Thank you for the kind words buddy! Usually, I'm not a huge fan as well so I tried to make one I could have fun with, hopefully it would be fun for others as well 😄
I would do it for free in a future update haha, at some point, I thought about having a playable Flood Career where your main weapon was flood spore to kill and infect other entities.
Like you just want to play as a Jackal or do you mean as having a weapon + shield to block incoming projectiles? x)
I worked as a Designer for Microsoft (France) when I was a teenager and I stayed in touch with some people from there over the years. When I started working on this project, I reached out to them and ask them if it was possible to work on this without having to worry about legal issues, and they pointed the Xbox Game Content Usage Rules. We checked and regarding what I was working on, everything seemed alright to keep going since I wasn't breaking any rules.
A year later, when we announced the game and release a first playable version, we learned some people from Halo Studios got their hands on it. Following this, the Director of Communication approached us and got in touch, very nicely, to talk about the game and making sure we could keep working on it and share it without making the Legal Team at Microsoft uneasy. They worked on their side to verify everything and came back to us saying we got their approval to keep working on it and have it playable for everyone everywhere we wanted, as long as we updated some stuff and especially our Terms & Conditions with a sentence/statement they gave us, within the game credits and on everywhere we were publishing it.
So nothing crazy to be honest haha, their approval/blessing is mostly us being safe that the game wouldn't be shutdown and that we could keep working on it without having to worry about legal issues.
Hopefully it answers your question 🙏
PS: Fun fact, one of our prototype was about recreating the CE's campaign as a 2D game in our style, and when I discovered your project, I thought it was better to offer something else to the community so they can get different fan-games to play, so keep up the good work buddy! ❤️
Indeed the game does not support Steam Deck nor Proton yet. We've seen members of the community trying get the game running but no success so far, mostly coming from the UI not being displayed due to the tech we've been using.
We're looking into that for the official Steam release but can't promise anything on that side as it might be more difficult to have the game running correctly on a Linux-based OS. 😅
We just deployed a new version which aims to auto-download the appropriate version, or ask you permission to do so if needed. It can cause issues if the Windows you're using has been modified or is a LTSC version, but this update should help anyway.
You can download it right now from the game page, tell me if it helped solve your issue. 😄
This might be an issue with the WebView (the display tech we're using for the menu), it should display a message to download the appropriate component to display the menu if you don't have this installed already on your PC, but we'll check that again and see to include a proper fix in our next update 🙏
Arf, we thought we had eliminated this issue, guess we'll have to get another look to understand what's creating this as it seems quite random, some people never encounter this issue and others it's like 50% of their runs.
Truly sorry you are having this issue, I don't want your fun to be impacted by this kind of bug, we'll have another look at it and hopefully we'll be able to fix it in our next update. 🙏
It was a two-ways process: I worked on it myself as for the base concept, the sketching for the idea and the composition and then I worked with a french artist I really appreciate called Jean-Baptiste Dessaux aka jbn0s0rus for the final piece of art 😄
This is something we're looking into. At first, I would have tell you "No" but since we got Halo Studios validation to keep going, we will discuss with them about releasing the game as part of the ID@Xbox program, therefore allowing the game to have achievements. I can't tell you yet how things will be moving on this front but I'll keep you updated as soon as I can.
What I can tell otherwise is that we will have achievements for Steam in the meantime once it's available there 😄
Thanks! Unfortunately not, we didn't intend to release it on Mac and ended using our own tech which is at the moment not compatible with Mac support. We'll see if we can do something about it once we're done with the several releases, I'll keep you updated. 😄
We updated the download yesterday to add some bug fixes, you can download the file on the page (they are the latest ones) and use them, it will keep your save. 😄
Oh and just in case, we'll be releasing it on Steam as well in the coming weeks, which should make the updates/getting the latest version easier.
Actually that's a bug we've run into in the past, but it should have been fixed by now, at least we worked on it before releasing the game and it didn't occur to use anymore in like 100 sessions. We'll check again before releasing our next update in July to make sure it doesn't happen that often (it shouldn't occur 50% of the time, that's really A LOT, as I said, we had this issue but maybe once every 100 games played 😅).
Thanks! We do have a mobile version which is in the work for Android at the moment, I don't know for the Xbox App at the moment (like you mean playing a cloud version of the game right?) but if it's doable to do so then we will check that. 😄
Hey buddy! Thank you so so much for the clear feedback, it is really appreciated as it definitely helps moving forward on some stuff! There's actually a lot I agree with you and some stuff which are actually already done and will be available in the next content update. 😄
Going through your feedback one by one to give you a clearer picture:
- Max upgrade: Yes there's an issue with the text, but rest assured it is only a display issue as it stays to the max upgrade. It's been fixed and will be available in the next update.
- Drop: Agree as well, it's been something I struggled with and haven't found an ideal design solution so far. I'll make the arrow & drop sprites a little bit bigger as well as making sure the drop is always above all the entities so it's not visually lost.
- You should have seen the Shield/HP meters in our beta, it was even smaller haha, but yeah, we made them bigger already and will check that again for our next update so make them the appropriate size, definitely with you on this. We tried making them available where they usually are in the Halo games (on top of the screen) but we had some feedback during our playtests that players didn't see them because they were focusing on the main character sprite, so we decided to have them below it instead.
- Yeah same as you haha, I'm so used to Halo games that I think it is sometimes my Shield bar and not the XP. Honestly, I don't have a solution yet for that, I will study the option to have it in the bottom of the screen next to the upgrade, not for this update but maybe for the Steam & Xbox release.
- Agree on the cursor, it's something I wanted to add before the first release but had time constraint. Basically, I also wanted each character to have their unique cursor according to the weapons they were using. It's definitely something I want to bring in the game, and do in a certain way for controller players like me as well. It's on my To-Do list.
- Melee attack was also something I wanted to work and had to remove for lack of time for this first release. I really felt shooting was nice but being able to also press a button to melee an entity would be a lot of fun! Had some issue with the animation, but again, really something I want to add, hopefully we can make it for the Xbox version this summer.
- Boss: 1000% agree and good news, it's already added! Had to remove them for the first release due to time constraint as well but this is something I've been working on since the first release and so far was able to add 3 bosses. I'm still testing them before release (especially for the endless mode) but know it's something I'm playing with as we speak. 🙌
Again, thank you so much for having taken the time to share your feedback, this is so nice and useful for me and my working partner, and it makes us feel like the game has been really appreciated for you to take this time. 🙏
We really want to work on all of this and a little bit more to make the Steam and Xbox release the best it can so anyone can enjoy this little game as much as possible.
Agree with you and it's in the plan haha, we had some technical stuff to fix specifically for Steam (Steam Overlay) which made releasing on Itchio easier at first (especially so we could see if everything was good or needed updates) but the Steam version should be released early June. We have a content update for this week-end, and then we can prepare the Steam page. 😄
And you are absolutely right, this is something I really wanted to add and have it unique for each character since they have their own weapon, couldn't because of time but I'll definitely check with my associate if we have the ability to add this in the next update. 😄
Oh thank you so much for spotting this! Actually, it's an issue with displaying the correct text, but rest assured the perk effect is always the most powerful. Will update this with a new build this weekend, thank you again 🙏
