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A jam submission

WodopomView game page

Race to the Wodopom, whatever that is.
Submitted by PricklyPearGames (@ColeDitzlerOnTw) — 2 days, 23 hours before the deadline
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Wodopom's itch.io page

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Visuals: I like the UI and ship sprites, I prefer some grit in my space games. The animations of the weapons and utilities firing were entertaining to watch. 

Audio: Sounds were fine, though the occasional sound felt loud in the mix. The culprit usually being the sound of defending against  a local hazard. The radio in the bottom right is cool. Wish I could hold click and keep on dragging to turn the dial instead of rubbing or spam clicking the dial though. 

Gameplay: Entertaining FTL like, though I haven't played the game in many years. The variety in ships and races is quite impressive. I played as several ships in explore mode and beat up some fools as well as buying from some shops. Fighting gameplay was pretty solid. Main issues were having a hard time clicking on doors and having it register, and that I found it hard to know at a glance that a subsystem failed. It would be nice if a flashing red light occurred in a room to notify that it broke, or do what FTL does and have an icon in the room that changes color. 

Seems solid, hope to see it refined. 

Developer

Good idea with color changing icons, I'll try that out.
thank you for playing!

Submitted(+1)

I don't understand :( I've never played FTL.

How do I shoot them? I think I selected lasers or rockets and then I click their ship and I see the "1" and "2" circles but it seems like my ship doesn't fire?

Developer

To fire the weapons, you gotta have a crew member in the weapons room

Submitted(+1)

Ok I played it and killed some guys! But I kept leaving combat for no reason I could understand, like I would just go back to the main map. Is that because of energy? I didn't know how to use energy while playing.

It was a lot for me to try to understand, I think a walkthrough tutorial would be good to introduce the concepts.

Developer

Nice work, it was probably the softlock detector, if you don't get killed or kill them within three minutes you get booted out of combat to prevent a softlock. The energy is confusing, fair heuristic is just that more = better. I'll rework the tutorial, it's out of date already. 
Thanks for playing

(1 edit) (+1)

Combat, shops, crew managment look pretty advanced and seem to work well, but the game feels confusing and unresponsive. The biggest problem is some things feel unresponsive or there's little info.

  • "Shift for more info" should be on by default, instead of pressing key.
  • Lack of indication where the weapon on auto-attack is aiming.
  • When weapons hits, it feels like nothing is happening. There's no punch. I see the laser but did it do anything? Only when I look at health bar do I see that yes, it did something. Explosion, damage number or something would make it more clear that weapons actually have effect.
  • No indication whether enemy system is destroyed or damaged.
  • I think some icons are not clear what they represent.
    • Teleporter power - lightning bolt doesn't fit here at all
    • Teleporter button - I thought it's some sort of biological blob icon at first.
  •  Inconsistency in icons. Icon for a particular thing should be the same no matter where it is. For example: oxygen is bubbles in power menu, but O2 in ship room and oxygen % display.
  • Unused energy bars are too small. It's hard to estimate how much there is with a quick glance.
  • When adding or taking away power you have aim at upgraded power slots. This should work even when clicking on unupgraded slots.
Developer

>Lack of indication where the weapon on auto-attack is aiming.
the auto weapons just fire randomly until you target them
>damage number or something
I'll experiment with it
Thanks for playing.

Submitted(+1)

game was fine overall, altho it could use more tooltips to help understand stuff better. i beat a bunch of fights but i ended up running out of rockets and couldnt find a shop to buy more so i just stopped being able to win fights, might be just because im bad tho, i didnt really understand ftl very well either

Developer

Who did you play as? Thank you for playing. 

Submitted

pomao

Developer

Ah yes, the main thing with pomao is you gotta sell the IOU and buy more weapons or upgrades or something that would let you get by even if you ran out of rockets. If you didn't run into any stores then you pretty much got screwed by RNG, sorry to hear that. 

(+1)

Pretty cool, not sure what the bottom right UI element does, but fiddling it it seems to cause a freeze. It is also one of the few elements not having a tooltip. Which is by the way a really great feature. The main gameplay loop seems bug free, though it could be a little more proactive as my crew never had to do much, but I can understand that building a challenge comes after everything works as intended. Nice work all and all.

