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Even first tutorial is laggy for me, i did find later the quality settings, set them to low but it made no difference. Phone gets hot, battery drains ect.

It might be nice to be able to remove a tower, although i dont think you should get a refund, maybe actually it costs additional to remove.

My current play style is to take the cheap turrets and place those down just as a maze then take expensive (sniper) and place it for best coverage over the maze, it could be interesting if the piece size was scaled with turret cost creating more need to plan ahead for placing key towers, furthering the puzzle aspect. Timer between waves could be a thing to

What happens when enemy gets to tree? I dont really see any change on screen.

 Im on a pixel 6a. First minute impression, the text is pretty small on my phone and it seems to be lagging. However I did the x3 speed and it seemed to lag the same amount so hard to say whats really going on but the frame rate isnt smooth for me. Kinda hurts my eyes.

I did enjoy the game, i like the large amount of placement options to create your own maze. I think the pieces could be varied more

On ui/ux there are a few places where its not clear there is a button there, like the tree itself, or the arrows left and right in the tech tree. 

It might be nice if the elevated sections that you can place turrets on gave the turret a little more range or something, otherwise there I dont see much use to them since enemies go over top of them.

model is missing for the alembic it seems during placement

not sure if its intentional but the hex that the turret sits on can be placed on the dark raised ground.

a little confused on what exactly to do after the tutorial, i tried the endurance thing that said 25 mins, it said victory but i had only filled like maybe 20% of the map with a maze.

I am out of time now but will probably come back and play this some more.

I think I will have to try that, starting the game with a premade tank, the issue in my mind was that the tank data is saved to the players AppData folder so at first i didn't think that would work but now that I think about it that can probably get forced on first load up of the game.

You have revealed to me a key instruction I missed in the editor,  it says you have to purchase the ai files first but it should also say you have to load them. I didnt even realize the menu popped up before loading, instead it should show a message saying to load a file or something, completely missed that since i normally just click load.

anyways it is functional you just have to load the file you want to edit first then the menu works properly.

were you able to figure out and follow why the tanks were making the decisions they were making?

was a charming little platformer. didnt really notice any bugs. music was nice.

the spring pads are little easy to miss, also i might have missed it but the wall jumping mechanic i dont remember being mentioned. took about 10 minutes for the demo.

all i can really say is add some content, i would have been happy to continue.

i made it to the top of the huge ramp, not sure but i think that was the end. has a trackmania vibe to it.

the car looks great, and it handles well at low speeds, but at high speeds it gets too bouncy. That being said this looks like an old muscle car so that might actually be realistic. I also think it would be less of a problem (the bouncing) if you smoothed out the track. something i think that would really help is level select and a timer that saves your fastest time for the track. I did not have much issue keeping myself entertained even with that tough curve in the last level (a little more grip would have been nice right about then.) Sound effects, some track textures, they are not really necessary to make the gameplay fun but would help immersion. 

slight bug when resetting it should remove velocity, sometimes it would throw me off the track immediately.

Pushed update for most of the QoL stuff discussed here.

Hello, I tried it out. It works but there is not a lot to it.

you might think of putting some upgrades in that you can purchase after a run or something like vertical move speed or horizontal movement? maybe have some moving spikeballs to add some challenge or things to try and collect to get extra points.

the parallax was cool, however it sped up a lot and the spikeballs didnt speed up that much

5. As far as i know it operates the same way its just to the right instead of down. lets say you have ifenemy and it has two connecting lines from its output with ifrange>100 on top and a ifrange<50 under that, the ai will check the top branch first (>100) and if that is false it will check the (<50) and if that is false it will then backtrack to the next available branch up the tree behind ifenemy. setting up the logic had my head spinning for a while, so i understand lol.

7. that is fair. 

8. i will implement this, i think ill just make it like fire 0 by default and the description will tell you that you can input a number that will lead the target before firing, i think at one point i thought being able to fire without aiming would be useful but cant think of an application now...

9. oh, i could do that. 

10. i believe there is slight acceleration functionality but i may increase it to help smooth out the jerky driving. I do know that tank weights affect speeds and stuff, along with the engine stats, but it may not be noticeable enough, hard to tell unless you have two tanks driving along side each other. You can blame the game, i can take it. all for the effort of making a better product.

I am actively working on some stuff to alleviate the "cant find each other" problem. one solution especially for early levels is to use mapcenter instead of wander for enemy navigation. Also having more than one tank should help fill out the field and provide more vision on the map so less lost puppies. Somewhere at the midpoint the tanks start using COMS node which allows them to see their allies vision and make actions based on that (ie. tank 1 sees enemy, tank 2 vision cant see the enemy but with coms it will chase, or fire at the enemy based on tank 1's vision) penalty for coms currently is slower driving and slower ai node processing (how fast it makes decisions) 

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, and actually trying the AI editor, since I feel it is a pretty big part of the game and I was really needing some eyeballs that are not mine to look at it. Originally I wanted the editor to look like unreal node editor but I couldn't even get a straight line to do what i wanted much less a spline.

