[SA Game Jam 2018] A Pirates Fill

edited in Online Competitions & Jams
Project name : A Pirates Fill
Level of experience : Professional
edit : 72hr entry

72hr submission builds on itch.io
PC and untested Mac builds

It's a resource management game about a balancing act of the crews stats, your ships tasks, and the events that can take place at sea, port and on Islands. (heh balance, that's out of scope)

Something happens on the screen when you click a couple things, and there no red squiggles appearing in the console, which I take to be a good sign.
image
The bad sign is that the game isn't cohesive yet and the only stat that really does anything is the ships speed.
Working on getting the rest of the ship tasks to be mildly meaningful.. Onward!

Comments

  • Love a good resource manager, looking forward to giving it a try!
  • Looking promising! Can't wait to give it a try :]
  • edited
    Uploaded submission version, bugs 'n all. see op.
    image

    I'm going to see if I can get time off work tomorrow to turn it into a 72hr entry, to uh... fix some stuff.
  • Such juicy UI feedback. Would love to try it
  • Juicy indeed! Waiting to play this!
  • I loved the UI and the concept, just struggled to really understand exactly what I was supposed to be doing. Maybe with some sort of tutorial or instructions on start up this game could really be something fantastic.
  • Loving this framework! Hope you get time to flesh it out for 72hr!

    I think some adjustments may need to be made to the rate at which some actions happen, not necessarily in terms of balance but more for the player not to be overwhelmed with options (the "escalating possibilities" theme can also help out by restraining early action types). Though I suppose UI iteration would help some there too. ;) Would be very cool to see where this goes.
  • edited
    I've updated the op with a new 72 hr submission build, and a mac build :P
    image

    I dropped working the combat events which would have brought some meaning to training that stat, in favor of making a light hand holding in the beginning, it's crude but pirates sway that way.

    I'm completely pooped, I totally over-scoped this one but I had lot of fun, specially trying to put together a tutorial thing, not done that before so has been really cool learning how to try orchestrate something.
    Some things I'd want to do if I take this any further:
    1. Finish the combat events, I have them firing at the right times, but with nothing happening, but would also want the combat to be a little more interesting than, click button.
    2. Balance the numbers, they really need to be a little more sane, visit the right island and you don't need to hunt again.
    3. Make the crew meaningful, I want the 'Walk the plank' task to be used because you find someone worthy of being on your ship.
    4 Clean the graphics
    5. Animate crew actions
    Thanked by 1Kelm
  • Wow this is a big game! Loved the tutorial great hand animations. Neat looking UI. And mean yet err cute looking pirates haha. well done.
  • UI - Sick!
    Sound Design - Banger!

    I really like the simplicity of the management of your crew. One annoying thing was the flashing pulsing of the UI that happens. Quite jarring for the system.
  • edited
    Hey a little pirrrate simulatorrr, that's somethin' ta whet yerrr whistle aboutarrr :)

    The UI interface elements are awesome and slick, I like the chunkiness of it all, and the wobble is great. However playing through it reveals that the actual UI placement and such needs more attention to assisting the player's workflow - Some of the information throughout the interfaces aren't really available when and where I'd like them to be - for example I can't see how many supplies we have right on the very big button where I send people to eat, so I need to go to the ship page to check how much. Are they hungry? Go to character. Okay wanna send some people to eat, click, control click, click. It feels like the information relevant to the UI that initiate the action should be there too.

    Oh geez I just realised now that the character info are per little guy rather than an overall "hunger level" for everyone. I feel like there's a better way to do the UI so that you don't need to hit two buttons on opposite sides of the screen to access the member's stats.

    (I don't understand how there's individual hunger but when you sell supplies there's a hunger change?)

    The activities should stop when it's no longer beneficial, like rowing in place, or eating when they're full. Both of these seem to consume resources even if they're maxed out, so that felt wrong. I also couldn't find a way to just quickly clear an activity so doing it manually was a chore.

    All the interaction when you arrive somewhere are would benefit from some information about your ship/crew. I wanna know how much money I have when I'm being asked to spend them. And to buy supplies I wanna know how much I have, etc. (relatedly, buying supplies when full mean you waste the money?) Also the impact of an action before you click on them. Also the time seems to progress sliiiiightly when in the menu, which feels wrong since I can't control the crew from there and again leads to waste.

    The idea of the game is great but micromanagement of each crew feels a bit like busywork. Maybe if the UI is more straightforward and I can see stats with fewer clicks and do assignments with fewer clicks it might feel better. Multi-select with a drag and select would be intuitive, for example.

