itch.io

Thanks and thank you for all the feedback you've given!

Thanks for playing and sharing your thoughts! Indeed this was aimed as a game-mode prototype for Demo Day. The way of pickups will have to be improved and I really liked your proposal of showing them as menu in Growth mode. I agree that lategame isn't well balanced and there's little I can do - the nature of Mutations and how they stack will always have player's power grow much more rapidly than enemies. I guess having a win-state is a must, otherwise I'd need to scale enemies unproportionally as well to end the game which will probably feel worse than allowing player to win. The thing I must do is to move the difficulty spike from the early game to later.

Performance improvement is a must for this game mode to work.

I have some ideas how I can spice this game mode up a bit:

• Make zooid counts limited by how many of them you have picked up. So you start with, let's say, 5 of each starting zooid available (also costing nutrition) and you can increase the limit by picking up the same zooid again and again. Zooid drops would make sense and stay important.
• Allow sacrificing zooids for Mutations or another zooid drops or just XP - allows you to clear your inventory of unused zooids

Raw notes from while I was watching the video. Some things you figured out later in the video, but I still note them - ideally they should be clear from the start:

• Enemies at the start don't let you figure things out - they could be passive until first level up
• Not clear what Grinder affects - would be useful to highlight zooids that other buffing zooids affect
• Not clear which pickups are shops and which ones are rewards for leveling up
• Not clear that level up awards appear in the center of the arena - could have a little zoom-out cinematic animation to show how they spawn the first time
• Survivors save file doesn't get deleted
• Starting Advena Layout is very non-optimal
• Shop tooltip could appear when you're over it to display what or why not you are getting the shop item
• Annoying to check Mutation rewards and keep off the fights at the same time 
• "I wish there was a way to prioritize which parts grow back" - parts grow back in the order they were grown. Re-placing parts (drag and drop in Growth mode) moves them back to the list. I should display the priority number, but it might too much for players to think of at the start. One of suggestions were allowing to keep snapshots of your layout for different occasions and allow switching through them. In your case swimming around with 2 movers and 5 structures only doesn't make much sense. You'd rather modify yourself to be faster or have more fighting power to defend yourself until you get back the lost nutrition and grow back to full form.
• Idea: dead zooid ghosts could display the order they're going to grow back at
• Game should display multiple tooltips if there are multiple things hovered - in rare cases it might happen in normal play, I think it should be good to have.
• Good idea to show Mutation selection in Growth mode!
• Highlight the zooids you are hovering Mutation for - as you've suggested, selection buttons in Growth mode would be easier to do for highlights.
• Note - you have been looking at stats on the left of the screen which didn't have Mutations applied. Should also display Mutation stats there
• More potent poison should change color - nice
• Your range could have been higher due to powerup.
• Self note: Enemies clump up too much - they are after action, might need to thing about some sort of disperse intention
• Squiter initial poison range is unproportionally too large compared to its projectile
• Powerup Addiction Agonizer or any other buffing zooid is pointless.
• Zooids should have their breed name somewhere written
• Game's dropping frames because something is "leaking" memory and makes physics raycasts more expensive. It's an old bug and I'm not sure if it's Unity's fault or not - in normal gameplay reloading scenes fixes this issue. In Survival mode you're always in the same scene, so the issue becomes more apparent. Also there are more enemies spawned as you play so the performance issue gets worse anyway - need to optimize AI to be less taxing in high numbers or overall.
• Need to explain Strain stat somewhere, maybe in sub-tooltips like card games do
• ESC should open the Menu to exit if it wasn't for the performance.

My lack of update notes on the itch page didn't indicate that I made some updates, so some things were already fixed before I watched your video:

• Level up rewards do not overlap for several level-ups
• When starting the Survivals you appear in the exact centre of the arena, preventing you from accidentally picking up starting Mutation

Some random balance ideas I had while watching the video:

• Radial restores 1 healing point on getting damaged
• Radial gets a speed buff on getting damaged
• Poison increases Melee damage dealt
• Flail carries buff effects!
• Mines carry buff effects and apply the m on explosion

Survivors improvements:

• Environment upgrade to spawn more environment Eggs
• Environment upgrade to increase the size of arena (and the radius of enemy spawners so they're more dispersed)
• Picking up already owned zooid pickups could give a random Mutation for the zooid

Holy crap, so much footage, thank you! I will let you know my thoughts after watching the video

Thanks! It was improved since last iteration. What was your strategy that it felt slow - did you try going at enemies first or roamed around to gain nutrition?