(+2)

Context: I have played FTL in the past, and completed all ships on Hard mode in Advanced edition, though with heavy abuse of pausing. I have also played a little bit of Wodopom previously.

What does "T-clicking" in the tutorial refer to?

For the player ship, the room symbols are difficult to make out from the background for me. In FTL, there is a single, clear to see, room symbol in each room (in FTL, there are also empty rooms without any system on it), for both the player ship and the enemy ship. See also the attached screenshot. In FTL, you can always see the room type of an enemy, I think, unless the enemy ship is cloaked. Could it make sense for you to similarly have a single, clear symbol in each room instead of many symbols that might be difficult to make out? I know you can hold shift or 'z' (which is nice) to see the room type, but it would still be nicer to see at a glance. If you implemented it as an algorithm, it might not require much work. But, an algorithm would also take time and be complex. In FTL, I supposed there is always a "center" tile for a system room to put the room type symbol in, and where a crewmate will never stand fully on top of the symbol, because the center is never a tile. That is not the case for Wodopom. Might that be the explanation for why the creators of FTL never added 1x1 or 1x3 tile rooms? (reverse engineering game design :) ). I do not know what the best approach would be here.


(continued, itch.io gave me an error when I tried to post the original comment).

Room symbols continued: When you use 'z' or shift to hover over a room type, it might be nice to add the room type symbol to the pop-up hover. Or, maybe have the symbols on the room become colorful and easy to make out? I also wonder: Might it make sense to "shift" the room symbols? Like, room symbols are not placed on the center of tiles, but always on the edges between tiles? That way, characters will never stand fully on top of the symbols, even if the room is full.


I tried holding 'shift' and 'z' over these parts of the UI:


But it did not show any tooltip/pop-up. It is mostly self-explanatory, though, especially for new players, it might be nice. Might not be worth implementing if it is bothersome to add a tooltip to those UI elements, however.

Is there any saving or loading at the moment? When I select a crew member on the left-most side of the screen, and the crew member is not the top one, the crew member jumps up the list. Once the crew member is at the top of the list, I can click the crew symbol again to see the inventory for that crew member. That feels a bit annoying, at least so far.

When I select a crew member on the left-most side of the screen, and the crew member is not the top one, the crew member jumps up the list. Once the crew member is at the top of the list, I can click the crew symbol again to see the inventory for that crew member. That feels a bit annoying, at least so far.

Nitpick: Possible, though minor (I think), bug: The body armor is currently in the helmet slot: 

Nitpick: I have a bit of trouble understanding the first line in the pop-up hover, namely what "Armor 2.1x" and "Armor 1.1x" means. I can hover over the items to see what they do, which is nice. I cannot hover over the skills yet, however, while in the inventory.

When an enemy is not at the enemy ship's helm, the enemy ship's jump engine still charges. In FTL, the jump meter does not charge unless the enemy is an in-game-AI ship, or has the pilot system upgrade. Would the same make sense for Wodopom?

Nitpick: Inventory: I can apparently put any item in any character equipment slot, as long as I first unequip it. I assume this has not been implemented yet.

I imagine the inventory is still under heavy development, but it looks nice so far.

Crew fights tend to happen very quickly. I think they are usually slower in FTL, and there is pausing.

The pirate hats are amazing :) .

Nitpick: When teleporting back, could it be useful to have returning crew land somewhere near the teleporter?

Nitpick: After visiting a shop, I think my current "trace" on the starmap disappeared.

Nitpick: The transition between tracks on the radio is somewhat abrupt.

Whoops, I lost one of my veteran attack crew after combat went very fast, I did not get to click "Teleport back" before he was dead. And his items are lost as well, it seems. Boarding is dangerous.

Does my own crew get healed by the enemy's healing room? It appears so.

I bought and equipped a blaster to my only remaining boarding crew member, and his attack almost doubled. I tried equipping a second body armor on him, and now his attack is even higher. He is a shield guy that I hired at a shop, and after I lost one of the starting 3 crew members, I have 3 crew members now, one pilot at the helm, one shield guy, and that boarder.

Oh god, some lightning-quick enemies boarded my ship and murdered my shield crew, even after I tried to run him around. The bunny with a knife murdered him. I guess I pay for being greedy and moving equipment away from my other crew members onto my main border, and I think paying for greed is good. At least my boarder and my pilot is still alive, but I have no shield charge guy now. The med-bay did not heal my crew nearly quickly enough - I should have upgraded it more than level 2, I think.

