itch.io

FYI, I've also started ZScript-ifying the HUD; that's still WIP, though all I really have left is the meds/equipment display. I'll upload those changes when I'm done with them.

All right, I've got a working version. Handgun upgrade kit doesn't spawn yet, use `summon HandgunUpgrade` to spawn it for testing. The weapon movements are jerkier because of how I redid the movement code, but I think I know how to fix that; I just wanted to upload what I have rn so you can poke at it. I've uploaded it to MediaFire here.

Status update: I un-spaghettied the movement code a bit. As I suspected, the differences in movement between weapons is encoded in the copy-pasted movement code, and I haven't adjusted for this yet, so right now everything handles as if it's the pistol. I'll poke at it a bit more. I could probably zscript-ify a lot of it, make it easier to alter the movement properties.

[EDIT]: Also, I tried putting together an upgrade item for the handgun. Since you suggested replacing the handgun entirely with the SMG, I figured, why not just make the "SMG" a full-auto conversion kit for the handgun? It fires every 2 tics, which is slightly faster than the AR (which fires every 3 tics). I might try upping the mag size as well later, but right now it feels pretty good.

I've started poking around at this. The good news is that the HUD edit is pretty simple, but I found out why changing the movement code is a headache: it's copy-pasted across every weapon. I guess the Deimos-1 dev didn't know about using inheritance. I'll try to keep you posted, but I started poking around way too late in the day to be doing a full refactor, and I don't wanna half-ass it.

Is there a github repo? I might take a crack at the HUD and movement code, it's a kind of thing I've done a lot of in my own projects.

There's a couple things I'd like to see added to this.

1. Something that I always felt was missing from Deimos-1 is a way to use 9mm/light bullet ammo faster. The pistol is basically entirely outmoded by the AR the moment you pick one up, and many mapsets put a chaingun (or chaingunner) somewhere early because the vanilla pistol sucks so much. What I'd go with is an SMG with a very high firerate and more controllable recoil than the AR--maybe even negligible recoil--as well as a magazine that's smaller than the AR's, but much faster to both empty and reload. Basically, the AR is to the SMG as the single barrel is to the double barrel--the SMG is for when you need burst damage above all else.
2. Likewise, a magnum revolver that takes the same ammo as the AR would be cool. Somewhat silly given that the 5mm ammo's supposed to be caseless, but revolvers are cool.
3. Chamber indicator for the shotgun. Basically, if there's a shell in the chamber, the rightmost I on the ammo count should be raised by about 50%. It bothers me that the only way to check if I have a shell ready is to try and pump.
4. There's a weird bit of movement tech in here--if you hold crouch and sprint at the same time, you repeatedly crouchslide, maintaining speed. I don't want to get rid of this, because movement tech is cool, but I do think it needs to be tweaked for balance. Maybe adding a slight random jitter to crouch slides, so that you can keep 'scrambling' as long as you like, at the cost of having to keep adjusting your angle. You could even have the jitter increase with consecutive crouchslides, similar to how the end-lag of the sideways/backwards dodge move increases if you use it repeatedly.

The burst shot and electric burst shot feel pretty underwhelming compared to the other upgrades, especially the explosive slug. What I'd do about it:
1. Put a delay on the explosive slug's explosion. It sticks in the target, dealing heavy knockback and the slug's direct damage, and then it explodes half a second later. This lets the player use it as a get-off-me tool and a crowd-control tool in fun ways, but it *also* means it can't instantly delete a ranged threat.
2. I'm not entirely sure what the electric burst does in the first place? The feedback on the flak and slug modes is great, but the electric burst doesn't feel like a more powerful version of the standard burst on single targets. Is it AoE-specced? But that's what the explosive slug does! I feel like the electric burst shot needs some kind of single-target-damage effect. My brain's leaning toward a thunderclap after the burst finishes, dealing a big burst of damage based on how many pellets hit.    

I'd like a config option to turn off pistols spawning on zombie kills. If you play a lot of vanilla-ish maps that use zombiemen all over the early sections, like I do, you usually have all four pistol slot weapons within the first map, and I prefer a slower burn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

History has shown us that when we try to appease the bigots, the bigots grow bolder. Furthermore...no, itch.io is not the last platform standing, because their actions during this incident have already shown how little they care. I understand that they have to keep the lights on; so do we. I understand that they were given an ultimatum by payment processors; look how they responded. We have seen this exact situation, this cycle of embracing adult content only to turn around and censor it after getting big, play out time and again--Paypal being the most famous instance. It's all well and good to talk about how itch.io is the last bastion of decent people, but they aren't. I cannot do business with someone who could take my money from me at any moment. We absolutely have to make sure they never pull this kind of shit again, and the best way to do that is to make it absolutely clear that this behavior is unacceptable.

