Amazing! Drifting feels very good in this game, even if its turnbased. This is shaping up to be a really good game. I just wish there was a fire hotkey, as using the menu is kinda cumbersome (please make ramming a viable build).
A fire hotkey is on the to-do list now, it should be there by next DD. Ramming is already pretty good but I'll be sure to add some ram-centric ship upgrades down the line
I am a dummy and need stronger tutorials in the games that I play. Admittedly it doesn't help that I've never really played a game like this before. I didn't get very far, and beat the first few fights by ramming other ships with mine.
Super fun gameplay! I loved how the different enemy types interacted with each other, tricking cannon boats into shooting the suicide rafts following me, top strat. Also yeah, adding drifting for high speeds is cool.
The time management aspect of it was fun too, like weighing advancing time against taking time for repairs, I thought that went well with the setting.
I was worried the enemies were too dumb but honestly even if I do implement better AI I'd like to keep the enemies in the initial area this simple because it's just fun to see them accidentally sink each other.
There's also going to be more time management in the future, specifically I plan the repair time to depend on your crew's size/skills and the crewmen themselves will have to eat or starve.
I really like the setting which I assume is at least partially inspired by Apocalypse Now.
Movement mechanics on the hex grid feel great. Easily the highlight of this. Wouldn't have though that the inertia of a ship would work in a roguelike, turn-based game. Anything to do with menuing doesn't feel great though. It often wasn't clear to me what menu I was really in. For example when pressing F in battle it shows you the range of the weapon you have currently selected on the map, which looks almost identical to the actual target selection once you have confirmed what weapon to fire so I was often confused as to what state I was in.
The overworld map seems pretty linear but I didn't get too far.
Starting the game in a large window and then scaling it down puts the map offscreen.
I will try to fix resizing messing with the map, good catch. Regarding menu clarity, I'll try to simplify the aiming process itself so that should already address some of the confusion, but I might also visually highlight the currently in-use menu, that should help too. And yes the map is really linear since it's the game's first area, but hopefully it will feel considerably less linear once land gameplay is implemented.
Controls are usable but could be improved, my main suggestion would be to have it so you can fire without having to click through the f menu, it just feels so clunky whereas the rest of the combat controls are much more intuitive. I enjoy games where I design my own ship so if you make this system shine by having cool and relevant choices here, it could be quite fun to mess around with. Combat is enjoyable but I must be bad at it because I died several times without getting very far lol. The drift mechanic was neat and felt natural after a minute or so.
nice game, but i couldn't keep playing more because of how small the UI is. i liked the hex based movement and how the boat has some inertia, but the difference between styles in the battle map and the river map is very odd. on a game with so much UI, the highest priority should be in allowing to choose UI size, or just set the theme according to screen size
Controls are rough, but they work once you learn them. Would be nice if you could just click on the weapon icon on the left and then on the map where you want to fire. Not sure if the ASCII map is a placeholder or not, but it looks better than the local map and worse than the boat picture in the top left which leads to a kind of janky visual style. The moving and drifting was better than expected for a turn based game and it was fun to put guns in different arcs to test out different movement strategies.
Very interesting game! How to control it and navigate the UI is a bit confusing I think right now, but it makes sense once you learn. It would be nice if everything could be controlled by either keyboard or mouse. Its a bit disorienting at first when somethings have to be done by keyboard and others with the mouse. The UI is really small on higher resolutions, I was playing on 1440p and for example the inventory icons are really tiny (also there's no exit button for the inventory screen). The "event text popups" were way too fast, eg. Drift!, and I could barely see it.
It would be nice if there was some way to see more what exactly would happen before making a move, e.g. moving at throttle 1 or 3.
I like it though, feels sort of like Faster Than Light but in The Heart of Darkness or something. Would be interesting it there were parts where you could disembark and go around a bit on foot, but maybe that's not something you're looking to do with the game. And just a pet peeve of mine; a way to limit FPS/turn on vsync. Just seems a bit wasteful to run the game at 3k FPS hehe. I suspect you are already aware of a lot these things already, I played it without looking at any tutorials and it was fine.
Unless I'm missing something, you can currently navigate all menus via keyboard only, it's just that some of them (like the inventory menu) use Q, E, TAB or space, I just need to make it clearer which menu uses which button. Conversely, some menus you can't navigate with mouse only but that's something I'm also working on.
The ability to disembark and move on land is a planned feature, along with land combat and a basic scavenging mechanic, as I'm envisioning the game right now it's supposed to be the main way to get fuel and other supplies like food or ammo.
UI scaling and FPS limit options are now on the to-do list, thanks for suggesting them!
Comments
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.
Amazing! Drifting feels very good in this game, even if its turnbased.
This is shaping up to be a really good game. I just wish there was a fire hotkey, as using the menu is kinda cumbersome (please make ramming a viable build).
Glad you liked my game!
A fire hotkey is on the to-do list now, it should be there by next DD.