Nitpick: After I defeated an enemy ship, the boomerang projectiles from the enemy weapons are still circling around their ship.

Oh wait, I think my trace on the starmap returned after I "zoomed out".

My O2 system is blinking red, which is a nice feature. Though, the O2 is at 100%, and I do not understand why it is blinking red.

I got a crew as a reward! Up to 4 crew members.

Listening to the radio is nice.

Enemies are becoming stronger, my sole boarder with 98 kills by now got to less than a third health after killing the 4 or so enemy crew members.

My weapons systems and weapons are the same as in the start. I have upgraded shields, healing, and energy.

I got close to losing:

My sole boarder could not attack this enemy crew member or move to the free space, I think, and the weapons kept shooting. However, after some time (30+ seconds?), the enemy crew member moved elsewhere (maybe my sole rocket caused damage to the enemy ship?), and got killed by my boarder. In FTL, boarders that are in a room without crew but with a ship system, attack and damage that system, meaning that the defending crew have a reason to go to that ship system beyond just fighting, namely in order to defend the system and try to prevent it from being damaged.

For some reason, I cannot repair my ship at the shop, even though I have plenty of scrap.

While my ship is not invulnerable, I feel like I am exploiting the game. I am getting lots of scrap now, and went to a shop and hired a number of crew members. My sole boarder has 125 kills now.

I got boarded, and I think I tried to counter-board, but my crew might have been forcefully returned, or I miss-clicked, or something. One of my crew died, my engine crew member, but at this point I have many crew members, 7 after his death. I found a few combats ago a double-sword fire crew member, and am trying to train him up. I only had a bit of gear for him, but I found two items that gave him regeneration, and one of them seem to scale with my medbay, if I understand it correctly. And I have upgraded my medbay a lot, in order to heal more quickly after combat. So despite having very little combat experience, and mostly poor items and stats, he has actually survived boarding. Two boarding members now.

I think I will stop now. The gameplay is rather monotone now, and I think it is because I am abusing the system. Also, crew boarding seems to be able to kill any ship. In FTL, this was not generally the case for multiple (many as it turns out, now that I have listed a lot of them) different reasons:

  • Drone ships have no crew and have no oxygen, meaning only one rare type of crew member can survive there indefinitely.
  • The enemy flag ship will continue fighting, even when all its crew has died.
  • If the enemy has a highly upgraded health system, killing off enemy crew can be very difficult.
  • Random events can not always be handled by crew.
  • There can be defensive drones that can fight.
  • In FTL, the combat system allowed a maximum number of crew in a room, rooms are at most 4 tiles I believe, and not all crew went to a specific battle. Also, the weapon system continued to work even when there is no crew in it, and at most one crew member could contribute to the weapon system's effectiveness, at a maximum of +20% I think. Crew battle is also much slower. This means that even if you had 4 full-experience mantis, the enemy ship could still fire its weapons and do damage to your ship, depending on if you had cloaking, defensive drones (shooting down enemy missiles, projectiles, boarding drones, maybe hacking system).
  • Cloaking on an enemy ship prevents teleporting to the ship, maybe also teleporting back and rescuing crew.
  • Supershields on an enemy ship (always present on enemy Zoltan ships) meant that you had to shoot down the Zoltan shield first. And, if the enemy has a shield drone (or the enemy flag ship), regeneration of the supershield might mean that you cannot board or rescue your crew, making boarding dangerous. This means that, for Zoltan ships, you really need to be able to hit the enemy ship with attack drones or weapons (or have the special ship augment (FTL lets each ship have 3 augments) that enables you to teleport through supershields) to defeat Zoltan ships and other ships with supershields.
  • There is no crew equipment.
  • There are system effects, such as asteroid field, pulsar system, and too-close-to-sun. The pulsar is especially dangerous for boarding, since it might knock out your shields and teleporter, meaning you take a lot of damage and might be unable to board or teleport back crew.
  • Enemy mind control can making boarding more dangerous.
  • Enemy hacking can make boarding more dangerous, such as draining oxygen or making health systems cause damage instead of healing, or make clone systems not work.
  • There is a cool-down on the teleporter, meaning that rescuing crew is not instantly done, and deployment is not done instantly. Also, you have to target the specific room you teleport back from.
  • Enemy ships have door systems that can hinder movement.
  • FTL has visibility where you cannot always see all of an enemy's ship (or your own ship in a nebula!). For instance if your sensor system is damaged or not upgraded, or you are in a nebula, you may not see all that is going on the enemy ship. And enemy cloaking can hinder visibility.

