itch.io

I tried it again and I think I got confused between "Crystals earned this round" and "Total crystals the player has" in the results screen at the end of the round. I'd recommend removing the "total" readout from the results screen, since the player doesn't need this info outside of the upgrade tree.

Apologies if I sounded frustrated in my original comment.

The amount of crystals the player has is set to zero every time you start a level, so only your most recent run has any effect on your ability to buy upgrades. This can make it hard to afford upgrades, especially when you have all 5 types of minerals on the board. Also, what's the point of the passive crystal gain talents if your crystals are just going to reset?

Seems quite barebones. No way to know what bugs can be found in which expedition, speed up the gacha process, or improve luck. Can't tell what effect equipping bugs has on income. Even in your screenshots Item and Trade are locked so I assume it's not implemented yet? The massive jump in expedition prices ($10 - $1M) makes me want to give up.

I guess I somehow convinced myself the game would end at 1 billion dollars, so I was surprised it ended when it did. Just as well, because waiting for $1b would take a long time. Short but fun!

Definitely needs some upgrades to make the fishing minigame easier, like reduced variation in the fish's movement, bigger green area, and less time needed for the fish to be in the green area.

I have a few more notes now that I played it again: if you decide to make post-jam updates, consider allowing the player to HOLD the mouse button to fire. Also I'm not 100% sure if you can get hurt by the plus symbol animation when enemies spawn in but it felt like that to me.

The movement top speed is a little too high, which might be part of the challenge, but when I'm trying to navigate through 50 enemies and projectiles that are the exact same color as the player sprite, the lack of precision can get a little frustrating.

Awesome, so after a few runs you kick me out to the main menu and delete my save. It's definitely a choice to bring your demo to a screeching and unsatisfying halt instead of letting players upgrade and improve to their heart's content.

REALLY needs the ability to skip to the end of the sentence / dialog entry if you press E while it's still coming in letter by letter, especially since the starting town NPC dialog seems to be mostly fluff

You just need to be careful with your usage of your thrusters and shockwave and you should be able to get the fake ship all the way across, drama queen.

For the anti-luck, you have to clarify that it's an overall speed bonus, because when I read the description, it made me think I was going to be worse off compared to before I bought the upgrade, by being lucky.

Might be good to have a stats section somewhere so players can see what the cooling rate, heat per reaction, special atom spawn rates etc. are.

How is this an incremental?

Full map for those practicing speedrunning or just confused like me

Ah, then this is something you must make clear to the player, because up until the 2nd run it just looks like a shooter with Arkanoid elements and purchasable upgrades.

While I appreciate you're bringing your own flavor and uniqueness to the genre, you should make sure players aren't caught off guard because they're expecting a conventional roguelite experience.

Maybe add a "refund upgrades" option so players with poor builds (like me because I was surprised by the adaptive difficulty) don't have to wipe their save?

Are you making the enemies stronger based on how many upgrades the player has purchased? If so, that makes it harder and harder to earn money and kind of takes the fun out of it, especially when the upgrades (except for damage) tend to be very small improvements (+0.02 per upgrade when the starting fire rate is 0.5, +1% chance per upgrade for the special bullets). It would be like indiscriminately jacking up prices based on how many times a player has prestiged, in a traditional incremental

Not bad! I thought I'd get Salvage really slowly but after upgrading the drop chance it became a non-issue. With enough upgrades it's possible to beat the simulation with the beginner ship and ability. Currently grinding Salvage to unlock the rest of them.

My only peeve is that there are so many passive skills that it's hard to get the one you want right away, but I guess the player can just choose more "Passive Skill" zones or use the shop.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Do you intend to get different sprites for your player characters and enemies? Not to accuse you of anything, but they kind of  have that typical AI-generated image look. It could turn people away from the game.

Hard agree with agitodev. Text getting obscured by the character sprite on the textboxes is particularly frustrating when trying to figure out how to play.

Why are the items in the equipment slots blinking in and out?

Holding (not dragging) right click to pan around the upgrade tree is very counterintuitive.

What's with the weird numbers in the skill tree? +0.0193% Efficiency? x0.00274 Attack?

In the nicest way possible, I feel like this game is doing a lot of things to try and be different which is not in itself bad, but most of them don't really have the intended effect, or even detract from the experience.

Ah, my bad! I didn't realize Lucky Cat has to be Level 1 for the prestige button to appear. Or perhaps it was there before that, and I didn't notice

I'm guessing it's intended to not give the player the Last Chance ticket again after the first prestige in the demo? Sad... I was looking forward to sinking my teeth into the upgrade tree haha. I really liked the concept in the previous version, the prestige upgrades make it even better in this one!

Unless I'm missing something, there's way too little information to make meaningful choices with regards to the roguelike aspect.

What do the unlockable components do, and why should I buy / save up for them? What categories (primary, secondary, precision, defense, etc.) do the unlocks fall under? How many components are currently available in each category? What does Cc mean in the Secondary weapon bias?

Once you communicate all this and more to the player, then maybe the whole sense of "ooh, I'm tipping the scales in my favor / adding strong components to the RNG pool" will be stronger.

