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A jam submission

Bombs and BulletsView game page

2D Real Time Strategy Game
Submitted by Commander Rad (@GamesBreakfast) — 3 days, 2 hours before the deadline
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Bombs and Bullets's itch.io page

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Comments

Submitted

Hey. I played your game as part of a Demo Day stream. If you didn't catch the stream live, here's a link to the video:

You can see my other demo day 46 streams as well on my channel.

Submitted (1 edit)

This game seems to have some frame rate issues, and even on a 1920 by 1080 monitor the text was really small. The game really needs some sort of tutorial to walk the player through crafting buildings and units, as well as how to make money. I was able to at least destroy one foe on the battlefield before losing my interest in playing. It felt cumbersome. That could just be me since I'm not very experienced with RTS games.

Developer

No, it's mainly because this is version 0.07 and there's still a lot of rough edges.
I'm planning on making an introductory and tutorial videos eventually.

Thanks for playing mate. Things will improve as the versions roll along.

Submitted(+1)

The Controls on your Page seem straight forward. Nothing weird or fancy going on just for the sake of being special. Nice.

Options and Credit don't work. Not testing multiplayer, since I have no Friends. Not testing Map Editor either, since I'm assuming its not the focus of the Game. 

Was expecting it to start in Fullscreen. I'm assuming its starting in Windowed right now for testing purposes etc., This looks and feels like it should be a Fullscreen Game.

Nice Music in the Main Menu. No Keyboard controls for the Map selection, but theres a giantt amount of them. Maybe too many? Do you need that many maps, especially with a Map editor, or should you rather focus on other Aspects of the Game first?

I'm not a fan of huge maps, so I went with arhangelsk ablast franz josef land 17-1 #2. The second map with that Name, since apparently your Maps are named the same but have slightly different coordinates or something? Why not give them fancy flavorful names?

Player default color is Red and Enemy default Color Green? Silly Dev, its Blue for the Player, and Red for the Enemy. And your Color selection isn't ordered it seems. 

There seems to be only 1 Faction yet, but an extensive TechTree, even tho the Display of it is really unpolished. Just a bunch of Pictores of Tansk and such.

Scrolling works through the Escape menu or if the Mouse is out of the WIndow. Also makes it really hard to select the scrollbar on the right of the Unit buil dthing.  Which just seems to display all units greyed out if I don't have any money. Which I didn't have because I started with 1000 Supply and apparently getting new one is quite slow. So I had to wait a while to build the Vehicle Depot.

But thats okay, because your AI does nothing. build a Light transport thinking it would be a new supply truck. Foolish Idea. But why isn't the first build option in the main building a supply truck?

Movement seems wonky sometimes, I thin kI saw the enemy supply track driving sideways while I was scrolling past, but when I went back it already had delivered its cargo. Otherwise movement/Pathfinding seems slow, causing units to sometimes stop on tiles for a short Time.

Why does my Jeep have to rotate in Place? Its not a Tank, and even Tanks can curve normally aswell.

Hemitt is marked as a repair vehicle, when its a supply truck. Had me confused. But good to know I can actually build new ones. Don't see what the Point in more supply depots is tho, I can just send them all to the same one, and the next one is very far away. 

Avoidance for movement seems fine, unless they change pathing in between, like a supplytruck swapping from loading to delivering. Then they bump into each other and stop working. Meaning if you don't pay attention to your supply line all the Time, they just clump up and stand around, giving you no more ressources. Building should really play a small animation or something, or at least have the Unit drive out of the Depot and not appear in front of it.

Wanted to build 2 more Hemitts, accidentally ran out of Money and build a Stryker instead. Why are combat vehicles cheaper then supply trucks?

No Gatherpoints for Buildings?  

I can exit the Driver out of the Vehicle? Thats amazing, really nice detail. Infantry has the same Tank turning tho, not amazing. And smoke for the Vehicles comes out of their Center not the back?

I don't know enough about Tanks, but I'm pretty sure the Abrahams needs more then 1 Crewmember, so why can I only exit the driver? Does it not come equipped with a gunner etc. when I build it? Do I have to build those seperately?

I deliberately chose the smallest Map I could find in Terms of Landsize, and it still was massive and took forever to get across. Are you planning for giant battles? Then why have such a low income and high cost for everything? Your textures and models seem way to detailed for the distance of scrolling. Unless you prefer scrolling really far in and loosing all tactical view while Playing. This obviously affects performance. If you order a unit to drive somewhere, it needs to stop for a second and recalculate its path. This should either be instantly, or masked by it starting to move in a linear path immediately while recalculating, since you can assume it to be mostly correct. This causes units to stop moving alltogether if you keep clicking for minor changes in the pathing. Makes microing impossible. 

Terrain textures don't blend into each other very well. 

