Post by AlexJItchio in Helixteus 3 comments

Viewing post in Helixteus 3 comments

After putting several dozen hours into this game I'd like to give my opinion on what makes this game enjoyable and how it can be improved.

The early game is amazing while you're first learning about what systems exist and you feel the scope stretch outwards as you grow. There is a curious "I wonder what gets unlocked next" which carries through your mind and keeps you going.

The early-mid game when you are nearing the end of your first universe and start bumping up against the limit of expansion is a bit of a let-down. There isn't much of a reason to scale into clusters and superclusters as the lack of any structures that can be built on those scales makes progress there tedious.

The mid game when you're first creating new universes but have not yet gotten enough dimension remnants to justify creating a new dimension can feel like a slog. The only time you get to experiment with new content is between universes, and that's several hours between. Even when you're able to alter fundamental properties you're really suffering for probe points and I can imagine some players feeling like it's not worth repeating until they unlock dimensions.

The mid-late game when you've finally gotten enough dimension remnants to create a new dimension can be heaps of fun. The players who stick with the game to this point and get the curtain pulled back on the math can see a distant future where they can break this game's mechanics over their knee. If they invest poorly and get stuck repeating the mid game, I can imagine a lot of people quitting here, but those who are able to find an expanding niche to exploit... oh-boy...

The post-late game, when you have invested hundreds of thousands of dimension remnants, are able to complete universes in less than an hour, and can reap exponential amounts of remnants every time you create a new dimension is when this game reaches 10/10 territory. Does having 10000+ universe value (after having reduced the cost of it to the floor) feel broken? Yes. But when you've spent days struggling against the grind the ability to drop so many dimension remnants that you can minimize the building cost down to almost nothing, or make the probe point cost of time speed insanely cheap (zoooom!) or pump pickaxe speed up so high that you can crack a planet in half within the first 5 minutes of a new universe is, in my opinion, where this game really hits its stride. Incremental games like these live or die on whether you're able and how enjoyable they are to break. And this game feels insanely fun to break.

Apple07262 years ago(+1)

Hey, thanks for your comment, your part-by-part analysis was very interesting to read!

I'm aware of how useless clusters, and especially superclusters, are right now, and I'm still open to ideas on how to make them more interesting. Probably not "terastructures" or "omegastructres" though, I want to be a bit more original than that.

When creating new universes, yeah I need to add more variety, but again, not sure what yet.

When resetting a dimension for the first time, I could include a tip to guarantee faster progress right off the bat, and maybe pointers on how to break the game.

Regarding the post-late game, I thought it was a bad thing that the player was able to break the game (and consequently nerfed it to oblivion a few days ago, probably a mistake), but apparently you say it's really fun, so I think I'll make it a feature, but I'll still make it a biiit slower than what you experienced lol.

Just curious, what made you continue playing the game despite the slog you went through after the early game?

AlexJItchio2 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Just curious, what made you continue playing the game despite the slog you went through after the early game?

Due to the "Dimensional Remnants" teasing its future unlock on the right-hand side of the universe list I knew there was more content to discover but dreaded repeating a near-identical experience to the previous several hours multiple times to get there. I looked through the game images on the center-right side of the game's itch.io page to see what content I would be missing if I called it quits. The last image has some of the equations from "Modify formulas" and my mind flashed back to an old Flash-based incremental game that I did enjoy playing to completion: Learn to Fly 3.

In that game you were a penguin trying to reach the moon by building elaborate rocketry. It delivered new content through the core gameplay loop (which lasted just a minute or two) by having each iteration reward you with currency used to purchase better parts, which in turn interacted with the environment and the player differently. After the game was beaten there was a New-Game-Plus currency which, like your Dimensional Remnants, altered the equations. I had sunk nearly 100 hours into that game, well beyond its 10 hour single playthrough-time, because I enjoyed the core loop enough to do it one more time and see how much the gameplay had changed. I noticed that the obstacles which the player would struggle to avoid in their first playthrough became practically unnoticeable as you smashed through them with ease after a few wise New-Game-Plus purchases, and there was this feeling of having mastered or overcome a meta-challenge the game was posing: Trivialize the things that were an issue for you earlier. Another good example is in the first Dark Souls, where a demon is a major boss early on in the game, then a standard unit later in the game, and the player gets a feeling of having grown so strong that this previous titan is now beneath them.

Before shutting down Helixteus 3 for good I played just a little bit more into the second universe... just enough to see that, instead of delving into caves, I could simply use a pickaxe and dig deep enough to find a minimal amount of the material required to progress then purchase as much of that material as I needed using dollars - completely skipping over the cave mechanic like it was the obstacles in Learn to Fly 3. I looked back at the image of the equations that the Dimension Remnants could alter, realizing that even if the content was completely identical my power-level relative to the content could change rapidly, and there was a feeling of accomplishment after having "cleared" or "broken" what was a challenge in the previous iteration with ease. I might be able to "break" other mechanics using the equations, I thought, and that promise kept me going though the rest of the early game.

(Granted that promise was eventually rewarded, but I had no way of knowing whether it would be possible in the end-game back when I decided to continue soldiering on.)

Apple07262 years ago(+1)

Ah I see, so I absolutely have to make sure players don't "dread repeating a near-identical experience", at least until the very end game. "Teasing" that there will be exciting things at the very end game while offering almost nothing new to get there is poor design. I'll shift my focus towards that!