Such a nice RTS! This time the evil is fairy and you command the goblin. Bring me memories when you can play as the horde in warcraft for the first time. This game is so special because of the arts and those are animated too! Hope in the future polish, you can fix the unit clicking. When i click one unit and then click another, the previous unit will move to that new unit. Nice submission, man and nice job!
Play game
Soilbound's itch.io pageTeam members and roles
Orkfaeller
DeagleDryan
How did you interpret the themes?
Combining RTS with Farming. In Soilbound you have to seed your units and after watering and harvesting send them to battle.
What are you entering?
Game only
Engine and tools used?
Dev&Programming: Unity 6, VS2022, Bezi
Art: Photoshop
Audio: Audacity
Music: Royalityfree Music by Kevin Macleod
Road to GDC
Yes
Consider my game for the Road to GDC prize
Bezi Challenge
Yes
We used Bezi and want to enter the Bezi Challenge
Synty Challenge
N/A
I am not entering this prize track
Which Synty assets did you use?
N/A
CrazyGames Challenge
Yes
Enter my game in the CrazyGames Challenge
Fan Art Artist
N/A
Fan Art Process Video
N/A
Where can we find your Fan Art?
N/A
Submission Confirmation
I have read the Bezi Mega Jam rules
This submission was created during the jam period
All team members and contributors are listed
Third-party assets are credited where applicable
Comments
13 days ago(+1)
Great job! I think a lot of people struggled with it because the enemy spawners all sent their units at the same time, which was an oversight on my part.
11 days ago(+1)
Thanks a lot for putting the time and effort in,
by all accounts it didn't turn out to be something that's easy to pick up,
much appreciated <3
Thanks a lot for playing and commenting! It means a lot to us!
This isn't the first game we've made where we flipped the script and swapped the "good" and "evil" sides. Seeing everything from another perspective instantly makes things so much more interesting.
The bug is fixed, but the patch isn't live yet—it was an issue with A-moving units to attack-move them.
Once again, thanks for playing our game!
Thanks a lot for playing our little entry and giving us feedback!
Even after a couple of games, making tutorials is still pretty hard. You know the game so well and every detail makes sense. In the end, it's so hard to imagine what isn't common knowledge in your game and what you actually need to explain!
Thanks again for the kind words!
14 days ago(+1)
Glad you liked the art.
The little guide in the lower right corner should talk you through every step of the tutorial, but feedback universally has been that's its not enough. We aim to redo the tutorial, and adress some control issues, once the jam is over and we're allowed to push updates again.
16 days ago(+1)
The map seemed to cover part of the menu too
May I ask you that you upload a screenshot here in the comments? Its not a bug any of us have encountered during development and I'd love to figure out what might have caused that. You'd be doing me a BIG favour. Also, what ratio of monitor do you have if I may ask? 16:9, 16:10, 4:3 etc?
16 days ago(+1)
Thank you tons. We only tested this on 16:9, I assume this causes the problem then.
Appreciate the support <3
16 days ago(+1)
I was trying all sorts of things in Chapter 1, but I had no idea what the goal was.
Well, first things first, you're ment to take your starting unit - the snail - and capture the Grub nest just to your right. Grubs are turned into your primary resource at your base allowing you to build an army.
It's all layed out by the tutorial Goblin in the bottom right, but maybe he was bugged out or obscured due to the same issue that messed up the rest of your interface ?
17 days ago (+2)
I very much appreciate the lengthy comment!
Hope you wont't mind a lengthy response - I'd love get more feedback, if you got a couple more minutes to spare
visual cohesion [...] elements of the environment i am confusing with actual units, as the treatment is almost identical [...] a random flower in the scenery had more detail and more of a unique design, than one of the basic controllable units.
I'd love to hear more specifics, if you would, so that I can take a closer look myself.
Any perticular assets you have in mind?
All units have like a bobbing animation when idle to help them not blend into the background (wish I could upload a gif).
Beyond that, if it is accented blue, it's one of yours, if it's red - it's the enemy.
A lot of enviromental assets propably do have a higher density of detail, especially in the textures, than many of the lower tier units.
That's largely an admission to my limitations as an "animator". An enviromental asset only requires a singular sprite, a unit requires at the bare minimum four. So every bit of extra detail quadruples(+) the work load. So fancier details have to be reserved for stuff that doesn't move.
_______________________
The tutorial focusses on things like camera control and basic things that are intuitive to RTS players, but there was no real description of a goal, or what or how to build units, or even any indication that the tutorial had ended?