I think your game is really fun and complex already, and I am impressed by all that you have implemented so far. I think there are a number of game design and game balance challenges, and after giving that large list before, I am beginning to be impressed by FTL's game design. It got a bit repetitive during the last part, in part due to me abusing the systems, and in part due to boarding possibly not being balanced and varied. I have not played through a lot of the game, simply because I barely used the weapons, so this does not try out a lot of what the game has to

Screenshots from the final ship and crew:





Developer(+1)

That was an epic yarn, and your crew is storied. I love to see it. I'll add a lot of those things you mentioned in the anti-boarding list. 
Thank you for playing!

Developer(+1)

after reading through the comment chain, if you never figured out
>What does "T-clicking" in the tutorial refer to?
you may be mildly upset to find that I meant to click the enemy ship while holding T, this sets the target for the teleporter. 

(+1)

I did indeed never figure it out, but I am not upset, instead I am laughing out loud :) .

(+1)

Started as Mummies, don't think all my Weapons were that useful.

Systems seem to be all there and working, Graphics are there for once, but not everywhere yet, mainly Ships are missing their backgrounds, and some Things like the Shieldbubble and Crewsprites could be better to fit with the UI and Stuff I guess.

I like that you have more different Options then just Laser, laser2, missile etc like FTL, and that you also seem to actually allow some Form of infinite Travel instead of always racing against the Time. 

I wish there were more non-combat Events and Spacestations and Stuff. (Apparently they're at fixed Positions and I just kept cycling the same Shop. Therefore also no different Selection of Stuff to buy. If thats the Case, ignore whenever I complain about Shops and Stuff)

Ship designs are sometimes decent looking, sometimes pretty weird and nonsensical.

Having a Radio is a pleasent surprise, pretty neat once you get tired of the Background Music in a long Run. But it'D probably play this without bgm anyway and put on my own. Not that it isn't fitting music.

Also pretty nice that there's equipment for the Crew and everything, makes it seem more complex and in depth then FTL. But some of the UI clearly is a placeholder or needs an overhaul if it isn't.

I wish Crewmember Positions wouldn't change in the sidebar when I click on them. Makes it hard to keep track of who's good at what.

I don't know how or when this happened, but somehow I got a new Crewmember through a Fight or something? Neat. (Apparently when the Enemy Ship draws near death, some Crewmembers can teleport over and change Sides? That'd be neat. But it says Intruder Alert constantly during that, so maybe a Bug? Just seemed to be an Intruder that stayed in Place in the End afterall. The big Wormy Thing.

A higher Rate of Weapondrops, or more Weapons to buy in Shops would be nice tho, just the start laser alone is really slow.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, especially the missing non-combat Events, the placeholder UI Parts, and the seemingly very easy difficulty, it is very much addicting. Expected to play this for a few Minutes, but put quite a bit longer in it. Didn't Time it thought, sorry.

Repairing my Ship doesn't seem to work, the Button is locked out, even at Traders.

When your entire Crew dies, the Game should just end, instead of being forced to watch your Ship die slowly. Explore and Run Mode also seem to be inversed, so when I start in Explore Mode, it starts in Run and vice versa.

Developer(+1)

>Started as Mummies, don't think all my Weapons were that useful.
Their weapons are the oddest set you can start with, the tractor beam is mostly defensive, while the ropes are useful to reduce enemy dodge, their real strength comes from the extra scrap you get while killing other ships with ropes attached. The double laser is sort of a punishment for getting some other good perks to start (level 4 weapons, three crew with +weapons skill) because it fires slowly compared to the basic laser, but you need it to break shields where the others can't. 
>A higher Rate of Weapondrops, or more Weapons to buy in Shops would be nice tho, just the start laser alone is really slow.
in explore mode the drops are throttled and the prices are jacked up to slow down the progression. It will make more sense when there are quests/events.
>Repairing my Ship doesn't seem to work, the Button is locked out, even at Traders.
it only works at the home star in explore mode, that's where the yellow line points in the star map, always home for repairs.
>When your entire Crew dies, the Game should just end
yes, I'll fix that. I was hesitant because there's a small chance you can come back from having no crew, but it's not worth it. 