Maybe let players complete the demo's skill tree instead of arbitrarily showing a popup that they can't close and softlocking the game?

I tried reloading, but found that my progress wasn't saved after a certain point, making it impossible to get all upgrades.

I think not telling the player what the chest-bonuses do is a special kind of evil. I was doing so well with max attack distance and almost max attack damage then poof! Attack distance reset to one for a measly increase in damage

Not sure how to feel about those rooms that can't be left until you beat the enemy, like Koltek or whatever his name was. It's possible for players to softlock themselves if they don't have the right abilities when they enter the room.

Ouch! No local saving is really a punch in the gut after coming back to this after investing some time.

You need more feedback on the Eggacha screen, because after unlocking it, players are going to visit it and get confused as to why it's blank. Also when there are eggs, some text instructing the user to select / repeatedly click would be nice.

Same for the Aquarium: if there are no fish, explain how to get them, and explain that dragging fish to the slots gives bonuses.

Ah hell, I forgot to give my thoughts on the game haha

It's very fun! Controls are snappy, camera movement is helpful. Not being able to see much was annoying but the problem went away with some torch upgrades.

I'm not the best at speedrunning though, so the timed challenges gave me the most trouble. Speaking of challenges, after unlocking the first tier, the very next level had its challenge active (tougher monsters) so I was puzzled at the sudden introduction of a new enemy type (the shooters) AND the drastic jump in enemy health. Might've just been a coincidence, but perhaps consider disabling challenges until the player has beaten a level at least once?

Also, this weird thing happened to me: after I realized you can press Down to descend while clinging on a wall, I instinctively started trying to press Up to gain height on a wall, but of course that didn't do what I expected. Now I have to unlearn that... Not sure if it's just me though

Hey, I don't know whether this applies to the itch build, but I played the armorgames.com version, and unintentionally pressed S while speaking to the dynamite-upgrade-character right after unlocking them. The dynamite-upgrade shop UI appeared. I pressed X and both the conversation and shop UIs disappeared. Now pressing S in front of any character has no effect and I can't talk to them, even after playing a level and coming back to the cave again. The shop UIs work as usual, though. Minor bug, but could be an issue in the future

Pretty fun game!

I found I was only able to get enough money to be strong enough to beat the final boss if I raised prize 3x on every round.

My completionist ass wasn't happy that I couldn't max out every upgrade, but I understand if that doesn't fit the purpose / story of the game.

I didn't need to do any requests; after a while thanks to automation I had more resources than I knew what to do with, even crafting the end-game coin resource was no big deal. Unless I'm missing something by not doing the requests?

The loop length upgrade is a little unnecessary, because if you just move the cursor fast enough, the segments can be far enough apart that you can draw a loop around the entire screen. This is possible at the start of the game.

I understand that upgrades and buttons only appear after a number of points are accumulated, but you should consider disabling them instead of hiding them and telling the player how much points are needed to "unlock" them. You don't have to tell the player what the button does (replace text with "???" etc.), only that there is more content. Otherwise the player doesn't really have much incentive to keep gathering points, because it's ambiguous whether there is any more content.

Player-spawned turrets don't track moving enemies very well, and they shoot bullets that seem to just pass right through enemies anyway.

Having popup text in the middle of the screen is very distracting, consider moving it towards the lower / upper edge of the screen.

Isn't this just Insaniquarium? You just slapped a random bonus system on top of Insaniquarium's base gameplay.

Really don't like two things:

- You can get hurt by enemies that just so happen to spawn on top of you

- Collected powerups just vanish with no effect if your powerup slots are already filled

I just completed the first level for the 2nd time after a few tries. I have to say it's VERY dependent on random chance for crate health and XP drops in its current state. From the left, the 2nd, 3rd, and 7th weapons are quite underpowered starting out, and there's even less reason to upgrade them later on, so focus on the others most of the time.

To the dev: consider showing the change in health on the NEXT 4-tick interval instead of the PREVIOUS one. This might require you to constantly monitor for changes in the number of enemy keys but it will give feedback sooner to the player on how their health will change.

Interesting idea and execution!

I'd appreciate a timer telling me how much time I have left to survive. When I survive the whole 30 mins, it also says "Game Over". This could because it's a demo, but nothing unlocked and the game didn't acknowledge it so I didn't know if I did something wrong.

If you cycle through the same four weapon upgrades until they're all Level 10, the remaining three can only get to Level 1 before they're locked permanently. Is this intended?

Also, you need to explicitly state the limits of the demo. I don't know whether level 2 (mushroom) can be unlocked. If not, what's the difference between that and the greyed-out levels?

Interesting idea and good execution! But there should be some indication that some Arcane cards aren't affected by damage-boosting Arcane cards.

After unlocking all items, it would be great if the hints gave you an undiscovered recipe. Maybe a potentially more convenient combination for something you already know how to make.

This would also be useful if you discovered an item through loot from a monster,  and you have no idea what to combine to make it.

I love that if you exit the shop and re-summon the shopkeeper when he's still walking away, a different shopkeeper will turn up

Wow, I left the spider alone because I don't know how guns work, and it kept getting bigger until it totally glitched out and disappeared