My entry for LD13 - Bulldozer Blitz!
Webstart link (for windows, mac and linux)
You’ve got to dig up the rocks and lay down roads to keep the city happy as it expands. Have too many angry drivers and it’s game over! Easy is good for those who want to build a big city, hard is more fast paced and frantic. And feel free to post your high scores in the comments and see where you stand. 
A bit more info over at the LD13 submission page.
Enjoy!
Wow, must be bad - not a single reply! ???
Anyway, some progress shots and the source now available here.
I only got one reply on my JGO entry, but I replied over at your LD entry!
Let be the first to say here:
Very fun game! The difficulty ramp needs a bit of work because it goes from quite easy to really damn hard, and I would increase the bulldozer’s speed a bit (in all of its actions). I also don’t quite understand what makes cars angry. Is it when they can’t get to their destination or something?
Very fun, great idea. Reminds me of Sim City.
Thanks
The bulldozer’s speed (both movement and actions) does get faster at the higher difficulty levels, but I think even at hard it could be sped up a little bit.
Cars get angry after they’ve failed to get to their destination after a certain amount of time. Then they’ll give up and try and return home (and your happiness takes a hit). If they fail to get home then they’ll get really angry and just disappear (and your happiness takes another hit).
Cute but frustrating. Graphics are pretty nice given your time limit. The gameplay for me lacks anything really compelling. I don’t feel I would do much better on my second attempt than I did on my first. The city grows very quickly to the point it becomes unmanageable and futility of trying to keep up up with an obviously degenerate situation is not particularly fun. I think a desktop tower defense type mechanism could really help here. If you had a preset building layout and a morning/evening rush of traffic say that you have to cope with and a period of downtime to essentially set up your defense against said traffic it might be a bit more interesting.
On the tech side there seems to be quite a delay between the pressing space something happening. You might want to have some sort of feedback mechanism to stop players from double pressing because the first one didn’t work instantly.
Aha I see. I figured it was something like that but it wasn’t completely obvious.
Well the aim was to be something like tetris where you just keep going and can’t win, which has the advantage that I didn’t need to spend a lot of time creating different levels (and all the associated gubbins of loading a level layout etc.). I agree that something more goal-driven would work better though.
[quote]On the tech side there seems to be quite a delay between the pressing space something happening. You might want to have some sort of feedback mechanism to stop players from double pressing because the first one didn’t work instantly.
[/quote]
Yes that’s deliberate, I wanted to get some sounds in to provide feedback for the actions but I ran out of time.
I really liked it, the graphics are really good.
It’s just that I ran out of resources so I couldn’t build any more roads, they didn’t seem to regenerate. And I’d often build and then nothing would happen, so I’d press space again, then the road would appear and then get deleted.
Overall it was cool though. The general styling of the graphics, menus etc were all very smooth and consistent which i think makes it look very polished even though you obviously didn’t have long to do this for the comp.
The taunts by the drivers are funny the way they’re in wing dings or whatever… They communicate expletives pretty well, breaking all language barriers.
Nice work!
This is great, simple yet you do have to think about resource allocation
Bill