itch.io

Nicely done! A more detailed combo guide would be good to have.

Thank you!

Thank you! Much appreciated.

I'll send you the executable. I can give you the source code as well if you wish so you don't need to reinvent the calculations in case you want to try some of it inside the game.

You can perhaps put something like this as some sort of experimental alternative control scheme into a test build, and see how people react. Maybe it'll be bad for your typical player, I don't know, but as I played with it, I realized I can more easily "do what I intended" than with what you currently have in the game. There's no flipping whatsoever if you keep orbiting inside one hemisphere (front or back)

There's a particularly satisfying (and I'd guess useful) 180 turn maneuver where you yaw or pitch to one side and at the same time orbit the camera to other side to compensate. Try it out.

The main problem with craft-centric yaw/pitch/roll control, except that is exceptionally nerdy ;), is that it's meaningful only if the camera basis is aligned with craft basis, or at least very close in alignment, so that player's mental model of directions corresponds to what they see . In other words, it's for first person or close-behind third person view. As soon as this alignment goes out of whack, the confusion sets in and it becomes very taxing for player to mentally map controls to what they see. It's especially incompatible with free orbiting camera, as the relation between craft and view bases changes from moment to moment. The player constantly needs to look at the graphic of the craft, figure out its alignment on all 3 axes, and mentally re-map the controls to get where they want in the world.

The new controls are better but I still wouldn't call them "intuitive", especially for more casual players who don't have affinity for "realistic" piloting. I'll play some more and report back.

Imo the best way to think about control scheme is to take into consideration what the player needs to do in a typical gameplay loop, and asses which control scheme best caters to it. With classic 6DOF I think you confine the player to the (near) first person view if they want to maneuver without frustration, so they lose the joy of observing what their craft and enemies are doing from various angles while still being able to successfully steer at the same time.

Close, but not 100% exactly what I had in mind. Steering still doesn't happen fully in camera space (which sounds weird I know). If the camera orbits 90 deg - yaw becomes roll in camera space. I'd like to avoid that. My idea was to eliminate perceptual alterations/flipping of controls due to viewing angle change, as much as possible. The focus is what is seen in the environment, not the ship.

This is kinda hard to verbalize. It got me intrigued so I made a small demo/test to see if the whole thing makes sense. The idea is to steer almost like in first person view regardless of ship orientation, so when playing, if I want to bring something into the center of the view - push buttons that are in direction of that something on the screen. This I think is best mode of steering in fights where your primary goal is to keep targets in view and your ship's actual orientation is secondary. 

In the demo, when camera is not locked, perceptual control direction flipping will still occur when the look direction is opposite of ship's forward direction, but this could be tolerated I guess. 

I also exposed some other parameters to play with, including camera lag in locked mode, to better suggest that you're actually steering.

Catharage - controls demo by nenad2d

The password is the name of your game, all lowercase.

I think controls/navigation is the biggest obstacle for an average player right now and can easily make them abandon the game. You should make "fixing" them number one priority. I could easily see myself sinking 100 hours into this if controls were "intuitive".

Let me suggest the following. It could seem strange at first but may actually work in practice.

Have the camera orbit fully relative as I already suggested. Discard roll and map yaw to A-D and pitch to W-S. Now the fun part. Don't steer in ship space but instead steer in camera space. Since primary goal of steering is to turn the nose towards wanted direction, this control scheme will do exactly that from player's viewpoint. The steering becomes completely intuitive without any need to mentally keep track of how the ship is positioned towards camera or towards any absolute planes.

There are two sub options for the camera when steering this way. The camera can stay put or it can follow the steering rotation with its orbiting. Perceptually, the former will make the environment static while the ship will rotate, while the latter will do the opposite. It needs to be tested which works better, or it can be an in-game option.

This will make both camera and steering, relative to the view and completely intuitive as your control directions map to directions you see on the screen.

You can now eliminate the horizon and the axis markers around the ship. The only thing I'd draw is a simple line going along ship's forward direction from nose to the end of range. This may help visualizing where the ship is aimed.

A cosmetic roll can be kept for both; map Q-E to ship roll and middle button + sideways drag to camera roll. The ship roll happens in ship space and camera is not reacting to it.

As for auto-pilot, it doesn't need to be lock-on. If you click on the target its current position in space is memorized as auto-pilot's aim. The location is not locked/updated to the actual enemy. You'll need to click again. This works similarly to your current pip mode just that you can click on the enemy. I don't know how you currently calculate the pip position but I'd do it like this: if an enemy is clicked, use its position, if empty space is clicked, use the farthest intersection point between mouse ray and ship's range sphere.

I'd still consider full lock-on autopilot option for people who need babysitting or have poor spatial perception.

