itch.io

1. Not really, sorry, the game doesn't seem to have much of a direction or underlying mechanic to it apart from being a strange and short walking sim.

2. The squares that tell you what to do are a bit hard to see in the hub, and feel out of place.

3. Yes, it was easy, albeit unfulfilling, as it's just the player stumbling into them rather than having coming from a skillful accomplishment.

4. About 5-10 minutes for getting the two fragments themselves.

5. Yes, and the tele-maze is incredibly tedious, since you can't see the associated number of a spot without going over to it and redoing the whole cycle all over again.

6. Like the levels, the hub is pretty sparse and doesn't have much to offer.

- The first note can only be closed with Enter, despite that key not being used anywhere else.

- Why E to punch and F to interact? Why not LMB for punching and E for interaction?

- Mouse sensitivity is incredibly high.

- Collisions are very strange, with it being far to easy to get stuck on the sides of objects. This is likely due to walls having a ton of friction with the player. Maybe try using a CharacterController instead of a Rigidbody.

- Why the outhouse? *Why?*

- The outline shader is incredibly buggy, flickering in and out rapidly and being visible through walls, other objects, the player, etc.

- The pause menu doesn't actually pause the game or stop non-UI inputs.

- You can jump over the fences in the fog level, softlocking yourself.

- The fog doesn't render correctly on the skybox.

1. The feeling of hecticness is absolutely much better than before. However, the underlying mechanics of gathering and depositing stardust still is a bit flat. Having more hazards in the map and/or from special enemies would go a long way to mix things up and require more skill and focus from the player when they move around.

2. It's hard to say, though the asteroid and sun towers feel a bit samey apart from their appearance and elements. That's not really a huge problem though, as getting different elements out there is an important mechanical difference in its own right. I'd love to see more variation in the future towers now that there's a way to get each element, however.

3. Not really, an in-game text prompt explaining the system would be quite useful. Also, after being told how the system works by one of the devs, I feel like the system could benefit from being flipped. Instead of enemies resisting the element they are, they should resist everything *except* their element. That way you will need a diverse spread of tower types, as currently you only need two elements in order to cover each other's weaknesses.

4. The game flow is good, although sadly there's not much in terms of progression between the levels, they're all quite similar to one another with the lack of hazards and other special environment features besides the colors.

5. The UI is great right now, good job on the implementation for the auto-play button.

6. See #3.

7. The multi-tiered system feels very good!

8. Absolutely, it seems to be at a good balance right now, slow enough that it doesn't entirely remove the need for collecting stardust manually. It may or may not need a slight cost increase though, I'm not sure.

1. It's good, although if you spam A or D a bunch, it queues them all up and leaves you spinning uncontrollably. Not a bug that's really going to cause problems for anyone, but a bug nonetheless.

2. The layout seems good for the most part. However, the mini-map isn't fully accurate to the world layout, there's some unmarked walls. For example, if you take a very sharp left immediately from the start and try to move between the two small wall pieces on your way straight to Hydroponics, you suddenly slam into an unmarked wall and die.

3. The panel layout is still good as-is.

4. The monster can still see and kill the player while they are hiding, even if they hide before the monster first sees them. It also seems like the monster can sometimes see the player through walls.

5. (No #5?)

6. The hide button only seems vaguely useful, it's hard to say how effective it really is. The fact that it's set to a fixed duration instead of being on a toggle is quite annoying. If you want to lock the player out entirely for X amount of time, then make it so the button is a toggle, but you can't go out of hiding until at least X seconds have passed, and have a visual and/or sound queue to go along with it.

7. What happened to oxygen slowly recharging when the window is closed? It's back to how it was in the first version, never filling up, and renders the window useless like before.

8. Turn and movement speed both feel spot-on. However, just like in the first build, the second item is next to impossible to grab, and might actually be even worse off than last time, as the mini-map makes it look like the gap is genuinely too small for the ship to fit through. I died multiple times trying to get it, and no amount of precise adjustments were able to get me through.

9. The map layout is much more identifiable this time, very good. Only exception being the aforementioned invisible unmarked walls.

10. It closes the game. Not sure why this needs its own question.

- What's the point of the "Do you want to start a new game" prompt? It doesn't seem to actually do anything, as the game state is never saved.

1. The puzzles were great! However, the time limit makes it nigh impossible to solve them without taking screenshots and doing them outside of the game.

2. When I had all my codes together and launched the game to put them in, I only had a quarter of the bar left on my way to the pod. It felt good, still having pressure to actually put in the codes fast enough. However, like I mentioned before, it does ultimately force the player to solve the puzzles externally.

3. The fire was alright during the code-entering sequence, but it feels contrived while trying to solve the puzzles themselves. Also, the requirement to drop the extinguisher to use a terminal doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose, as you always drop the extinguisher right there and can immediately grab it once you're done with the terminal. Unless you incorporate a system of multiple items and meaningful things to interact with (which might be too late at this point), I'd recommend removing the drop requirement altogether.

4. It felt good, but most of my time was spent outside of the game itself. See 1 & 2.

5. The layout is fine, although some of the doors connected to the terminal rooms can't ever be opened and yet don't have anything to indicate as such.