    If I want to enter the port I'm already at but closed the menu on, I have to go to map, set another destination and then set back to the one I'm at. That probably should change. Also it seems like you don't intend for any destination to be used more than once, so you'll have to rebalance that.

    There's a bug where if I send all the people to fish the row meter animates like it was emptying over and over again for a while?

    I have no idea how to get over 100D, I need more than 100D to upgrade the ship, but I can't collect more than 100D?

    There are some nice touches I really appreciate, like the ship gaining speed slowly, or the variance on the "thing done squeaky sound". And them soothing waves are GREAT. It's a super polished experience :)
    Thanked by 1Pomb
  • @CurtisBetz unfortunately the tutorial isn't super in depth, but I did manage to get some sense of unfolding progression in terms of going from row boat to bigger boat with more tasks, which I'm really proud of, the 72hr entry has a small hand holdy section in the beginning that should get you going in the right direction. + some tool tips.

    @Orimaso Thanks, even though it's not the game I wanted to make, I'm proud of the 'thing' not very much game there, but had great time learning, specially learning more about using unity's timeline and playable assets for the tutorial section, and UI elements.

    @SUGBOERIE Thanks for playing. I know what you mean! I actually got some feedback early Sunday about it... should have made it more of a priority to change it.. and it's one of those that's really such a quick easy thing to fix.. uh!

    @Tusim Woah! Thanks for playing and taking the time in giving such comprehensive feedback!
    Absolutely agree on the chunkiness of the layout, it's not friendly to understanding your current goals at all. Ultimately I'd want all relevant information as close to the initialized mouse click as possible, to reduce travel distance for any tree of information the player goes down. Click ctrl click! I mentioned this to @Rigormortis on Sunday about wanting to do box select for quicker action selection... one of those things that just didn't happen. Relevant info on the tasks, agree. Needs the requirement if any and the effected stats right there.

    Hunger change on supply selling, eh, that sucks, that's er... not supposed to happen :P

    It does suffer from 'chore'iness, the original idea was to be way closer to something like domina, in that the training that you doing, everything is useful to the fight, where as with pirates fill, it's just necessary work they have to do. I do think that with some other systems there's something interesting in trying to balance the needs of the crew with the players goals.

    Yeah you shouldn't be able to re-visit an island and hunt again after just visiting there, needs a cool down on hunting.
    balance :D hehe :D

    So that's not a bug with the rowing, you ship loses/gains speed at a particular rate, if you stop rowing you still drift a while before not moving, when the sails are up you still sail on while the ships sails are being closed up, so the bar going down is the boat/ship losing velocity. I really wanted to add in some sea drift where the boat gradually moves in a direction, with another task (compass) for course correction. Have some ideas for wind effects on the course.

    > 100D should be quite easy if you visit islands, there 3 different hunting reward sizes: 1. Scavenge 2.Hunt for booty 3.Hunt for Treasure, each have different ranges for the doubloons received for success and each with more effective/severe reward stats/fail stats. you can quite easily get more than 100D if you visit Deadmans Isle, Pelican Isle or Isle of Barknora.
    (hold down the dev testing key alpha 9 to speed up the ship) I totally screwed up, the Galleons max speed is accidentally set at 1000, so you can go really fast if you just leave your crew to work the sails on that thing!
    Honestly this thing seems like it needs a spreadsheet to figure out how all the numbers should be balanced.
  • Uh, I dunno, my money was always capped at 100D, doesn't matter how many times I loot or get money other way, it's always maxxed at 100...
  • @Tusim, oh uh you need to buy a bigger ship, the starting row boat can only hold 100D because it's a small boat. The bigger the boat the more doubloons / supplies / crew you can have aboard. Bigger ships come with more tasks, which require more crew. It was my attempt at including the theme of escalating possibilities. On the row boat there's no training for combat, but once you've made a little booty, you can get ships that allow for training that increase your chance of success when boarding other ships for plunder/combat.
    Personally don't really like choices that are just better, linear progression and linear curves tend to gross me out so If I work this idea further it's something I'd want to refactor into having each ship be a valid play style. -Scope Dragon was here.
  • edited
    Hmm, I thought buying a new shop was 180D, the galley? That's why I thought I couldn't buy a new ship because I thought my money was somehow capped at below what a new ship needed. Maybe I missed something.
  • @Pomb Wow, just wow! The art is so simple and adorable even the sounds! Still, need to play the game a bit more to get money but the mechanics, game art, sounds are all fantastic, thank you for an amazing game! (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ*:・゚✧*:・゚✧
  • I loved the UI and the concept, just struggled to really understand exactly what I was supposed to be doing. Maybe with some sort of tutorial or instructions on start up this game could really be something fantastic.