I gave it couple more hours and it has grown on me. Managed to clear out all contacts in a sector.

There's a lot of very interesting stuff in there. The sector generator is quite nice, it pleasantly surprised me with variety. I love the weapons system. The general feel of controlling something big and heavy through mostly indirect commands. 

I'll focus on problems and improvement opportunities though. I'll just throw some notes at you so forgive me if they are a bit disorganized or repeating.

I know the game is meant to be a simulation of sorts, but I'd sacrifice some of the adherence to the simulation paradigm in favor of pure gameplay and monkeybrain feelgood. Realistic simulations are almost always boring, but the idea that you play a simulation is exciting. So my general mantra for simulation games is - never make a simulation, always make an illusion of simulation. Illusion that's more pleasant than the real simulation but still tricks the player into believing they're dealing with a serious simulation. In short, remove/compress all tedious simulation aspects, amplify all pleasant/fun aspects while not breaking the illusion of simulation.

Controlling the ship is hard. Both schemes have serious disadvantages. I'd think about having a single scheme but delegate tedious/confusing parts to auto pilot.

The ship should feel a bit more agile/responsive, regardless of type. Qucker steering. Quicker thruster change, quicker velocity response to it.

Get rid of the notion of horizontality completely. The main goal of controls is to point the ship into wanted direction. For that, you don't really need the whole yaw-pitch-roll system. You can drop the roll altogether. Roll (and notion of horizontality) is important only in atmosphere/gravity bound flight. In space, it doesn't really matter. It's not important how your imaginary wings are rolled relative to some imaginary plane when approaching the target. To point the ship you only need to adjust longitude and latitude, which translates to yaw and pitch. The roll can be just cosmetic. So I'd use only 2 degrees of freedom and map that to WASD. Optional cosmetic roll can go to QE.

Once there is no horizontality, you can drop the rendering of horizontal plane and you don't need Elite style bars in map view to show target distance from that plane.

All targets should be highlighted on hud, in both views, possibly by putting a square marker around them. A target should display distance and optionally the time to reach it in your current and maximal cruising velocity. You can select any target at any time and tell the autopilot to point the ship towards it, keeping your current thruster state. It can keep doing that during dogfights.

Approaching collectables is slow and boring and the reward is often not worth it. How about this instead: Use the above described autopilot to get the collectable into your range. Once in range, send out fast pickup drones to collect it. You can have multiple such drones and assign them to multiple pickups at once, or assign multiple drones to a single pickup to retrieve it faster. Alternative may be tractor beams with similar function.

Projectiles seem kinda slow. Make them faster. They'll be more satisfying to watch. Make the moment of firing a weapon more pronounced via some audiovisual effect so I know when I'm unleashing destruction. Every weapon phase should have some sort of duration/progress indicator. An enemy that's currently targeted by one of your weapon systems should have a corresponding mark visible on hud at all times.  

I was very close to ships and I couldn't fire and I didn't know why. All blockages/cloaking should be made known. When an enemy in range is clicked on, display all information categories that you can possibly get about it, but for unavailable categories state the reason they're unavailable.

Destroying enemies is hard. I want rewards. I wiped out a whole sector and got nothing for it. Always reward some instant credits on enemy destruction. On top of that let the destroyed ship always leave several pieces of loot you can collect with earlier described pickup drones.

Enemies are too clustered. In addition to organized hard enemies, put plenty of weaker single ships flying around the sector for player to sadistically prey upon and practice fighting. The rewards should be smaller for them, of course.

I'll stop here for now. Will write some more if I think of any.

In your unconstrained camera mode the horizontal mouse movement maps to orbiting around world up axis. I'd prefer it to map to orbiting around whatever the camera up axis is at the current frame. That way the same relative mouse motion always results in the same relative orbiting motion, from the perspective of the viewer. 

Went through tutorial and several warps afterwards. Managed to do some kills. Just for the record I played the original 8 bit Elite back in the 80s :)

I think the controls and navigation can be improved quite a bit. I'll need to play some more to give specific suggestions.

Neither of camera orbit modes feel natural to me. I'd prefer fully free and relative mode where delta x and y mouse movement result in delta orbit around current x (right) and y (up) vectors of the camera basis. 

This lack of free orbiting was frustrating me all the time, as it makes hard to visually follow anything that flies by.

Thanks for playing and reporting the experience. Yeah, some story elements should be in the game, I'll see to that. I'm still focused on exploring possible mechanics extensions that utilize light/shadow dynamics. 

The objective is literally written at the start of the run, extending the title ;) But I think you picked everything up quite quickly. You need to shut yourself into the darkness. The game was done for a jam whose theme was Isolation. The ultimate why is left to player's interpretation. Perhaps you're a vampire and need to go to sleep :)

The inverted mouse is default simply because it's my personal preference. Since game still doesn't save any settings on the user side I just kept it inverted for easier testing. Will swap it to the standard non-inverted default.

