itch.io

Went ahead and gave it a solid three replays. The wall fix implemented is excellent. Not letting you place into the mass feels logical and good, and it still lets you spam walls but continues to destroy them so you have to sprint around constantly repairing them and falling back slowly as the mass continues to advance. Feels good.

Thats fair enough heading onto other projects, better than getting bogged down on just the one.

As far as other thoughts on how to improve this one I would give the player other things to manage and juggle while trying to deal with the spread of the mass. Drastically lower its speed to give more of that creeping horror vibe. But have the player have to go to their extractors to collect resources. And have those resources need to be taken back to the base to construct new extractors and walls and inhibitors. Maybe add another machine you can produce that acts like a placeable production center where you can bring resources to make the various enplacements.

Maybe add in an inventory limit for players to juggle with this. That you can upgrade to carry more enplacements at a time. Means you really would need to (as a player) figure out the right balance of gathering materials, running to base or to your production enplacements to make more things like walls and extractors and inhibitors, and generally give you more to do and get overwhelmed with. Just feels like it would fit the vibe you are going for here. Stresses the player out but in a way where if they use their brain and keep calm could lend itself to a really good grind as you manage to squeeze out maximal resources while balancing all of these factors.

Would feel kinda like the loop offered by the Biters in factorio but with all the extraneous things stripped out from that experience. Just you vs this force that won't stop and will only keep getting worse as time goes on.

Anyways, I'm dropping you a follow and I'm interested to see what you put out next!

I would definitely make inhibitors less powerful. I gave it another run through and obviously I cannot see the code in front of me, but I'm fairly sure the inhibitors are stacking.

As far as suggestions to stop the problem I would say instead of making the walls able to completely stop growth, make the rate at which the mass grows significantly reduced. I understand this sounds a little counterintuitive but if you are going for a kinda bleak/horror tone (What I gathered from the ending) it would help to sell the sort of creeping terror of it all. Make it so that the walls are being broken all the time, and you have to head between the front lines (Which are always slowly advancing) and the rear of the field to keep placing extractors.

This would keep the walls from simply rendering the mass entirely unable to advance (At which point it just becomes a waiting game) and instead lets you use them basically as decoys to draw the mass's fire while you try and put up things like inhibitors to stall it.

Other suggestions I have would be for expanded mechanics but I'm not exactly sure how much you are looking to dedicate to polishing and working on a game jam game, or if you were looking to jump into new projects right away. But if you'd like to hear suggestions I'd be happy to provide some.

doubled checked and tested it. On the browser version specifically. You can place walls and inhibitors inside the approaching mass. And it would seem that (Assumedly to save on processing) The mass's that attack your buildings only spawn at the front line, but they cannot spawn directly on top of your buildings and inhibitors drastically reduce their spawn rate.

So if you rush a handful of decent miners, then save a bit and spend nothing on ship improvements, you can rush to the front. Slap down an inhibitor, which the mass will then try and destroy, where you can put down Mk2 walls rapidly inside of the mass itself to block shots as they come out. Once they have expended themselves you can then use your accumulated cash to slowly push back the effective spawning radius using walls until it is out of the front line. Then pick up some more mines while it trys chewing through those walls, and then go absolutely hog wild with inhibitors (I mean like i ended up with a solid 10-20 stacked up next to each other in choke points.) and use a combination of them and the walls to prevent the mass from making any progress at all.

There also seems to be some level of glitched behavior to this possibly? Where it seemed at a certain number of inhibitors the mass's just stop spawning entirely to attack my structures? I even tried to run over the mass (Which oddly doesn't damage you once you hit this point) and couldn't find anything shooting anywhere within it.

At this point the mass is effectively stopped entirely and you can leisurely wander about the map slapping down large MK3 Extractors and just wait till the bar fills up.

Ran it this way a few times, best time I managed to keep the eastern mass contained within its spawning region, and the northern mass I was able to cut off just below the second horizontal row. Meaning it actually never hit the starting area or the starting inhibitor at all!

My suggestions on this would be to simply not let inhibitors be placed so close to each other. If they are reducing the spawn rate of masses that attack your buildings by a percentage (Say increasing it to double of its norm) then overlapping rings would rapidly reduce this number to be so low as to effectively not happen. (5sec->10->20->40 ect ect.) I should do more testing but its pretty easy to slap down overlapping rings of 10-15+ inhibitors. So whatever factor may be used would either have to be cranked so low as to make them basically useless (And still not solve the issue, as volume could still be used to brute force through any lowered numbers). So it feels like the easier solution if that is the issue is to prevent their overlap similarly to how you prevented it with the Extractors.

I'll check this out next time its updated. Though its entirely possible you just respond here saying "Oh yeah, browser version is outdated" or something similar.

The inhibitors along with walls allow you to actually fully stop the spread entirely dead by stacking dozens of inhibitors overtop of each other. I would assume that this is not intended behavior?

excellent

Watching someone get scalped like this will absolutely never get old.

tutorial doesn't kick in, or at least didn't for me. I'm just looking a guy wandering around an empty factory office with no idea what anything does.

Is Ditto supposed to not have a cap on its level up price like all the other mons I've run into the cap of 100,000 on so far?

I know you made this for me and the other 7 nerds who read the Silmarillion. Amazing work chief. I actually laughed like a madwoman when I leveled up the first time and saw Huan, "The Greatest Dog who Ever Lived"

Honchcrow can hit invisible mons. Only one I've found so far who does. Presumably others do as well

Oh yeah I will say maybe something to clarify for folks that some evolutions aren't in the game would be good? I don't know if you included stuff like Farigiraf in the game or Sir'Fetched (I may have just missed them but I leveled up both a lot to see if I could pick them up)

Oh sweet. These are hype. Why the random pick to include just a handful of random mons from mid to later gens? From 6 I'm counting Hawlucha, Binacle, and Froaky? These just some favorite picks?

Any chance of getting a list of all the mons in the game? Doing an ancient mons team and i have all of them excepting Aerodactyl for the first 4 gens. Want to know if I can be hunting hard for others or not.

Also maybe a way to release mons you don't want and reduce the price of a new egg? At a certain point if the full dex up to a certain point is in here it does feel like its gonna get ridiculous to afford.