6 & 7. The puzzles are nice and clever, though the game is honestly far too short.

8 & 9. Here's some assorted bugs / pain points I noticed, which should be pretty simple to solve:

- The beeping alarm is ALWAYS playing and it gets quite annoying, especially if you try to focus on puzzles. Also, it doesn't cut off when the death screen shows up, and instead lingers for a while.

- The intro audio cue always plays at the start of every run, it gets tedious fast.

- It's not obvious what button is used to exit the code terminals, the first time I got to one I thought I was softlocked and needed to quit.

- The music is quite loud and makes it hard to focus, and isn't helped by how obvious it is when the track loops.

- It says you can only input one code per terminal, but after submitting a code you can still edit it. The submitted code still doesn't change, but the text does, causing a disconnect in information. If terminals are meant to be one-use, then the player should be blocked from interacting with it once they submit, and have it auto-exit the terminal.

- Terminals say the code is valid/invalid based on whether the code was from the right poster, instead of based on it being one of the possible poster codes.

1. I feel like the sheer quantity of stardust should be toned down somewhat, dropping less often while having more buying power. Reason being, things currently feel tedious more than they do hectic. Maybe adding more things to do like additional places to spend stardust or different kinds of drops or dynamic hazards from the enemies could help alleviate this as well.

2. Stardust costs seem more or less fine, though the black hole cost is teetering on the edge of being too much, especially on the third stage.

As for tower balance against enemies, the Saturn tower is far too strong. Multi-target towers should always be more expensive and deal very low amounts of damage to each individual enemy. I'd also recommend having a simple single-target tower be the starting tutorial tower once you have one implemented, instead of starting the player out with Saturn.

3. Here's some ideas:

Sun: Absolutely would be fire elemental, though lots of possibilities for how it attacks.

  A. A large, single-target beam that melts through enemies. Maybe weak and constant, maybe strong and periodically goes on cooldown.

  B. Launching fireballs.

  C. Solar flares that pulse out to deal bursts of multi-target damage.

Earth:

  A. Bolts of water.

  B. Flurries of 'tiny' rockets/nukes that either focus on multiple targets or go to one target and move onto the next if they die before the flurry is done. Humanity going nuts with its bombs or something, could be neat.

  C. The Moon constantly orbiting around, damaging enemies as it passes through them. Upgrades would increase the orbital speed.

Jupiter:

  A. Single-target lightning strikes.

  B. Preiodic gusts of wind that push enemies back.

Pluto:

  A. Freeze/slow effect to nearby enemies.

  B. Upgrade path where Pluto periodically freezes/slows all enemies on the map for a short duration, but goes on cooldown for a long while. Something something joke about pluto flip flopping its planet status over and over.

  C. Pluto and Charon together, launching out icy projectiles (irl they often trade material due to being so close).

- Some kind of asteroid-related tower(s) or something with the Kuiper belt

- A comet tower that costs a lot, has a purchase cooldown, and only fires one attack before destroying itself, but it causes a huge comet to rip across the map and take out all enemies.

- Similar to the single-use comet tower, maybe a meteor shower that bombards the map randomly for a duration of time, lasting for a while instead of being instant.

4. Occasional hazards/obstacles beyond ice, like moving blocks or timed spikes or something of that sort could make the levels a lot more interesting. Alternate routes to areas would be good as well, so you don't always go through the same choke point and have more options in movement. Perhaps some routes are faster but more hazardous, etc.

5. With how overpowered the Saturn tower is right now, most of the time spent is just walking back and forth to grab stardust and fiddle with the selection reticle, lots of laborious downtime between waves. I will say though that standing in the middle of a pile of stardust and spamming E to spew them all out quickly is really satisfying.

6. The UI itself is good, though I'd recommend having some text for the next wave button. The selection system is very neat, though sometimes becomes a struggle when I'm trying to toss stardust (especially in large piles) since it loves to latch onto towers, often forcing me to move things a distance of one tile at a time.

I'd recommend having a setting that lets the mouse interact with things (same as E) if the player clicks on anything other than a UI button. Constantly going from WASD to tapping E can get a bit clumsy at times.

Along with that, I'd love to have a setting which allows the player to, when standing still, use the mouse to aim the reticle on any specific tile they want within range, for more precise control.

7. Not sure.

8. Adding more towers, enemy types, different things to do or focus on, and more interesting level layouts and hazards will go a long way for fleshing out what the player can do and strategize over.

1. The puzzle was good, though it's hard to judge when there's only one available right now.

2. I'd definitely like to see some puzzles that revolve around the lack of gravity, both for navigating around and for toying with floating objects.

3. The O2 meter feels balanced.

4. The fire extinguisher is painfully slow, especially since you can't do anything in a room until the fires are out.

5. The game is incredibly short. It needs more rooms and different ways to interact within each one, especially if you're still planning on the whole branching endings/routes thing.

6-8. The game is quite rigid right now, forcing you to do things in a precise order before it lets you progress. It's also got a fair number of bugs, such as doors taking your power but not opening, being able to rotate the camera upside down, parts of the door arches are z-fighting, and the escape button can be pressed over and over.

