did notice that if you have moved, then want to end your turn, if it was over another tile it would still move me, this also happened when the pop up was talking about the floods for that turn.

The sound for the flooding is very off putting compared to the music, which sounds great

Interesting game altough a bit confusing. Try adding more feedback for the players actions.

This was really fun. The only big issue I encountered was that, for some reason, the scout's teleport would only move them one tile (which ended up costing me my sweet sweet victory). The music was very nice and the way it built as you activate towers caught me off guard but was an incredible surprise. The artwork was a nice mix of 3d and 2d overlayed sprites which gave the game a nice coherent feel.

I didn't experience the issues others have reported about actives as both the mage and the druid did almost exactly what I was expecting after reading their tool-tips. Movement was clunky though as getting the game to accept the tile I wanted to go to would sometimes take a few clicks and on one occasion my mage just launched themselves into the flood tiles for no apparent reason.

Overall it was a fun experience only problem I really had was the scout active and the occasional fight with the UI

I feel like more that a game, it's a prototype with a lot of potential. It could become a very interesting complete strategy game. I encourage you guys to continue on that path ;p congrats

(Like everyone else I didn't figure out what to do, your video is good for that :ok_hand: )

Nice strategy game. A little strange at the beginning but the more you play more you understand the gameplay. Could be nice to have more info about how many actions/movements have each character per turn. Anyway, nice job!

That is a really nice game. The graphics look good and it has really nice music. It took a while before I understood what to do, but once I got it it was really quite fun. Perhaps a tutorial would be nice. Also, the sound is quite loud when you play the game. It would be great if that would be a little quieter.

Love the way it looks, but sadly I have to parrot what everyone else is saying, I simply have no idea what I'm doing. A tutorial would help in a big way.

Edit: watching the video helps at least.

I really like the mood of the game :) initially the sounds were a bit too loud/scratchy (might be my setup tho) but once in the game they were really nice. As for the game itself i didn't really get what i had to do, without reading the info, a short intro in the game might have been helpful (i guess it wasn't there due to time constraints). But i like the concept/feeling of the game :)

Interesting idea but there were a few annoying bugs (or I couldn't figure out how to play the game correctly?):

- I wasn't able to pick up the child (so I wasn't able to win the game)
- Sometimes when I tried to choose an action the turn would suddenly be over
- Sometimes I wasn't able to choose an action and had to pan around
- No way to end a walk action if you didn't use all movement points (only with 'end turn' but then the second action gets missing)

The music while nice at the start gets kinda annoying after the xth repetition.

Interesting stuff. Love the style. Was a bit confused on how to play and how to activate/interact with towers and such. Sometimes my unit moved when I clicked a menu item. Sound effects are a bit harsh.
But yeah, a lot of potential here if you manage to explain the way its played a bit better.

Couldn't move the camera on the windows build and sometimes the turns end for seemingly no reason. But a good take on the theme

Interesting and really nice that you started by making it as a board game. The graphics are great, it took me a while to understand what was going on, and the concept is great. Improving the camera control (zooming, etc), the sounds and making it easier to understand while in the game would be even better (I still don't know what the man is used for). Really great work!

Making it more obvious which unit you can move would be good, and perhaps giving us more camera controls. Otherwise an excellent game

The game looks very promising and interesting, I like the visual style and the premise (I love turned base tatics). However, the UI and gameplay was kind of confusing. I didn't know what to do. A good tutorial would make this game turn this game from good to great! The sound effect was a bit loud, and the camera could have zoomed out a little bit more.

Good job finishing the game though. I would love to play a more when it is more polished :)

I love the Audio and Art that this game has, it's very atmospheric, I was a little at a loss for how to play for a while so maybe a tutorial or a tweek in the UI to make it more intuitive for new players.

Very nice game, I was hooked and a bit scared of the Child going down in the abyss.
There were some clicking issues with the menu but they were negligible, I liked the art and the music.
Turn-based and hex tiles are the perfect choice for a game like this.

Hmm, your download on itch.io appears to be Windows only despite being marked as Win/Mac/Linux. :disappointed:

Reminds me of a nice little boardgame called Forbidden Island where random tiles being flooded is also one of the main mechanics. :) I like this quite a lot.

Apart from that I agree with what everyone else is saying, needs a bit more work in terms of UI and definitely requires an in-game tutorial.

Will try to play it as soon as I grab time to do so, so far all I can say is I like the graphics, green underwater tiles are definitely my cup of tea.

Nice concept although I'm not sure what can i do with the action button. Good work!

I like the concept of the game but it took me a while to understand how to play.

- The info for what the buildings are and the special habilities of the children are displayed in the lower right of the screen and in a gray background. Positioning it over the buildings/children when hovering on them or on the bottom center of the screen with bigger white text would have made a huge difference.

- The teleporting special hability was a little bit confusing, I wasn't able to teleport other units. The highlighted hexes didn't stand out much. Adding an arrow in the final teleport location would have made it clearer.

- When making the provinces flood it would have been better to take out the control of the camera from the player.

