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OverBern

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A member registered Jun 10, 2021 · View creator page →

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I did play through the tutorial again.

My Q and E swap was wrong - the ship was upside down at the time. I was supposed to swap W and S instead.

I know about the thrust and agility bars, they're just very off to the side and easy to miss.

Played first level and died to a big thing. A few last issues.

At the end of the tutorial, I ended up with a very low-damage laser that clears armor effectively and has very short range, together with a long-ranged, slow-firing missile with tracer. Killing enemies was painfully slow. Like I needed to pass the weakest enemies around 3 times to kill them. I feel like it shouldn't be possible to screw yourself like that with equipment choices you make in the tutorial.

Couldn't pick up equipment after the first warp. Even if my ship physically goes through them.
a shield and an engine. Then later some more equipment in the same area that I didn't see the first time.
The area was the overlapping area between two beacons. The first two items appeared before I had killed many enemies. Maybe they started spawned, or spawned when I interacted with the beacons. Killing all enemies near the beacons didn't let me pick them up.

Indirect control feels much more agile than direct. That might just be that it switches thrust strength to make large turns, though.

Able to target weapons onto an enemy (the big thing) from very far away (850ish) in overview mode but not in normal mode. Part of that might be because it has really high signature.


When you remove the keyboard control in indirect mode, maybe it should switch to direct mode when you do those keyboard inputs? And vise versa maybe - clicking automatically switches to indirect mode with movement towards that position. That bit might need a setting toggle, though.

Saw it in your discord bio, so I played it before the jam. That time, I quit at the end of the tutorial because I thought the green cube that appears on the overview mode was the one I'm supposed to interact with. This time I found the white one.

Last time I didn't notice the control modes and the 1-2-3 to set movement (maybe they weren’t tutorialized or weren't in the game? They help a lot. I haven't used the other camera mode, though.

Posting this as I'm at the end of the tutorial. I'll play a bit more


Pressing the buttons in indirect control mode works weirdly. 
A and D turn you relative to ship. I have no idea what W and S turn you relative to the ship. Q and E do nothing.
I feel like the speed they move your targeting point should be based on like degrees relative to the ship? Not movement in space. If they don't already work like that.

I swapped Q and E with each other, so e.g. E brings the nose of the ship right.

I don’t intuitively know whether I’m thrusting or not. I figure that’s the job of the particles in space, but maybe there should also be some difference to the trail or something. Like trail color and width. Or the trail has a little velocity away from you, so if you turn thrust low, the trail disappears and what there was will fly away from you. I can imagine that being kinda difficult, though. Depending on how you model the trail.

I frequently end up on the wrong side of the ship so my controls become reversed. Maybe it should be clearer which side of the ship is up.

Locking onto an enemy is disorienting, partly because I can't see my own ship.

I feel like it’s intuitive to use indirect control for large-scale maneuvers and turns, and direct control for dodging and precisely moving to positions. This is hampered greatly by the way the indirect control waypoint persists when you deactivate it and then activate it again.

Pressing space while there’s a tutorial popup will unpause. It will also sometimes fill the screen with grey. Not sure exactly how this plays out.

Firstly, excellent that you got that far. I was uncertain whether anyone would in this build.

Endgame isn’t quite a win – it’s the last phase, which has a few special rules that can be read on its tooltip. I’ll have to add some more fanfare to phase transitions so that’s clear. And explain the mechanic in a popup the first time it happens.

You’re right that those symbols are reactions. I’ll try to place those so they’re more on top of the HP bar, so it’s easier to see them regardless of the background. And mention them in the tutorial.

(The rest is noted)

I played through on King. I kinda stopped paying attention to new items in the late game, but early items were very impactful and influenced my decisions a lot. I feel like two early pears and the thing that gives you money for making peasants kinda carried me.


This is really similar to something I played a long time ago. That one had like simulated battles and stuff, whereas I feel like your main standout features of your game are

Relative simplicity. Units just contribute as a defense value, don't die in fights, and upgrades are really simple. I don't consider this bad or good.

The week loop. Things happen on a regular schedule, so you can plan somewhat. I consider this predictability good, you could maybe do some more interesting things with it. Like there's specific additional things that happen at any point in the week, but you're warned at the start of the week.

Quests and events.

Items.
I feel like the game would benefit from making the player consistently think about which items they get and which items they have, throughout the game. 
Generally have items be stronger, more expensive, and fewer. Like divide the number of items someone on average gets through a playthrough by like. At least 4. Low enough that you can actually think about every item. And/or structure the way items are shown more. Like once the player has bought the item that gives +2 stone every day or something, or the item that gives you a day's harvest extra, then chances are they never need to think about that item again, so it's clutter to have items like that together with the actually interesting ones.
Rarely give the player random items, have some fanfare when you do, and have those items be usually worth the fanfare.
Don't take away completely random items. Take away specific, known ones. Or show like 4 different items and offer choices: [lose 1 of those at random and get X], [lose 2 of those at random and get Y], etc. Take away the items they've had the longest, or the ones they just got.
More opportunities to choose between items. Trade away specific items.
If you cut a lot of boring items, maybe add bundles of resources to the shop?

Also the candy feels kinda broken.

If this is the first Matilda level, I was confused by it too because I misunderstood her ability. 

She gets the extra movement and action when she's picked up all three berries (when she shows the smiley), not for each berry she picks up. 

It kinda feels like she's getting back movement and actions when she picks up things, but what's actually happening is that she's out of actions, so the turn ends automatically and her remaining movement is wasted.

I had a ton of ideas for how to improve the UI immediately after submitting, yeah. Just made an update trying to make it work while sticking to the resolution.

Breaking up the actions like that doesn't really make sense for what this game is. I want the action economy to be super limited and shared among all actions and all characters on the player's team, so the player only gets to do the 3-4 most important actions they can think of on most turns.
I think the answer is more to have a section with just 2-3 units instead of 5, so players can learn the basic tactics of using shields to waste the boss's time, while using polearms to prevent him from regenerating and punish him if he tries to get past the shield.

Hell of a blast from the past. Used to play a lot of third person endless running/driving games on Kongregate. No jump and no adjusting speed is interesting.

Feel like it loses a little fairness relative to games like that, because of the complicated environments, tilting perspective, and just, sometimes being on the outside of the environment rather than the inside like in e.g. the Run series.

Maybe the voice is supposed to help with that, but I can't hear what it's saying without making the music and crash noise uncomfortably loud.

Would like options to reduce the camera tilt from steering, and adjust the volume of music/game audio/voice separately?

I'm making a rhythm game and want to ask jam teams for music to use, especially music they made for their game in this jam. This could be considered to slightly influence votes, as stating what other game shares a given piece of music might direct players who like that music towards that game. Am I allowed to use such music? If so, can I state the game/team I got it from?

You probably won't see me adding sound to this directly, but I want to revisit laser blocks as a hazard in a hex roguelike or something. Posted a comment on trying to fix the control scheme above. Might try with controllers if that idea doesn't work.

I'm going to change the controls a bit like I described to Deep-Fold once I'm allowed to upload new files, so be on the lookout for that and tell me what you think about them. I really want to make the 'six keys for six directions' thing work, and use it in other games.

thank you. he does escape in the end.

I notice UHN IKM feels better with the left hand than the right, which makes Z to undo a bit awkward.

I've thought about more of an I I shape rather than the O. e.g numpad 741 963 or TFC ESZ, but I want to use combined inputs for different moves in a different game (e.g. IU for north jump diagonally/cleave attack/reach attack) and that might feel weird to do with TE or 97.