Pass is

agdg

Follow the link here: https://dominas.itch.io/sipho-survivors?pass=agdg

The goal of this demo was to try out Vampire Survivors meme in the game, so it features new game mode - Survival. I could have gone better lengths to add auto attacking, but I haven't (yet). Anyway, enjoy the arena mode with some number go up scaling. Nice to test out different Mutation builds.

Thanks for reality check, gives good priorities to focus on.

Thank you!

Hey, thanks for asking. I have updated the game description with all the changes: https://dominas.itch.io/sipho-dd48?password=agdg

Password is:

agdg

Heya, thank you for thorough feedback. Knowing your experience and train of thought helps a lot.

• The leech bug was fixed, thank you for reporting it
• For the boss that you've been chipping away and then learned to kill head-on - have you noticed the buffs that spawn out of holes and have they been useful for defeating it?
• The mid-fight editing is somewhat conflicting feature. It was intended from the start - I want to foster creativity and have confidence in game that it can be with this feature as its core. And it's really cool. Although it gives psychological burden of knowing that you can do this tedious mid-fight editing to give yourself an edge most of the times. Once discovered, how do you feel about difficult encounters? I wonder if it could be limited somehow to prevent abuse and free the player from thoughts that they could have used it to dodge an encounter that ended in death. Or maybe reduce its drawbacks - have an undo stack so you can restore your design after abuse (often requested feature) and manage powerups in a way that regrown zooids keep them.

Just found your stream, disregard my questions. Thank you for streaming AGDG games!

The big guy you encountered was quite optimal, too bad it obliterated you so fast.

Thank you for playing. Which parts of UI do you think need the most improvement?

Password is:

agdg

Changes to test:

New Mutation system aimed at players playing New Game+. Get them by slaying bosses and choosing over other boss drops - part unlocks. The ones you don't choose are given to enemies. Let me know if it makes the game more interesting and doesn't break the general feel.

>agree, idea was to introduce bigger enemies but havent implemented yet

I see, if the intention is to keep zooming out it somewhat breaks your beautiful pixel art into aliased soup, which is not ideal.
>hmm what do you mean?

It seemed like you have some sort of respawn system to move cannons closer, however at some times they were moved elsewhere just as I got close to them. Or was it some sort of pooling bug?

>is the game worth finishing?

Depends on how much time you're going to be spending on it. Gameplay was solid, there's clear Vampire Survivors influence here, so to capitalize on that you'd have to finish fast OR make something unique. I think all games are worth finishing if you can see the end result now.

Fun game, got me hooked to play until enemies were barely spawning.

• Zoom out is unnecesarily far in later levels
• Your own bombs are hard to see and feel their effectiveness
• Need to keep looking left to see my own HP - could be good to have that in the center of the screen or on mouse cursor
• Good enemy variety, although it was hard to judge when they do damage
• Cannons despawn too often when you get close to them
• Item magnet level 1 could be default from the start - it is annoying to hit pickups precisely to get them
• Nice permanent gibs on the map

Hey, which version did you play - free or the latest one? The latest has several second bosses, which should be more interesting and easy to encounter.

- player is now represented by the letter J
- movement between far away tiles is now instant 
- level up now both increases the health cap and heals to full health if possible 
Good
- you now level up only if the killed mob is of the same or higher level as you
Grinding low levels would have been fun and challenging higher than your level should still have a reward. Now that you don't have XP but discrete levelup or not is less fun.
- moving one tile costs 1 health (if overhealed)
- exploring one tile restores 3 health if not at full health, overheals by 1 otherwise
Good. But for some reason you lose HP while walking on explored tiles. Might be a bug?
- game now progresses through 5 depths
- every depth level is populated with mobs of the same level
Good, but see point about grindin easy enemies. Variation was good. I would expect levels look like in Desktop Dungeons. A lot of my feedback kind of assumes mechanics of that game.
- you now win the game by killing the Reaper in depth 5
Good
- combat spins reduced from 3 to 1
More spins means combat is resolved more quickly, I liked the multiple spins thing. Now it's just busytime replaying the spins.
- combat slot roll chance increased from 1/11 to 1/4
- mobs now gain damage the same way you do: through gambling:
Good
- - they get randomly assigned slots in the combat phase, numbers rolled in those slots add up to the enemy damage
Before this change I thought enemies would get their own roll-board, but this might be better. Although it's weird that sometimes enemies can get 3 tiles (or more?) of rolls initially when you get just one or vice-versa. Random isn't fun in this case.