I'm certainly not entirely happy with the state of the tutorial. It was something implemented very late and I think its inadequate; but I'm not sure I can agree with you on all these points.
I apologize for the wall of images.
The tutorial then ends with the notification that the tutorial has been completed.
The tutorial isn't nearly as elegant, or hand holdy as I wished, and some of the hints are too easy to miss. But it's all in there. I'll gladly walk you through things though, should you feel like giving this another chance.
_______________________
I then tried level 2, where I could actually play the game, but i was just lost,
The goal in chapter two is to destroy the four enemy bases revealed on the map.
It did not help that in fullscreen, half of the UI is hidden behind the map, making it next to impossible to build certain units
Please, PLEASE, PLEASE send us a screenshot of that. Sounds like a major bug that should obviously not be happening. We encountered nothing like what you're describing on our own end during development. What format monitor do you have?
I dont mean to be harsh or have this come off as negative review. just my honest opinions
No, please, more of it. We're allways desperate for actual critisim. <3
Okay great, let me read this and play it more, and I can give you more extensive feedback. I appreciate the level that you are going to invite this level of discussion, but I want to give it some time so I can give you more descriptive details. Maybe we can continue the conversation on discord DMs? This comment section probably isn’t great for it
16 days ago(+1)
I'm Orkfaeller#0883 over at discord.
Feel free to shoot me a message where/whenever, if you're feeling like it.
16 days ago(+1)
Thanks for your in-depth comment on the game! It means a lot that you took so much time to give us feedback on our submission!
- Regarding the art: Orkfaeller already gave you a explanation. As the artist, he's much more qualified than me to answer that!
- Regarding the tutorial: We can all agree that we didn't do a great job here. Our initial reasoning behind this approach was to incorporate a funny character (the goblin as a lickspittle) to help players understand the game. After implementing it, we saw the flaws in this approach. We even placed a sign in the game to help visualize the most critical part as a last second implementation. Redesigning the tutorial any further wasn't possible because it was already late at night with no time left for changes, sadly. In the future, we'll go with more straightforward tutorials with an unskippable window if one is necessary.
- Regarding the mission objective: To be honest, this wasn't on my radar at all, but I agree. A small text box with the objective as a reminder would be easy to implement and is industry standard. It definitely should have been in there.
- Regarding the fullscreen problem: I'd also love a few more details on this because this bug never occurred during testing.
- Regarding the RTS farming: I can totally see where you're coming from. I have the exact same feeling about it. In theory, it sounded really original. However, during the design and programming process, I quickly realized that it felt like Zerg gameplay in StarCraft II. Even though some small tweaks made it a bit better, I never lost the feeling that the idea needed a bit more time in the oven. We're currently discussing internally what changes we could make to further embrace the farming aspect while keeping the RTS core.
Thanks again for your feedback. I can't express how much these kinds of discussions help us refine our skills.
I'm always down for further discussion, and as soon as I have time, I'll gladly take a look at your game to leave some feedback as well—it's the least I can do!
Cheers!
18 days ago (+1)
Agreed on all points.
Having the tutorial at all was kinda a final hours implementation and I would have pushed for more clarity had the time been there. I think ideally you'd be able to flip back and forth between all tutorial messages at will. I know they are easy to skip in their current state.
Thanks for playing <3
Thanks for playing and leaving feedback! I agree, in hindsight it would have been better to focus a bit more on the tutorial. As the dev, it all makes total sense to me, but seeing how many layers we have, I can completely see why people need more guidance in the beginning.
Thanks again for the comment!
18 days ago(+2)
Thanks lots!
When a jam is over I really enjoy unwinding by just piling game assets into the page and see what I can make from it without much of a plan.
I'm quite happy how it turned out this time.
18 days ago(+2)
Thanks for both playing and replying.
I don't think you're the only one with issues though,
I've seen a whole number of games have comments disappear, and submission pages purged.
Might be on itch' end.
17 days ago(+1)
Thanks for playing and leaving a comment. We learned a lot, that onboarding the player should be more priority the next gamejam!
18 days ago(+1)
Thanks, much appreciated! I had a lot of fun illustrating for this.
It was quite a learning experience but I'm quite happy with how things turned out.
18 days ago(+1)
Propably not much of an conscious choice; my programmer wanted to do an RTS, and I only know how to doodle cartoons. We're both amateurs of limited range, but we make it work (mostly).
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