- The mana should have been displayed as a UI element

- The movement limitations were a little unclear. A "actions/movements remaining" count or something similar would have made things clearer

- I also had some issues with the context menu. I had to click Move many times for it to work properly.

- The function of the action menu isn't clear at the beginning. A tooltip that points the current child's special hability when hovering over it would have made it much clearer. (And it would also fix the first issue that I pointed out)

As I mentioned before, I love the concept, I also liked the graphics and the audio and I enjoyed the game when I figured out how it worked, however, it could be way better if the points would have been clearer.

Great Job!

And thanks for the feedback on my game! It was very useful!

Interesting concept, but like others already pointed out some more instructions or visual feedback would really help.

After playing a couple of turns and reading the instructions I figured out how it worked and actually got the hang of it a little bit.

I liked the pixel-hex style artwork and music. I think the gameplay mechanics/interaction might have been a bit more advanced than what I'm used to playing in game jams. I found the movement/interactions a bit confusing to figure out, but I really appreciate the work that must have gone into it. It was scary watching the provinces sinking.

For the UI, I wonder if an X-COM style UI would have worked better, where you see the action buttons for the character you have selected, instead of the context menu. And when you have someone selected, it would show you a picture of who is selected and the abilities/numbers for that person. Or did it need to be turn based - would it have worked out more easily with pausable RTS controls where you can issue different commands to the different characters?

Anyway, cool concept, I hope you get to refine it further!

The first time I played, I was completely confused. I read the instructions on the game page and I just had no idea what to do. But I started playing, anyway. I vaguely understood that I had to interact with certain characters and to move them, but I had no idea what the towers were, or what my objective was.

Thank goodness for the video, which did help to outline what I was supposed to do.

I tried a second time and couldn't understand why my characters weren't allowed to move, what Mana was and why my characters just moved to a subsequent square when I tried to execute an action. I tried to use the Druid's action, but most of the time, this character moved to another hexagon and only sometimes allowed me to undo some tiles from their flood state. Anyway, I was just getting the hang of it and even unlocked the ship, but my scout sunk beneath the waves before I could get to it. Well, I did get to a tile and tried to interact with the ship, but the game didn't do anything and it kept bringing up the notification that the place was flooding. I think it was taking into account the other turns of the units I had lost.

I tried playing the game again, but the issues with the interaction and actions were frustrating. Finally, I used a scout to interact with a Tower and got this nasty popup:


thus leading to the game freezing and not letting me do anything else.

At that point, I decided I was done playing this. Not that it's a bad game by any means; I just don't think it's the kind of game for me. It was definitely interesting though, since I don't think I've played one of these board game-esque type browser games before. I like the look of the game overall; the pixel art style characters on this sort of isometric board. It's very pretty to look at. I also like what you did with the music, what with the extra layers to the same loop being added as you light up the towers. That was a great touch.

I can echo the comments above that this isn't really the kind of game one could learn just by reading the instructions on the game page alone. Without the video, I think I still would have been super confused as to what I was doing.

@random-storykeeper : I'm very interested in that error, it's literally the first one that I've seen in days, it's a bug from an early version of the game and was one of the Hard Locks we thought we fixed... What website did you use to play? I'm sorry the experience was frustrating, I think I need to make sure we don't have a bad build on one of the non-itch.io sites.

@andyman404 : Funny enough, we came to similar conclusions on the UI. When the jam is over we'll likely revisit it depending on how we're received and if folks think we should keep going with it.

Excellent work! I really enjoyed my 3 games with it, so far. I will echo the UI concerns, it was good for a prototype, but going forward you might need to make it more intuitive. Off the top of my head, better feedback and less menus to click through? Context-sensitive menus is what I'm thinking off. A scout clicking on something can get a move or interact option. Unless it's a building, in which case only interact or something.

Fantastic overall. Also huge thanks @occultone for the heads up on how bad my game lags, I fixed it thanks to you <3

@occultone I played on itch.io on Chrome and had refreshed the page several times to restart. I also zoomed out of the screen a couple times, but undid it on subsequent playthroughs. I don't know if that messes up the display, but I'm just trying to recall the things I did that possibly may have affected the game's performance.

@random-storykeeper Very weird, I'll try and look into what might have caused that. (As programmer I take Locks quite personally. =P )

Art and music were nice, it should have a tutorial of some kind to explain everything. Once you get the hang of it however it's a fun rng strategy game, nice entry!

There was too much information given at once but as I understand each member had a different function and I needed mana to activate towers (which I could do without mana because UI let me do it) I could click buttons when they were not active and when I pressed end turn, character moved etc. So all in all UI was problematic, I liked the visuals and I see the potential, just not very playable as it is right now.

I'm the artist for Cosmic Cleaner, thanks to @occultone for streaming our game!

So I played your game and it's definitely one of the most complicated games I've see so far. A very ambitious game concept for 72 hours.

As some of the comments have mentioned there is some execution flaws. I'm having issues with characters moving when I go to click 'end turn'. I also can't seem to progress any farther after getting the scout stuck in the water. I can't use any actions and I don't see a way to pass their turn.

In general there does need to be more UI and feedback on what's going on. For example, I can't tell if I can only use an ability if I haven't moved yet or if it's bugged.

