itch.io

Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for playing.

Yes, I am well aware that the enemy and loot detection is a bit hokey at the moment. I am using a single raycast, which is why it is too finicky just now.

Just to say, when you attack an enemy, and vice versa, there is a chance to hit, rather than it being automatic. This will become more obvious when the upgrade mechanic is implemented, as some of the upgrades will affect the hit chances.

Maybe I should just add a little floating "hit" or "miss" box when making an attack. Hmmm. Thanks for making me think about this.

So, I like the concept of this game, but I just kept dying too much before I could warp back to the station. I played this in the browser.

As the dev, it will be obvious to you how to play this correctly. But for someone who has never played it and/or the casual player, I think it needs a gentler ramp up so that folks can at least get back to the station at least once. This will hook folk into the game more easily, instead of feeling like a struggle to get to even a first opportunity for a ship upgrade. The mechanic for jumping back to the station is too awkward: would be better to just hit a key and have some kind of dimensional jump animation instead of press and hold. It is already necessary to wait for the jump thing to fill up, so the press-and-hold mechanic feels like overkill.

Also, when flying along, there is a no explanation for the UI elements at the top of the screen. I suggest adding some tooltips or a help screen that explains what things mean. Maybe do this with a transition screen when going from the station to a level? With an option to "never show again".

When I got further into the level, the basic weapon did not keep up the same firing rate as at the beginning of the level. I could not see any reason for this - is it a bug? This also contributed to the dying...

The UI is generally very good, but there are a few points that might benefit the game:

• The intro is very long. I get why it is like this, but maybe try to cut it down a little bit. Also, I was not sure how long it was at first, so I tried the scroll wheel on my mouse, and this dismissed the intro text before I finished reading it. It might be better to have an OK button or some such in the bottom right corner, so that the intro text only goes away when the player deliberately clicks the button. Especially as there is no way to retrieve it other than starting again.
• In the station, add a settings cog somewhere, to access the main settings screen.
• In the list of ship parts, you could include the cost of each item on the buttons. Initially I thought the numbers (1000, 2000, etc) on some of the names were the costs of the parts.
• Probably best to reduce the number of your dragon logos on the main menu and other main UI screens. Just one instance of the logo  in one of the corners would be much more classy. And I also suggest sticking to one version of the logo, in terms of colour choice.
• Also, in the main menu screen etc, your studio name should be small compared to the name of the game. I would use separate Labels for this.
• In the Settings screen, make a gap between the game name and the tab names - they look like they are crashing into each other at the moment.
• In the main menu, you could make it more dynamic by having the same scrolling star field background scrolling behind the buttons and labels. Instead of the current static background, that is.
• You have an e missing from Kenney in the Credits screen.
• On your itch page, you have your studio name as the banner, instead of something relating to the game. I would replace this. At the moment, when playing the game in the browser, it looks like part of the game, so that you have your studio name twice in some places, particularly the UI screens.

Feel free to ignore any of this feedback. It is, after all, your game.

Edit: Just skimmed the devlogs, and I see you already had some feedback about the jump mechanic. The info box is not clear enough, and just putting a thin red circle around the icon is not obvious enough. The circle just looks like part of the UI. As noted above, better to have a transition screen that is the whole screen, and has an explanation for everything on the top status bar instead of just one item.

Nice game and concept. I died really soon, though, so was not sure if I should just wait or what. Great visuals.

Nice game. The stylized art is very good. Well done.

Nice game for platformer fans. Not really my kind of thing, but I can appreciate what has been done here. Good interpretation of the theme.

If only de-orbiting space junk was that easy. Not sure I was playing the game correctly. I got "game over" before too long for no reason I could figure. Nice idea though.

Thanks :) Just wish I had had more time...

Nice game, although it would have been nice if the map showed where the rover is positioned. Amazed that this got done in the jam timeframe. Well done.

Thanks and yes, it is very much at the alpha stage. Unfortunately, working full time does not leave much time for game dev, especially when working solo. So there was not time to, for example, add more types of enemies, add any kind of objectives, and so on.

To make it full screen, click the full screen icon in the bottom right corner. It is part of the itch.io functionality. I presume that is what you mean by "postage stamp viewport"?

So, do you think it is worth continuing further development and updating the game once the jam is completely finished? Opinions on this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks :)

Thanks :) 

Very nice. Would be good to play on a larger scale. Excellent artwork.

Nice game and well executed.

A bit brutal when night came.

Um, confused? Well done if that is what is supposed to happen.

This is now fixed, and adding items to the Fridge now works!

Yes. It is in the alpha state.  As stated above, most of the game play is missing. There might be some more things working before the jam deadline... and bugs can be fixed after the deadline.