I think the roll expansion mechanic could be improved. Right now 4 initial tiles are shared by you and the enemy and expanded ones are also shared randomly. I would expect that expanded tiles would be "owned" by the one who expanded to them and get rolls there.
Now that enemies share the same board, I think expansion trigger should not be filling lines, but should expand upon successful roll (or even better a special expansion symbol rather than a damage symbol) to adjacent free tiles and expanded tiles should be "owned" by the expander. This would open up strategy of choosing what kind of rolls you have - expansion or damage. And enemies could have their own "flavor" - "fast" enemies would expand a lot, while "slow" would have less expansion rolls, but more/higher damage rolls. This would also allow the player to build their own "deck" of rolls, or as you've mentioned earlier, items, which give different rolls and knowing what enemy you're gonna face would mean strategy of adapting your rolls.

For example you might wanna go for quickly expanding deck, but then you over-expand and instead of doing damage, you expand on the board, doing little damage, but also preventing enemy of doing it - because you now own all the tiles on the board.

Maybe there could be special "expansion" rolls which change the ownership of adjacent tiles to yours, allowing you to make the enemy "hit itself" and could be a strategy against certain heavy-hitting enemies.

This game gave me gambling addiction.

• HP: 7 of 2 what
• First move - tried clicking on map, first on empty tiles then on squares and noticed health changing up and down - the "scroll" thing feels like it's being swapped rather than added and then reduced, which I now know
• The plus looks like a health thing rather than your character
• First fight - I get long explanation of how things work. Feeling pressured to read well since there's no going back to previous tip. Telling how many tips there are going to be is good, forces me to pay attention. The fight plays itself out and I roll nothing, deal no damage and get out of the fight. Feels weird man. Lose 2hp
• Lose three fights in a row against Ogre, starting to thing that I shouldn't be fighting it at all or maybe I'm doing something wrong? I guess the x1 that appears while rolling just doesn't appear often enough. I would say enemies and player damage should be scaled in a way that player kills first enemy is mostly guaranteed and not necessarily following enemies.
• Explore around, find higher level enemies. Notice that I've regened a lot of HP, feel like I've lost some just because I wasn't at max HP. Go back to Ogre lvl1 with 44% chance to win and try grinding it out. Don't wanna explore the map and lose potential HP gain. Would like to grind for some guaranteed outcome rather than a chance of getting a kill.
• Finally get a hit. Now the chance is 69% nice. Second fight gets a lot of x1s and x2s and keeps resetting the spins. wtf is happening, deal like 40 dmg.
• Lvl 2, got 4 max hp, go after previously discovered Ogre lvl 2. Kill percent is very low.  Deal 1 dmg now. Deal 1 dmg again. Deal 2, get 2, die. 
• Play deathsweeper lmao, nice one. Get back on my feet. Now lvl 3. I wish I didn't die if my kill was guaranteed.
• Explore to regen. Jesus, lvl 3 ogre now has only 8% of win. Fuck it , we're gambling here. Deal 1 dmg. Fight again, get three x2s again, the board keeps growin, dunno why that happens, would have expected it to grow immediately when got first x2. Deal bazingallion of damage, kill the ogre.  Feels inconsistent and somewhat potentially allowing to kill anything that doesn't kill me in one shot, since the dmg grows so much.
• Don't understand why x2s are now appearing. Is it because I leveled up? What other things rather than my HP have changed?
• Being level 4 fight lvl 7 ogre. Chance says 0%, bitch you don't know I can roll 256 dmg with the board if I get luck. Fight two times, first zero, second x6 rolls and deal 6 dmg. I can grind this. Got 2 HP left, go explore to heal. I hope lvl 7 will give me scaled up XP
• Fight Ogre7 again. Both times 0 dmg.
• While healing explore the rest of the map. Last tile that I'm standing on is Ogre5, hit it once, zero. hit it second time - 13dmg. Okay, I thought it will be more when the board was showing  many x'es. Second fight zero dmg. Got 2hp left, ohwell.
• Died. Deahtsweep. You can mark mines, nice.
• Grind down Ogre5. Didn't get a level, huh.
• Died to Ogre4. Deathsweep. Even middle mouse button works, good job, makes it fast. Death seems futile.
• At this point start paying attention to how damage works. It seems that remaining spins are reset every time I roll a number. Board expands if there are numbers in a line.
• Die. Grind deathsweep. Finally kill Ogre4. Lvl 6 now.
• The xNumber notation feels like the numbers should multiply eachother, but they actually add up while fighting. Makes sense when there are x1s.
• Feel at this point that only a bad click on Deathsweep can end the game. Fighting feels very random.
• Deathsweep. Kill ogre something now. Finally only level 7 one is left. There is still some unaccessible map left, maybe I'm missing out on something?
• Fuck, died to Deathsweep from clicking 5 numbered tiles without opening more of map, finally clicking on random 6th which was deth. Should have clicked next to uncovered 1s.
• Reborn, explore the map to see if I missed anything in previous game. Nope. Wish that far movement was faster.
• Kill Ogre1 in one megahit. Lvlup, don't get back HP, come on. Kill Ogre2 in one megahit and die. Very random damage outcome.
• OK clicking fast on target tile speeds up movement, nice. Now wish it sped up rolling.
• Can't kill Ogre3. quit.