1.2.3 Your description of your experience definitely gives me some ideas to make it better, the overload of info right at the start makes sense (as in don't that)

5. the guide does mention that if false it will backtrack, I haven't used the unity behavior designer but the screen shots seem to show similar tree but it goes down instead of to the right.  I guess my question is if the backtrack part mentioned in the guide was missed? if you did that line (maybe you at the time you wrote point 11.) and were still confused ill have to revisit, maybe green output bubble and retry an explicit description. 

7. A visual indicator for tanks vision cone did cross my mind, i dont think it will hurt anything to add that. Did you see the debugs in the top left of screen when you follow a tank?  It shows what ai paths are currently in use.

8. I struggled quite a bit on how to implement leading a target, trying to keep it as modular as possible and not make the text in the node excessive. I think what you are saying is give fire an output and connect lead target to that? is there a reason for fire to ever not use lead target,  instead just make them one node.

9. 14.  As you play through the campaign the shop populates with new AI files to purchase, these files are what the enemies used, nodes dont actually unlock but they do get shown in the later files that enemies use.

10. 18. taking note on QOL features that would be nice, currently the SubAI node can be used to copy another ai tree directly into the open file, allowing modular design.

12. im planning to rework the campaign to start with more tanks, probably 4 as just 1v1 is rather stale.

13. tank selecting targets: i did try to implement a tag system, i need to test it some more.

15. ill have to check on that, in my tests id notice they would start turning to flee but it takes a while. I did not notice them driving the wrong direction so maybe i broke something lol.

16. The turret and body operate independently, the turret can point backwards (and shoot) while the body drives forward, the body cannot drive in reverse currently, only rotates and drives forward, i ran into some issues on backwards driving but might revisit if it makes sense.

17. the ai file can be programmed to mitigate the collisions using wait commands and ifrange, i need to put that into the base files.

you mention smooth feeling tank behavior, im not exactly sure what you mean? like physically the parts of the tank move very rigidly, maybe the body needs a slower acceleration to mimic reality a little more. or do you mean inside the ai editor the constraints on design are too rigid?

Anyways thank you so much for your feedback, I know it takes time but without it we would head down wrong paths and waste our time anyways.

I forgot to mention one other thing. It might be nice to be able to customize inputs, it was quite frequent for me to kinda panic press the shift key to try and keep dashing and it causes windows to pop up the sticky keys message if you do like 5 times in a row.

Alright I played through the demo, it was really well done. It is quite difficult but i enjoyed the challenge. Its not necessarily what i think of when i think cozy, but my definition may be off. I say it was difficult but i guess i mean difficult to get perfect score, after the first two levels i did fill all the ships. I did save scum a few times (the fuel wipe of darkness can really put you in a bad spot if it comes at a bad time) also I went around preparing everything before lighting the lighthouse, not sure if that was intended.

The one thing I didn't fully grasp was the main engine fueling the light, the first time I died I wasn't really sure what happened, i then realized i kept letting the light go out and it does show the warning symbol. However once the screen starts greying out and the purple smoke comes in (very atmospheric, well done) and i start filling the fuel back up it doesn't make the smoke go away till it is at 100 %, so do you keep dying unless its at 100%? then in the last demo level it wipes your fuel tank so if you were trying to keep it at 100% you now got punished for it. 

That was the only part that wasn't quite clear, still had a lot of fun playing it, before i died the first time i was like "man what kind of feed back am i going to put, its all done real well..." 
art is cohesive, story is good, oh wait another small feedback note, the text did not match the talking speed very well.

Yeah good stuff here! Good luck.

Id be interested in reading about the studies of AI harming people's ability to think for themselves if you have a link.

Ive been looking at some game Jams and it seems pretty common to have a zero tolerance ai policy. Id love to join but my current game would not be eligible.
I am interested in where the line is drawn since I believe most software includes auto complete or predictive features. When people say no AI do they just mean prompting a chat bot?  (in reference to the coding side, I think the art side the line is pretty clear)

Hello, I am looking to improve the onboarding experience to my game. I have had a little bit of feedback and figuring out the tank assembly and starting a match is catching people up more than i had hoped. 

Id also like to know if editing the tanks Ai files for the tank is achievable by an outsider as opposed to me who created it.

Thank you for trying it!
I will consider starting the game off with a tank already configured.
The way it is set up currently is a little harder to understand than I had hoped. You need to first purchase one of each of the 5 categories from the shop and then select a tank slot and then equip one of each category to that slot.

This was a nice little rpg! its a pretty cute flip on you being the slime getting attacked by the humans.