This is really cool and very useful.

Couple of little suggestions... Would it be possible to add a pause/play key for the animation? For example, hitting the space bar. It would make it much easier to stop the rotation animation (instead of using the menu) when it is just right to get a nice view of the settlement. Edit: Scratch that. Just worked out how to use fly mode to get any view I want :)

Also, what about a tree option for mixed conical and ellipsoid trees?

Are you intending to take account of ground elevations at some future point? For example, to generate 3D ground from the ground contours in Village Generator. This is not a feature request, just curious.

I agree with Felipe. Having everything exported would be excellent and a great time saver when trying to recreate and add details to any kind of settlement in, for example, Blender. And yes, I know it is also possible to import a PNG to use as a ground map for the placement of things, but having everyting as 3D objects would be awesome. Having said that, I totally get that time is a resource and you probably have other things to do that you find more interesting!

I think all these random generators you have done are amazing and thank you for making them available to those of us that do not have the skills to create such utilities.

So, as I said, I am a hostage to the nav system in Godot for further droid behaviour improvements. And yes, I am aware of them bumping into walls etc, and they do sometimes getting temporarily stuck. Just have to live with it for now.

Yes, Q and E sounds sensible for left/right camera rotation. Unfortunately, this is not as slick as using the mouse, as for some reason doing this recognises the key press delay from the OS (I have tried it in my two other games that are on itch). However, I have now stopped work on the prototype, and already started on refactoring and adding new/different functionality for a proper demo version. It will take a long time before the first build of that is ready. As well as adding missing functionality, I will also be radically changing the UI/UX functionality - I have thought about that quite a bit since your first bit of feedback and I think I know where I want to go with it now.

Thanks for all the useful feedback. This is what I was hoping for when I joined this jam.

Thanks for trying the game again.

I wasn't going to update the prototype again, but I had a sudden inspiration on how to mitigate the droids getting stuck in the warehouses, and I think this is now solved.

Build 0006 is now uploaded with the "stuck droids" fix, if you feel like giving it a go yet again.

The problem was that the Navigation system was sometimes sending a droid the "wrong way" through the warehouse as a way of avoiding droids coming the other way. If a droid was already moving in the correct direction through the warehouse, they would bump into each other and get stuck. I have simply placed an invisible object so as to make the inside of the warehouse less attractive (to the Navigation system) as an avoidance route. I tested it by using all 8 droids to build the same building at the same time, and none of them got stuck. There might be corner cases where they still get stuck, but this solution will do for the prototype.

As for droids colliding elsewhere, I am a hostage to the Godot devs. As they are all "agents" within the Nav system, they should not be bumping into each other like that. There is dev effort in this direction planned, so hopefully things should improve in future.

Thanks very much for the test/feedback offer. It will be a while before it happens, but I am very likely to take you up on that.

I also watched your uploaded stream of the game on YouTube. It was a very odd experience watching someone else play my game. But... it helped me understand your point about the menus and I have taken that on board for the future. I am not sure I will be able to do what you have suggested for everything, but I will give it a go where it makes sense. Creating this game is still very much a learning experience and it will be good to experiment with alternative ways of doing things.

Apologies for the delay in replying, but I have deliberately delayed my reply so that I can share some good news with you.

So, thank you very much for the enthusiastic feedback. Very much appreciated. I played the main StarCraft campaign quite a bit in the original release. I have to confess that that is one of the inspirations for Raiders Of The Alaments.

I have just uploaded Build 0005 of the game, which includes your suggestion to provide warnings about temperature effects.

On the menus front, please bear in mind that this is still a prototype. My long term objective is to improve the interface elements. For example, using icons for adding buildings, instead of the current building menu. Note that using right-click doesn't actually save you any clicks, it is just how some other folk do things.

The droid capacity of carrying one unit is deliberate (frankly I copied the concept from Surviving Mars). I have adjusted the amounts of resources needed for the buildings so things move along a little bit more quickly. Also, in future there will be other things going on at the same time, such as dealing with various creatures, neighbouring demon lords and so on, which will make the game feel more lively. This first round of prototyping is my first foray into making a game like this, so I wanted to use this phase to make a solid start with the basics: that is the building construction and operations plus the droid mechanics.

And yes, I will bring it back again to another Feedback Quest when I have the next version to share (which will be a more complete demo instead of a prototype). However, that could be quite a while...

Anyway, please have a look at the main game page and the devlog for build 0005, and I hope you have another go at playing the game.