How do you beat week 4?

Very nice tetris type game with some twists. The rules are easy to pick up after a few minutes play.  It's very satisfying to build a large explosive construction and then blast it. Music is a bit repetitive but it somehow suits the game.

The animated background is just fine. Looks good and it's not too distracting.

Really well done. Easy to get into, fun and playable. Card themes are funny with just the right amount of self deprecating humor. The art style is nicely casual but not stereotypical. Characters are funny but adding some facial expression animations would be awesome. The whole thing work very well as a complete package.

The card part itself looks well balanced although I didn't test it thoroughly enough to be certain.

I'm just not sure the thing you afflict on your date should be called "damage". Maybe replace it with something funny that fits the theme better.

Btw why don't you let us read funny descriptions on date's cards?

I wouldn't mind seeing the girl vs. girl and boy vs. girl DLCs as well ;)

It took several runs to get to 29. Don't remember the exact number, but not that many. I was actually surprised that I got that far, The arena bubble was quite small for at least 10 last waves so I guess there was not that many enemies to deal with. I probably got lucky. Will try this other hinted dominant strategy :)

Hit response doesn't need to shake the screen. A particle effect or a color flash and a subtle sound may be sufficient. Currently it looks like there is nothing.

LOL. I'm glad I'm not alone in this.

I managed to wave 29. Arrgh! Rage quit!

Visually it's beautiful. I liked all gameplay elements and I really wanted to unconditionally love this game. But something won't let me. Every gameplay aspect is good but it also comes with a minuscule annoyance of one kind or another. When all those itsy bitsy annoyances add up, it leaves you with feeling of frustration. As  a bubble, I never felt powerful. Maybe that was the point.  I'll still give the game high grades though. There's a great game in there that wants to be freed. And you're very very close to doing so.

Let me try to address some of it, in no particular order. Well, the first thing may be the most important.

It's too bouncy. Everything is so bouncy. I know it's bubbles, but it's too bouncy. Whatever you touch, you bounce, often times the bounce speed is insanely high. Coupled with very strong controls inertia, it sends you into a cascade of uncontrollable bounces that end up with inevitable death. Things that deliver damage, punish you additionally by - bouncing you. The edge of the arena bounces you. The use of bounce needs to be more - measured. The only way to play in a more calm way is to get the heavy modifier. The default controls should be like for heavy. The feel of the game may still be very bouncy, but that doesn't mean that a literal bounce is scheduled to happen every half a second. Give it some solidity so the bounces may shine in contrast to it.

All enemies always fire at the same time. Not sure if this is good or bad.

There's no pronounced feedback when you get hit. Because of that I had hard time learning what is dangerous to touch. Often times I still don't know if I've been hit or not.

The enemy explosions should be audiovisually juicer. Let them pop with gusto. Maybe introduce some tiny, pixel sized "aerosol" particles. Make everything explode immediately without that pause. The enemy rebound strictly in the direction of shooting may be better than "realistic" circle-to-circle collision resolve (or dare I say it - bounce). It's perceptually too random and makes almost impossible to fire a satisfying burst into an enemy.

Some good remarks on visual design have already been given by others so I won't repeat them.

There's a dominant strategy I think and it's mostly focused on minimizing  getting - bounced: Get heavy as soon as possible, just circle the edge of the arena and fire into the center. When all enemies are dead, clear the red things. Repeat until wave 30. 

A few more enemy types would be cool.

So what to do? Gather a couple of sharp testers that are not afraid to say what they think, weed out all those micro annoyances and you'll have a golden game on your hands.

Would shared ap scale well? If you add more units on the map, with fixed ap most of them become useless because there won't be enough ap for every unit to act.

I'm afraid to start it. Are you sure it's just a game?

The cover graphics is too cartoony compared with how the game looks

Is there a devlog link?

Oh, that's what those triangles are. Ok, I think I'm starting to get it. You may want to make those something other than triangles. Triangles look like arrows which suggests direction, creating an unwanted association. I'd just put circles or squares there instead, and maybe write "AP" on the left side of them. Being an important element, they also should be in more contrast towards background. In action cost popups they're white on yellowish background, which is barely visible.

This new version is a bit easier on the eyes. One of the main causes of clutter are orange range markers of your units. They're just too thick, big and eat up all space. Those should be made subtler; perhaps thinner lines or just semi-transparent shapes without lines.

I'm not sure if the action points should be shared though. If they are then each live unit should at least add to the total at the start of turn. Imo it'd be better if each unit had their own.