I do really like the visuals, though maybe an option to zoom out a little would be nice. The fancy looking font is interesting but a little too thin to easily read in the UI. I love the music, but the sound effects are oddly arcade like.

I would love to see this game once it gets polished up. It has a lot of potential, it just seems to be a lot to do for a weekend jam.

Okay, where to start:

I played this twice, on two separate occasions. The first time, admittedly, I was pretty lost and unsure of what I was supposed to be doing. I took a break and came back and made quite a bit more progress the second time around.

First and foremost, I loved the music. It not only set the audio apart from a lot of the other entries, but it set the mood of the game perfectly.

I like how you had little objectives around the map that were usually pretty worth walking to for their benefits, it added a nice touch and an extra dimension to the game play.

I would say that you and I both had similar challenges in the way of communicating our game's instructions to the players though in-game insturctions. For a simple game, this isn't usually an issue but your project was pretty ambitious. You guys got a lot of depth (and atmosphere!) into your game, and knowing how to take advantage of all of it from the get-go would have helped.

This is a game that would / will pop into my mind 6 months from now and make me do a google search for it to see where it's at in production. I feel like I played a really good prototype of a game that's going to be really special when it's finished, and I'm looking forward to that!

I love your music and characters

I love your music and characters

I really like the idea, but i am super confused how I am suppose to play the game. I hope you keep working on it, and I would really love to play it again when it is a bit more polished.

Thanks for the comment over on my gamei know its kind of confusing at first but the main idea is to build a base my be in a future version if i continue the project it will have monster ai that attack however at the moment its just build a base. also basic is just a wall. The name is just mean build a basic block

This was an awesome game, it took a while until I realized how the game worked and what to do but once I figured that out it was actually a lot of fun. Nice to see another strategy game! I managed to win in my first attempt.

An in-game tutorial wouldn't be hurtful, that would probably help a lot for people who didn't understand the turn-based system at first. Interesting mechanics that were fun.

The graphics were really innovative and good looking too, the 3D effect combined with pixel art was very unique. The music was really nice and most sound effects worked well but I found the white noise sound effect when the ground collapsed very obnoxious and made it hard to focus on the music but other than that the audio aspect was really good for this game! Great job!

Nice graphics ! This game is beautiful. Great job.

it is a very interesting little game very fun

I liked the melody that plays throughout the game. Decent concept. I'm a sucker for a hexgrid.

I would suggest making the active ability visible while the context menu is visible. I suppose it doesn't matter long term, but just jumping in, there's some disconnect between buttons and what happens.

I beat the game on my third try. It's pretty tough, but things got better when I stopped using the scout to ferry the heir and used the druid instead. The ability to cross through water without a movement penalty was huge in the lategame, and since the scout's teleport was (wisely) blocked when carrying the heir, the druid was definitely the smarter call. Plus I was getting the hang of the pace, and knew how to utilize the other special abilities - for example on my first turn I teleported my mage away and then my scout, so that my team was properly spread out.

I really liked how you used the theme here. Lots of us made small worlds - but your fundamental design challenge was about the small world shrinking around me, which was taking a step further and I liked that.

I think there are a lot of little things that were sort of rough, but fortunately you delivered enough of an interesting experience, plus had nice graphical styles and sound/music to make up the gap. I guess that my critique portion of feedback would be that the pace of the turns was a little too slow, having to watch the sinking over and over, plus I struggled a bit with the lack of transparency in the mechanics/UI. So for example it wasn't entirely clear to me why I could or couldn't use the druids ability, and at even more basic a level it took me a while to understand the movement system, sometimes it felt like I had extra moves... but eventually I realized you can take partial moves and a "move" action really allots a set of cells you can move, that it's still one action even if you take it in two or three chunks. Once this was clear it was fine, it just threw me as I was learning. I also got a bit stymied with selecting the target for the scout's teleport, because there wasn't really a selection confirmation, so I wasn't sure what state the game was in.

Eventually all that stuff became clear to me, so it was really just with the newb's eye that it confused. I bet if you watch over someone's shoulder who has never seen the game before, and say nothing but just watch them, you'll quickly be able to pin down what misunderstandings they have, though, and that could totally be cleaned up. I do think it needs a bit of love in that direction though.

Anyway, once I got past that bit of confusion and got to the meat of it, I really enjoyed this. Could stand to double the pace personally, though. The procedural generation might have gotten me to play one or two more times even after I beat it, if the pace was quicker.

Nice entry with cool strategy mechanics grounded well in theme and offering several different abilities, as well as cool art and sound - this is a nice entry you should be proud of!

Hi ! Very interesting game ! The graphics and abiance sound are very beautiful !
It's very hard for me to understand the game without a tutorial and you must add more feedback for the interactions.

Greet job

It's what a lot of people have said, the only fault this game have is how it presents itself to the player. I spent some minutes trying to figure out what to do and even restarted the game three times.
But I have only compliments to the rest: beautiful, very polished and fresh approach to theme. Nice entry!

