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(2 edits)

Really enjoyed the demo, couple things.

1. Would you be able to add a system where when you mouse over attributes/modifiers there's a little tooltip that pops up that tells what they do?  Like when you mouse over a box that has the 'perpetual' modifier it would say something like 'Resets to 0 when completed, can be performed indefinitely' or when you mouse over the 'Calmness' in your inventory it would say 'Decreases the time spent in all tasks'.

2. When it comes to calmness/time modifiers, would it be possible to make it so instead of the timer themselves ticking down faster, it just decreases the total amount of time displayed? That way it's easier to tell exactly how much time something actually costs you at that moment.

3. Is it possible to make it so that once you complete the final boss of the demo, you can toggle it so that you can complete tasks instantly instead of having to wait. (Maybe you could add a slider too that would let you complete a certain percentage of a task instantly so you don't accidentally just kill yourself by climbing the hill)

4. When you encounter a node, would you be able to add an indicator (like a question mark or something) that tells the player that interacting with this node will unlock additional nodes? It kinda sucks when you do something like drinking the water 40 times and it does unlock something for you but then you try and do the same with gathering spring water which takes longer and it doesn't.

5. I know someone else mentioned this before but making it so that you can see nodes that you have already encountered on subsequent runs would be really nice. I don't know how hard that would be but I assume all that you would need to do is just add like an 'isDiscovered' true false value that when triggered would just display a faded version of the node on your map in subsequent playthroughs.

6. There seems to be a bug where sometimes swapping to single/loop mode doesn't actually swap you over, I'm not sure what triggers it but I've noticed that happens sometimes.

Really like what you've done so far, I also hope that there's a steam demo coming in the future

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

1. I’m planning to add an in-game glossary soon. I’ll consider the mouse over feature if I end up doing a UI rework.

2. There is a math formula that can convert haste to equivalent CDR, so it should be a simple visual change. I try to avoid extra calculation to save frames, but I’ll see what I can do!

3. I’m thinking about adding a 'Fast Forward' upgrade that just speeds up the whole game. It wouldn’t affect game balance, just make things faster.

4. That’s a good idea. Maybe an indicator for when a node disables another one too.

5. The biggest hurdle right now is probably the save system. There’s a save file that gets wiped every time players reincarnate, which I change frequently since it’s “safe” to do so. There’s also another separate persistent save file that I avoid modifying because it’s kinda permanent. On top of that, there’s the queue system. Players will probably want to queue nodes they’ve seen before, so it has to work with that as well.

6. Are you using Alt-Tab to switch between windows? I do that a lot and noticed that the single/loop mode switches on its own as well.

I want to implement all of these player suggestions and polish up a bit before releasing a Steam demo, but it’s definitely on the way. Thanks a lot!

(1 edit) (+1)

When you say 'saving frames' are you saying that you are running the 'haste' calculation every single frame? That calculation should only ever need to be done whenever you complete an activity that alters haste.

I don't think that alt-tabbing is the issue as I don't recall alt tabbing before it happened. What happens is I manually swap the mode to 'single' by clicking it, and the symbol reflects that, however nodes still loop even though the symbol is displaying single (i was not using queueing either so that wouldn't do it).

Thanks to your comment, I went back and cached the haste calculation. Before it was just simple multiplication so I didn’t bother, but now it uses a square root, so this should avoid those more expensive operations. I also made it show the exact time needed now.

As for the mode swap issue, I wasn’t able to reproduce that, but I’ll keep an eye on it!

(2 edits)

Even if they calculated every single frame this really shouldn't impact performance unless the optimization is terrible. Maybe it's just a language thing, but I could perform the square root of 7727 a million times in just 4635428 nanoseconds (~1/216 of a second) with a Java loop. That's far more than needed and they should indeed only be updating it when there's an actual change.

Although speaking of optimization I wonder why there's a stutter when saving. Not that I mind considering it makes identifying when the game saves easier.

(+1)

Please ensure the original time remains visible somehow to ease calculations. It'd be a pain to subtract all my modifiers so I can start doing math.