TL;DR:

More guaranteed damage. Rare high damage rolls should stay - maybe reduce number of empty rolls while leveling up. Feels like it needs some progression as health is arbitrary when there's Deathsweeper. Choosing what numbers you get when you level up would be nice too. Do you want to get three x1s? or one x3? etc.

Hey, PHI, thank you for taking to record, analyse and comment Sipho. I wanted to watch your video in full focus before commenting, sorry that it took so much time.

I believe that the damage to controlling player caused by "physical correctness" we are aiming for can still be mitigated by programming movement controls more smartly. Although I would agree that the subtle differences and benefits of movement parts are too subtle to feel impactful and at certain player size / movement part count it becomes negligible. Assuming new player has enough patience to reach that far.

Struggle with controls you've experienced is a combination of new experimental physics we haven't accounted for (overshooting) and old assumption of constant "turn ratio" which causes movement logic to always prioritize turning, hence you not being able to strafe with your movement setup. "Bad movement" is now a common theme we get in negative reviews and refunds we must fix.

There has also been a hilarious amount of powerups you've picked up and I should somehow balance those - so many that they stop making a difference in your actions. That works against their design goal of encouraging player to change their current strategy (flee -> defend or defend -> go on a frenzy killing everything).

The issue with powerups is also the issue you mention with picking up new parts - I'm slowly working on coming up with new synergies between parts so there's never a "meh" pickup option of the boss drops and every pickup should provide a significant boost to the player's build.

I feel that my "conservative game design" can be felt though current insignificance of mostly any pickups and the buff powerup of powerups. I've been designing this game too much as a balanced multiplayer game and not enough like a crazy single-player experience. One of planned features to mitigate this are passive buffs called "Mutations" that can be exclusively picked up among Zooid drops - so you can either choose a new zooid or permanently change stats of your current and future Zooids. You could consider them as Zooid upgrades you have proposed.

tl;dr; I should be less conservative with power spikes and make them significant and guaranteed. Movement will be fixed, sacrifices will be made if necessary.

Password for game page is: `agdg`

These are the things that have changed since last DD37 submission. Please take a look:

• The game now uses constraint based Verlet soft body simulation characters. Have fun in Aquarium - all parts are unlocked there for full experimentation. Post glitches.
• Cra'Than (bone/body) environments use new sprites
• Whirlpools allow choosing one out of two environments to dive to
• Sizzler (stun zooid) now deals damage to Mucked (slowed down by muck) targets
• Lots of other changes - full changelist since last DD build: https://pastebin.com/Cce1KELG

This is a special build for AGDG. The game is in Early Access on Steam and Itch. 

