Dice Settlers by Jimbly
Prophecy has foretold that destiny awaits in this new world. Grow your settlement to fulfill your dreams!
Roll, place, level, and construct worker dice. Hall of Fame position / high score is based on fewest turns to unlock the ending.
Links * HTML5(WebGL): dashingstrike.com/LudumDare/LD52 * Source Code: Jimbly/LD52-dice-settlers
High score from LD'ers during the rating period: @OadT winning in 72 turns
Controls: Mouse with keyboard shortcuts, should also work with Touch controls
A lot of this is explained in-game at various times, but it's not always accessible, so I've assembled a quick-reference mini-guide: here:
Screenshots:
Post-submission bug fixes: * Fixed incestuous bug where children coming out of the cuddle room would sometimes end up in someone else's bunk * Fixed bug where an early-game hint about growing population would reappear in late-game due to... circumstances * Fixed typo in cuddle room's help text referring to "Bedroom" which is actually called "Bunk" everywhere else
Development Notes
All sound effects created by either recording bouncing dice onto things, or using Bfxr
Me before jam: Last jam I overexerted, let's do something small.
Me when theme is announced: Let's do the most mechanically complicated game I've done yet for a jam.
And for the fun of it, let's make only 1-bit graphics. Maybe that actually reduced the time to make art though, it was a fun challenge regardless =).
Pretty much all sound and final graphics were done in the last 2 hours, no music for this one!
Tools Used * Custom Engine: GLOV.js * Mtn Dew * SFX from real dice, recorded in Audacity * SFX in Bfxr * Photoshop * Fonts: Perfect DOS VGA 437
| Link | http://www.dashingstrike.com/LudumDare/LD52/?D=COMPO |
| Link | https://github.com/Jimbly/LD52-dice-settlers |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/dice-settlers |
Ratings
| Overall | 14th | 4.179⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 10th | 4.25⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 11th | 4.179⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 31th | 4.286⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 125th | 3.714⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 174th | 3.135⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 144th | 2.854⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 72th | 3.75⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
At the same time the graphics could be a bit simpler/cleaner e.g. for the "MARKET" & "PORT" there is much going on in on icon.
I enjoyed the core gameplay loop but after ~20 or so turns i wished some sort of lose condition to make it challenging and prevent me from reroll spam.
@phlip45 Glad you enjoyed it, and congrats on getting all of the way through! It really did end up pretty long - the one user test I did lasted over an hour and she got stuck with a bug, didn't even beat it, and even then didn't experience a handful of the buildings, though I made buildings _much_ cheaper after that, but they still take time to build and get into play... The leaderboard gets submitted to every time you end a turn, it's basically my cheap/lazy version of adding analytics so I can see how far people get, so the people on there that haven't finished either quit, or are currently in the middle of a game.
Perhaps a save/export-save feature would be handy to coninue playing later/on-mobile :)
The core mechanic is very enjoyable, it feels very well-balanced. I got a bit stuck at one point because I didn't realize that the Cuddle Room needed two tiles. Also took me a bit of time to realize that I could pan around, though also I only tried when I had expanded to the edges of the initial view.
@resevoir Thanks for playing! Yeah, I was worried about the placing of 2x1 rooms, tried to convey that, but definitely could have been better, glad you figured it out though. I really should have added a mouseover showing the two tiles it'd replace while mousing around, that would have cleared that right up (beyond the initial potential waste of a turn to activate the Shed, for course ^_^). Similar worries with panning, but I figured people would stumble upon that at least accidentally by the time they actually needed to pan the view, there's plenty of nearby unexplored tiles to start with ;).
Edit: I'm number 10 on the scoreboard :D
@verttixpertti Cool, glad you stuck with it, and, it looks like you've got the new high score (for players from Ludum Dare anyway - the actual top score is some kid from a Discord for one of my other games who likes competing a bit ;).
I burned at lot of cycles at the end because my last dice did not have the required temple face. Luckily, I had enough resources saved to buy a new one so I did not get locked out.
Inspiring entry, thanks :)
i love dice games, and the overall concept is great! i wish the map was not always the same tho. apart from that, upgrades are cool, and learning how to use them was great. it is a very good compo game!
thank you for these two last hours mate :D
(i got 189 turns, i wonder how it can be doable in 50 haha)
@amarokczukay If you play a new game from the main menu, it always starts with the same seed (for the competitive speedrunners amongst us...), but if you go to the Hall of Fame first, there's a "restart game" or something that actually chooses a new random seed, if you really want to play again. The only difference on the map is where the temple/forest/quarries are, not particularly interesting, though =). Glad you had so much fun!
Really nice entry
@niterich Yeah, there's a bit of luck, although you can always Kitchen your two gatherers into an explorer to find stuff for them to do later, so hopefully didn't ever feel like you were out of options. Visuals definitely got pretty clustered, I even turned off a bunch of the labels until the appropriate die is selected where I could, but I still wasn't happy with how noisy it felt. Don't think it would have been very discoverable without at least some text, though... probably just adding a bunch of whitespace between the tiles woulda helped at this point, but could probably benefit from a different style (higher res, smaller text) or something...
Well done, I can't believe this is a Compo submission! 5/5 stars, took my attention for well over 20 minutes! :beers:
I liked the art and 1-bit definitely helped! Lack of music was not missed at all in this case, the frequent interactions and their sound effects had their charm and filled the silenced very well.
Played twice got it done under 100 - probably could have done earlier but just did not want to part with my die :|
some of the buildings I did not feel the need to explore. harp for instance.
Very nice touch of the small hints/narrative upon exploring!
It is very dire in need of a tutorial of sorts tho. I had not checked the guide in the description which added to my own fun but I figured it out in the end. Would have helped a ton if it was part of the game like the initial few steps
In this version at least, it felt like a rush to find the temple and finish it. Resource requirements increased a lot. felt like it s easier/better to rush the temple than build bunks
I really like this entry - well done. you may be on to something here! would definitely be checking this out if you were to continue working on this post-jam
One small issue I had: Sometimes it was a bit hard to see if there are free spots for a dice or not, so maybe some guidance could be added here (though I am still amazed how much you managed to do in time) Apart from that fantastic work, currently my #1 in fun!