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A jam submission

CharcoalView game page

Build a civilization to stand the end of time
Submitted by jam_bone, preatomicprince — 2 hours, 56 minutes before the deadline
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Charcoal's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#113.1303.500
Fun#112.9073.250
Sound/Audio#182.4602.750
User Interface (UI/UX)#202.2362.500
Visuals(Graphics)#212.6833.000

Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

DevLog Link
https://jam-bone.itch.io/charcoal/devlog/1653260/who-knows

Developer Feedback Questions
Thoughts on UI?
What was least clear about the game?
Any suggestions for town names for the game?

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Comments

Submitted

I'm playing on Linux. I started from the terminal. As soon as I started the tutorial I got a bunch of errors about being unable to create Tiles. Followed by what look like debug messages, and a Node not found. Then "im getting a bug here in unit, under set strength Player".

I like the outline of where you can move to. I also like that you now have the menu when pressing Esc.

I went through the tutorial, and it looks to be similar to before, so I'm not going to repeat my comments on it.

Starting a new game, I chose The Commune. Extra orders sounds like a good buff. Many of these could use with a bit more description as to what they do, but there were several that sounded interesting. I left the other settings on their lowest values.

I moved twice, then went to press Turn, and it did not react to the mouse hover, nor click. I could interact with everything except Turn and Note. I started trying things, and eventually interacting with the mini-map seemed to fix the issue. I had clicked the plus to zoom in, and clicked on the map moving around a bit, then when I moused over Turn, it reacted.

Knowing a bit of how to play, I built a town sooner than when I played before. When gathering survivors they now went to the nearest town, rather than forming new teams, and I had to use orders to form new teams. I can see reasons for both ways, but at that point it would have been more convenient to have more units. I wanted to start a town to get to research, but also want to build teams to explore, so I'll need to think on strategy in the future for how many teams before a town, or when to build a new team from a town.

Some research completed, so I queued up more. I then tried to click on one of my units to move it first. I had a tooltip showing for something, and it did not change as I moved my mouse. I clicked and nothing happened. I moved the mouse around and clicked on things, and nothing happened. I tried pressing escape, but nothing happened. I then moved to the top, near the center, and clicked, and ended up back at the menu. I don't know if it was the clicking, was things catching up to previous clicks/presses, such as Esc, or clicking that spot, which finally caused the reaction. The terminal did not show any new errors.

This was a small update, but it is improving. The UI is better, though still needs refining. More details replacing the placeholder text would be good. Tooltips and instructions are helpful, but in many places you have a lot of space that can be better used to convey information.

I look forward to seeing how the game grows.

Submitted (1 edit)

Thoughts on UI?     I like the pop-up UI that shows the tile your on but, it can get in the way of the map later on when you have discovered more of the map and need to move around more. I forgot I could just use the arrow keys to move the camera.


What was least clear about the game?    I needed to press turn to end my turn and the button wouldn't press. I found out hitting return ended my turn. Every time I play this I'm on it for a few hours not sure why I got from test to how far can I get before I have something come up.


Any suggestions for town names for the game?   I would say any generic name would be fine or the ability to edit the town name.

Submitted(+1)

Thoughts on UI?
Add more labels rather then relying on hover-over for everything.  The keyboard style was sick!
What was least clear about the game?
Have a much better history/event log that shows what's going on. I was able to equip my units and attack pretty well. 
Any suggestions for town names for the game?
Try to base them on the factions? For the democrats name the downs after major US Cities. Have cannibals name their towns after their favorite body parts? :)


Really good work! 
This is certainly a post apocalyptic 4x game and does not disappoint on that. 
The factions are all really neat, got a good laugh out of the flavor text. I did run into an issue with the audio lowering when ever a sound effect played, its a little jarring. Also try to push a web build, a lot of people are afraid to download stuff like this. My favorite game this jam so far. 
Developer

Thanks for telling me about the audio stuff and the labels. The naming cities after body parts is a really good idea that i'll defiantly use. Yeah I get the web build issue. It's something I always recommend people do as well, but the last update made the game to big and unruly for a web build. Thank you for playing and the feedback.