Very unique art style and an interesting take on the theme. Background music works very well even for a longer time. As a lot of people have mentioned, it could use better in-game explanation and UI improvements. Still an impressive entry.

Its a fun game, entertaining to play, and really beautiful, the graphics are amazing. The only problem I have seen is that is hard to know how to play and what to do.

I should preface my comments with the fact that I don't play these sorts of games at all so I feel a bit like an outsider. I was able to light the four towers but by the time I managed it I was tired of clicking through the same message about another tremor and then waiting for the camera to pan around the map a few times. If you could tighten up the flow a little or at least allow the player to skip through these sections then I think it would be more enjoyable.

Saw another Forbidden Island variant here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/escape-from-sytlanta

Your game is very pretty but the gameflow and interface is a bit confusing. Try out that other version for some ideas.

The mix of visual elements was unique and worked well for this game, liked the whole setup but do wish it had been a bit clearer with the ui and the movement selecting as at times I felt like I was selecting things but was getting no feedback.

At first sight it looks really great!
The graphics and the sounds design go well together, it creates an atmosphere that fits nicely with the lore of the world.

But some others already pointed it out, it is pretty confusing to get into the game. I had quite hard times to move around trying to activate the towers. A bit more feedback when playing would be really appreciated, like end of a turn and so on. Another thing I noticed is that with some characters, when I was moving them, they could walk quite far and the tile was almost a bit out of the screen, thus I couldn't see clearly where I could go (mostly when going at the bottom of the map).

Still congrats for this game! :D

Very calming atmosphere, but yes it is extremely confusing to get into. A better ingame tutorial would've been appreciated but it is still a well made game.

once you get it, it's quite a very well put game. would benefit greatly with a mobile version(but that's just me wanting an excuse to play it more) Very good job.(except when the druid does nothing and you dont know why cus no feedback )

@drazil100 , @camilo , @akirassasin , @drtizzle , @spacewarp , @digitaldude555 , @kevtukk , @jamesy012 , @faithcaio , @tiny-planet-studios , @aurelien , @fernandoadolfo , @stefvanschie , @oxrock , @loktor , @smbe19 , @mathijsvissers , @wevel , @shurty , @geeitsomelaldy , @jackyjjc , @valicitor , @fanu , @zarkonnen , @palemachine , @kr4ft3r , @canochaba , @knightess , @rick , @andyman404 , @random-storykeeper , @christina-antoinette-neofotistou , @gamechoy , @nettleflap , @thecritterscove , @burgee , @fangzhangmnm , @jk5000 , @twistashio , @linus , @pandakipu , @terryg , @mox , @pkenney , @piller-yann , @epiplon , @ekkiiiii , @blackrose , @richard-michael-smith , @peachtreeoath , @franklins-ghost , @mewsoul , @subwooferx3 , @pyokoanarogue

And Anyone I may have missed! Thank you all for the fantastic reviews. I spent the past 48 Hours curating your reviews and cutting them into usable data (See my Word Cloud Meme for examples of this), and implementing fixes based on all of your input. I’ve pushed an updated we’ve entitled the “Ancient Technology” Update, and I hope you’re willing to come back and give our game another try!

The Original Jam version is still featured prominently for our purists, and all the patch notes are featured in the Itch.io Forum… there’s a LOT.

Thank you all so much for the reviews, if you decide to give us another try, please leave comments below so I might further improve the game. We’re really hopeful we can place well, if we do we may move to fully flesh out the entire game and release it as something really awesome.

This was amazingly well thought-out and put together; I'm definitely going to give the updated version a try, considering how good the jam version was.

There were some UI problems, but I feel like those have been adequately addressed by other commenters. My main problem was really just that it wasn't always clear ahead of time that there were problems impending. For example, when my Scout died for no readily apparent reason. I assume he drowned, but the tile he was in wasn't all the way sunk, and anyway the mage could stand on similar tiles just fine.

That said, this is just superb, big props for getting this made in just 72 hours!

@philomory : I'd love to hear your thoughts on the new version as well!

I wasn't really sure what I was meant to do, but was very impressed with how the game looked and felt. :-)

Best Immersion so far from all LD games I have played. Really dived into the game and it was a awesome experience. At the start it's a bit hard if you do some wrong decission path wise but if you manage to get the mana early and rush for the towers you can make it. I was a bit unlucky so only my druid survived but for my first try I was quite satisfied :D Well done!

Cheers

The Good: While the graphics were good and the game fit the theme nicely, the audio, mood and storyline were by far the best parts. It is apparent that a lot of thought was put into the story. It was certainly one of the best (If not the best!) games I played for Ludum Dare.

The Bad: The only noteworthy issue that I had with the game is that the interact button was messed up. When I hovered over it, it displayed the wrong thing. For example, when I was interacting with one of the towers, it said something along the lines of "Pay 1 mana to activate ancient defenses." This was not only the wrong text, but it costs more than that to activate ancient defenses. It was a minor bug, which didn't take much away from the gameplay, but still a bit annoying.

The ~~Ugly~~ Suggestions: I would have liked to see more cards than simply the Tremors and Good Fortune cards. It made the gameplay a bit blander than it could have been.

