Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• In sci-fi, Dyson Spheres are objects so enormous they wrap around whole stars to gather their energy. Yet, in Sphere, whichever part of it you are exploring fits on a single screen, and goes just six floors down: presumably you had really good sensors to pinpoint the location of the artefact and know not to wander off. As a game, Sphere is enormously inspired by Alien: while AliensRL and its later fork Alienhack already exist, this does not stop Sphere from being effective at what it does. In particular, its level generation algorithm is surprisingly good for a 7DRL, with every level out of 6 feeling very different from each other, and the geography of the early levels goes heavy on either winding, angled tunnels, or organic walls, both of which heavily limit your visibility and mean that whenever you cannot see more than 2 tiles ahead of you, you are open to an attack from the Xenomorph expies scutterers, which act twice a turn. While they only deal 5 damage out of 100 to you per hit, and die in one hit from your Pulse Rifle, their numbers and ability to attack twice a turn once up close make it stack up - and that's before considering that both healing and ammo are very much limited. In theory, you can try to wait for a long time before every corridor entrance with poor visibility to be sure, but while this may work on floor 2 (and you may get to witness some scutterer-alien zombie infighting as a bonus), the hive floors are full scutterer eggs that may unpredictably hatch on any given turn; while that doesn't occur too often, it does mean that waiting simply converts more defenceless eggs into creatures you have to expend ammo to kill. Cutting through the organic walls of the hive at times presents a similar trade-off, but the enhanced visibility and thus less room to get ambushed feels worth it more often than not. However, your success in the current version of Sphere is heavily affected by randomness. There are only a few in-game items, and they are all randomly found in supply crates (and alien crates later on), with no real weighting. Thus, your ratios of Pulse Rifle ammo to Plasma Rifle ammo to Medkit charges to Smoke Grenades will typically vary heavily from run to run, and it's entirely up to RNG if you will have enough ammo to be able to fully clear floor 4 or not, and if you will have found a Plasma Rifle at all by the time it matters. The worst thing is consistently finding a surplus of Smoke Grenades: these only begin being useful on floor 5, where you begin to be beset by ranged androids, and even then, they'll only prevent them from shooting at you while in the smoke (and likewise preventing you from targeting them unless you try to guess their position in the smoke) but not confuse them enough to stop the android emerging out of smoke after a few turns, ready to shoot at you, and with greater accuracy thanks to being point-blank than it would have had if you just tried to trade shots at range in the first place. It's possible to get 20 Smoke Grenades by floor 5, but only have 20 Plasma Rifle ammo - when it takes about 5 shots to destroy one android, and you'll run into multiples (plus the alien zombies, which are slow bullet sponges that are best avoided on their own but can surround in you in numbers) unless you get really lucky with finding the exit/the crystal. Sphere is played in dead silence, but it has an effective and consistent aesthetic visually, and one nice touch is that every defeated enemy leaves something behind: typically green bloodstains for scutterers and yellow ones for undead xenonauts. However, I would recommend altering the upstairs symbol, since it uses same shade of green as scutterer blood, and can be difficult to pick apart once you have killed a bunch of them in the vicinity. Altogether, this is a promising coffeebreak sci-fi RL in need of better balancing.
• There is a lot to like here. The setting is cool, enemies and weapons are thematic, and I like kicking the eggs. Any game with smoke grenades is a good game in my book. It has some DoomRL/AliensRL vibes to it. It's always interesting to have a gun in a roguelike. Visuals are nice and mostly clear, though you can sometimes miss monsters that are brown on brown backgrounds. There is an amusing bug where if you return to the location of your ship on a lower floor, you can still see it. Unfortunately, there is another bug that makes the game very difficult to complete-- there is no way, as far as I can tell, to exit the fire mode unless your target has died. This info is not in the instructions either. For instance, if you target a monster that is outside of your weapons range then you have to keep shooting the wall until they get closer and you can hit them. This came up in a number of different situations and ended many runs.
• Honestly this game just never clicked with me. Either it was way too easy (the first few levels which are mostly just empty corridors - a run key would be nice) or way too hard (anything after that in which I'm swarmed by aliens); I never really saw a reasonable level of challenge. I also found some rather significant bugs. First off, if you drop your pulse rifle, there's a chance it will disappear permanently. And this leads into the problem where if you hit the F key with nothing in your inventory, you'll be stuck in targeting mode with no way to exit it and continue the game. Finally, it seems that you can cheat by using the X key to examine tiles that you haven't explored yet. I do like the atmospheric text that is displayed when you enter a new level, though! If only the gameplay were compelling enough to match...