Had to join just to leave you a comment on your excellent little gem of a game. Found out about it in PC Gamer, now I'm really looking forward to your steam release.
This reminds me of Metroid Prime games' scanning mechanic and also the camera from Beyond Good and Evil (love that game).
I hope the full game will give you flavor text for each of the lifeforms you scan. Also you should get more data from the first of each type you scan and less from scanning the same one again (just a thought).
Hi. I felt like a dummy, having rushed to post my comments after playing for only a short time. After I posted it I noticed that you do indeed get more scan points for the new lifeforms.
I think the swimming controls could use a bit of tweaking, I found it nearly impossible to scan the fish because they are moving around and you are sinking too quickly, or trying to frantically tap up to stay afloat. More buoyancy might make that aspect of the game more enjoyable/manageable. Maybe I'm missing out on a suit upgrade though, I don't think I've gotten all the upgrades yet.
I noticed sometimes the lantern gets caught and left behind in the block above your head while you're digging. Just a minor bug. Also in fullscreen mode I noticed some kind of separation in the tiles. I didn't notice that in windowed mode.
You should make escape key exit the game to a menu (of course these types of things may be getting addressed in the full game, just my observations from what I've played). I got stuck the first time and had to manually force quit because I couldn't figure out how to get out of full screen and exit. I realized afterward F key was what was needed to toggle back to windowed mode, but that's not intuitive.
I think you should limit digging to a shorter reach and not be able to dig on the opposite side of rock. Just a tiny thing that bugged me for some reason :)
Great game though, has lots of charm and fun mechanics. Will be interesting to see what else the full version has in store.
What are you using to develop the game out of curiosity?
Hey,
yeah I could never get the swimming controls the way I wanted for that demo. there's no extra suit upgrade for that, it's just bad design :P.
And the digging--I've decided I'm going to remove digging. It's a good way to hide secrets, but having to put rocks down everywhere just sort of spoils the look of the game. beyond that, digging kind of messes with the core concept: you're here to observe, not to destroy. digging destroys.
I made the game in openfl, using haxepunk as my framework. mostly because I started with flash and flashpunk--I don't know if I'd heartily recommend haxepunk. haxeflixel is probably better.
Digging is a fun part of the game, but I think you get that upgrade too soon. If it were me I'd leave it in, but work it into a later upgrade of some sort. I don't mind the rocks, that was kind of a new thing I'd not seen done in this type of explorer game. You always see double jump and jetpacks, and keys or ammo types that unlock doors, this was original as a barrier that caused you to need to dig tunnels to find ways around them. Maybe there could be a pick upgrade at a later stage to break the rocks too.
I'm not familiar with any of those tools you mentioned, I've used gamemaker and Unity myself.
