It's great, and I kept having this notion that 'well, maybe I can survive this anyway', but at some point fire spreads too quickly and I had this sense of inevitable doom. Good job, I was stressed as I should be!
I love the design, but the fact that cards are only partially visible made me constantly feel that my screen is too small. Pixel art is great, animations too, music is *chef's kiss*.
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! Just making sure, because I didn't properly tutorialize this - you can click fires to extinguish them (if you didn't know already 😅)
The feedback for the cards if fair! I'll see about leaving them open at all times. Or maybe make it so that all cards are revealed when hovering over a card!
From my playthroughs, it seems like Resources Gathered is the most important stat; hence, it's important to exclusively focus on choosing buildings that produce lots of resources. Also mines have the best resource per turn vs faith cost, so you should never buy anything else with faith. By doing this I was able to consistently get over 5000 points.
For a WIP post-jam update, I changed a how the score is calculated, so placing buildings, or rare buildings, as well as extinguishing fires, will grant more points.
Since this was a jam game, I didn't have the time to properly tutorialize the game. You begin the game with 0 resources, and you have to let them accumulate just a bit before you are able to place your first card. You might have gotten a bad starting hand, too. It happens 😅
You can always open the menu and click restart. You'll get a different set of cards and a random map.
Are you on the latest version? Do you by any chance have hardware acceleration turned off?
And, just to make sure: when you click a card, it slides down a bit, and you enter build mode. Clicking a card won't make it disappear until you place the tile.
I tried clicking the card and then a tile, then double clicking the card, and then any other variations I could think of, lol. I even tried from smartphone and other browsers, so I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. Maybe I should try downloading it.
Thanks for playing! You can click fires to extinguish them. I definitely needed to prioritize making a tutorial for that, but you know.. Jam and all 😅😅
I enjoyed the gameplay and the cute pixel art. One suggestion, if you'd like to extend the game, would be to allow players to postpone the inevitable eruption, but make it increasingly difficult the longer they delay it. My score is 4127.
Being able to delay the final calamity eruption event was one of the first core mechanics I wanted to implement for the game, but later I decided that for a jam game it might not be necessary. I believe I'll implement this in the future though.
Heh, it was my first time playing too. Git gud. :D
About feedback - I don't know how complex you want the gameplay to be, but having buildings have bonuses based on adjacent tiles would be a nice touch - for example having houses next to each other could boost their rate by 10% of something along those lines.
Also I don't really get the "terrain" tiles like meadows - why would you want to use them, unless you run out of space? They are way too expensive and don't really give you anything. I was expecting to be able to build the world out by placing them on the black space, but nope.
Towards the end game I had more resources than I knew what to do with - maybe upgrading buildings with excess resources to better their gather rates could be a thing?
And a small nitpick - those clouds get in the way sometimes - my quarry burned down cuz I didn't see it was on fire, while under the cloud :D
P.S. How did you embed a Godot game in the web page? I thought there was some incompatiblity with firefox and it always needed to open in a new window, but yours seems to be working fine on my FF?
Proximity bonuses - definitely plan on adding those!
Meadows/Forests - I wanted to make sure the player could always rebuild forests and meadows if they burn down. I also needed some lower tier cards so discarding won't be painful. Furthermore, I thought about being able to expand the map with those tiles, and to maybe use them to destroy buildings if you needed to. But I agree they might be a bit of a nuisance currently.
Resources - the plan was to be able to buy Wonders, one-of-a-kind building, which require a ton of resources. Like - a lot. Also thought about introducing new god-game mechanics that will require resources.
Clouds - got that feedback a lot. Fair - I will add an option to turn them off or make them invisible on mouse hover!
Firefox - don't know anything about that haha The game was made with Godot 4.4. I just exported a to HTML5 and uploaded the build, nothing else. No multithreads / sharedarraybuffer as well..
The first set of cards is decisive. A strong start includes farms, lumber camps, and possibly a mine, as these provide the essential resources needed for expansion. If you start with statues, aqueducts, or coliseums, it slow a lot your progress and you will hit ~4500 points.
Early game :
Focus on cards that generate food (fishing huts), wood, stone, and a 1-2 houses. One-two houses are enough at the beginning to avoid spoiling ressources into too much population. At the end of early game if everything went well your hand is empty.