Edit: Forgot to say, I had already made changes to the warehouse before I read your post, so that the droids don't get stuck as much. They mostly only get stuck now when the time is running at 2x or 4x. In most cases, you can fix it by going back to 1x speed briefly. It that doesn't work, it is necessary to try somthing else, as you have been doing. The warehouses have more room, but need redoing so the droids have even more room to manoeuver around each other. Droid movement is also dependent on the navigation sub-system in the Godot engine itself, so things should also improve when there is some dev effort in that direction.

I totally get it. I am also using the various games I am making to teach myself all sorts of things.

And yes, never assume that something is obvious to a player. Of course, sometimes you want things to be obvious, but other times not.

It also occurs to me that maybe your current first track should be the third or fourth track, after a couple of easier ones. For example, have less hazards (carpet and water) to start with, as well as making the AIs easier to beat. Or maybe have a first track with just a few carpet hazards, a second track with a few water hazards, then start combining them, so there is some sort of progression of difficulty.

Nice game, but as someone else pointed out, make the AIs a bit worse at racing. I am terrible at racing games anyway, but it would be nice to stand a chance on the first track.

Very entertaining. Do you have a long term plan for this? That is, where are you going with it? Anyway, most amusing and it made me smile. My one suggestion might be to vary the music a bit (as well as having control over the volume).

Thanks for giving it a go. It is steadily getting there. I have an update in progress that has greatly improved building placement. Once that is available (on itch) I will also do a demo vid on YouTube. However, I want to get the save/load game functionality done first, as that will also help with testing the game.

As I pointed out in the description (on the game page), a lot of buttons do nothing at the moment. Decommission is one of them, as it will need the corresponding additions to the droid state machine. After placing a building, all you need to do is use the building menu to assign an idle droid to build it, or use a droid menu and assign it to Build instead of doing something else.

I am also dependent on further development of the Godot Engine itself (I do not have the experience to help with this, unfortunately). Once the droids start doing something, the behaviour can go wonky because the navigation server still needs a lot of dev effort to improve the behaviour of navigation agents (the droids in this case).

I totally agree that assigning multiple units to a task will be a good thing to implement, but that is a long way down the list of things that the game needs... However, using the droid barracks menu for multiple unit selection is a great idea. I hadn't considered doing it that way. Getting good feedback like this is why I joined this jam!

By the way, to make Full Screen stick: make sure you have a profile created, then after choosing Full Screen, you need click  Save Changes to save your preferences.  Maybe I should disable the preferences until at least one profile is created.

Hmm, interesting idea about the limited views. I will see how it feels with 45 degree turns (8 views) rather than 4, as being backing into a corner to get furthest away and face the witches is a useful tactic. Or maybe 22.5 degree turns? Worth experimenting anyway.

Anyway, thanks for giving it a go.

Thanks for playing it on YouTube.You were so close to the witch that the curses were hitting you pretty much immediately. You need to keep your distance to see the curses coming towards you, as that also gives you time to type in the counter-curse. Also, don't step backwards after entering the room or it's likely to be game over...

If you have time, please give it another go.

Perhaps give longer to get through Level 1 (2 mins or so?) then reduce the time for each further floor. That would give a player time to get the flavour of the game before the time limit gets too short.

Other than that, nicely implemented. I like the continuous shooting - slightly reminiscent of the original Llamatron.

Got there in the end... if you'll forgive the pun.

Nice job. Just a shame I am so rubbish at platformers.

Good to hear and thanks for playing.

Yeah. One of the perils of doing things at breakneck speed for a jam... I naturally did something that I found worked for me.

Glad you liked it and thanks for the feedback. Sounds like mouse sensitivity needs to be there in a settings screen...

And so it does :)

Nice idea. Are you going to make it longer than just one battle after the jam is over?

So, I toyed with the idea of having 666 levels, but thought that would be a bit too much...

Yes, the controls are a common theme in the feedback here, so I have been giving that a bit of thought. The only thing I can think of is left-click and drag to move, but I have played games that have that mechanic and you end up forever picking up and putting down the mouse, which also interrupts movement.

By the way, the middle-mouse click and drag is how you control the camera in both Blender and the Godot 3D viewport. It just takes a little getting used to.

And thanks for playing and the feedback.

Glad you like it and thanks for the feedback.

I will break up the text into some sort of in-game help after the jam. I was concentrating on other things up to the deadline.

Made me laugh.

Probably a good idea to put a ColorRect or Panel behind the UI elements, as it's hard to see the text without that.

Also, maybe slow down the castle disintegration a bit, or have an easy mode that does that, so it's possible to get a bit more practice picking up and throwing the inhabitants before the floor gives way.

Same experience as the other folk with Windows.