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A jam submission

The Commanding HeightsView game page

Economic simulation factory game with climate modeling
Submitted by AnimatedRNG — 1 hour, 7 minutes before the deadline
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The Commanding Heights's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Innovation#1663.6003.600
Gameplay#3103.4003.400
Visuals#4233.7333.733
Overall#7243.0893.089
Enjoyment#8093.0003.000
Audio#8202.8672.867
Theme#16841.9331.933

Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does the game fit the theme?
Trade war starts in the mid-game. You cannot trust any city to be a reliable trading partner. They will tariff you. It's just a matter of time.

What code and assets did you not make from scratch during the jam (if any)?
Music: Cozy Casual Game Music by Cheryl Mcc Music
Portraits: ​1BIT Character Portraits - Urban by 5yvalia
Bevy 2D Template

How many people worked on the game?
1

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Comments

Submitted

There's a lot to unpack here. I love the planet, quite a stunning display. I really wanted to get into figuring out how things work, but there was a bit too much.

I think pairing things down a bit and focusing on some core experiences and streamlining those would have helped. There's just a lot of complexity and facets here which make it hard to understand what's going on, and I would perpetually get tripped up with dialogs sticking around or not or clicking on the planet when trying to navigate to the next step, especially as I saw the targets in the tutorial on the planet appearing over whatever window I had opened. Or trying to deselect what I had selected. Having hotkeys is great, but they should be indicated in the UI as well, especially for the buildings.

The whole UX really needs an audit for the level of depth the game provides at the moment, it really reads like I see so many UIs these days with just a lot of extra complexity, dense amounts of information, and layers of information. It was just hard to understand what a city was taking in and what it needed as every resource had a listing even if it wasn't relevant. Outside that in just the world view a clear toggle switch for resource view would have been good, as well as making selection its own toggle mode aside all the buildings to make it easier to get back to a 'safe' way to select cities and other buildings.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the detailed review. Some thoughts --

I would perpetually get tripped up with dialogs sticking around or not or clicking on the planet when trying to navigate to the next step, especially as I saw the targets in the tutorial on the planet appearing over whatever window I had opened.

Yes, I think there's still some stickiness here, especially with the tutorial overlay. The tutorial arrows don't render on the right layer, that's a bug that we need to fix post-jam.

Having hotkeys is great, but they should be indicated in the UI as well, especially for the buildings.

Yeah this was an accident, meant to add a tooltip before the jam ended but I forgot. The blueprint UI gets this one right

It was just hard to understand what a city was taking in and what it needed as every resource had a listing even if it wasn't relevant

It's a little tricky, given that cities need a lot of goods right off the bat. But demand for higher tier goods is not there at the start of the game, so maybe we can move that to the end of the list? I didn't really know the best way to organize it because I preferred to organize everything by category (rather than tier). One idea is to add sub tabs but I think that's very confusing UI as it adds unnecessary nesting. Another idea is to add a search bar for goods on the city goods panel, to filter the list. That's implemented for the blueprint UI and I can add it here pretty easily.

Outside that in just the world view a clear toggle switch for resource view would have been good

There's a button on the top middle of the screen to toggle resource view, but maybe we can make it bigger. I think it highlights during the tutorial to teach the user where it is but if we make it bigger then it's harder to miss. In retrospect, using the function keys for the overlays was a bad idea.

making selection its own toggle mode aside all the buildings to make it easier to get back to a 'safe' way to select cities and other buildings.

If you have a building selected, I think q should work in the overworld to deselect, but I'm realizing I never showed that to the player. I think I should make it so that ESC will deselect before it opens the pause menu. You can also click on the building type on the dash to deselect, but imo I just added that behavior because it's consistent with other common game UI even though it's not very ergonomic. I think more visual cues that something is selected could help here. In Factorio, right click will deselect, but we use that for moving the camera.

many UIs these days with just a lot of extra complexity, dense amounts of information, and layers of information

It's tricky, on one hand, this is a complicated game and I don't want to hide important information like "where is my factory sourcing its raw goods and materials from". On the other hand, that's a lot to understand all at once and I agree that the tutorial is insufficient. It's a lot of cognitive overhead right off the bat which is not great. I'm open to suggestions on how to refactor the factory UI in particular, I think there's an opportunity there to make the game more beginner-friendly. 


Overall, thanks for the feedback, it's very much appreciated.

Submitted

Very impressive! 

Submitted

Incredible, SO in depth for a week. Great work!

Submitted

hey!! congratulations on submitting your game to the jam!

I love when people use Bevy, it's a great modular engine and to see this project stand with procedural generation and market dynamics is a great achievement! Phenomenal work!

I noticed a small issue with the road UI, as the buttons don't conform correctly to the canvas space.



Other than that, I also wished you would've incorporated more of the theme into your game. Trade wars between cities is an innovative twist on the theme, but I think you could've taken it much further, introducing natural disasters so as to not trust even the Earth, or other failures of infrastructure!

Great work however, and I hope to see more! Perhaps you'd be interested in playing our game aswell? 

Developer

Hi Pedro, thanks for the feedback! And yeah I messed up the button and didn't have time to fix it during the jam.

R.e. the theme, yeah there was more we wanted to do with it but didn't really have time. Happy to play your game when I have time

Submitted

It is incredible that you managed this much in seven days! 

Submitted(+1)

Unbelievably in-depth! Very impressive. Don't even think I scratched the surface of all of the mechanics. Loved just messing with the settings and spinning the globe around.

Submitted(+1)

Very great and complex game for a 7 day jam! The visuals are striking, bit confusing but I managed, congrats!

Submitted

I keep trying to play the web version but it stops almost immediately as the title plays. is there a recommended browser? i would love to give this a try so i can rate it!

Developer

Hey sorry on Windows on the Web build there's a bug that makes it crash immediately. I'll have the fix out soon, but you can also play the Windows binary if you want to try it out in the interim

Developer

Fixed now (confirmed working on Chrome / Firefox / Edge)! Give it a shot :)