S. G. A. R. E.

I'm afraid I wasn't able to trigger the ending of the game! I played it twice and on the second time I even let it sit for a good twenty minutes, just gathering money and military power, but nothing seemed to happen unfortunately. But I enjoyed it regardless, even if it didn't really present a challenge as far as I understood it. It was fun clicking around and finding out about the rules and restrictions. I love the visual of the small world floating around in a void. A shame that the ending bugged out or something, as you've discovered as well, but hey, that happens :D Great job anyway!

Doesn't seem like your first game, because this is actually too well made for a first game lol. The graphics fit nicely and it was fun trying to figure out what each stuff does. And it's a tile-based strategy game, that's pretty hard to make, especially in a 48-hour jam.
Also right now I think I'm pretty much done with the game but it doesn't seem to have an ending like you said :(

It's impressive to attempt a strategy game for a 48 hour game jam, but I definitely think you overscoped - there were a lot of ideas at play that were a little underdeveloped overall, which means I think this would be a great game for you to keep working on, with a lot of potential to be amazing, but fairly unintuitive and incomplete as a gm48 entry.

Stuff I'd consider:

• For dialogue boxes (the intro/tutorial basically), make it so you can click once to "complete" a text box before you skip to the next line of dialogue. Having to wait for each one to fill itself in meant I had to keep waiting for it to finish, and made taking in that information harder. I ended up just reopening the description and relying on that.
• Cut down any features that are unnecessary until they are necessary. For example, in this iteration of the game, you can pan the inventory left and right even though as far as I can tell you never fill it up horizontally. (This is best to keep in mind for future jams, although it's good to know how to do it so you can implement it later down the line.)
• Generally, for jam entries, keep it as intuitive as possible. Even with explainers, the fact that buildings could only be placed on certain tiles requires a fair amount of thought - I needed to learn 1) how to make money to afford buildings, then 2) how to place buildings, then 3) why I should place buildings where for a strategic advantage, and 4) where each building can go. This is the level of learning that most game players would put into a game they are specifically investing time into, but when we're going through 10+ entries, it's a lot to take in.

Good points - your style is really good, and the graphics all fit together well. The font/text was decently readable for how low resolution it was. And you did good to keep everything to the mouse - that helped keep things a little grounded at least 😄

This isn't bad, and it isn't wasted effort at all. Keep working on it, if you can, or at least store what you've learnt and apply it to future games. And kudos on the ambition - strategy is a hell of a genre to undertake for a month-long contest let along a two-day jam, and even though I don't think this is currently as fully formed as it needs to be, I still thoroughly respect the effort!

This is a pretty cool game! The AI was quite good :)

Interesting game, seems like it incorporates an impressive amount of things for 48 hours. The tutorial is a bit long-winded but the game itself looks and plays nice. However, it appears there's no win condition and also I wonder if the lose condition doesn't work either; at one point the AI was very far ahead of me militarily and that didn't cause me to lose. If it showed what the strength of the enemy was, and what the losing threshold was, that would be helpful.

A nice foundation, I'm reminded of a pixel art style forge of empires meets early sim city - I think it was a very slow start and could use some sound and a bit faster pacing to set the scene better with this but you have solid foundations to expand on here so if you do continue this after the jam there are so many avenues you can explore with this :)

The art for this game is beautiful, great work on making everything work together so well artistically.

The drag and dropped worked great once I got a hang on how to get it to work. Great job on the opening dialogue and instructions written in the description, it helped a ton.

Overall this is really well made for a 48 hour game and I'd love to see where you take it from here

The Game is pretty fun. Seeing your City grow is great and all but I reached the point where it seems do be impossible to do anything. You just watch numbers to go up. Apparantly the ending implies that its not good to rely on nuclear ressources to live in peace. A topic that is even relevant right now. Thats neat. The Game does not actually need much improvement except for the mentioned ending that seems to work not consistently. I dont know if that is on purpose or a bug, but there is no music or noise? (my volume was at max)

An incredibly ambitious first game, especially for a 48 hour jam game. I applaud the attempt at a 4X, they are some of my favorite games and a type of genere that rarely if at all gets explored in a Jam setting. One of my first games I ever attempted to make was a 4X Game space game so I understand the technical struggles you must have gone through to make this.

Even though I had read the instructions, I still had tried to click the bottom options like buttons rather than dragable items. The lack of feedback made it difficult for me to know if what I was doing was working or not. The color choice for the players was also not good, as I confused the AI for myself because I associated blue with good, so it took me a while to realize I was playing on the wrong side of the board.

The text was down right impossible for me to read, and I had to rely on brute force in order to learn the game mechanics. When I did learn it, I found a suprisingly in depth strategy game that reminded me a little bit of an older 4X game known as Enemy Nations, it too had tile-based building placement restricted by resources present that built slowly over time by workers present.

I would encourage you to challenge yourself to learn free audio tools for sound effects and music to add some audio feedback for your game. I use Bfxr to generate 8-bit sounds for some of my projects, and I would encourage you to find a DAW that works best for your work flow... if you are looking to make retro-sounding music I would encourage you to learn how to use a tracker. You can find recommendations at the end of the video I linked.

Congrats on your first game jam! My first jam entry was not too long ago (was for Ludum Dare 50) and was incredibly difficult for me. You'll find, as I did, that each subsequent attempt at any jam gets easier as you do it.

This game has a lot of potential.

Things I liked:

The angle you've set the game on looks really cool, and the tiling system is nice.

It's very simplistic and with slightly more guidance, could be really easy to understand.

Your first game is much better than my first game lol.

Things I didn't like:

It wouldn't always let me place structures (even with enough money).

It felt like it was going to take ages to get to the end, and due to not being able to place enough structures I felt like I was unable to speed up the process.

The text boxes were cool, but a lot of it was slightly mis-aligned or had had the resolution reduced perhaps during rendering? So a lot of it was hard to read.

The left mouse to scroll didn't always work, and it kept assuming I was trying to click on a button.