I had/have to deal with Yahoo Customer Support's multi-hour holds, so I thought I would peek at Ludum Dare again.
Here's a "Post Mortem" writeup on Undermined.
http://www.ludumdare...dermined-postmortem/There's some insightful notes here. It may be close to a Kobyashi Maru where the point of the game is that is indeed is really tight and you can't help everyone. But maybe I am a bit of a sap and I like it when a game is slightly easier and it is in fact possible without a 1/100 dice draw.
"On any given turn, you’ll never be able to help everybody, and it actually feels really stressful to decide who needs the most help. Having to make this choice every turn gets particularly intense near the end of the game, where you have to start making the difficult decision of declaring certain characters as being beyond help."
That's not really my type of game though, I like at least a narrow way to a full victory.
(Edit) I'm starting to do a detailed commentary.
"Something else that I’m really happy with is the way that you have to actually remember which members of your party prefer which methods of comfort. I was initially a little hesitant to include a challenge in my game that was based on just pure memory, but it ended up working really well. I like that they player actually needs to pay attention to what their miners tell them and familiarize themselves with the preferences of the crew if they want to get anywhere. It’s such a simple little mechanic, but it adds an extremely personal level to the game and I feel that it gets the player actually invested a little bit more in their crew."
I got this pretty early on. After a couple of runs with sticky pads, I eventually made a spreadsheet to keep track of stuff. Fine by me!
"The first big flaw is that the game feels to heavily dependent on luck. You can be doing everything right, making the most strategically viable decisions, and you can still get screwed by a bad roll of the dice."
Yeah, I began to see this and in my previous notes here, I began to advise to just ditch bad runs because the "near-win ratio" is really tight and won't stand for like 3 bad dice rolls in a run. I got a 4 Miner win a ways back but that's getting hard to do and I killed some thirty bad draws to get it.