It would be one thing if there was any communication about this, or if you weren't locking people out of their earnings, but the combination of total silence and people not being able to retrieve their funds is extremely frustrating and leaves me wondering why I should trust this site at all. If I can have my content yanked off the platform with no warning, and lose access to money that is rightfully mine in the process, why the hell should I do business with you? I don't care what excuse you have for it, this is a fundamental breach of trust. Make no mistake, I would've been hesitant to keep using itch.io whether you communicated about this incident or not, but the decision to not say anything until after you'd started pulling games off the platform was boneheaded at best.

Did you consider that maybe the combination of gambling as a theme, references to medication and side effects, the horror-adjacent presentation of the game and the unease associated with it, and the framing device of this being a card game played against "your boss", are all deliberate choices made to get the player thinking about the game in a certain way?

Time advances by one minute every time you make a move or enter a room.

I don't know if you noticed, but Doomslayer's fullscreen hud (screen size 11) doesn't show the ammo properly, possibly because it's still looking for the old ammo types.

The one piece of feedback I'd give is that I'd like enemy spawn rate to ebb and flow a bit. As it stands, the spawn rate only goes up, which leaves me feeling like I basically have to be manning the guns at all times after a bit. If there was a sine-wave-ish ramping up and down--let's say, with about 30s between the trough and the peak--that gives me time to go buy upgrades and/or repair the drill in relative peace...but then, will I get caught off-guard? (I'd recommend having the actual time between peaks vary each time, so the player's always guessing how much longer they have.)

Also: Is there a depth at which you reach another dock and can go back to the surface? Knowing this would affect my strategy as well.

I am going to adapt this to so many absurd surreal meta-narrative campaigns and no one can stop me

Shoot, the autoaim! I completely forgot to change that from the default. There's another item for the post-jam version...

And yeah, I really should've added a teleport trigger to the floor in Machinehead. I went out of my way to not use killfloors in this--it's a puzzle game first and foremost. I actually considered having enemies at one point, and decided that it was too low-priority (and even if I added them, they'd just push you around).

The lack of music is 90% bad planning on my part and 10% not knowing what I'd do for music. I'd love to say it's supposed to be an atmospheric thing, but the reality is that halfway through the week I woke up at an awkward hour to help a housemate with our new fridge and that left my brain just kind of not working for a couple days. I ended up having to rush the last four or five levels. I'm really glad that people like the level design, because I was definitely nervous about that.

(Edit: Listening to Point of Departure right now. Yeah, this would've worked real well. The only thing I really had in mind for the music was either "chill atmospheric stuff" or "something with breakbeat".)

Man, this was wild. I was playing with keyboard, sadly, but I still enjoyed the heck out of it. My main struggle was with range; getting the right distance on a curve is harder than it looks.

It was also kind of counterintuitive that the gun swayed vertically by default, but I suspect I would've been even more disoriented if I had to do a vertical curve by leaning sideways and then doing a sideways swing. It's probably easier with controller, where you can precisely control the lean.

Overall, a really interesting experiment in input. I really appreciate experiments like this, even if I can't quite wrap my head around the necessary inputs.

Thanks! It makes me really happy that I was able to pull off show-don't-tell tutorials. I've always loved games that do that. I hope I'll get better at it as I keep making stuff.

(Of course, not writing down the names of anything has some drawbacks. Internally, the green shot is called the Heavy Bolt and the orange shot is called the Sticky Bolt--of course, you never really get a chance to see the projectile in flight, but it *is* shaped like a big chunky rivet.)

Re: the final level--the intended solution involves getting the orange sticky bolt and using it to grapple into the tower's mouth. I'm not surprised that there's a way to skip getting the sticky bolt. I'm not going to 'fix' it; I love that there's technically speedrun tech in this little thing.

I also love working in GZDoom. It's a little clunky for certain things, but it's just so good for prototyping an FPS in, and building levels is just so simple.

The green symbol makes your bolt affected by gravity. Try shooting over the fence.
(Honestly, I should have adjusted the height of the fence, but I ran a bit late doing the levels and didn't do as much polishing as I'd like.)

This is deeply interesting to me. I only have one critique: the visual effects make it unclear when Mind Split triggers a multi-hit. It's fairly obvious on Heal, and when my entire party gets Feared or Enraged, but occasionally I'll drop an Adrenaline on a Mind Split party member and only that party member gets the status effect glow.

Wait a second--I saved and loaded back into a world, and everything in my inventory disappeared?

It appears to be working, though I have FPS drops when lighting changes. Thank you!

I get the Unity crash handler right away. I pastebinned the console output; if you can make heads or tails of it, it may be useful.
https://pastebin.com/Lv0mi5gc

I'm having trouble running this through WINE or Proton. Will there be a Linux build?

I wish this were longer. Actually, I wish this were a hacking minigame in another game. It fits well as a 'minigame'.