On my first round through all the Game Jam games, I only spent a few minutes on this one because I thought that it was half-baked as I didn't understand the mechanics. After spending some more time with it, I can confidently say that this game has enough entertainment for at least a couple weeks. It contains enough elements for emergent gameplay and there are concrete objectives to achieve, with tangible rewards. Since the forum post tutorial is not complete (purposefully or otherwise), I had to look in the code to learn a little bit about how things work, but this may have been intentional to encourage the player to explore on their own. There were also some lag issues and some specific bugs, but overall this game could be as popular as NodeCore with some more polishing and additional mechanics.
Thanks for the thorough investigation! When I posted this I didn't expect people to get past the initial hurdles, so it's been great to see someone do a deep dive into the mechanics. I have some ideas to solve a few of the issues I've seen mentioned, so hopefully a post-jam version can make the game a bit more smooth.
I haven't yet figured out how to turn this into a popular game though, but I'm already well motivated to investigate ideas. :-)
On my first round through all the Game Jam games, I only spent a few minutes on this one because I thought that it was half-baked as I didn't understand the mechanics. After spending some more time with it, I can confidently say that this game has enough entertainment for at least a couple weeks. It contains enough elements for emergent gameplay and there are concrete objectives to achieve, with tangible rewards. Since the forum post tutorial is not complete (purposefully or otherwise), I had to look in the code to learn a little bit about how things work, but this may have been intentional to encourage the player to explore on their own. There were also some lag issues and some specific bugs, but overall this game could be as popular as NodeCore with some more polishing and additional mechanics.
Thanks for the thorough investigation! When I posted this I didn't expect people to get past the initial hurdles, so it's been great to see someone do a deep dive into the mechanics. I have some ideas to solve a few of the issues I've seen mentioned, so hopefully a post-jam version can make the game a bit more smooth.
I haven't yet figured out how to turn this into a popular game though, but I'm already well motivated to investigate ideas. :-)