itch.io

Wonderful little game, though it badly needed some clearer UI indication of which attack directions are available for which units. It took me ages to notice that the tiles highlighted when you mouse over a unit are attack directions - combined with attacks being non-replenishing unless you find resources on the map, the basics of combat were far less intuitive than they should have been. I haven't quite managed a both Hin and Zurück ending, but I'm getting there!

Love the graphics and names as well :)

It didn't 100% click for me, but I had fun, and might come back to play it some more once the mapgen bug has been fixed. Love the graphics and mood!

Really nice turn-based aerial dogfight momentum game and the art is fantastic! :) Feels really solid to play. Well done! :)
EDIT: Forgot to say but I did manage to beat them game after much swerving  ;) I'm not sure if the exit is always going to be in the labyrinth part of the map but the escalation of having to navigate these tight corridors after only dodging the odd rock felt pretty epic.

Thank you so much, looks like it works! :)

Any chance of a Linux build? Looks great but all I could get through the Wine emulator is the start menu.

Chiming in to answer as best as I can (I was part of team for this game):

- Yes, the really dense tree line forms level boundaries. Sometimes regions of trees will also separate parts of the map you can access, but the gap between them is a lot more noticeable, so there's no need to go try squeezing into the tiny spaces (unless it's to chase a bug for example)

 - When you successfully hunt a bug, you hear a slightly different sound, your hunger bar (visible on the screen at all times as several squares) goes up, and the bug disappears from the map (which may not always be clear if there are multiple bugs of the same type flying about). It's quite difficult until you get a knack for it, so it's quite likely you haven't caught a bug yet. The trick is to really SPAM  ping until you've got a kind of time lapse image of the bug's movement, and then strike to intercept (attached a screenshot showing the kind of echolocation imaging you should aim for). In the start it's a bit slow as you need to wait for swoop to come off cooldown if you miss, so you really need to pick your strikes carefully. As you fill hunger past a certain point, you unlock additional swoops. However, different bugs move differently, and some are much easier to catch than others. (For example, there's a grasshopper-like bug that moves in hops and remains completely stationary between them.)

- There is no end goal in the game other than to survive as long as possible (at least at this time)

Oh that could explain it :D Looking forward to it, very cool game either way

That's cool! What does that look like, given there's no health score? I'm not sure if I've seen this or not. I'm guessing you mean the ones that actively increase stress, but I could have sworn I tried using the spell around them with no noticeable difference on stress increasing; that's why I said I couldn't find a use for it.

Really lovely atmospheric game. I think I got both endings? Also, putting on  this in the background really set the mood.

Is there a use for the invisibility spell? I couldn't find one.

I somehow lucked into a win on the first try (albeit with some deaths) and then spent a few more failing miserably, but what I noticed is you can redo the mission with the same setup and crew, so you can try one thing, see what doesn't work, then make minor changes and try again without starting the whole heist-planning over from scratch. Super useful to test out the impact of certain actions.

It seems that stopping the train completely (by shooting at it or blowing up the tracks with dynamite) is pretty optional, although it might be necessary to get the full payout from multiple wagons. The minimal recommended heist steps are something like 'shoot at wagons with money', 'attack guards', 'loot money', 'escape'. I wonder if you could skip fighting guards as long as you're quick enough, but probably not...

Extremely fun, thank you! World needs more heist games. :) The ability to retry the same heist with minor changes to the plan really makes this shine. This is the highest score I've got so far though I'm sure I could do better. I couldn't quite seem to get sniping from a roof to work? Not sure what I was missing there. My only criticism is that the map action would be easier to follow if civilians and crew had different colour schemes. I also had one run softlock on me as two of the crew were stuck moving back and forth around a train track corner - I changed the start location of the crew member with the dynamite and that seemed to help.

I also had a freeze at a screen like this. Firefox and Ubuntu

I beat it! Great game.

I figured! I also recommended the game to my friend and this was their feedback:

"I beat it that was interesting. Running around scrabbling for pills in the dark felt ludo-narratively harmonious" :)

I can't believe how close I got! Ran out of fuel with like 20 km to spare and there was a canister on the side of the road I didn't grab much earlier because it was surrounded by enemies. Even ran all across the map here just in case I found something but it was not to be. I'll come back to this for another attempt for sure.

I beat it! Very cool and atmospheric little game, thank you for making it.