I see this scoring very high and possibly getting in the top 100 LD38 games. The only thing it may score low on is Humor, which I would have recommended you to opt out of. I say this because some people may score you low on humor, and then take the average of all of the scores and put it into overall, possibly bringing your score down.

@dragonzlay : Good idea, we've opted out of humor.

Think I had a bad run. Got all the towers lit and the boat never showed. I thought it was odd that the endgame dragged on so long :wink: I could swear the camera pointed to it during the little blurb after the towers were lit, but it was definitely wasn't there my next turn. Also, the defense shrines (pay 2 mana, -1 calamity) weren't working at endgame (the only time I tried to use them).

Anyway, a couple little nits to pick. I'd really like to see the action icons near the active character rather than off on the side. I sat there mashing on characters for a while before noticing them (the buttons don't exactly stand out, either). Randomly generating the map seems like a bad idea for a puzzle game. I guess time will tell, but there does seem to be a pretty wide variety in heights it can throw together. The intro tutorial window is quite an infodump (and an unformatted one at that). I would have liked it on the Esc/Pause menu to refresh my memory (Kudos on having the time to have a pause screen at all, though!). It also takes far too long for the 'sinking' phase to pass (and the sfx is grating), especially endgame where you have to sit through it twice in a row. Standing NEXT to a building to interact with it is counter-intuitive to anyone who's ever played a strategy game.

Now I'm sure I'm going to be the polar opposite to the LD crowd that thrives on pixel puzzle platformers, but I really disliked the art for both the terrain and buildings. It is an interesting experiment, but, man, did I find it ugly, particularly the ground textures. There's some nice pallet-shifting animation on the castle to give it a bit of life (which is great!), but you spend too much time staring at them too closely. Too low res, maybe? I didn't understand the icons over the character's heads, either. I really had to stare at the crown icon (I think its a crown. The 'I'm holding the baby' icon) before understanding what it was. The province borders, once I figured out what they were, were so distracting as to drive me bonkers. Static lines on the map would have been just fine.

Um... Geez, I'm sorry. I honestly didn't expect to rant this much.

It is a very interesting experiment, both visually and mechanically, and simply oozing with polish (maybe a bit too much polish? (Looking at you, province borders!)), but I feel the game itself has a long way to go.

Wow! Awesome!

@ryte2byte : Sorry you had a bad run with the towers! That is a bug that we've struggled to find the source of, I'm not sure what has caused it. What build were you using, and what source?

That was pretty neat! Thanks for making such a cool experience. Some feedback: I was a little lost at first of where the controls were. Mostly UI asthetics might of been the one thing missing that prevented me from enjoying the game fully. I spent some time trying to figure out the controls and they all ended to be right at my face :D Otherwise, great idea! great gameplay! great music and over all mood. Made me feel like i was flooding myself :) Great Job!

Nice game!

Seems like you did a lot of things in this small amount of time, great effort.

Very nice game. The graphics look really cool with the combination of 2D sprites and 3D terrain. The music is nice and the sound effects are good too. The gameplay seems quite interesting but I'm not sure I fully understood it. I managed to activate the four towers and call the boat, but I couldn't seem to interact with the palace. The interface overall feels like it could be a bit more intuitive - it took a while for me to figure out I was supposed to be using a specific character each turn. That said, I really appreciate the effort put into having some flavour and story to the game.

@mikea : Was the button greyed out, or was it just not accepting input?

I almost lit all of the towers! Neat game, I have a soft spot for grid based stuff. I thought the path finding was impressive. Game play was solid. At the begging I was all chill and relaxed them I got more and more into it as the areas started sinking. SOLID GAME good work!

- THe sound is very relaxing .
- Graphics of the game is cool :)
- Initially i didn't understood the game then i came and read the comment in this page and went again and played i enjoyed .
- such a complex game in a very limited amount is time is really appreciable
- Unique concept In this jam played so far

The music is really nice and the overall mood is really great (really good pixel art, animation, sfx). The game is a little complex so more explanation could be appreciated but I really enjoyed it . Congratulation!! Good job!

Really loved the atmosphere and sounds. Also liked the core mechanics - gameplay took just a bit of getting used to, but after that it felt very fluid.

I'd suggest adding some sort of hilighting or visual cues on the active characters - it'd make the start easier, and perhaps try to hilight the way interactions work a bit more. Now it took some trial and error, although it's simple enough. Overall, a great game :)

Good entry, nice to see a turn based game and so well done in such a short amount of time. It was a little tough to get going, but got the hang of it eventually :)

I loved the music and sounds in this game.

The initial phase of gameplay is cool, but nothing happens for me once I reach the ship. It did spawn on me, so that may have caused the problem. I may make another attempt later.

Illustrations and more variety in the calamity cards would be good. It seemed they were nearly all "tremor"

> "@mikea : Was the button greyed out, or was it just not accepting input?"

I assume you were referring to my comment since mikea's comment didn't mention any issues.

I can't recall exactly, but I believe the button was greyed out.

@veralos : Yes! Sorry, the structure of the LDJam comments section is a little hard to follow once it reaches a certain length. Awesome, that's actually really helpful: I'll go look into what might have caused that.