Thanks! Other creatures kind of spawn based on your previous designs, but not in all levels - I haven't gotten around to doing that yet.

Did Spike appear inside the collider or was it just between several objects?

Noice, thanks for playing

- I went to bind Dash to M2 and it didn't automatically switch with Impale. I figure this MIGHT be intentional for later game so I'm not gonna yell about it though.

Yeah, that's intended, you might want to combo several skills on same keybind. Drag and drop skills swaps them.

- I actually got stuck and had to devolve to get through a path. I had a laugh about this one.

I'd guess if this repeats it gets annoying

- I kinda wish there was an area in the editor where I could drop things so that they're not sold but they're temporarily off of the creature.

Noted. This is something that comes up sometimes and seems like is a general problem of temporarily editing your layout. Either if you are refactoring without leaving growth mode or need to do a quick adaptation to your situation.

See game's page for more info. Pass is:

agdg

Nice, thanks for playing. I was considering at the back of my head to allow keeping adapted zooid selection through runs, we should maybe do this. That would make it less punishing to newer players as they don't know what they're missing out on.

Noted Swarmer minions becoming stuck - I'm glad you've considered minions as a viable playstyle here. It's something that we don't see often and we should cater to it.

Poison kind of stacks - damage increases max stack count and pierce multiplies "charge" count on poison. It's kind of complicated, but allows both damage and pierce stats differently affect poison. We should make it so that more stacks of poison dissipate more quickly, giving reason to keep it stacked up top. Maybe we should have a better way of displaying poison stack counts, but can't easily come up with anything.

Thank you! Looks like an engine/setup issue

The consistent aesthetic is nice, but controls being so sensitive makes it really hard. 

I've tested Privacy button on Windows and it works. I see that it should log a warning if it fails to open. Would you have time to see if it does log anything after clicking privacy button?  The log will be in ~/.config/unity3d/All Parts Connected/Sipho/Player.log Just click the button and look for "Failed to get data privacy page URL..."

Noice, thanks a lot! I don't know how much you've played, but maybe you could give some comment on part (Zooid) variety and their cross-interaction? Did you feel, at any point, overwhelmed by options or lacking one?

Yes, that's possibly it, thank you. What are you mac specs if you can tell?

Yeah I figured UWD helps covering few percent of different setups - a significant part of games can't handle that.  Rewatching the video a bit seems like some of the voice was cut-off with noise filtering, damn, sorry about that.

First time playing your game, feels nice. Seems like it has quite a lot of replayability. Captured first 25 minutes of ever playing your game. Have to admit, that I've seen it being played on stream a bit, so I had an idea what it's about.  Video might take a while to process.

Reminds me of MotherLoad flash game. Nice idea with color-coding materials, although pretty hard to see blue text over black boxes. Was able to "exploit" facing sideways while ascending/descending. Died of overconfidence and greed. Character could be a little less sticky to surfaces. More upgrades would make it a lot more addictive.

Thanks! Have you felt any nuisances? Experienced any bugs?

Hey, glad to hear that! What level was that? Game shows title of the level you enter at the middle of the screen or it could be found in game log 

... or you could describe what kind of environment you saw. Level order is random. Also, what are your Mac specs? Very curious what's the performance impact of recent changes. Thanks if you find time to report this!

What has changed since last DD:

• General stability improvements compared to previous DD
• Extended growth positions for structure zooids - allows more options when growing, should add design complexity
• Demo Day exclusive: movers have additional features:
  • Advena movers give energy when getting damaged
  • Seanus movers also act as weaker pushers on dash
  • Buginis movers reduce ability cooldowns
  • Vagorian movers regenerate health
  • Cra'Than movers have additional connection points
• New cooldown reduction stat and powerup, damage powerup. Graphis WIP

If you use Discord, come join Sipho Discord server to say hi!

Nice find :D We are glad synergies emerge like this

Thanks, it's released on Steam as Early Access game, working on updates.

Noted sniper misalignment - currently placing logic is not ideal, it gets worse when you enter growth in motion.

Disabling input is something unheard of - did it just stop working altogether?

Thanks for playing and feedback, I'm happy there weren't any larger issues.

Can't tell if pressing shift makes you ran faster instantaneously or after the FOV animation ends.

Would play an FPS