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Coboids's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #11 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Theme | #44 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Fun | #56 | 3.062 | 3.062 |
| Overall | #75 | 3.054 | 3.054 |
| Accessibility | #78 | 2.812 | 2.812 |
| Audio | #88 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
| Graphics | #111 | 2.812 | 2.812 |
| Controls | #155 | 2.188 | 2.188 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
4.4rc1
Wildcards Used
One-handed, Here be dragons
Game Description
Lead a pack of lizards to greatness.
How does your game tie into the theme?
The hoard must grow! The horde must grow!
Source(s)
N/A
Discord Username(s)
PeteTimesSix
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
6
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Comments
Great concept – it's fun to control a horde of cute cobolds!
The tutorial was a nice touch, but I didn't understand the need for different flags.
I like the 90s RTS vibe of the map, a fog of war would have been interesting for exploration purposes.
Thank you for this entry!
The separate kind of flags aren't really necessary if you control the 'bolds manually, but they're helpful for the automation stuff. Glad you had fun!
There's a lot of good here. Good concept and fitting execution in audio visuals.
But I just could not handle my kobolds, at all. Both in tutorial and the level it felt like they just go unresponsive pretty fast.
The flags didn't seem to do anything in early game. I thought they would be connected to different colors of kobolds.
There is an issue you might have ran into where even briefly sweeping a flag too close to kobolds makes them remember it as a flag to ignore.
As far as colors go, they are purely decorative - kobold type is determined by what they are carrying, though I should have communicated that in the tutorial. Glad you gave it a shot regardless!
Ah, I see! The flags make a bit more sense now!
brilliant title pun hahaha!
visually, some of the pieces are quite charming, but it’s overall lacking color as large parts of the screen are just grey. the walls and the ground has the same color, making them hard to distinguish at a glance, especially when zoomed out. the scale of the map is quite impressive, even though it’s not completely filled out.
the music is really fitting, I particularly like the menu music. looks like you didn’t fill the credits screen in the game, so I can’t tell if you made it yourself.
about the gameplay: I absolutely adore the idea of controlling and automating a hoard of lil kobold guys, but the execution here is somewhat lacking. I managed to set up the egg-automation in the tutorial, but it didn’t seem feasible to automate much in the real map. still, it was fun to manually move the hoard around to grow the numbers, arm everyone with weapons, and finally raid the town. unfortunately the kobolds didn’t want to drop their weapons to pick up gold, so they didn’t manage to bring anything back with them.
the game is quite rough and clearly unfinished, but I enjoyed what’s there — it’s always cool to see boids used for different ideas!
...huh, you're right, somehow the credits didn't make it. Weird, because in my local build they're where they're supposed to be.
Anyway, I can't claim credit for the music, it's sourced from here: https://opengameart.org/users/tausdei I should probably contact them, now that I've used it for multiple gamejam games...
While it is possible to automate things on the main map, it does indeed take a lot of flags and a fair bit of fiddling.
Thinking about it, I should probably have put a shop somewhere where you can sell weapons for gold :]
Glad you enjoyed it!
A really interesting idea this must have been really satisfying to make. I'd love to make some sim like this but I've yet to do it for a jam. It took me a while to get a feel for how the flag system worked but I got there in the end. Kobold factory builder next :)?
Very cool game! It's a lot of fun to build up your kobold army and watch them flock around to the flags. I think the automation mechanics are cool tho I wasn't very good at executing it lol. I think some kind of end goal would've been a nice addition to the game. Great work this is fun and super cool!
The original plan (once it was Tuesday and I was done with my usual loop of coming up with an idea only to decide its not interesting an hour later, anyway) was to start with most of the map locked off or concealed in a fog of war, and having days progressively increase both the amount of gold needing collecting that day and how much map is accessible. As it is I barely had the time to even have a map at all :]
Hey, really great entry. We did a flocking sim for our game as well, so it was super cool to see your take on it. Your controls, despite their quirkiness are so much better than ours. Hehe. I really like the waypoints and automation idea. Occasionally, I had a hard time getting the li'l guys to move because they were all standing still and that was more powerful influence than a flag. I had fun building a giant kbooid army, building up far more than necessary to kill the knights. I razed their cities to the ground and then was done, cuz that dragon doesn't need my gold.
Seriously good work.
It's unfortunately quite easy to wave a flag a bit too close to a ball of kobolds while placing it, which makes them remember it as one to ignore - its a problem I was aware of but couldn't think of a way to make that visible to the player. Glad you stuck it through to the end though!
Cool game! The flocking was fun to look at and gave the kobolds a fun character. I'm not a good lizard boss but I eventually got enough of them to fight some knights.
I really wanted to be able to play but I don’t have a middle mouse click, so I couldn’t pan the camera…I did see the first part which looked really interesting.
Aw, no :c
I was going to add WASD/right mouse drag as an alternative but it completely slipped my mind...
If you do post Jam I would like to try it out!
It's done, if you still want to give it a try.
Thanks for the camera update! I appreciate it. I did try it out, though ran into issues pretty early on with the flags not causing the kobolds to follow. It might have been user error though. I liked the tutorial space, but I think I might have understood the different resources more if there was a way to introduce one at a time with a kobold. The last part of the tutorial could have served that, but I was already a little lost :(
Impressive amount of work for a solo dev!
Solid concept! The resource exchange works well.
Controls were a little awkward, but interesting! Eventually I couldn't really direct big (~40-60+) groups. But it also started getting laggy in browser at that point, so maybe I overkilled it XD.
Overall, I had fun mobbing everything :)
Under the hood its actually just the boids algorithm with no optimizations at all, so that's entirely to be expected - both squiggly controls and a sharp performance drop off :]
Oh! That’s cool!
I didn’t know it was an actual thing. And you put it in the name too ^_^
Nice work! The “squishy directions” is both irritating and amusing but trended towards amusing over time. It was hard to tell if I didn’t quite get the mechanics or if area “fill up” and that’s why I was left if a bunch of them standing around holding food. Also, despite the zoom, the flags were too same-y and clicking for importance generally laid down another flag. It was pretty satisfying bringing a dozen over and plowing over the knights.
Yup, adding an animation for waiting at a building / an indicator of how many kobolds are needed / a way to get a waiting kobold off a building if necessary were things I didn't find time for. I've added zooming out relatively late too, otherwise I'd probably have made the flags more distinct. Same reason for not fine tuning the flag importance mechanic too - I've cut it a fair bit closer to the deadline than I usually do this time around!
Really neat idea! I'm going to have to come back to this one. I had a hard time figuring out how to get the flags to work right, but I think that was more on me than anything.
I spent a fair bit of time tweaking parameters, but in the end silly little lizards do silly little things :]