Thank you for playing and thanks for the analysis. 

Submitted(+1)

I love FTL, this seems like a good interpretation of it. The spritework is awesome. Agree with what everyone is saying about the screen size though- I had to switch monitors to play it.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I've played this game a fair bit ever since it came out. It even made me reinstall FTL to do a few runs for comparison's sake and I gotta say Wodopom is pretty impressive. 

The new window screen size is a pretty big deterrent to keep playing though, I'm not a fan of having to zoom out the screen because small UI elements are a pet peeve of mine. 

I think crew killing weapons are my favorite, sorry Pomao  

Developer

There will be a setting to scale the game, but the UI size is bigger than it was, in pixels anyway, it's just the huge resolution that makes it seem small.  Crew killing is a good strategy, and it's why there's only the one pomao in the game, so you won't have to kill him. 
Thanks for playing!

(+1)

Is there any way to change the resolution of the game? Or go into or out of fullscreen?

Developer(+1)

I don't have fullscreen enabled on it because the radio UI is right where the fullscreen button would appear. On the other hand, since it runs in browser, you can just change the zoom level of the page. There's a few ways to do it, my preferred method is (on a mac) holding command and pressing the minus key. On a windows computer, you should be able to hold ctrl and press the minus key to zoom out.  

(+2)

This game is awesome!

Submitted(+1)

Cool game! Its a bit rough around the edges in some places but it seems really promising. I'll preface this by saying I didn't look at the tutorial at all and just jumped into the game playing explore mode. Some thoughts:

  • What about having selected units get outlines when selected?
  • Would be nice to have a clear indicator when room are online/offline.
  • Holding shift made tooltips blink, Z worked, then suddenly shift started working too.. I dunno
  • Would be nice with some soft of animation/icon over their heads and sound when putting out fires and repairing things.
  • HP bars over injured units.
  • I didn't see any indicator that a room was damaged other than on the power display.
  • Different icons for shops on the map would be nice.
  • Pressing Z on enemy crew did nothing, intended?
  • An "auto" setting for the radio would be nice, so it changes channels by itself when a song runs out for example.
  • Dying was very abrupt, and then when starting a new game I got a very odd bug (see vid). Refreshing the page fixed it. https://files.catbox.moe/85cply.webm
  • What does left clicking weapons do?
  • Could never repair my ship the option was always crossed out. When are you supposed to be able to?
  • Fought a ship with no enemy crew, intended?
Developer
  • Different icons for shops on the map would be nice.

they're slightly larger when you zoom out with c+click, Maybe I'll do the same with the stars in normal view

  • An "auto" setting for the radio would be nice, so it changes channels by itself when a song runs out for example.

you can put the radio on shuffle by clicking the channel number, this will turn the text green and the music will randomly change occasionally.

  • Could never repair my ship the option was always crossed out. When are you supposed to be able to?

when you're playing in explore mode, you have a trail and a yellow line. The yellow line always points to your home star, which is the only place you can repair. In run mode you can repair whenever you aren't in combat.

  • Fought a ship with no enemy crew, intended?

if your security room is turned off, the enemy crew disappear, as does the health bar for the enemy ship. This is because the security room represents the scanners and doors. 

  • Pressing Z on enemy crew did nothing, intended?

increasing your security room power will allow you to know more about the enemy crew. 

Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+1)

I've played so much FTL that I didn't even need the tutorial and enjoyed figuring out everything.

While holding down shift is ok, I would recommend coloring the icons for the different rooms or at least darkening them/increasing the contrast so it's easier to see where everything is at a glance.

Highly enjoy the music, almost seems like it adapts to what is happening (is it?). Can't wait to see the designs for the other ships. I would probably also like to see selecting multiple characters at once.

Love me' crab ship. simple as.

Developer

The music isn't adaptive, but that's fascinating. I think the reason it feels as if it may be is the fact that the channel 0 song, which I assume you were listening to, is long with a lot of different arrangements of the same stanzas. I'm glad you like the crab ship, thank you for playing :)