Seems to me this is enginedevved, thanks to the folder layout. Is this correct? Nice if it is. 

Controls in general are fine and seem to be working, but the sidebar can be confusing at times, it should just automatically select units if on a transporting option, buildings if on a builder and so on, and not have the option for the Rest. 

Overall, nice strategy Game, but needs some work in the performance and smoothness of pretty much everything, instead of adding more and more Maps. Also personally I would prefer smaller maps. Around half to maybe a quarter of the landmass size of the small Island map I played on for a 2 Person map.

Deleted 1 year ago
Deleted 1 year ago
Developer(+1)

Thanks Tomodev for your detailed feedback.

FYI, this version was focused on doing maps and making tiles and water look better visually. So a lot of the UI stuff that was added in last update and other gamefeel & QoL issues haven't been looked at yet.

Options and Credits are placeholders for now. Folks do seem to complain about this, so I think I will definitely move some options into this by the next update.

As for fullscreen mode, the coder previously  wanted to add it after some specific selection feature was in. Then we both just forgot about it. I just had a chat with him and there's nothing preventing us from adding it in the next version. lol

We have yet to add keyboard controls to much of the UI yet. We will probably add that alongside customizable hotkeys.

One of the core features of my game is that I want a map for every inch of the planet. Feels like a pie in the sky, but we're actually pretty close to making it a feasible thing through map generation. I stopped at 109 because I felt it was enough for batch 1.

There is a list for the maps, but there's also a 'world map' selection screen where you can browse the world map and click on parts of the map to zoom into and select the part of the world you want to play. I think in future I will make the world map interface the default and have the map list on one side of the world map or something like that. It's currently kind of clunky and needs improvement so the map list is the default.

Franz josef land 17-1 #2 is a typo on my end. I just checked the map list Excel spreadsheet. They are named according to province and subdivision they belong to in real life. All the arctic provinces are huuuuge, so there's a lot of maps for them. We're working on the Arctic maps first because those biomes are barren and easy to make. The names will become more varied as we move south because the provinces will become smaller. Map names with numbers at the end will be rarer as we move into more settled territory.

Color selection order and default settings I think we could change into something a bit more 'gamey'. Does 'blue' for P1, 'red' for P2, 'green' for P3, and 'yellow' for P4 sound good? Maps are generated as 4 players as a max by default, although there can be more.

Only one faction for now. I want to have it fully completed before moving on to hammer out the second one.

The Tech Tree is just a grid with tech tiers on one axis and production buildings on another. We just added that in the previous version as well, we haven't added any visual polish to it yet.

I think the scrolling issue will go away once we make things full screen.

What do you think about the build menu though? Currently we have three things displayed: 'things you can build', 'things you can't build because you don't have enough money', and 'things you can't build because you don't have the tech.' I'm thinking it might be better to hide all the 'things you can't build because of tech', since the tech tree is accessible in-game anyway.

As for the build order of the vehicles, I don't think we're going to change that right now. In future we will add hotkeys to help build things faster.

There is no real AI right now. In fact this version with the maps just added the infrastructure needed to add AI in the future.

Pathing is the core problem of the game right now, one which we are taking about 2 months time to fix right now. Increasing unit response time and improving path smoothness and unit object avoidance are all things we're working on right now. See the new Object Avoidance right here: https://twitter.com/GamesBreakfast/status/1566827073003352066 

As for why Jeeps and all vehicles rotate in place. This is a trade-off of the path finding. In order to have bigger maps with amphibious and navel units in future, we need to simplify the pathing objects. So they all just pivot in place. We had very complex navigation in earlier versions, but that did not fly with the complex and large maps we wanted.

Building animation is something we would like to do, but currently do not have the time and resources to do. We're going to redesign some of the production buildings. The vehicle depot is the oldest and lamest buildings of the whole bunch and its getting replaced.

Yeah that HEMTT thing is also a typo, I just fixed it in the internal dev. Thanks for spotting it. The HEMTT is cheaper than the Stryker, although it is more expensive than the JTLV light transport.

Gathering points are for later. It's something that is doable and we have plans for.

Yes, all vehicles have a single 'driver', for the sake of our sanity, we're pretending that all vehicles only need the one driver. It makes leveling them up, giving them abilities, and transferring them from one vehicle to another in the future easier. They encompass all the functions of the vehicle. I will not add multiple different crew types for single vehicles and aircraft. In future, when ships sink, I might add a bunch of 'sailors' that you can save for a small monetary bonus, but all the abilities and experience will be given to a single 'captain'.

The economics of the game has yet to be tweaked, kind of can't until the path finding is fixed and supply trucks can gather supplies reliably. The Supply Dock is not infinite by the way, so you need to seek out new ones eventually. Also, in the future, I will also give the player an option to get supplies from specific points on the edge of the map. These will be infinite, but obviously will take longer to gather. Early game will be about the supply dock nearby, mid-game will be about fighting over other ones on the map, and late gate will be about securing the edges of the map to ensure the flow of supply.