Mid-game :
Once you secure a steady supply of wood, and food, aim for more mines. Build the palatium & pick all coliseum available (or statues).
End-game :
Continue for a strong ressource supply, specially stone to build monuments & convert faith into new production buildings.
Fire management :
Since the beginning you can let 1 tile burn & extinguish the tile around, for a full round you will not get 3 but 18 faith. On mid/end-game ressources are not a problem anymore and you can easily replace burned places with aqueducts / statues or farms
That's a solid strategy right here. Plus, I was wondering if players will let some fires burn to get that early faith going. During playtests with friends, I saw that most of them went to extinguish the fires right away, but that's actually not always needed.
I'm so glad to see that you took advantage of this "discoverable" mechanic!
I wonder - what do you think about the Meadow and Forest cards? Did you find them useful in any capacity?
In fact for me - meadow & forest are a big food cost for nothing. They have no immediate value since you can build directly producing tiles on burned lands like farms. However in potential harder maps where you start with burned tiles already healing the land first might be necessary before placing lumber camps.
If you’re too slow to extinguish fires, then restoring land can be useful for placing houses, pastures, or lumber camps.
Otherwise, there are usually enough wood-producing tiles on each map, making meadows and forests unnecessary in most cases.
The conclusion is that the game rythm and only 2 cards choices make the direct resource production way more usefull than land restoration. Even if you replace your burned lumberjack into a farm.
That's a shame! I'll look into it. Can't update the game while the jam is ongoing, so I uploaded a build without a custom mouse cursor for you! hope it works! 🙏
I really enjoyed this game! My one comment is that the clouds are annoying; they get in the way and don't really add anything to the game. Otherwise, it was a fun couple of hours!
Thank you! I used a TileMapLayer node to create the levels manually. When the game starts, it reads the TileMapLayer's data and creates the tiles, which are Node2Ds.
This game felt very polished, awesome stuff. The art was on point including SFX and Music. The game felt relaxing to play. I also enjoyed the UI, very well put together.
Glad to hear you enjoyed the game! I find it relaxing too, which is a bit ironic considering you literally have to put out fires or your kingdom burns!
your game looks really cool! 😊 I'm the leader of a small bundle community where we occasionally put together game bundles, and it's that time again!
Your game would be a perfect fit for our current collection, so I wanted to reach out and ask if you'd like to join us. If you're interested, you can submit your game directly here: https://itch.io/jam/urb2015. I'd truly appreciate it if you'd consider participating!
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Such a chill game... until the fire appears!
It's great, and I kept having this notion that 'well, maybe I can survive this anyway', but at some point fire spreads too quickly and I had this sense of inevitable doom. Good job, I was stressed as I should be!
I love the design, but the fact that cards are only partially visible made me constantly feel that my screen is too small. Pixel art is great, animations too, music is *chef's kiss*.
I loved it!
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! Just making sure, because I didn't properly tutorialize this - you can click fires to extinguish them (if you didn't know already 😅)
The feedback for the cards if fair! I'll see about leaving them open at all times. Or maybe make it so that all cards are revealed when hovering over a card!
Amazing concept! Great job!
From my playthroughs, it seems like Resources Gathered is the most important stat; hence, it's important to exclusively focus on choosing buildings that produce lots of resources. Also mines have the best resource per turn vs faith cost, so you should never buy anything else with faith. By doing this I was able to consistently get over 5000 points.
Thanks for the feedback!
For a WIP post-jam update, I changed a how the score is calculated, so placing buildings, or rare buildings, as well as extinguishing fires, will grant more points.
Very fun to collect farm buildings & special buildings! It is so satisfying. And hollowness at the end.
If the final eruption was more tragedic, that would be more dramatic. 😈
Nice! Any suggestions for that? 😁
Oh... this is difficult.
Maybe you can allow player a few clicks to extinguish fire to give a little hope.
And maybe you can gradually change color of the tiles from red to gray like aged over time.
And to moderate player's emotion, it needs a peaceful music. Then it can still give emptiness.
I can't do anything in the game, no card are playable.
Since this was a jam game, I didn't have the time to properly tutorialize the game. You begin the game with 0 resources, and you have to let them accumulate just a bit before you are able to place your first card. You might have gotten a bad starting hand, too. It happens 😅
You can always open the menu and click restart. You'll get a different set of cards and a random map.
