itch.io

Thanks for playing and for the feedback! I can see how the project can come off as cryptic, esoteric, or uninviting. That’s part of its core identity, and I apologize if that is a point of frustration.

My philosophy toward game design is that failure is the best part. At some point, game designers have to let players off the rails, make mistakes, and fail, because failure is integral to learning. The first and only test of THE OMEGA REACH is to ask players to navigate to The Reach and then activate it. After that, it should gradually become more intuitive as you keep playing.

There is most likely a change (or ten million) that could improve its intuitiveness. That’s why I’m considering feedback like yours—and still a year away from the full release. I’ll look into that and let you know.

I imagine that the search bar is related to your browser or device. However, I’ll double-check that too.

Cheers!

Also, the project uses IndexedDB for persisting the session. At first, I used localStorage in my projects, but I found it quite limiting when wanting to store bigger or more complex data structures. However, both strategies are viable. Especially, if you just want to store a JSON-encoded representation of your game’s state—and it’s smaller than a few megabytes—then localStorage is a much simpler way to accomplish that. Seriously, it’s the difference between just calling localStorage.setItem(), versus ensuring a database exists, creating it if not, and connecting to it, before you can set that item.

I’m not proud of this source code, but it’s pretty loadbearing: https://github.com/nicross/the-omega-reach/blob/main/src/js/app/storage/api.js