Unit path finding response time is something we're trying to improve right now.

For the zoomed out view, we currently haven't found a comfortable limit to how far away it should be. We might limit it a lot more once we add a full map view into the menu.

This is developed on the Love2D framework. Not 100% engine-dev, but close.

We have added some context-sensitive selections in the sidebar menu we'll add more once we feel the layout of the sidebar UI is mature.

Yeah, there is a lot of work to do.

So, the thing with maps is that I am purposely making them very big to test the limits of our path finding and how the gameplay feels on the big maps. I've heard the maps are 'too big' many times, and their size makes the game really chug. So, all in all, the it's highly likely that maps in future will be smaller. The current maps are based on 0.5 degree longitude and latitude squares, which are about 56 square km at the equator. We might have to shrink that down to 0.25 degree squares instead. Making them smaller will obviously mean I have to make more of them to cover the entire globe.

We've spent 2 versions focused on things other than actual gameplay and QoL. One on new UI, one on the map making and tiles. So the next update will be on improving QoL and gameplay.

Thanks a lot for your huge in-depth feedback. I appreciate it very much.

Submitted(+1)

Not going to reply in too much detail to most of this, it just makes Sense. Single driver, the worldmap selection, focusing on different Parts then the AI. It either makes Sense as explained, or makes Sense in that I just thought it was further along in development then it is, so I just thought there would be more. Like the AI i.e.

As for turning in Place for pathfinding reasons, can't you just increase the Turnspeed for various Units? So Tanks turn as slow as they do, while Infantry turns almost instantly? I'm assuming you've tested with your desired max Unit/Player count in a max sized map to find out that the Pathfinding needed workarounds like that to not lag out? I'd assume with a prebuild navmesh, it shouldn't take too long to just lookup the closest desired Points while already driving, but I don't know anything about your Architecture obviously.

What do you think about the build menu though? Currently we have three things displayed: 'things you can build', 'things you can't build because you don't have enough money', and 'things you can't build because you don't have the tech.' I'm thinking it might be better to hide all the 'things you can't build because of tech', since the tech tree is accessible in-game anyway.

Things you can't thanks to tech don't need to be there I think aswell. If People are confused, just put a tech tree lookup into the Game, and/or display a tooltip of Tank ( Requires Tank depot to build -> unlock by building (BuildingYouCanBuildRightNow) first). Something like that maybe. I'd also keep the other options, so things you can and can't build in the same place, and just grey them out, not swap them between menues. Makes it more clear I think. 

Color selection order and default settings I think we could change into something a bit more 'gamey'. Does 'blue' for P1, 'red' for P2, 'green' for P3, and 'yellow' for P4 sound good?

Sure. In the End, it doesn't really matter all that much, but blue and red for Player/Enemy is rather common. Maybe just look at whatever Strategy Game you want, and copy their default color Layout or something.

Developer(+1)

Yeah, the version number is 0.07. That's more or less where I think the game is at right now. Still exploring gameplay, adding basic features. There is a game loop but it ain't a real game yet.

We actually also have an in-depth terrain system. So a tank will turn way slower on sand than it does on asphalt. None of the in-game stats have been balanced or anything. Next version we'll have a closer look at these things.

We're switching to flow maps for navigation in future, things are already much better on internal builds.

Anyhow, thanks again for your feedback.

Submitted(+1)

First thing I noticed was that the "Options" and "Credits" buttons in the main menu don't work. I'm using a 4K monitor, and most of the text was REALLY small and hard to read. It took a while to load the game, and I also noticed some framerate issues, mostly when trying to move the map around.

After the game started, I suddenly realized I had no idea what to do. A tutorial for brainlets would be nice.

I really like the art and aesthetics. Just fix the technical issues, and this could be a good one.

Developer

Yup, haven't put anything in those two menus yet.

The text is something we're going to fix. The current text seems too small for most people, it's on the list of to-dos.

The game is a memory hog, and there's rather large lag spikes whenever you build something taht alters the terrain. This is something that's being fixed right now by changing the entire pathfinding system, but that will take an entire month yet to finish.

Yeah, our game has most of the features we want in right now, we need to work on playability, game feel and content now. The groundwork for adding AI has been laid with this version, with all maps have little markers to help the AI navigate. They will also serve as capture points for players.

Yeah, Right now it's 0.07, I think it'll be 0.1 to 0.12 before we have something I would consider a full 'slice' of the game.

Cheers and thanks for playing though. Any and all feedback is appreciated.

Developer

As for tutorials, I'll probably make a vid soon. In-game tutorial requires a lot more work to set up an events system. Right now we're just working on the core game and not much else.