Mandible Games

Nice. Very nice. It has simplicity, challenge, and replayability. My only complaint is that the mouse events are received a little bit above where the pointer is, so I have to click on the bottom half of a tile to be sure the click will be received on the correct tile.

There's also a sense I have that escaping doesn't really feel like a victory, but that would be a better subject for a sociologist or a shrink than a programmer. If you'd had more than 48 hours, a victory animation of some kind would be a better reward than simple "you won" text.

OS is WinXP. Not sure what would be causing the issue. About the only abnormal thing I have on my system is CJK language support which should not affect the pointer.

I like this one a lot. It would be nice to see it expanded and developed more if you ever have time to come back to it.

It took me a few monster-cycles in the first game to figure out what I should be trying to do, at which point I quit and started fresh. I think I'm at the point now where I can win more often than I lose or give up, but I'll probably have to play more to figure out if I've developed a strategy or just gotten lucky the last few games. It's the sort of game I win and quit instead of immediately playing again, but then later I get itchy to play another round.

Suggestions if you decide to expand this one:

This seems like the sort of game that could fit into a Creeper World style storyline. You escaped from your homeworld, hooray! But it turns out the monsters are taking over the entire galaxy, so you'll have to keep jumping between ever-more-hostile worlds to survive.

Being able to "discover" a pile of resources (shipwrecked?) between islands might be a neat bonus, and keep travel from being just a shortest-distance-between-two-points kind of thing.

I'll let you know if I think of anything else.

Re the mouse bugtesting, yes I do see the same issue in Robert Recurring. Clicking the top of the 'h' in "twoholes" will cause "jumps" to be selected, and clicking in the black space just below a level name will cause the item above it to be selected.

The issue occurs in both standalone .zip and .exe installer versions. The problem is only in the Y direction, by about 8 pixels in Nieuwe Aarde.

Beautifully maddening little thing, though I keep wanting the grid to be more obvious. It would make scouting make a lot more sense if I could actually count tiles.

The game's also prone to the RNG completely screwing you over. I had a really great game going, got to like 19000 magic and made a small error in judgement, went to load up a fresh one, and didn't have an empty island within 3 tiles, which lead to my head being handed to me. The exponential monster power curve also means that, eventually, you just run face-first into a cliff.

One other suggestion I just remembered: A way to manually enter amounts of metal/magic when monsters attack would be nice, or just a way to make the number increase faster. It feels like you're holding down the button for ages at the higher levels :)

This is pretty fun, I'll probably keep playing and see if I can win (3 tries so far)
The two inspirations you cite are both amazing games, and I can defnitely see some resembalances here.

I think I'd prefer it if there was difficulty settings (although I take it the difficulty is one of the desktop dungeons inspirations)
In a fuller version a multi level campaign would be very nice, with progresive difficulty and a story of course.

I think knowing what the next monsters stats were going to be before it attacked would be nice, so I could plan ahead more, and if I understood the way my attack was calculated. Although this would remove some of the fun unpredictability.

Finally, having pictures of the monsters would be cool too.

[…] « Nieuwe Aarde […]

Found this because my Questhelper updated ;) Thank you so much for that WoWmod
doesn't look like this game here is one i would play normally but will try it out at least, much fortune to you in your developing endeavours

Whizzy

so yeah, what strategy am I gonna neet to use to beat this game. I've played through about a dozen times, and gotten to 7 digit monsters, and tried two or three different strategies. But I have not been able to acquire even half the magic you need to escape. If someone could give me a pointer on what strategy to employ it would be lovely.

I had decided that 20000 was an arbitrary number that couldn't be achieved realistically. until I read this forum where you all seem to be succeeding…

Terry, here's how I go for my wins: At the start of the game, colonize your initial island as a first priority, scouting / sailing only once you have a town on each resource. As you go, initial resources should be somewhat balanced, then rapidly switch to building towns only on metal and occasionally on food while producing forges at every opportunity. Make notes of how many resources you need to defeat each monster (the closer to balanced you can get the better, favoring the spending of magic in the early game as metal can be traded for an exponential increase of magic by using it to build forges). At a certain point, it will become nigh-impossible to earn enough metal in a round to defeat a monster without vastly depleting your magic reserves. At that point, dig in and just spend all of your metal on building forges and working to earn more / keep your food production in the black. You should pass 20k before a big nasty shows up and wipes you out. I have the resources needed to beat each monster in a text file somewhere if you need that.

Beat this the first time I tried it, but I had to stop and think several times. I thought I had lost more than once, until I figured out another way to step things up a notch. Nice to see a developer who actually cares about game mechanics, and this isn't bad for a 48 hour game, not bad at all. I will be following your blog, sir, and I look forward to more excellent Mandible Games in the future!

Yeah next time I played I got it. I was going about the attacks wrongly. Great game, Even if its subtleties were beyond me

Great game. Still haven't beaten it yet, but I'll keep at it until I do.

if you ever do decide to go back to rework the code, you might want to fix this bug I found by accident. Apparently, you can keep playing the game even after you've lost. If you click on the map, it still allows you to build towns, forges, etc. if you have the available resources, even after you've been technically wiped out. If you lose again, the screen just gets darker.

[…] it turns out, this month's music is being composed for another Mandible Games title called Nieuwe Aarde (Dutch for "New Earth"), a game developed for Ludum Dare 17, a 48-hour game development […]

I love this game. Great concept! Scratches my Desktop dungeons itch, while being new and interesting.,