The tutorial was pretty thorough however it was just a lot thrown at you all at once. im kinda just being picky though. I had a little confusion about equipment, pretty much everything is consumables and you just chuck them at the opponents i guess and each of your characters has an affinity for specific projectiles. 

It did feel a little easy, you get so much stuff it would be pretty hard for any competent person to fail, but its a light hearted game and that does seem pretty fitting. Lots of options to expand as far as story direction and difficulty later on so not really a complaint, just feed back.

played in browser with no issues, i left it open since i didnt finish, they just keep going. I liked the story enough to read it so that is good.

The ui art looks decent, however the map art like houses and stuff are quite basic, but hey you have to start somewhere and this is a good start!

It took a few minutes to figure out how to play, when you start the actual round you immediately get attacked, so i died cause my bot didnt have a gun  lol. I could see day night cycles but the enemies didnt seem to care if it was day or night, they just pop out when you are near by.
This led to an issue later where i went searching for more crystals, a lot of enemies start popping out and it basically lagged my game out, it didnt crash but it was unplayable.  Having lots of enemies come out is fine but this game doesnt really strike me as resource hungry so im not sure why im having trouble running it (to clarify I am on a laptop so its nothing beefy but it isnt an old laptop either, and i did download the windows version as the web version froze pretty quickly for me).

a few QOL things that id like.

- hold click to fire continuously, maybe make it not super fast so you can panic rapid click or something but having to click both mouse buttons on a double laser bot for every shot is kinda awkward.

-delete and rename options for the custom bot builds (torlai and i had the same idea apparently with the double drill guy.)

Last thing, the capsule and name of this game give me no indication as to what type of game it was, like i have no idea what a root warden is, do they protect trees? I actually played it cause torlai commented on my game and i saw he commented on this one too.  The objects in the capsule are too obscure, a triforce and a button looking thing, i could not tell there was a bot on there from just a glance.

The potential is there and I could see the fun, wish you the best!

Thanks so much for your reply!

my initial thought was to not overcomplicate the very beginning and the campaign be more of a tutorial with the multiplayer match listings being the endgame, but it seems im sacrificing the actual entertainment part too much at the start. I am starting to think I should start the game at 3 or 4 tanks, this should alleviate the boring tank searching part as well.

Each ai file can be directly edited and renamed, the puchasable files just correspond to the arena round where an enemy uses that file for its own tank. 

Is editing the ai file not appealing or did it just go unnoticed?

i did kill the 41 enemies. and it was pretty fun once i figured out what to do.
a little confusing on the weapons, at first all i could do was fire rockets with right click, i did finally figure out to push q to switch main weapon and that allowed what seemed to be the rail gun to fire. i never did figure out how to get mini gun to fire, tutorial says hold for mini gun and just click for rail gun but that didnt work.

it seems like you have a larger scope in mind than what has been implemented. Id say for the live build to scale it back, dont even include the shop or whatever that was until you have it fleshed out more, just drop them into the demo level. The core of the game where you fly around and blow stuff up did fire some dopamine in me, it was fun.

the UI was very small and hard to read for me, i am guessing that it doesnt scale with monitor resolution so maybe check that. 

I can see the vision but it seems like you have a lot of work to do before it is fully realized. have fun on your journey!

Thank you for your comment! I will review your recommendation.

The arena menu closes when you press campaign again. I should make it so it closes if you click in the open space.

The game is made for more of a "programmer" audience. You can edit the ai behavior of each tank to try and get it to perform better. I really should take more time to make the starter files less annoying.

You are basically my first real feedback from an outside source and I very much appreciate you taking the time to try it out. 

At my current experience its hard for me to figure out how to extract the fun out of the idea, but either way it was fun to make this for nostalgia purposes

its a pretty fun game, a lot like vampire survivors which was probably the goal.
however it is very annoying that the sprite is smaller than the hitbox.

no quit button or settings.
bullets from my tank only seem to bounce on the first level.

you pull the lever on the bottom middle, it has a light on the top of the lever

This is pretty great. Id love to see this more fleshed out.

this is pretty well built little game, got that vampire survivors feel to it!

Can you make it run in browser instead of having to download an EXE. Most people will not want to download and run an exe and im guessing this game would not have much issue running in browser.

I have been working on a strategy battle simulator type tank game.

I need a fresh set of eyes to play it and see if it flows in a way that makes sense. I am a systems oriented person but not everyone is so im trying to get it in front of more people.
What onboarding tips are needed and such. Any help is much appreciated.

https://lordricker.itch.io/cognitanks

Ok I have played it for about 3 hours. Jotting down my first impression and opinions here.
It was an addicting game loop, very reminiscent of the old flash game style. It has a quick hook and cycle. I do feel that the addiction will wear off but so far it is paced pretty well with new stuff. The art is not distracting, i think it looks good myself. I think something that would really help the overall feel is some sort of NPC dialogue simulating people visiting your farm. Right now it has this eerie feeling of loneliness.