Thanks for playing!
I didn't see the how to play.
I made a new go, my city has been destroyed but at least I have points (4103).
It is a good base for something a little more interresting.
Thanks for giving it another go!
Let me know if you have anything in mind 😀
It doesn't work on Chrome browser, for some reason. I can click around, even extinguish fires, but clicking cards does nothing at all. Idk.
Huh, that's a new one!
Are you on the latest version?
Do you by any chance have hardware acceleration turned off?
And, just to make sure: when you click a card, it slides down a bit, and you enter build mode. Clicking a card won't make it disappear until you place the tile.
I tried clicking the card and then a tile, then double clicking the card, and then any other variations I could think of, lol. I even tried from smartphone and other browsers, so I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. Maybe I should try downloading it.
You can only place tiles if you have enough resources. A card that is usable will have a green checkmark.
If that's still not working, it might be a bug.. 😔
Oh, then I spent two-three days every time without enough resources to place any card! 😬
I don't know if that's supposed to happen, but I'll try again. Thank you :)
I'll definitely improve the UX for that! Thanks for giving it another chance. Let me know if you have any feedback 😃
This is really nice.
Has some good potentioal for a little mobile game to pass the time with.
Thanks for playing! You can click fires to extinguish them. I definitely needed to prioritize making a tutorial for that, but you know.. Jam and all 😅😅
Hope you'll give it another try!
I enjoyed the gameplay and the cute pixel art. One suggestion, if you'd like to extend the game, would be to allow players to postpone the inevitable eruption, but make it increasingly difficult the longer they delay it. My score is 4127.
Thanks for playing and posting the score!
Being able to delay the final calamity eruption event was one of the first core mechanics I wanted to implement for the game, but later I decided that for a jam game it might not be necessary. I believe I'll implement this in the future though.
Really nice and cozy game! Got 4950 score with this little town:
You beat my high score. Mine is 4923 😂 Gotta play some more!
Thanks for playing!
Do you have any feedback?
Heh, it was my first time playing too. Git gud. :D
About feedback - I don't know how complex you want the gameplay to be, but having buildings have bonuses based on adjacent tiles would be a nice touch - for example having houses next to each other could boost their rate by 10% of something along those lines.
Also I don't really get the "terrain" tiles like meadows - why would you want to use them, unless you run out of space? They are way too expensive and don't really give you anything. I was expecting to be able to build the world out by placing them on the black space, but nope.
Towards the end game I had more resources than I knew what to do with - maybe upgrading buildings with excess resources to better their gather rates could be a thing?
And a small nitpick - those clouds get in the way sometimes - my quarry burned down cuz I didn't see it was on fire, while under the cloud :D
P.S. How did you embed a Godot game in the web page? I thought there was some incompatiblity with firefox and it always needed to open in a new window, but yours seems to be working fine on my FF?
Proximity bonuses - definitely plan on adding those!
Meadows/Forests - I wanted to make sure the player could always rebuild forests and meadows if they burn down. I also needed some lower tier cards so discarding won't be painful. Furthermore, I thought about being able to expand the map with those tiles, and to maybe use them to destroy buildings if you needed to. But I agree they might be a bit of a nuisance currently.
Resources - the plan was to be able to buy Wonders, one-of-a-kind building, which require a ton of resources. Like - a lot. Also thought about introducing new god-game mechanics that will require resources.
Clouds - got that feedback a lot. Fair - I will add an option to turn them off or make them invisible on mouse hover!
Firefox - don't know anything about that haha
The game was made with Godot 4.4. I just exported a to HTML5 and uploaded the build, nothing else. No multithreads / sharedarraybuffer as well..
Cheers! And thanks for the feedback ☺
I loved the experience ! Very easy to understand & very satisfying to play ! Wish you the best for your next projects !
Oh wow, that's the highest score I've seen! More than I managed to get. Any tips? 😂😂
Yeah sure ! Here’s my current strategy !
The starting hand is crucial :
The first set of cards is decisive. A strong start includes farms, lumber camps, and possibly a mine, as these provide the essential resources needed for expansion. If you start with statues, aqueducts, or coliseums, it slow a lot your progress and you will hit ~4500 points.
Early game :
Focus on cards that generate food (fishing huts), wood, stone, and a 1-2 houses. One-two houses are enough at the beginning to avoid spoiling ressources into too much population. At the end of early game if everything went well your hand is empty.
