Many thanks that you did such and extensive test! That is very useful feedback for me. Not having a queue for unit production was a design decision, but you are probably right, not a good one. I will add a queue in the future. I will put improving zoom and sound on my list as well.
I really like this one! If there where more levels I would have continued playing. I think with all the character in the game you have enough to build very challanging levels. So my preference would be to add more levels instead of new mechanics. Maybe you could think about letting the player choose the difficulty: tutorial (basically what you have right now, but a bit easier), easy, medium, hard, ...
Another Idea could be to create a random level generator that can create levels of different difficulty ... than you would not have to create them all by hand. But I am not sure how realistic that is...
The game looks really nice but the gameplay lacks some strategic depth. I could easily play through the game without thinking about strategy. I just randomly mixed offensive and defensive cards and it worked out.
You could think about:
Make the game longer so that the deckbuilding aspect of the game really kicks in
Add some kind of permanent effects that force a proper response (Like damage over time, buffs, debuffs, etc.)
I also had some issues with the UI scaling. (I played on my laptop with a resolution of 3000x2000.)
The game very well creates the atmosphere of fear you are aiming for. Combat could be a bit more versatile, with different attacks/skills to use. The difficulty of the combat was fine for me: In theory I should be able to kill a rat without taking any damage, but in practice I only managed to kill 4-5 Rats in my best run. I did not find a way to heal (I see in the screenshots that there are potions, but I did not find any), that limited my ability to kill all the rats...
Things you might consider:
Slowly heal over time (When I went outside and found a dungeon, I was still bruised from the dungeon in the town so that I did not come far.)
Let the rats drop some loot (like healing potions, gold, etc.)
Add something to find when outside of the town: Healing Herbs, etc.
Many thanks that you did such an extensive test! I put your points into my backlog: an easier introductory/tutorial mission, additional units for more versatile strategies, more responsive UI
One possibility to beat the AI is synchronizing buggy production: Doubleclick a buggy factory to select them all -> wait until all have completed production and you have enough resources to build in all of them -> build in all factories simultaniously
Tried it again. I had no problem to beat the level now. Maybe it is a bit to easy now. :) Honestly I was not aware that I could end the level early to collect money and muster up my army. I like the concept, but I think it still neads some balancing/streamlining...
Maybe you could add an additional resource that the player gets for killing enemies. This resource is not lost when losing and can only be spent between runs. In that way it would be possible to grind a few runs and then start with a stronger army. Also the player should have always at least 1 marine ...
Wow, very impressive. The visuals(the black hole!) and sound are very good. A chilled atmosphere, but a challanging puzzle game. I understand that you aim at mobile devices, but maybe you could add keybord controls for the web-version.
I like the graphics and controls. Looks promising to me. What I noticed is that the inventory does not scale well on high resolution screens. On my laptop it is almost not readably.
I like the game and had some fun playing it. It has a good progression model: When you loose you get a bit stronger the next time. That prevents frustration but is not to easy, well done.
It would be nice to see the exact stats of the units, health, damage, attack rate, DPS etc.
Cool game, I had some fun! The difficulty is very high - I did not found a way to win the first mission. I tried a lot different strategies, buying mechenaries, upgrading mariens, different placements and combinations of these.
Issues I found:
Somethimes the money jumps backwards
As money and army is lost after a defeat I was forced to restart the game to start a new run
Many thanks for the feedback! I will add more units in the upcoming updates (7 additionaly unit types are planned). I hope the scout will become more useful when there are more options for expanding/units/upgrades. The minimap is a good point, I will add that in the next update.
This question has been asked very often. The answer is: It is difficult. There are multple new games released on itch every day. A lot of them have good or decent quality, but most of them will attract no attention at all, just because there are so many. So either you have to stand out a lot, or get very lucky.
What I recommend: Trade feedback with others and constantly improve your game. Maybe you can create a really good game in that way, or you learn from your mistakes.
Thanks for your feedback and that you tried it out! Currently the game is an early alpha state. I am trying to gather as much feedback as possible and will address the issues found in the upcoming updates. The UI (font & size) will be improved in the next update. I am also planning to add more units, buildings, upgrades to improve the strategic depth. But that will take some time as it is rather time consuming to create those 3D models...
Thank you for testing the game! You are not the first one complaining about the font and its size. Both will be fixed in the next update. Im am still in an early stage of develpment, gathering some feedback. I will add more units in the coming months...
Pretty cool game! I like it. Are you also planning to make this multiplayer?
Some minor things that i have noticed:
- Especially the larger units struggle sometimes with the pathfinding
- The upgrade times are so short that they feel almost instant. I would suggest to either set them to 0 or to a much longer duration, so that they are more an investment into the future
Many thanks for your feedback and that you tried it out! I think I should add a tutorial in the next update.
You can see if a building is currently producing: The alloy refinery has a blue glow and the fans on on roof of the buggy factory are rotating when production is running.
There are some possibilities to better manage the production: When you double click a building all buildings of that type are selected and you can start production on all of them. There is also the possibility to store a shortcut for the current selection (ctrl-(1-9) ) and the current camera position (ctrl-(F1-F9)). (This may not work in the browser-version but only in the installed version.)
You can see the current hitpoints below the building portrait of a building when selected.
May thanks that for your feedback. Enemy units have a different color, maybe I should make it a bit more visible...
