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A jam submission

Rough WavesView game page

Third-person hovercraft combat game made in GZDoom
Submitted by Khodoque — 1 day, 21 hours before the deadline
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Rough Waves's itch.io page

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Comments

I'm very impressed with your demo!  I believe you were going for the Megaman Legends look and you nailed it!  The music was good as well!

I only noticed a single bug that effected the demo: sometime the turret would get "stuck" and wouldn't rotate towards where the camera was facing, but other than that everything seemed fine to me.

I only have a couple gameplay suggestion: it'd be nice if you could add a spatial sound-effect to the enemy boats or projectiles, that way the player could keep track of his surroundings without having to pan the camera all over the place (especially since the turret tracks along with the camera).  Also, I think the enemy drops should vanish after an amount of time--if you watch the footage I attached I ended up just going around the perimeter of the maps kiting all the enemies into one big death ball--with the time limit maybe it'd incentivize charging in to get the drops.  Other than that gameplay seems solid to me--I liked the health boats & think they're a cool idea.

Here's my footage & I hope it helps. Took me about halfway through to grok the game but I enjoyed it!

Submitted (1 edit)

Looks extremely charming and plays well, I love it.

A couple of thoughts about the mechanics: I feel like the piercing railgun is fairly useless, as it seems to leave you unable to attack (and requires you to beforehand) for a while and only does the same damage as a single normal shot. It pierces, sure, but it doesn't seem worth it. I feel like you could easily buff it a little and maybe compensate by adding a delay to the fire instead (with appropiate s/vfx for it). Enemies overall could also use having less health. Also, please make middle mouse rebindable, it's typically an awful input to execute and my mouse fails to do it 90% of the time. I tried looking into the settings but I'm fairly sure it's hardcoded/not using these settings.

Speaking of the settings, I had a pretty bad time trying to set it at a nice resolution. Gave up in the end. I don't think this is really your fault or that most people will care (and maybe the CRT mod would've done some nice things already), but I @d you in discord if you want to read about it.

More things about the gameplay: I feel like it would be nice if the turret would start rotating once you look towards "the other side", even if it's not an "acceptable angle" it can rotate to. Basically, if, say, its max rotation is 90º to one side, then looking at 100º on that side because you switched while looking back should already make the turret rotate, considering it takes time to do so.

Hitboxes feel a tad larger than they are, at least for the player's hovercraft. I've seen a few enemy boats go out of bounds but since it seems they go back in upon dying, this doesn't seem to be an issue and I'd actually leave it in if it's not already intentional.

I think I'd make the dash work even if you're not holding a movement key, provided that your hovercraft still has some velocity either forward or backwards.

It took me a good while to realise that letting the charge bar fill up makes shots be faster. Maybe the sound should be swapped with something slightly different?

I've seen some enemies getting stuck for a bit too long on islands; maybe their turn rate  could be increased for a bit when that happens, or have them move in reverse?

Also, on the first level, I thought that was the entire span of the demo, so until I read someone else say there was a level 2 I thought I was done with it. The "survive" objective text could probably be changed to something like "destroy the enemy fleet" or so, to clue you in on the enemies not being endless. Overall, the dialogue was pretty funny!


All in all it was fun and I'm looking forward to what you do with it next. I think it could be fun to have some level objectives like taking care of coastal buildings or such; you could have them sit on the side of islands and be destructible, maybe even have stationary turrets that way. Stuff like hovercraft customization, swapping parts with stats or so, could be fun too.

Developer

>I feel like the piercing railgun is fairly useless, as it seems to leave you unable to attack (and requires you to beforehand) for a while and only does the same damage as a single normal shot.
In fact it does double the damage of the regular shot. As I said, it's supposed to be an AoE option with less DPS.

>Enemies overall could also use having less health.
Current enemies are buffed and I added some new weaker basic enemies already.

>Also, please make middle mouse rebindable,
I should've made it more clear, but you can rebind it by rebinding "Zoom".

>I feel like it would be nice if the turret would start rotating once you look towards "the other side", even if it's not an "acceptable angle" it can rotate to.
Turret rotation gives me a lot of headache, but I'll try to rework it. I think you gave me a valuable hint on what to do here.

>Hitboxes feel a tad larger than they are, at least for the player's hovercraft.
Oh, hitboxes are a big mess and there's nothing I can do about it because of how they are implemented in GZDoom. Namely, they are square and do not rotate. I will try to implement some multi-hitbox solutions for bigger enemies, but this is gonna get janky.


>I think I'd make the dash work even if you're not holding a movement key, provided that your hovercraft still has some velocity either forward or backwards.
Sure thing.

>I've seen some enemies getting stuck for a bit too long on islands; maybe their turn rate  could be increased for a bit when that happens, or have them move in reverse?
I've reworked their movement code already, now they will stop, then back up and turn when they encounter obstacle. Doesn't really improves their pathfinding (if it can even be called that), but at least it looks like they're doing something instead of blindly ramming the wall.

