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A jam submission

Hammerhead SquadView game page

WW2 submarine base tactics
Submitted by TC Interactive, [snowburn] — 4 days, 2 hours before the deadline
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Hammerhead Squad's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Controls - How well does it control?#13.6673.667
Graphics/Visuals#33.6673.667
Fun - How fun is it?#33.3333.333
Overall#33.1433.143
Tactical - How tactical is it?#33.0003.000
Theme - How well does it match the theme?#42.6672.667
Sounds/Music#42.6672.667
Innovation - How unique are the mechanics?#43.0003.000

Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How large was your team?
3

What tools/engine were used to build the game?
Unity

Will you continue to work on the game?
yes

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Comments

Host(+2)

Great job! The game had all the features you would expect in a turn based tactics game. I really liked the the character select screen and having time units instead of a set number of action points. I was also going to mention some of the things Rebello mentioned such as chance to hit and also the mission objective. Also, I felt that the map layout is a bit too spread out as you couldn't always safely run to the next cover and perform an action. I am looking forward to see your updates in the future because I would love to see that Shardpunk style campaign in this style.

Developer (1 edit) (+2)

Thanks syncr0! I really appreciate your interest in our project. Indeed, we are more accustomed to the Time Unit system from old-school tactical games, but perhaps we'll try other alternative Action Point  systems. Personally, I liked the systems in Gears Tactics and Phantom Doctrine a lot, so we'll experiment to see what we get.

Regarding the campaign, we wanted to have a branching level system, but unfortunately we didn't manage to implement it by the delivery date. However, it's on our immediate TO-DO list to start designing the strategic layer.

Thank you very much for your comment and your time!

Submitted(+3)

Firstly, we were really impressed with your entry. It has all the elements that we would expect from a turn-based strategy, with nice orders, movement and overall controls. Graphics were nice and consistent and nothing broke that we saw. Good choice of existing asset packs like Synty and URP Water. Great job. We want to give you some honest feedback though, which will hopefully help you to make your game better.

For us turn based strategies are all about making meaningful, informed, decisions. We're going to mention that quite a few times.

Team selection and backstories was a nice touch, although you just added them all to the team. There was no meaningful decision to be made here.

Health bars were nice to see but you didn't have any idea what the scale was, also the enemies didn't have any health bars, so you were completely in the dark with them. How many health points did you have? How much damage would an enemy weapon do? How much damage would your weapon do to an enemy? You couldn't make any meaningful decision about who to attack, and which unit to attack with, and all the health/damage/chance to hit information was hidden. You just ended up randomly clicking on a unit to attack with and a unit to attack and then just sat back and waited.

In theory you could move into cover but, with the AI as it is, you didn't need to. You could just move behind them, and they didn't know you were there. You could then just shoot them from behind without needing to be in cover at all. We just went to the end of the map (thinking it would end the game) and then worked backwards like a firing squad. They seemed to have fixed positions or firing directions or to move to known positions to fire, sometimes running past us to where look the opposite direction to us, or ran up to us, ignored us and ran away again.

This brings us to the fact that we didn't know what the mission objective was. We seemed to be following the flags but at the end nothing happened. Presumably we had to kill all the enemies (while repairing the leaks that any of their grenades created) but we didn't really know for sure. We played for over an hour and didn't manage to complete the first level, so we didn't see if there were more levels or a meta game between levels. Probably you might want to have an intro level that you can finish quickly, that teaches you the basics, and gives you the sense of accomplishing something. We didn't get that buzz of finishing anything, just that the level dragged on.

Chance to hit was completely unknowable. In classic XCOM style you could be on an adjacent square to an enemy and miss them 3 times in a row. Again, there was no meaningful decision to be made here about whether you were more likely to hit with a given unit/weapon or from a given position.

Weapon damage was similarly unknowable. The shotgun seemed to be deadly, but the damage was random and the lower or upper values of damage you could do was unknown. It wasn't clear if the range affected damage either, although you could at least see the range of your weapon on the tiles, which did make that an informed decision, nice! Time to kill an enemy unit seemed to be very large, and without any health feedback on the enemies you had no idea whether they were close to death or not.

Movement range was clearly indicated too with the line changing color when it was beyond range. This was very good. Cover indicators were good, although full/half cover wasn't clear. Sometimes we felt we were in full cover, but the unit still crouched as if it was half cover. Great work on those animations, they really added a lot to the feel of the game and were well done overall. You could move through scenery like red barrels though!

Graphically there were only a few notes. The health bars weren't horizontal on the screen. You were billboarding them to the camera position, not camera direction. Something like this in you HealthBar (Late)Update method should fix it: 

        transform.LookAt(transform.position - Camera.main.transform.forward, Vector3.up);

Health bars partially were clipped by the water, perhaps move them to a separate UI overlay camera so they're always in front. When in third person over the shoulder firing mode, sometimes the enemy and your shots were obscured by scenery. It's very hard to get this right but it was nice to see you have this change of any close-up for the shots.

For the UI, you had no idea what weapon you had on your character, or what stats it might have, until you saw the "missed" message (sometimes a hit one, but not often). You didn't know when your team had run out of action points to know whether to end the turn or not without going to each unit. This is partly because of the large action point economy of 100 points. It's one reason why a lot of games use a smaller number of action points. It does mean you can step out of cover though and then step back into cover without needing to have automatic "step out and back in again to shoot" logic that a smaller number of AP would require.

SOUND VOLUME WAS A BIT LOUD AND WE COULDN'T FIND A VOLUME CONTROL. We had to use the Windows game bar to lower it to 2/100. The non-so-in-the-background music got a bit annoying after a while, but maybe it was more about the volume. Nice shooting sound effects.

Overall though, well done guys. That was a great entry to the jam and thanks for making it!

Developer(+2)

Wow, thank you very much for such an extensive review. I really appreciate that you took the time to write all this; it means a lot to us!

We plan to continue with the game; we want to achieve something like a linear roguelike (or not so much), similar to Shardpunk or Depth of Extinction, with a short campaign where the team has to progress through a level tree. The idea is that the player chooses the units at the beginning and tries to reach the end with those same units, giving it a survival touch.

The idea of having action points in increments of 100 comes mainly for two reasons: influences from Jagged Alliance and also the intention to integrate it into the flooding system, but unfortunately, we didn't get to it. Our idea is that as the water level rises, it becomes more difficult to perform actions (not just movement), so it made more sense to be more granular. Nevertheless, I agree with what you're saying, and it could be simplified.

The idea with the AI was to have offensive and defensive units (like the ones with MG42s). I added validations for them to check their surroundings when attacked, but I think there was a bug that I didn't see before the release, causing them not to respond. We will fix it along with several other AI improvements. Also, we might remove the vision cones since small maps don't make much sense for them.

As for the UI, it's not my strong suit – I've been a back-end programmer all my life lol! We used CodeMonkey's ui for both the HUD and elements in 3D space, but we didn't give it the priority it really deserved. We will improve it in a future version. (In fact, today I already started working on changing the movement grid from sprites to a dynamically generated area mesh like in XCOM)

We really liked the theme, and we will continue working on the game. So, again, we appreciate your recommendations and the time you spent with our game!

Thank you very much!

Developer(+3)

new version released!

Developer(+3)

Incoming new version...... (in 2-3 hours)