It looked like there were missing symbols in the final dialogue:

We were both looking for a meal... but the bird found its meal first >.<

I loved this, delightful. Took me four tries but I got the blanket ending, might go back and also try to get the day 20 ending. Definitely had fun with the learning curve and uncovering the mechanics. The aesthetics and flavour of the game are an utter delight, and I appreciate the Lint Lapins who I'm sure are relatives of Dust Bunnies. :) Quite interesting managing the health and stress stats. I know what the maid hat does but want to go back and explore some of the other equipment options. Wonderful work!

Love the art and ambience, very atmospheric and combat feels pretty good. Great job!

What I liked: Fun concept, the basic idea of a racing game roguelike and your choice of flavour for it is a cool and daring combination. The art is fantastic, massive kudos to your collaborator. You've put a lot of thought into the mechanics and how to keep things moving and interesting for the player. There's a lot of variety in the kind of units and obstacles on the map.

What I did not like: The controls. The way momentum works and the hard corners and cluttered nature of levels makes for a very frustrating combination. Neither playing nor the learning curve are fun for me, though I imagine people with more experience playing racing games might take to it a bit better. Boomer enemies are very difficult to avoid. In general, it's very hard to get anywhere without crashing. Another more minor criticism is that I had trouble visually parsing the map, specifically what tiles block movement/make you crash and which you can path through. The map looks quite busy and I think more consistent visual colour coding would help legibility.

Still, very cool concept. I would be very interested in playing a version of this that's more of a precision racer (a Snake game-like, if you will), where there's acceleration and braking but turning response is instant.

Yeah, there's definitely a time and place for deliberately letting yourself be caught by the chicken's vision or by the hound or farmer's peripheral vision to cunningly manipulate them. I really enjoyed that too ^^

Fantastic little InvInc-like. I enjoyed engaging the farmer, hound, and the most harmless yet fearsome enemy of all, CHICKEN, in a heart-pounding game of cat and mouse.

+ Addendum:

I'm reminded of Invisible Inc, which is a fantastic game and works in all the right ways... and has a god-awful tutorial that fails to teach you some of the most important mechanics, such as the distinction between noticed and seen enemy vision. I regularly watch new players hamstring themselves by playing on self-imposed hard mode, navigating enemies under the assumption that the "You get seen and *overwatched* here" vision cone is twice its actual size.

It speaks to the flaws in the tutorial, which not only fails to explain the difference, but doesn't even let you move through peripheral/noticed vision, let alone force you to do so to teach you that it's basically safe. I wish the devs had improved the tutorial, but I am very very glad they didn't decide to instead cut the peripheral/seen distinction just because it was confusing to some players. *Shudder*

>I’m curious for feedback here from other designers. My instinct at this moment is to cut diagonal movement.

You're never going to make a game that instinctively "clicks" with 100% of players. I recommend resisting the impulse to fix what isn't broken to reach a broader audience. Besides, you spelled out a much better solution already: Simply rework the tutorial so that moving diagonally is unavoidable and have players repeat it once or twice so it sinks in.

I don't think so, most likely it was a room accessible only via diagonal corner tiles that I missed.

Which, I'm torn about. My biggest issue with them is that it's often very hard to see if there's a corner entrance or not until you're looking at it squarely. So scouting them is a bit of a timesink.

Simple but pretty fun concept! Well done, would love to see a more polished postjam version of this with some SFX

Fantastic write-up. I was wondering about the map-gen - it was sufficiently challenging to explore and navigate without generating completely frustrating dead ends (such as ending up in one "prong" of the map only to find that the exit is on the other prong). Very interesting

Question: I can't speak to this with certainty, but I could have sworn that twice so far I've had maps (both cases it was the first level - chronologically, I mean, not LVL-1) where one of the data nodes was in an enclosed space only reachable via Burrow. One was a particularly memorable occasion because I tunneled into the room with the node and a patrol in it, had the Hunter follow me in, and then circled back around to the entrance I had made to get back out. I don't think I could have possibly missed an existing door if there had been one. Do you know anything about that?

Excellent game with fun mechanics and a great difficulty curve

Thank you for playing :)

Personally, I can say that luring guards out into the hedges works almost as well as with gardeners. They will aggro after a bit, but breaking line of sight seems to reset the timer, so you can pretty easily get away with it. The only downside of their disguise is you don't get the shovel. (And you can't interact with poisonous plants without raising suspicion, but it's usually not hard to do that without being seen, so it's not a major constraint).

It looks awesome and proves less is more sometimes

What a cute game. Thank you for making this.

Nice concept but controls are little too frustrating for something this time-sensitive, I think