Post by theoratkin in Polychoron 0.0.5 alpha update comments

Polychoron 0.0.5 alpha update » Comments

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It’s nice that you’re still working on the game! Can’t wait to see what will be in the full release.

I like the fire rate power-up, I wish you could keep it between the levels. I think the game needs some persistent ship upgrades, otherwise it doesn’t feel like you are progressing.

Sometimes I encounter strange black boxes in the levels, I don’t think they are supposed to be there. What could they be?

May I also suggest that you package the Linux version in a directory? tar archives are usually created like this, and most people are already used to it. It can be annoying when your working directory unexpectedly gets cluttered by archive contents.

You are doing really well, keep improving the game. :-)

FRACTiLE Games4 years ago(+1)

I initially wanted to make all the upgrades and power-ups persistent but then the difficulty would have to go up much faster too and it would make it even less predictable due to the random/procedural nature of the game. This could easily lead to unexpected situations where a really good player could keep on playing indefinitely or a the player would face an "unfair" difficulty.

I have some power-ups planned that have limited usage and those will probably stay between levels.

That black box is likely an unused cube mesh instance.. I though I fixed that bug a long time ago but apparently it has returned. Thanks for pointing that out.

I used to have all game files in a sub-directory but I had to change that for the Itch.io app. I'm not sure if that is needed anymore, though.

Thank you for the feedback again!

theoratkin4 years ago

Oh, I didn’t think itch.io app requires to package games in such way. I actually use butler for all my games and it does exactly that. But it packages everything in a zip archive, and those commonly store everything at the top, so it won’t surprise anyone.

In that case you could use zip for the Linux version as well. Or give butler a try, it’s actually a very nice way to manage itch.io releases. ;-)

FRACTiLE Games4 years ago

I don't use zip for Linux release because it doesn't preserve file permissions on executables.. at least I thought it didn't.

I actually already added an item to my to do -list for finally checking out Butler :)

theoratkin4 years ago

It actually does for me. I prefer tar myself, but seeing that itch favors zip I think it’s okay to use it. It’s kind of universal.

FRACTiLE Games4 years ago

Hi again, I'm trying to reproduce that random black box issue but I can't see any. Do you remember if they were there already at start of level or after playing a while and destroying things?

What OS are you using and on what kind of hardware?

theoratkin4 years ago (1 edit)

Hi! I think these boxes appear at the start but I can’t say for sure. And… I actually can’t reproduce it anymore either. I don’t know what happened. It’s just gone now!

I’m playing on Arch Linux on i3wm using GTX 1650 SUPER (with the latest proprietary drivers).

But I’ve found another fun bug while testing. When you scroll the mouse wheel your ship moves vertically very fast. So fast that you can get yourself out of the map!

FRACTiLE Games4 years ago(+1)

I'll put that issue on hold then and get back to it if I can later reproduce it myself.

The mouse wheel control problems have been "fixed" by removing it completely. I didn't know it can warp through walls but the huge acceleration spikes from it caused all sorts of other problems.

Thanks for the help again! By the way, I have a big update almost ready with some of your suggestions implemented :)

theoratkin4 years ago

That’s awesome! Can’t wait to play it!