>Stuff like hovercraft customization, swapping parts with stats or so, could be fun too.
I absolutely love that kind of thing, but I don't think it will be done in the current iteration. It can be done in GZDoom, but I'd rather avoid any feature creep on the current iteration, I want to release a finished game as soon as possible and focus on working with a different engine.

looks create, music is really charming as well, cool to see people still developing with GZDoom!

might be cool to unlock the player's mouselook so they can see up and down, it would allow you to add aircraft and stuff in later  assuming that's not already a feature

Developer

I don't think I will do proper mouselook in this version of game. That being said, I do hope I'll get around to remaking it on a proper engine later on, or making a sequel.

Submitted

Damn.

It looks great and plays nice. I love the health crate ships idea. Enemies feel slightly bullet spongy. It would be nice to see visible damage when enemy ship is about to be destroyed - that would slightly help with picking target when there are lots of samey enemies.

Gameplay is definetely solid and fair. I managed to win with 1 health point through 2/3 of the second level.

Is it compatible with brutal doom?

Submitted

oh my god this game is SICK! keep it up!

the combat feels great. I think the path finding on enemies might need some help, if I drive in a big circle they all get kinda bunched up around the island and can't do anything.

I also like the characters

Submitted

I wish the missile killed every time it was used but had a chance to fail/miss and that the main gun did more damage. Outside of that it's extremely well made.

Developer(+1)

I have some ideas why weapons feel underwhelming right now besides the lack of damage. To address that I will introduce weaker enemies, and current enemies will be used more sparingly (although their attacks are much more threatening now), and you will see some indication that your shots are having  effect on them, like smoke coming out at lower health.

Submitted

-The dialogue box overlaps the selection box if the text is too long, and it barely uses half the width of the box before wrapping.

-The turret doesn't take the dead zone into account when deciding which direction to traverse in, so it gets stuck if you aim to the other side too quickly or switch to the other side around the back.

-I didn't have any trouble hitting enemies, but an indicator showing the turret's target rotation would still be nice.

-The railgun and torpedoes feel underwhelming.

-One of the gray enemies at the start of level 2 remains stationary and doesn't respond to being attacked.

-Game crashed on level 2 shortly after I killed a supply boat. Don't know if that was the cause. Didn't happen again.

-The delay before the supply boats drop their item is pretty annoying.

-Enemies have too much health.

-Enemy shots are too easy to avoid if you have enough space to not get surrounded, and the gray and yellow boats are too samey (if there's any difference at all). Maybe give the yellow ones a triple shot or make them lead their shots.

Text errors:

Level 1 intro: doing squeaky voice --> doing a squeaky voice

Level 1 outro: Oh hi, --> Oh, hi,; a compensation --> compensation

Level 2 intro: Comma splice in Zoey's first line

Level 2 outro: Comma splice after Chief's "I see"; what you're gonna do about --> what're you gonna do about it; comma splice after above sentence

Developer

Finally, some actual feedback on balance and stuff. Also thanks for dunking on my ESL, although I'm not sure this is gonna be helpful since I'll be changing script a lot in the future.

>The dialogue box overlaps the selection box if the text is too long, and it barely uses half the width of the box before wrapping. 
Were you playing with a low resolution, or high scaling? Dialog box was kind of a mess at lower internal resolutions and I reworked it already.

>The turret doesn't take the dead zone into account when deciding which direction to traverse in, so it gets stuck if you aim to the other side too quickly or switch to the other side around the back.
I am aware of this issue and I'm looking for a way to fix it. By the way, enemies suffer from it too.

>I didn't have any trouble hitting enemies, but an indicator showing the turret's target rotation would still be nice.
I am planning to implement a laser sight or at least a targeting reticle.

>The railgun and torpedoes feel underwhelming.
Torpedoes I have buffed already, but railgun balancing is a tricky thing, it should have a lower DPS against single targets compared to regular cannon. I may increase cannon rate of fire across the board, plus I have already added a consumable item that temporarily buffs the railgun as one of its effects.

>One of the gray enemies at the start of level 2 remains stationary and doesn't respond to being attacked.
Did you "woke" it with a railgun shot? I know that it is one of the reasons for that happening and I found a way to fix it.

>Game crashed on level 2 shortly after I killed a supply boat
Can't do much about it without seeing a crash message.

>The delay before the supply boats drop their item is pretty annoying.
Fixed it, it does looks better if item is dropped right when the explosions start.

>Enemies have too much health.
Yeah, that's a problem because I only had time to implement one enemy type and hovercrafts had to fill the role of a basic enemy. Right now I am working on some smaller, weaker "popcorn" enemies while hovercrafts will have their attacks buffed to turn them into medium-level threats and they will be used more sparingly. That being said, I will probably reduce health on yellow and black boats.

>Enemy shots are too easy to avoid if you have enough space to not get surrounded, and the gray and yellow boats are too samey (if there's any difference at all).
Again, didn't had enough time to implement a proper difference. Right now the yellow boats are just souped-up gray boats (faster, more agile, more health, higher RoF). I am planning to add torpedo launchers on a yellow boat as well as adding more turret types. I'll try to implement leading shots across the board as well.