I managed to bring enemy's hp bar to zero but it just refilled again. I'm at the same time happy and sad about it :D

You have some sort of game breaking bug. At start if you do nothing for a second, a couple of circles hit you and the camera goes out of whack losing the focus on the brain. Doing WASD after that just seems to move the camera through 3d space in a weirdly floating way, with your brain nowhere in sight.

Yeah, tutorial would be ideal but you can start by putting some simple written instructions into the game, that describe the basics of how to play. This should also reflect in gui. The information should be visually hierarchical: the most important information need to be most prominent. Try to visually design the game in a way that minimizes any possible confusion for the player.

For example I'm totally confused about the ranges. They are somehow color coded and I encountered at least 6 colors: white, yellow, light blue, dark blue, ochre and red. There is no information on what any of those colors represent. I only guessed that the enemy is red.

I really dig the mood of the game and I can sense there is some depth to the gameplay. I'd like to defeat that enemy, but every time I try, the confusion caused by visual clutter sets in and I just lose any track of what's happening with my units.

Try to clean up the gui and add some basic instructions, either just text or a tutorial. It'll make for a much more fluid experience.

Thanks for checking it out! The addition of some kind of tutorial would be in order I guess. The hints you get when you die should help you get going. All the in-game hints can also be found on the game page.

I cannot play it because it's Unity package, but it looks nice for a single scene demo. Is it interactive in any way?

Why do we need to hold the button to end a turn? 

Are there action points for each unit? I seem to randomly lose the ability to do things. The UI should perhaps be redesigned a bit to better communicate the state of units to the player. It's currently not clear what each unit can or cannot do. The main parameters of its state are not shown in a clear way.

I managed to hit that single enemy several times but it always regenerates its health.

Can get tense. Did you manage to finish it?

Was commenting on the jam submission page but wanted to leave a comment here as well. Excellent game! Keep on developing it!

I'm not big on idlers but this was just excellent. It's really fun! Please develop it even further.

Some remarks:

There's no need for enemy base to have that many hitpoints. When you kill all of their troops. you've practically won the round but still need to wait quite a bit until your units deplete all of base's hitpoints even though there's no any resistance. 

You know what could be cool; instead of killing the base, let your units take it. Scroll the screen to the right and now the occupied base becomes you new spawning base while your existing units keep on pushing forward. That way you get a more satisfying sense of progress/persistency and the scenery can gradually change as well. The game can show how many bases you've advanced and there could even be some boss base at the end of a section. The enemies could also take the base back and you're then forced to retreat to the previous one.

Oh, that's how it works. 

I managed to finish all 3 levels!

Regardless of the scatological theme the mechanics are actually quite good. Growing is fun and hints from where the food is coming from are quite useful. I really liked how each level changed a gameplay a bit so you need to use different tactics to get out of the pit.

I still feel the character could be a bit more agile, but all in all it's quite good.

Thank you!

Will do! :)

Great visuals and mood, cutesy characters and story.  Really dig the color palette.

The fights in the tower could be improved. They trigger completely randomly so you can finish one fight and half a second later you're in another and mechanics of the fights is a bit simplistic. I'd think about putting actual enemies on the map, blocking the doors perhaps.

All in all, very good game. Improve the fights and it will be golden.

It's funny but it wish the player could move faster. Couldn't do anything due to my slowness.

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.

Yeah it would really add a lot of the depth to the game if each weapon behaved in a different way, or at least if there was more than 2 weapon behavior mechanism.

I really loved it. Quite easy to get into and relaxing to play. The retro blue-green pixel graphics look very juicy. 

My only gripe is with controls. The key layout is kinda unusual and non-intuitive and the keydown state is handled via repeated keyboard events that include initial key delay. There also seems to be a delay between pressing space to hit the ball and it taking effect so it's hard to be precise. Maybe transfer aiming controls entirely to the mouse.

Fix the controls, add some nature ambient sounds and you'll have an excellent old school golf game.

>Yeah, one of my first goals was to have "realistic unforgiving gravity controls"

I know. It totally shows.

I guess it wouldn't be a proper moon lander if that wasn't the goal. So I'm backing down my request for baby physics mode :D

Great assortment of characters and weapons but I expected more variety in how different weapons operate.

Quite good for a 3-day effort. One thing I'd work on a bit more are collisions. It's a high speed chase and it's too easy to get stuck on walls/corners. Also the enemy collider is too large. It catches you before even visually touching you.

Oh, managed to figure it out. I wasn't aware that you can hold the jump key for a slightly higher jump so I initially got stuck at the beginning when the third row of red bricks appear. You should include a hint that says "hold jump for higher jumps", or something like that.

After I figured that out I was able to finish the game. It's short but smooth and very playable. Got a bit frustrated at the end when you have only a small window of visibility.