    This was fun to play, the concept and UI was well thought out and the art was amazing, and very adorable. The sounds are very well edited as well.
  • It's obviously a jam game with a lot of unfinished bits in it, but even then I think it's pretty obvious how compelling this can be, particularly with seeing various numbers go up, buying a new ship, and training up crew members, and just generally feeling more powerful.

    It wasn't very clear to me what some of the tasks would do (e.g. scrubbing the deck vs walking the plank) and why I'd need to do them, and for some reason my pirates couldn't seem to catch any fish ever. Even though the pirates' names were on the character screen, I somehow missed that, and misunderstood what the character screen represented for a while. I think important stats (arguably Doubloons and Supplies) should always be visible somewhere.

    I spent a good little while getting to the point where my decked out Galleon was whizzing between islands, with enough pirates that I couldn't select my newest recruits any more because they were stacking off of the screen. :P I liked how new ships brought new tasks, with the first ship having very little management required (and an easier time of it) while later ships come with more management but much more potential resource-generation options.

    I don't know if you intend to continue working on this, but I'd look forward to being more engrossed in pirate-fantasy actions that feel meaningful. Congrats!
    Thanked by 2Pomb EvanGreenwood
  • @Tuism sounds like you trying to buy ships outside your price range, sloops are more affordable as the next ship up from the row boat. I was thinking that the crew should yell out hints that can nudge players in the 'right' direction.

    @lightprincess98 I can totally see how you'd get confused by what to do. The game as it stands doesn't have a great set 'goal', the best it has is maybe a player driven goal of trying to get a ship they can't currently afford.
    I tried to hint at this in the tutorial to get a ship with sails, but really maybe there should be explicit goals to hit. There's really so many directions this thing could go, all of which scare me. Thanks for playing.

    @Elyaradine It's really the thing I'm most happy about achieving this jam, I really thought I wasn't going to make it with some bugs that cropped up 2hrs before submission. I started to panic - arriving at locations didn't show any actions in the build but they worked fine in editor - got those fixed which allowed for the ship/crew/task progression, ah the relief and happiness.

    You right in some the tasks aren't 'meaningful'. Walking the plank for instance was supposed to be useful when the individual crew members were more meaningful individuals, So it was a way of getting rid of crew members that were currently 'bad' for the ship. Initially taking some inspiration from rim world here, in that crew members were supposed to be better at certain tasks, but the current stat make up was a bit too shallow to allow for that.

    I've been trying to map out some of the boundaries of the venn diagram (games I can make vs games I want to make).
    I have learn't some cool things from Pirates Fill but I don't know that it's a game I want to continue working on.
    I love the pirate theme and will probably make other pirate themed games in the future, but the size of the current vision fr this scares me. Rami once said that Flambeer take the number of days to work a prototype and multiply it into years to get an estimate of the development time, if that's true : this thing isn't a fully playable experience after 3 days of effort, I think it would be wise to either drastically change scope, or try again on a different idea.

    Thanks for playing guys.
  • Played this finally! It's really impressive! Managing the various tasks the pirates do is a clever way to simulate a pirate ship.

    I never needed anyone to walk the plank. Though that seems an interesting possibility.

    I don't know if I was missing something, but after about 6 crew the crew bled off the side of the screen?

    I felt like the game would be improved a lot by having confirmation of purchases, like clicking on "Buy Supplies" brings up a screen that says "Buy 20 supplies with 10D" and a "Buy" button. Same with ships and crew etc. That way I can weigh up the costs before purchasing. This was something I especially wanted after I realized a frigate was smaller than a galleon (though I would have known that if there'd been a stats screen before the purchase).

    Maybe for the smaller more obvious purchases it could be a single button. Like a button that says "Buy 10 supplies for 20D" which then doesn't need an additional "buy" button. But for the bigger choices, like buying ships, a description text before the purchase would have helped me understand what was going to happen when I bought it.

    Also having a little "Busy Fishing/Rowing/etc" beneath a character to indicate what the character was doing would mean I wouldn't have to remember each character's task when shuffling characters around (in particular I didn't want to accidentally lose the rowing/sailing speed when shuffling around tasks to feed or alcohol crewmates).

    I liked the idea of a "luck" stat, it seemed like it would deplete at low morale or high hunger? It feels very piraty to have to manage luck (and I presume for it to affect things like ability to catch fish).

    Never got to use the combat of my highly trained crew, but I can imagine that's where the game is still heading!
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