Ramming is already pretty good but I'll be sure to add some ram-centric ship upgrades down the line
I am a dummy and need stronger tutorials in the games that I play. Admittedly it doesn't help that I've never really played a game like this before. I didn't get very far, and beat the first few fights by ramming other ships with mine.
Thanks for trying the game out, I'll try to make it dummy-proof by next DD
Super fun gameplay! I loved how the different enemy types interacted with each other, tricking cannon boats into shooting the suicide rafts following me, top strat. Also yeah, adding drifting for high speeds is cool.
The time management aspect of it was fun too, like weighing advancing time against taking time for repairs, I thought that went well with the setting.
Thanks for trying my game out!
I was worried the enemies were too dumb but honestly even if I do implement better AI I'd like to keep the enemies in the initial area this simple because it's just fun to see them accidentally sink each other.
There's also going to be more time management in the future, specifically I plan the repair time to depend on your crew's size/skills and the crewmen themselves will have to eat or starve.
Pretty cool.
I really like the setting which I assume is at least partially inspired by Apocalypse Now.
Movement mechanics on the hex grid feel great. Easily the highlight of this. Wouldn't have though that the inertia of a ship would work in a roguelike, turn-based game. Anything to do with menuing doesn't feel great though. It often wasn't clear to me what menu I was really in. For example when pressing F in battle it shows you the range of the weapon you have currently selected on the map, which looks almost identical to the actual target selection once you have confirmed what weapon to fire so I was often confused as to what state I was in.
The overworld map seems pretty linear but I didn't get too far.
Starting the game in a large window and then scaling it down puts the map offscreen.
Thanks for playing!
I will try to fix resizing messing with the map, good catch.
Regarding menu clarity, I'll try to simplify the aiming process itself so that should already address some of the confusion, but I might also visually highlight the currently in-use menu, that should help too.
And yes the map is really linear since it's the game's first area, but hopefully it will feel considerably less linear once land gameplay is implemented.
Thanks for the feedback!
Controls are usable but could be improved, my main suggestion would be to have it so you can fire without having to click through the f menu, it just feels so clunky whereas the rest of the combat controls are much more intuitive. I enjoy games where I design my own ship so if you make this system shine by having cool and relevant choices here, it could be quite fun to mess around with. Combat is enjoyable but I must be bad at it because I died several times without getting very far lol. The drift mechanic was neat and felt natural after a minute or so.
Thanks for playing!
Weapon hotkeys are a good idea I'll put them on the to-do list.
nice game, but i couldn't keep playing more because of how small the UI is. i liked the hex based movement and how the boat has some inertia, but the difference between styles in the battle map and the river map is very odd. on a game with so much UI, the highest priority should be in allowing to choose UI size, or just set the theme according to screen size
Thanks for playing!
Yes I always forget UI scaling until DD when somebody points it out, sorry.
I'll add an option by next DD!
Controls are rough, but they work once you learn them. Would be nice if you could just click on the weapon icon on the left and then on the map where you want to fire. Not sure if the ASCII map is a placeholder or not, but it looks better than the local map and worse than the boat picture in the top left which leads to a kind of janky visual style. The moving and drifting was better than expected for a turn based game and it was fun to put guns in different arcs to test out different movement strategies.
Thanks for playing!
It is actually possible to shoot via the mouse by clicking again on the selected tile but I forgot to include it in the tutorial text, my bad.
Regarding visuals, it's technically all placeholders, I've yet to decide on a style, but it's good to know what looks better among the placeholders!
Very interesting game! How to control it and navigate the UI is a bit confusing I think right now, but it makes sense once you learn. It would be nice if everything could be controlled by either keyboard or mouse. Its a bit disorienting at first when somethings have to be done by keyboard and others with the mouse. The UI is really small on higher resolutions, I was playing on 1440p and for example the inventory icons are really tiny (also there's no exit button for the inventory screen). The "event text popups" were way too fast, eg. Drift!, and I could barely see it.
It would be nice if there was some way to see more what exactly would happen before making a move, e.g. moving at throttle 1 or 3.
I like it though, feels sort of like Faster Than Light but in The Heart of Darkness or something. Would be interesting it there were parts where you could disembark and go around a bit on foot, but maybe that's not something you're looking to do with the game. And just a pet peeve of mine; a way to limit FPS/turn on vsync. Just seems a bit wasteful to run the game at 3k FPS hehe. I suspect you are already aware of a lot these things already, I played it without looking at any tutorials and it was fine.
Thanks for playing!
Unless I'm missing something, you can currently navigate all menus via keyboard only, it's just that some of them (like the inventory menu) use Q, E, TAB or space, I just need to make it clearer which menu uses which button.
Conversely, some menus you can't navigate with mouse only but that's something I'm also working on.
The ability to disembark and move on land is a planned feature, along with land combat and a basic scavenging mechanic, as I'm envisioning the game right now it's supposed to be the main way to get fuel and other supplies like food or ammo.
UI scaling and FPS limit options are now on the to-do list, thanks for suggesting them!