There is a lot of not translated stuff, so not sure whats going on with that, most of the time i could figure it out with the video. Was a little confused at the very start since i didnt realize that i needed to complete the first task.

Canals: using them constantly seems very costly. Not sure if it was intended but i did find that you could remove just one block of the canal connected to the water source and only put it back when harvesting, this stops it from leaking all your water but still saves you from having to till all the ground again. Later it did seem that the water was more manageable.

Buildings: it would be nice if i could upgrade or move existing ones, instead of removing and repurchasing.
Side note, so far the cash flow feels pretty good, i havent felt limited or like i have way too much cash at any point 

Collection: not really sure how this works as of this comment, basically i just buy the amount from the shop and then give it to the collection to get the bonus? not sure if that is intended. I think maybe a better mechanic would be to not sell the mutated crops in the shop and only be able to get them from growing the regular crops, then the collection thing is just for mutated crops.
Also i am not sure how to get more stars, its possible i didnt make it far enough in the game yet

Crafting: took a while to figure out what it wanted cause i couldnt read the description but it looks like a lot of the rare stuff, i didnt have enough for anything it seems, what was the percentage for?

ha, just noticed the button in front of the water percent was to upgrade it, again its in a different language so i couldnt tell.

Here is where i stopped. I got the red cabbage legendary pretty early so was farming that (literally). I stopped just before the auto harvester for 3.2mil 

 

as for the rollercoaster of motivation i have had a similar experience with my game. I have a few IRL gaming friends that I have asked to test it and it seems like pulling teeth for them to do it so it makes me feel like its not worth perusing. I think this game you have here is worth perusing, looking forward to what you do with it!

keep thinking about how to make it better, it could possibly turn into a great game.

Nothing serious, just a hobby for me. 
I have yet to join a gamejam, it seems a little stressful to me and I guess that isnt really what I want out of this hobby at the moment.

Wanted to post a little about my thoughts on my experience with the game dev process, mentally. Not just the technical hurdles, but the constant loop of thinking you understand something, realizing it was quite a bit more complex than you thought, then slowly crawling your way back to something that kind of works, iterating on that repeatedly until you have it the way you want it (or at least close). I feel like I am getting better at properly envisioning a design element up front 

A lot of my time isn’t spent “coding” so much as staring at a problem from different angles, trying to figure out what the real problem actually is. I’ll go in convinced the issue is technical, only to realize it’s a logic flaw, or a design decision I made three steps earlier that painted me into a corner, or I simply didn't assign the fields correctly in the inspector (unity). Fixing the bug is easy once you actually understand it — getting to that understanding is the hard part.

What’s been interesting to me is how much progress feels invisible while it’s happening. Days can go by where nothing seems to move forward, but then suddenly something clicks and a whole chunk of the system makes sense. Looking back, those “unproductive” days were actually me building a mental model, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time.

Ive been actively trying to design a game for probably around~300 hours. I feel like I am getting better at properly envisioning a design element up front but iteration seems to be king. I draw parallels to molding something out of clay, you keep pushing, pulling, tear a piece off here, add a piece on there, sprinkle a little water on it, stare at it, lick it, hope that it doesnt fall apart when you bake it.

I guess I’m curious how others deal with that side of development — the uncertainty, the second-guessing, the constant balancing act between pushing forward and stopping to rethink things. How do you know when to power through a messy solution versus when to tear it down and rethink it entirely. Any specifically infuriating bugs or reoccurring issues you have encountered?

I am working on a Ai Tank game.
You can build a tank with components and then send them into an arena.
Each tank needs an Ai Script to read, you as the player can edit this script to make the tank behave differently.
I am looking for feedback on how easy it is to grasp this concept since I am too close to the project to tell.

Here is the game link https://lordricker.itch.io/cognitanks

You should create a project page of one or two of your ideas.
How thought out are your ideas?

For Pizberry it would seem they have a bunch of them that he doesnt need.
For myself i should probably look into that patching ability. Is that butler related? My download is less than 100mb right now so downloading the entire thing is not really an issue but if it grows patching in updates is a good idea.

Should be in the Edit Project or Edit Game  screen

Then under the uploads section you can delete files

ive uploaded a bunch of versions and i usually delete the old one first. only the two current versions show for me in the dev log "selected attachements

Hello, this is a game I have dreamed about for quite some time.
Finally have gotten around to building it!
It is a tank game inspired by the old flash game Bot Arena III
In this game you assemble a tank from components and then send them into battle.
However you do not drive the tank directly, you program them with a Visual Node Graph Editor. 

It is a work in progress but if you are at all  interested id at least appreciate a read through of my project. You can download and play it as well
https://lordricker.itch.io/cognitanks