Mid-game :
Once you secure a steady supply of wood, and food, aim for more mines. Build the palatium & pick all coliseum available (or statues).
End-game :
Continue for a strong ressource supply, specially stone to build monuments & convert faith into new production buildings.
Fire management :
Since the beginning you can let 1 tile burn & extinguish the tile around, for a full round you will not get 3 but 18 faith. On mid/end-game ressources are not a problem anymore and you can easily replace burned places with aqueducts / statues or farms
I hope it brings you some tips !!!
Here is an even better run !
That's a solid strategy right here. Plus, I was wondering if players will let some fires burn to get that early faith going. During playtests with friends, I saw that most of them went to extinguish the fires right away, but that's actually not always needed.
I'm so glad to see that you took advantage of this "discoverable" mechanic!
I wonder - what do you think about the Meadow and Forest cards? Did you find them useful in any capacity?
In fact for me - meadow & forest are a big food cost for nothing. They have no immediate value since you can build directly producing tiles on burned lands like farms. However in potential harder maps where you start with burned tiles already healing the land first might be necessary before placing lumber camps.
If you’re too slow to extinguish fires, then restoring land can be useful for placing houses, pastures, or lumber camps.
Otherwise, there are usually enough wood-producing tiles on each map, making meadows and forests unnecessary in most cases.
The conclusion is that the game rythm and only 2 cards choices make the direct resource production way more usefull than land restoration. Even if you replace your burned lumberjack into a farm.
Agreed, and very insightful. making tougher maps with having to restore pre-burnt tiles is actually a really good idea, too!
I added those cards for 2 reasons:
1. In case you end up with too many burnt tiles or built tiles and can't build a camp, for example. To prevent the player from getting locked.
2. Every deck of cards needs some 'lower tier' cards you can discard or care less about, imo.
Other possible use cases for them in the future are:
1. Allowing the player to expand the map, and that it could only be done with non-structure cards.
2. Allowing the player to destroy buildings with those cards, so they could build better buildings.
Making this in 7 days is incredibly impressive. Good job!
Thank you! It was a grind, but definitely worth it. Let me know if you have any feedback 😁
cool game, i will never forgive you for destroying my palatium corner
Terribly sorry about that 🤣😬
I can't see my mouse, it made the game kindof unplayable for me... Now i'm sad because it looked extra cool !
That's a shame! I'll look into it. Can't update the game while the jam is ongoing, so I uploaded a build without a custom mouse cursor for you! hope it works! 🙏
Let me know?
https://avivlevy.itch.io/before-the-ash-without-cursor?secret=3OLCNZ23E0dPkRTD49...
I really enjoyed this game! My one comment is that the clouds are annoying; they get in the way and don't really add anything to the game. Otherwise, it was a fun couple of hours!
Wow, thanks for playing and for the feedback!! That's awesome.
Those pesky clouds haha. I'll see about an option to turn them off or something. 😎
☁🚫
Will there be a android port?
There might! 😁
wow congrats very polished! what do you used for the tile/grid in Godot?
Thank you!
I used a TileMapLayer node to create the levels manually. When the game starts, it reads the TileMapLayer's data and creates the tiles, which are Node2Ds.
Ok great! Thx for your answer :)
A very well made and concise experience.
It's a good game. nice work.
This game felt very polished, awesome stuff. The art was on point including SFX and Music. The game felt relaxing to play. I also enjoyed the UI, very well put together.
Glad to hear you enjoyed the game! I find it relaxing too, which is a bit ironic considering you literally have to put out fires or your kingdom burns!
your game looks really cool! 😊 I'm the leader of a small bundle community where we occasionally put together game bundles, and it's that time again!
Your game would be a perfect fit for our current collection, so I wanted to reach out and ask if you'd like to join us. If you're interested, you can submit your game directly here: https://itch.io/jam/urb2015. I'd truly appreciate it if you'd consider participating!
You can find all our past bundles and important details about bundle creation on our bundle page: https://xx696.itch.io/bundles-ultimate.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask me anytime. Thanks for your time! 😊
Best regards, love, and peace! ❤️✌️
Nice game, I like its chill atmosphere! Art, especially colors, are good too!
Glad to hear You enjoyed the game! Let me know if you have any feedback😎