1. The monster feels very inconsistent, sometimes spotting the player with ease and other times it's blinder than a bat. It also has a tendency to suddenly lose sight of the player and forget about them entirely, even if the player is just standing still.

With how fast the monster moves compared to the player, along with the constant screen swapping, whether or not you can survive/avoid the monster feels almost entirely up to luck. It spawning right next to the player isn't great either, as the beginning of every run is just waiting and hoping that it moves out of the way.

2. The controls are fine, though swapping back and forth constantly to align the ship little by little can get a bit tedious. Being able to keep the mouse held down to move in one direction while looking at the map really help with this; I imagine it was unintentional but I'd recommend leaving it in.

The only thing that felt unclear to me was the button for the collector. It took some time to realize it was clickable or that it was for the collector, and I'm still not entirely sure what each color indicates for it. Otherwise, everything was pretty intuitive!

3. The ship looks good so far! I especially love the instruction booklet, it's got a lot of charm.

Really the only thing that felt off is the position/objective display. The panel is uncomfortably close to the camera and the font is so large that it's hard to read it off at a glance, requiring your eyes to pan across almost the entire screen.

4. As mentioned previously, dealing with the monster feels like a game of chance, especially with the map being essentially just one corridor with no options to go somewhere else. If the monster between you and the objective, there's nothing you can do but sit and wait for it to go away. The small walls and hiding spots off to the side aren't really usable thanks to how fast the monster is and how tedious it is to go around corners.

The second objective is far too tight of a gap. The ship only barely fits in, requiring a solid minute of fiddling about, made worse by the ship icon not giving a good indication of what the actual hitbox is like. Getting caught by the monster is almost guaranteed here if it comes by.

5. The ship speed feels good, though the monster far outpaces the player, especially when it comes to turning corners. I would try to tweak the monster to fix that, and not change the ship speed too much, since too fast of a speed would mean crashing into things all the time.

6. The paper map doesn't seem to line up very well with the actual game layout, and I only have a vague idea of where the starting location fits on it.

7. I never really had to use the window much, so I'm not sure if there is or isn't enough O2. It does drain way faster than I would've thought, however. As for the window itself, it usually doesn't offer that much more information; the lack of textures makes it really hard to see what's going on outside.

8. There's definitely a lot of potential here, I'd love to see where this all goes! My main advice would be to have a few more branching and connected paths for the layout, so there's more to explore and some actual options for avoiding and getting around the monster. That, and to make the monster more consistent and make sure the paper map matches the game.

1. The level size feels perfect right now, though it'd also be interesting if it varied in size randomly.

2. The blue vial replenishes almost nothing right now, though I assume that's since it's planned to do something special later. The red vials seem to give a fair amount.

3. Here's a few ideas for temporary duration powerups:

  - Something that slows down enemies and the horde

  - A magnet that pulls in nearby blood packs through walls

  - A boost to how much blood packs give, and it allows the blood meter to overfill past its normal maximum.

  - Instantly kill any enemies that you touch

  - Increase max blood by a large amount and fill the meter with 5-10 blood packs worth, but slightly increase the speed of the horde for the rest of the current run.

4. The horde's speed seems perfect as-is.

5. Maybe the amount of blood packs and powerups collected? Distance travelled?

6. Of course, it's fun trying to repeatedly beat the high score and push it as far as possible.

7. I'd recommend either making the blue vial not permanent, or have it permanently increase the max blood but NOT the starting blood. Otherwise, your high score becomes entirely dominated by how many raw hours you've played, and not how skilled you actually are at the game, since you just have an ever-increasing starting pool of health.

Bugs:

- There's no way to restart the game once you die, other than relaunching the entire game.

- If you're holding down a movement key when you exit a level, in the next level your character won't move until you release the key and start holding it again.

Misc:

- I'd recommend tweaking some of the shrub sprites, they blend in easily with the background and are hard to see at a glance.

1. The game is engaging, though the arena sections feel a bit long, at least for being part of the intro area. I'd also recommend having enemies spawn randomly within or near the edges of the arena, as opposed to the immediate center.

2. Sound effects for getting hurt, enemies finishing their attack, and the player missing their attacks would help a lot with game feedback. Otherwise, the sounds are great!

3. Combat feels good, but the parry locks the player for a long time, and the spacebar ability feels pretty underpowered. I'd recommend upping the damage, and change the extra bar segments to either increase the damage or simply be separate uses, as the increased AOE doesn't do much when all the enemies are surrounding the player so closely. As of now, it's really easy to just stunlock goblins with basic attacks (which can hit multiple enemies) and never use anything else, which feels fun but leaves the other mechanics unused.

4. The game is pretty short right now, I'd recommend extending the length of the two regions, maybe add one or two new areas if time allows for it. Having multiple enemy types would be great as well, perhaps some that can't be stunlocked at all, some that need to be fought with a specific high/low attack, or ones who shoot at the player from afar.

5. The difficulty feels nicely balanced so far.

6. The visuals are great! I really love the 2.5D style, it's very unique!

7. There were no problems with performance.