It's strength game, it has good art and sound. I very like that sound and game also!

How to escape? I lose two of my heroes and after i reach the ship game is not end. In any case good job!

Really great game! Had a blast playing. At first it was little confusing and I didn't really know what was going on but after one round I figured it out and ended up getting to the ship at the end :) I love how the music changes slightly as you activate each tower. (Or was that just my imagination?) I liked the strategy involved, good job on the design. My only criticism would be that it isn't that easy to get into initially. But excellent game overall :)

Solid game! Great idea. It didn't take too long to figure out the rules, but it was really interesting to try and play. Towards the end I lost because well, I didn't think a province could completely flood to a deadly level. With some more work it could be a great little board game!

I started playing on Itch on OS X / Safari. I had some difficulty with the window size. I then tried to get the Indiexpo standalone player, but it was only for windows (the download button indicates combined with OS X tho...). I finally went with Kongregate.

This definitely has a board game feel to it, and the mechanic reminds me of Forbidden Island. I like the multi-character puzzle-like aspects and the overall mission is fun. I drowned about half of the island befoe I got a hang on the controls, though. This game is incredibly polished for such a short competition. Would love to see this as a board game.

First I have to say that the main menu music is **Haunting** ! The graphics are nice as well and together they perfectly match the mood of the game.
**This is a great game!**

But there were a few things that could be better:
First the fact that the Mana Generator looks exactly the same as the Ancient Defenses, and since none of them are mentioned in the readme, I didn't even know that the generator existed in the beginning.
Also it took me a while to figure out where are the action points and mana displayed.

And unfortunately I encountered many bugs in the WebGL build:

- I can only click on the left side of the ability button
- The ship teleported to a new location at the start of the turn and the "Calling the Ship" message was shown.
- Couldn't Interact with the Mana Generator on multiple occasions.
- The scout's teleportation didn't work on the Druid with the heir. (*Is this by design ?*)
- After moving to an Ancient Defense Building and Interacting with it the turn not ended automatically, I could click on the move button but could not move.
- The Interact button showing wrong tooltip, and sometimes not working. Its like the game logic thinks the character stands somewhere else.

Also after barely surviving sinking of the whole Island where my civilisation lived, I would probably build my city next time somewhere deep inside the mainland.
But who knows maybe the last heroes of Atlantis are total island freaks! :smile:

Definately one of the highlights of LD38! The graphics and gameplay were outstanding and it fit the theme very well. The thing I liked most was the music. It suited the game perfectly!

Really well done. This game was stunning to look at, and the music was perfect! I do think it could benefit from either a small tutorial, or more explanation in-game about characters, turns, and mana use. It took me a few rounds to get the hang of everything, and I also experienced some bugginess with the Ability button. Overall though, you guys made a fantastic game.

Hey, REALLY liked this. It feels a lot like a board game, just with mechanics that a board game would never be able to accomplish. It a couple tries to actually make it to the boat, but eventually I got the hang of it (i.e. I spammed the Wizard's mana collection every chance I got). The mechanics are great - enough complexity to have some interesting options, but not so confusing that it didn't immediately make sense what my options meant.

Presentation was great - simplistic but with enough interesting touches to give life to the game (the board animations in particular). You did a great job of guiding the player's focus and highlighting possible moves. Music really fit the tone of the game and I really liked the subtle build with each new tower getting activated (but then again, I'm a sucker for anything like that).

The foundation of this is solid and I could definitely see some really deep gameplay come out of developing this idea further. I definitely hope you keep going with it.

Really enjoyed playing this entry, the music was phenomenal and the art direction was too!

The characters and environment art were fantastic. After wasting a few rounds, I got the hang of how to play. I think more highlighting on the active character would clear up most my issues. There was a lot of polish and winning requires a strategy. Best of luck in continued development.

I love the combination of 3D and pixel graphics. The music is very soothing and the gameplay feels good. It would've been nice, if you had had the chance to see which tiles are sinking next. The menu graphic/animation is cool, it fits the gameplay and everything. Very solid entry overall.

Cool approach making a physical prototype first. Would it be possible for you to post a few pictures of it?

The UX could use a bit of polish. The thin black text in the hint boxes does not have enough contrast to the gray backgrounds. Also I'd prefer it if the hint boxes and command pallet appear next to the things they related to, instead of at fixed positions on the screen.

Finally, the constant sinking of regions creates a tens claustrophobic feel. It really captures the sensation of a hastily declining civilisation.

I do agree that the development of a tutorial or early walk-through would help, but overall the game was very impressive. Music, sound, and graphics were nicely done. I think this is a game that should continue in development.

@jordgubben : I'll check my phone, there might be one more picture... but it was taken home by our Designer to tinker and create a more professional board version for his portfolio, so I'm not sure it still exists in its original form.
Here's a link of the only picture I have, along with my very messy house full of Jammers:
https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/18077123_10208770630374303_4550694765061379831_o.jpg?oh=be28fd7b7f9192a31d80ee8ebcc5d84e&oe=59911C88

I enjoyed this one, especially once I better figured out what I was doing. I came close to the end on playthrough 2, but was then informed Atlantis fell; though it seemed to still be okay. Perhaps because one of the towers sank?