I will address the other issues you had in the next update: More units, pause function and better readable UI are on the way.
The repair function is something I might add later ... I first would like to see how the dynamic of the game will be when all planned unit types are added.
For the prediction of the trajectory you could do this:
The path of all your gravitational bodies should be deterministic. i.e. you could calculate them in advance for N frames and put their positions into a ring buffer. On every frame you then pull the positions out of this buffer and calculate the positions N frames into the future. In this way you only need additional memory but no additional CPU cycles.
For the player trajectory you can basically do the same thing as long as the thruster is not used. If the thruster is used you have to invalidate the ring buffer. As soon as the thruster is turned off you start calculating the trajectory again: maybe add 100 future frames on every frame, that should be possible as you only have to calculate it for one body (the player ship) and you can take all the gravitational information from the precomuted buffer for all celestial bodies.
Really cool graphics. For the gameplay: The controls feel kind of clumsy. If you miss the correct direction ... you have to wait for a complete cycle to try it again. The balance between dying to asteroids compared to fuel running out was a bit off for me. I always died to asteroids, never was in danger of running out of fuel.
Things you might try out:
- Add health to the ship: Only die on the 3rd asteroid hit
- Add a toggle for the rotation direction of the arrow
I think this game has a lot of potential. I like that you have realistic navigation in space with conservation of momentum and gravity. As I played a lot of "Kerbal Space Program" I am probably a bit more skilled as the average gamer when it comes to navigation in space - and still I had problems controlling my flight. My main problem is that, when entering a system, the planet, moon etc. are so close together that it is very hard to swing into a stable orbit without colliding with a suddenly appearing moon. Then I bounce and its hard to quickly adapt to the new flight direction and figure out how to thrust to get into a stable orbit again.
Things that might mitigate this issues:
- Move moons and sattelites farther away from the planet to reduce the probability of random collisions
- Do not bounce of objects but just continue on the trajectory, taking damage while "inside" an object. That would allow to adjust slowly an incorrect orbit, but would not reset it completely
- Show the current flight trajectory on the minimap (as in Kerbal)
Many thanks for your feedback. You are totally right: the game is lacking strategic depth in its current state. It is still in an early development stage and a lot of things that I have planned are missing. Having more units and resource types as well as an upgrade system is planned. I am hesitating to give more control over the units: I do not aim to create a starcraft clone - I cannot compete with that. I aim to get enough depth with unit composition, build orders and building placement - if this does not work out, I will think again about adding some more controls over the units.
Health bars is something I will definitively add. What helps keeping the unit production up: You can multiselect buildings of the same type by doubleclicking. And you can hotkey a selection with ctrl-(1-9).
By all its shortcomings this game is fun! I like the mix of dexterity and puzzle solving. The graphics is primitive, the fullscreen did not work properly for me and the mouse was lagging like hell. But as I said: It was fun enough to make me play it through! Well done!
I like this very much. Well done! The graphics is nice. The battle system is a good compromise between luck and control. All the technical aspects are also very well done: Menu navigation, quick save, save, options, access to the rules - all very accessable.
There are a few things that could be improved (from my point of view):
- When assigning positions for battle: Show a hover info what the resulting element/faction bonus would be. I can calculate it on my own, but it is a bit cumbersome.
- Maybe shorten the forrest maze a bit. Collecting 10 wages took me rather long...
Cool Idea! But I think you need to work on the mechanics to make it more deterministic and understandable what would happen. As an example: If you create a robot only consisting of 2 spike balls without any connections, it will magically move around and win almost every fight.
I think for an "offline"-game you cannot do that. OAuth can be used to authenticate the user with your server. Then your server can check via https://itch.io/api/1/KEY/game/GAME_ID/purchases if the connected user has purchased your game.
I experienced similar issues once: I used UI-Toolkit for the UI and in the WebGL build I could not detect clicks on 3D objects. It seemed that UI-Toolkit was "blocking" the mouse with invisible UI-Elements that should not be there. I was able to workaround this by using "abolute" positioning for top-level UI-Elements.
This game is really cool. I like the mechanic with the spear that adds a puzzle-game aspect to the action. Overall the game leaves a very complete impression. That makes it really hard to give advice how it can be improved... :)
I really like the graphics style - it reminds me of how we thought in the 90ties how VR would look like. Great! In terms of gameplay I miss the feeling of progress, the power-ups have no directly visible effect and I cannot see how many gems I collected until I die. Maybe adding a gem-counter and making the power-ups visible in some way could greatly improve that.
This game is really cool. I did 5-6 runs. I think in the last one I came pretty far (I died because of the 9 day limit...). The game is really hard, and sometimes you think you are dead now ... but then you find the bottle of water that saves your life! Really great! Honestly I have not much to complain about. Controls are good, tutorial is good, its difficult, but should be doable...
That is very useful input. Thank you! I will work on the UI and add some tooltips to address the issues you found. Having a less "straight forward" map sounds also like a good Idea. Maybe I add a second map that is less straight than the first one. For the commands for the units: I will keep that in mind, but for now I will stay with the complete "indirect" concept. But if I fail to add strategic depth by adding more units, buildings and better maps - this may become an option. Many thanks to you!
Many thanks for the detailed feedback. Some of your points I did not have on my list, but I will put them on it! It is really good to get feeback from someone else - after testing the same things over and over again I developed some blind spots.
