itch.io

Thanks for the question. 
Prior knowledge of Gearbits won't be necessary for this game. If I come up with a fun way to incorporate characters or other references I'll put them in, but I'm not really planning a massive shared universe project.

I don't think I'll be adding story content to Gearbits anymore, but I would like to make a sequel someday. I have some notes about mission and gameplay ideas and a rough story outline, but nothing concrete. I've learned a lot since starting game development so I'd like to make a sequel to see how much I can improve. But there's only so many games you can make, so I don't want to immediately just do the same basic idea again.

Okay, thanks. That gives me somewhere to start looking.

Okay. Good that you managed to start the game. A click on empty space interfering with controller input is something I've also noticed. I will see if I can find a solution.
Landing the plane is very difficult for a lot of players. I might have to add a mandatory tutorial, or change the landing mechanics completely.

For now, press both rudder buttons to activate the landing gear. The galley has some more tutorials for the controls.

That's weird. What OS are you using? I've had some trouble before with the input system getting mixed signals from the controller and mouse input. But nothing like this.

Strange. I don't know what could be the cause. It's strange if the keyboard works still. Do  the other controller functions work normal? Can you control the throttle with a controller after taking off. Does your controller have analog input on the triggers? My best guess is that the game reads the analog input differently from the keyboard keys.

Hello. Can you tell me more? What OS are you using? When you say you can't start, does that mean that the game program won't start, or that you can't progress into gameplay?

Thanks! I'm planning on adding more functionality to the ships, as well as hostile ships. 

I always try to put out a patch note, but sometimes I forget. But I I haven't updated Gearbits in a while, so if this was recently, it might have been something else.

Thanks for the comment. I was planning that the energy running out would encourage the player to be more active with collecting the powerups. But of course, you can't do that, if you have no weapons to defeat enemies with. I agree with the enemies flying by. Since the player is not required to defeat them, the game allows the player to be way too passive.

You're welcome. I'm glad you like the game.

Great. I'm glad you liked the game. Thanks for playing.

Well then, I'm kinda stumped. If there is no override that turns vsync off, there might be a setting to force it on. But for that you'd need to look at your GPU settings. Unfortunately that's all I can say for now.

Is it possible that there is some override in your GPU settings? Does this happen with any other games?

This is very weird. As far as I know, there is no way to change the sensitivity during gameplay. The only place where it can be changed is the main menu, so I have no idea how this happens. Turning off vsync caused some issues with the sensitivity, so I would advice turning it on if possible. Does the sensitivity slider in the menu also get reset, or is it just the actual look sensitivity in-game?

Does this only occur when moving between platforms? Do the Linux and Windows versions stay in sync on their own?

Let's hope it stays that way. Bugs that happen randomly are the worst, because you can't really troubleshoot them by recreating them.

I don't know what could be causing this. No one else has reported anything like it. Does it always crash at the same point, or does it happen randomly?

Vsync toggle has been patched in now.

I'll add the option. It'll be in the next patch.

Thanks for letting me know. I made it so that if there is another turret near the landing site, it gets destroyed when the new one is called. Great find. This was a pretty wacky bug. I almost feel sorry for patching it out. If you need to contact me, itch.io works fine. Or if you want to, you can join the Gearbits discord. Active links to that are currently in the wave mode announcement on Steam.

Can you tell me which version you are using? This should have been fixed in the last update, so I'll need to look into it.

Thanks for reporting this. The game should count an enemy to the mission score, even if it dies of environmental hazards. If it didn't spawn, the game should only display nine pursuers as the objective. My guess is that it fell out of bounds, or the scorekeeping didn't count it for some reason. Both of these are something I've addressed in the development build. Unfortunately, the itch.io version is a bit behind. I've made a lot of progress, so I'm planning on updating the demo soon.

I implemented aim inversion today. It can be set seperately for each axis. Thanks bringing this up. I'm sure that it'll be usefull

I added support for windowed mode and resolution changing today. I don't know when I'll update the demo, but it will be in the finished game. I hadn't considered how the game would work on a non 16:9 monitor, so thanks for bringing this to my attention.

I just tested it. It should only be a few lines of code to implement, so I could put in the option.

Could you tell me your screen resolution? That might cause the text issues. Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to localize the game, so it'll only have English language text.

I haven't tested the game on an ultrawide monitor. I'll have a look and see what I can do.

That might be because the player can fly. So they have access to places that the bug pathfinding doesn't know how to get to. So the bugs end up just stayin still. Let's hope I figure out how to get the bugs to figure it out.

This is a few months late. But I looked into this today and seems like some of the UI elements weren't scaling properly with different resolutions. This should get fixed in the next build. Thanks again for reporting this.

Thanks. More is on the way! Look forward to it!

Thank you. Reporting the bug was very helpful.

I tested it just now. Looks like a bug made it into the build. I'm uploading a fixed version now.

Thanks. I did experiment with different control schemes for the thrustres a while back. None of the others felt quite right. But maybe that's just because I got too used to the current controls. I've been thinking about taking a second look, maybe as an alternative control scheme.

Thanks for the comment. I also agree that the health and ammo balance needs some work. I'll have to put it all into a big spredsheet and figure it out one of these days.

I made some changes to the script that sets the starting position for the player. That must have fixed it. I do have plans to make a discord and take testers eventually.  But that's gonna be a while from now. I'm glad that you're interested. I hope I'll see you then.

That is bizarre. So does this happen multiple times during the level? Does it happen near the start, or anywhere in the level? Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

It's mostly just "under the hood" stuff to make the game run more smoothly.  And also some cosmetic changes to make the UI a bit prettier.

Thanks for the comment. The health values will be changed during the development. All of the values, like item prices and weapon damage are in a mess right now. Thankfully all of the values are made so that they can be easily tweaked. Feedbakc from player is very valuable when trying to figure out the game balance, so that's why I encourage people to give feedback. The melee combat is something multiple people have pointed out, melee combos seem to be a highly requested feature. Also, you are 100% correct about how the mining melee should be a drill. I would have put it in right from the start, but I ended up settling for the placeholder beam saber. If I tweak the melee combat I'll definetely take another look at the weapons. Thank you very much for the feedback. This is very valuable.

Get the game from here.

Thanks for the comment. I'm not sure what I want to do with the ammo yet. Right now I'm thinking of adding ammo pickups. But I could also design the levels so that you can manage with limited ammo, or just increase the ammo capacity. I originally had no plans for a melee attack or a horizontal boost, but those are something that several people have commented on, so maybe I'll look into adding them.