In any case, I think I grasped the overall strategy and I think the immersive feel here is spot on. Was pleasantly reminded of Greed Corp (what with all the collapsing hexes), as well as the boardgame Forbidden Island. I'd be interested to see where you take this, given time to tighten the UX and presentation.

Fantastic game, I had loads of fun with this one and was drawn right in. The strategy in moving around each class, and deciding what to do when was well done and really well excuted. The artstyle was really good and it played really smoothly even with this complex aesthetic. The music also fit the game really well, and gave this sense of a dying civilization. I don't know how it managed to but it did. The gameplay was really quite unique and I have little issues with this game, only one or two. The first is that at times I wasn't sure if I did something or not and the game did get really confusing, especially when you first begin. The other thing would be that the HUD wasn't all that clear, and finding the mana counter took a while, as well as the menu's being rather small. Other than that great game, loads of fun.

@pascalman , @philomory , @thedoodleguy , @yves , @dragonzlay , @ryte2byte, @hellsquirrel ,
@meenners , @mikea , @veralos , @codechomper , @sagarpatel25700 , @jin47 , @zebrainflames ,
@wisstopher , @ectucker1 , @yyam , @powerspark , @kate-kligman , @devpaul , @daniel-conway ,
@caterein , @atmospherium , @wtoa , @mooncalf , @skosnowich , @jordgubben , @schizoid2k , @novodantis

Thanks for the feedback guys! I've been hard at work curating all the new data and looking into bug reports and the like and all your input went into this latest update. Thanks so much everyone!

@porcus-pie : Thanks for the input, I'm glad you had fun! We're actually starting to look into getting a totally new gui designed to fix all these issues.

Awesome entry! Really good sense of imminent calamity, especially at the end as most of the board is flooded. Controls took a little getting used to and I didn't realize I couldn't selected the hero I wanted per turn, but I figured it out soon enough.

The music and the world you put the player in remind me of the good ol' days and titles like Hero Quest. This has a really great vibe to it :) Nice touch with music change on activating the towers.

** what could be improved **
I haven't play enough to really give you feedback on balance. Seems rather hard, but that's the whole point. There's many aspects to look out for, including different hero abilities, so I have to spend more time with it.

Visually, ability to zoom in/out would definitely help.

When it comes to polishing up the graphics / visual presentation, there are a few easy things you could do to make it more consistent /polished
1) players feet at the centre of hex instead of somewhere near the bottom would make their position clearer, and visually better (wouldn't look like sprite on 3d plane)
2) buildings bases looking more 3d (i.e. towers especially) and aligning with hex on which they stand on -
3) Working with scale to make it look more pixel-perfect
4) UI polishing, but that's a more complex thing - somehow, I feel that darker panels with gray-white font would actually do better, but that may be just my taste ;)

Jam-wise, you did a tremendous job. A complex mechanic like that must have been a pain to code, especially with all the events and map, so very well done. Mood and vibe is clearly there, you captured the situation of a dying civilization well, and the calamity system works just fine.

Actually after a few playthroughs still the only things I clearly see could be improved are matters of graphics consistency / polish (ones I mentioned before, and standard things like consistent fades and so on). And that's not really a Jam issue - in jam it's the mechanics that count. So well done, and keep updating!

If I find something that could be imprved mechanics-wise, I'll let you know :)

Cheers!

You've got a good art style. The blue zone selection could use some tweaking to fit better with the pixel art texture of the rest of the game (a semi-transparent diamond block in Minecraft comes to mind).

Interesting game, keep it up. Also, nice metrics post, its always interesting to see some stats. :wink:

I was confused at first, because I wasn't getting the characters to spawn at the start, and couldn't do anything- this was in the web version- but the jam version worked for me.

Very cool game, impressive concept. I love a good strategy game, and this one had me from the start, as soon as I figured out what to do.
The art style, using 3D hex grid with pixels was something very cool and unique.
Slightly buggy, where I couldn't do any actions even though the buttons were not grey.

Amazing job overall!

@diptoman Which website had a broken webgl build?
EDIT: Oh hey! Unity Analytics broke something! Gonna have to disable that and do a rebuild. Not sure what went wrong, gonna file a bug report.

@ryan , @takusan , @ianmorrison : I've fixed the WebGL Build if you guys wanted to try the new Version. Sorry for the bad build, Unity Analytics seems to have borked something in the command sequencer.

I can't play with this gametype :) But I tried your game, and I have to tell you: It's awesome. The graphics and the game mechanics is cool, and the multiple unit type is a great idea.
I missed a "How to play?" Or tutorial level with a little summary of the gameplay.

Good job!

Nice game, enjoyed playing it. I also like the style of the graphics. Great job!

