itch.io

I think that “always give some Fever” might be a good place to start. (Right now, it's directly proportional to Coherence, so shooting with zero Coherence gives zero Fever).

I see, that is a bit harder to intuit as a player because I conceptualize bullets as distinct things once they leave my ship instead of being treated as a group where one hit “validates the rest”.

Actually, they aren’t a group at all. Firing starts coherence drain and any bullet hitting any target stops it. (The state of this is visualized as the wavy part of the bar — each of the 3 quantities has a “temporary value/modifier” associated with it which is drawn that way, but each one has different rules.)

The rule for Coherence is that not hitting at least one thing has a penalty, so it’d be difficult to tie it to damaging something because most of the time, not all of your shot hits an enemy. In development, the first version of the rule was that bullets that miss did have a cost, but that was (in my opinion) not fun to actually play well, so I changed it.

I agree that there should be more guidance towards the idea of avoiding firing, but I didn’t have any good ideas for how to make this clear in-game, short of a “quest marker” system that explicitly points you towards the next stage of play (a more explicitly labeled, attention-getting version of the thing where bars appear when they first become nonzero).

I think it’s a brilliant plot twist: “you can do that??? of course you can do that". But the game requires you to think of it, rather than showing it to you, while in an open space — too many possibilities. A fix might be to make that room smaller in such a way that it is difficult for the player not to be in the position to do it.

Possibly relatedly, I noticed early on in a corridor that if I typed "left" while moving right, I got stuck, and my reaction at the time was "huh, kind of a bug there; they should handle it better." I learned better later, but maybe some kind of cue there might help. Yvxr vs gelvat gb qryrgr vagb rzcgl fcnpr synfurq gur rzcgl fcnpr.

In case you didn’t, try the fullscreen button in the bottom right.

I agree it’s not a great default — the problem is that I did a pixel art design for 640 × 480, which means that the next scale up is 1280 × 960, which would be a bit uncomfortably large and put part of the game offscreen sometimes. If I do something like this again, I’d pick a smaller or larger base resolution with the itch.io page layout in mind.

I like how the level design made me think “oh, that’s what I have to do” several times.

The hardest part was jumping up the cloud staircase while carrying the cheese. Everything is rather slippery and the low FOV makes it hard to see where I’m putting my feet. A simple change that might help is to make picked up objects stay at the same height instead of moving up and down. It would also help if everything had more friction against the ground.

I think the thing that would most help this concept besides fixing the bugs is some kind of indication of where attacks are happening. It wasn’t clear that pieces attack automatically rather than by moving them.

I would probably love this if it was turn-based just like the classic roguelikes. As it is, aiming at the tiny squares and timing attacks was too hard to make progress past the second level. Excellent graphical and UI work, though!

In hindsight it really needs some in-game explanation that the win condition isn't “survive all the waves” or “kill all the enemies to advance”. Lesson for next time: get playtesting sooner. Thanks for the feedback!

I kept falling off and wondering how you were supposed to steer, and then I figured out that the terrain is an infinite ribbon, not an arena. Don't try to go in circles!

I tried reloading four times or so and it does this every time! (Chrome, macOS)

For me the web build is panicking: 

Encountered an error in observer `chainboom::gameplay::npc::sound::on_death`: Parameter `ResMut<NpcAssets>` failed validation: Resource does not exist

I couldn't figure out how to lay an egg at first. The instruction "Fly over worker cell" didn't tell me I needed to stop over the worker cell. 

I think the #1 thing this could use is crisp visual cues for what regions are drop targets.

This could go somewhere interesting, I think, with better UI and gameplay tweaking.

The ship-building could greatly benefit from some UI refinements such as displaying a preview of the ship you're building at all times, flagging when you have a synergy or not, and allowing viewing all of the part type lists at once (rather than having to exit out to check if you have a match).

Controlling the entire fleet with one cursor was a really interesting challenge at first, but then as the lasers got longer-range and the ships got faster, "hold still in the middle" became a better strategy.

And if the combinations somehow visibly affected gameplay, that would be cool and tie it together better. (Ghostly alternate universes with ships taking different routes?)

Neat concept. I think it would benefit from some sort of difficulty control or slower pacing, because I got the idea of what I needed to do but just couldn't both plan and drag things fast enough to make it happen.

This feels like it could be refined into a very nice game with a simple concept. Right now, it's hard to tell what's going on (what needs attacking/dodging versus what needs collecting) with the bright blue shield circles being the dominant visual effect.