I played the web (itch.io) version. It's a fun game once you get going but it's pretty unpleasant to play at first. The UI isn't clear and the control scheme is just not intuitive at all. It wasn't until I watched your YouTube playthrough that it made sense (even then, the UI didn't match between the video and the web version). How to play, what your abilities are and even which character you are in control of currently could be made more obvious. For example, the Scout the description reads "Moves 6 spaces instead of 4. 1 Mana. Teleport self or other in same Province". This could be made clearer just with some different formatting, such as;

Scout

Can move 6 spaces each turn (instead of 4).

Ability: Teleport self or other in same Province.

Ability cost: 1 Mana.

Because right now it's not clear what the "1 Mana" is in reference to.

The game is very nice visually, though some more diversity between the building designs would help as currently I had to click on each building every time to see what it was. The gameplay was a good challenge and forced you to use a lot of strategy, I was able to succeed once but I got lucky with the ship spawning quite close to me. Other attempts left me stranded as I'd positioned the wrong characters in flooded parts of the map. The flooding and the small map was a good take on the theme, you definitely felt like your world was shrinking as you ran out of land to move around on. Some of the random events were pretty punishing but that is part of this kind of game.

Overall, an enjoyable game that looks like a lot of effort went into it. It's just let down by the initial learning curve, which is steep due to an unclear interface rather than the challenge of the game itself.

Great game :) It gave me a vibe of the board game Forbidden Island. The game seems to have a lot of depth and nice randomization. A great LD38 entry

Cool game, seems like a lot content and time has gone into this. To give some feedback, the graphics were a bit messy and the game was somewhat hard to understand. Whose turn it is, what the different things do and the objective of the game. Great ground but wouldn't hurt to get some further polish! Great job!

This is a solid project which fits with the theme perfectly. I am not a big fan of this genre, but I had fun playing it. Maybe the controls could be improved. The sounds are weird - excepted the quiet music which adds something hypnotic to the atmosphere. Thumbs up. Highly rated ++

Congrats a fantastic ld entry!

Presented in a lovely way. I loved the 2D sprite characters within a 3D world. They were also well animated for the various actions etc.

The music was pleasing.

I didn't really know what I was doing at first but I read the page and the tooltips helped a lot.

I think this has a lot of potential, and with a more intuative ui/tutorial rework I imagine this could really lead to an awesome full game.

A beautiful game with real potential.

Thanks for creating and sharing!

Visuals and music are great, but the controls are so counter intuitive that I had to watch your video to know how to do anything. Especially the fact that your action menu is somewhere on the side of the screen (so it's hard to notice it even appeared); or that there is no visual feedback what character is currently selected (there should be at least some circle on the current character's tile). Walking towards a tile should be a default action, and the action menu should be just for choosing something else. Also, turn end doesn't belong in the list of a single character's actions. UI is very important in such games, so it was a major problem for me.

THAT. IS. JUST. AWESOME.

Nothing else, just awesomness...


Shameless self-promotion: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/lil-hunt

I found it kind of confusing. The art was nice, but some of the tiles were blurred for some reason. The audio was good. It just seems like you tried to put a bit too much into the game. Nice entry though!

This seems like a pretty ambitious game for a jam but I think you've done a fantastic job, there's a lot in here!

The mood for this is so spot on, it's super nice. Love the look and feel, the music and the graphics work well together. I kind of felt... a mixture between melancholy from the atmosphere and stress from all the land being swallowed up around me. In a good way. :P

Like others have mentioned even with following the instructions I wasn't too clear on what I was doing, and why I couldn't do certain things. Had to do some trial and error. But I imagine clarification and feedback would come with time and playtesting, if it's something you were interested in continuing with (which I'd be well up for seeing!)

Fab job overall. And major kudos for all the games you've been rating that's one hell of an accomplishment on top of your game!

I had seen this game quite a lot of times along the site - it's easy to understand why. Good graphics, music and game system overall. It's one of the best I've played so far. The only problem I had was that the mechanics (particularly how much mana I needed for each tower and the restrictions of the characters' actions) were slightly confusing to me in the beginning, but I got the hang of it after a few minutes.

Great game. It must have been a real effort to translate a board prototype into a game like this, even more so with a Game Jam time limit. Amazing job!

I can see that this game has been pretty popular so far, and I can also clearly see why. It's a really cool and fun concept that is executed very well. It feels very carefully designed, and I love the graphics. Keep up the good work!

Very confusing at first due to the lack of tutorial. UI could use some work but other than that it captured my interest well. Graphics are cute, audio pleasant although the flood sound effect was a bit too loud. I would like to see it developed further.

Cool game.

I was a little disoriented at first. I didn't find UI very intuitive.

However, the hexagonal grid is great and sinking tiles is a really cool effet.

Nice graphics too. One of the characters reminded me of the Ghost busters. :)

Well done!

This was awesome! The music was very atmospheric and the game was very original and used the theme quite well! It took me a little bit of time to understand what I was doing but once I knew this was great. If I were to give some criticism I would say that the UI was pretty bland and ugly, but the game was so good it made up for that. Good job!

Nice game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcx-zIJDIVM

Fun game! but what I really like about it was the art style, I am impressed, great overall.

@darylsteak Not sure if you know this, but this was last Ludum Dare's Entry, I'm guessing that's why you're here.

Nice Game ! Love the graphics and the music ! Well done !