itch.io

Needing to turn off a shield to pick up things was something I didn't put much thought into, it just felt "right", but if it's a source of annoyance then I'll opt against it. 

I don't think so. It adds gameplay friction but in a good way since player is perfectly in control. Stuff like this should actually be common across the game, as the game teaches you its nuances in intuitional ways. Even better if there's additional depth by implementing obscure and situational ways to utilize the collision between shield and crystals.

It could be worth a try to have slower with snappier movement and auto braking, and booster mode (let's say by holding LShift) where it's all inertia and no safety guarantees. I played on medium. Traction beam is not that bad, but since you need to switch out from a weapon and turn off shield to use it you can buff it to maximize the fun rather than put you on the mercy of more physics. It could be snappier, powerful out of the box, with more uses to make it something that helps players handle the inertia heavy physics reliably. Think more in the direction of gravity gun from HL2? Sure players can upgrade it, I did, but the starting point should give you a decent start and get invested into it ie. by slingshotting small asteroids into enemies.

I tried the third weapon by ditching the laser altogether and going all in on damage and it carried me through thanks to shield generator. Laser is a defensive weapon mostly, so giving a shield generator last second before a big fight while player needs to reinvest from mining to combat is definitely tricky but I don't disrespect that design decision (the cost of the shield might filter some players though).

A lot of problems come from the zoom being upgradable. It makes unupgraded weapons look like peashooters or at worst the projectiles aren't visible at all (missile launcher). This also throws off your sense of scale (ie. planet sized enemy appears? I don't have any point of reference to comprehend that so it's not as impressive, largest crystal so far? can't really tell).

The way it's all set up so far it feels like I can't execute much of a plan, as asteroids are really fast and chaotic so only greedy approach works, and same goes to enemies that are so ever-present that it comes down to outgunning and shielding. When those factors are combined most of the crystals you can get are pretty much given to you by rng because of how many things can go wrong outside of your control, while constantly fighting floaty physics on a timer. Weapon balance is somewhat fine but tighter controls and reliable traction beam by default could help a lot.

I'm getting mixed feelings, started a bit disappointed that it seemed like just a mining game, but later was annoyed that enemies stop me from actually doing the mining. Wave 10 completely destroyed me both navally and financially. Outside of that money was plenty.

Even with slowed down time it's often hard to read all the hints in time just because of how many things are going on at the same time.

First stages are way too short, they feel like 5 seconds pass where you desperately try to use your constant dps laser to the best of your ability while it makes you think you accomplished absolutely nothing. They are so short I couldn't even get into the flow state.

Then it quickly transitions into absolute chaos where the game feels like standing under a waterfall with falling rocks. The enemies are too uniformly distributed to be able to plan out any tactics.

All the weapon options feel very underwhelming from what little I used them (or at least trying to use them instead of defensively capable laser will get me killed quickly) so it's hard to decide to invest into them further. Traction beam reaching outside the bounds feels like something that should be available from the start rather than an upgrade purchasable at some arbitrary point, because it feels really bad to have a crystal fly off the bounds (that are just there without good enough justification why your corporate cage would stop you from getting the valuables) when you can't do anything about it.

Because of all the pressure and jank surrounding crystal gathering, the amount will greatly vary among players and playthroughs so it sounds extremely hard to balance the game unless you expect players to savescum.

What hurts the game is trying to do both mining and combat, and as a result both seem like an afterthought, all while I'm investing into upgrades based on my best guess of what the game is expecting from me for the following stages. I'm terrible at combat outside of cockblocking enemies with laser until they die so it's hard to comment further.

Focusing on mining would be cool with more space and time to prospect, picking asteroids based on risk and reward, in depth mining by targeting cracks and placing explosives, and sometimes pushing your luck against enemy perimeters when you decide to do so.

Focusing on combat would be cool too with tighter controls, well thought out enemy placement, AI adding depth, and satisfying weapons.

I think I either took everything form the shop or I left some shotgun ammo there to leave some free equipment space, but whatever happened there when I came back the shop was empty. I tried to be efficient with the ammo use so outside of finding flamethrower earlier I don't know what I could have done differently, maybe aside from environmental kills but they couldn't possibly make up for that.

I'm a bit confused as I don't know whether I should look at this game as an action, action rpg or survival horror game. Depending on that there are different solutions and it can be fine tuned while preserving the tight ammo experience, but there are trade offs and additional work required. Even the way you place enemies or how readable the level design is can make a big difference.

It's pretty good. Managed to freeze it on death somehow. The only thins I'm seeing is

Removed Unequip, but did not find a default in the library.

and

FMOD returns error code 78 (r) executing getPitch

Dashing is a tiny bit broken so you can infinite aerial fist of the northstar everyone's ass, but it's balanced by ranged enemies.

The chain shouldn't cover so much of the screen at times and the game should somehow telegraph the chain's tension beforehand so that the force pull back isn't as abrupt.

I have no idea how to play this game properly. At first my instincts told me I should try to find an opportunity to turn around and take down chasing enemies, but the camera and movement aren't fit for that. In the end the most efficient playstyle is circle strafing and holding the laser, and waiting for most things to die. The shield regen communicates that it's not a tight game and you are expected to get shot very often, and also allows you to play defensively by buying time for the shield to refill.

The laser is kind of an unfun main weapon for this type of game - non automatic high damage weapon or dropping bombs could be better, and laser should be for players who got the hang of aiming and movement. You should probably ditch the upgrades for the time being until the base gameplay is tighter.

Visuals make everything hard to make out, enemies are nearly invisible with the mountains in the background. I also can't tell when I'm taking and connecting hits, that's also a part of why my playstyle instantly turned sloppy.

It's coming together nicely. Fans were going full blast, but it runs well otherwise. The lag while first firing a shotgun was actually satisfying.

Ammo is really tight, so if you miss that one room with flamethrower you are quickly forced back to explore with nothing to defend yourself with. Is there an option to unload ammo from a weapon you want to drop?

Ranged enemies are pretty much the only threat with their chip damage and no healing options, and that's how I died at the first three centaur encounter. Flamethrower feels OP with one shot kill and little ammo usage, but I guess it's balanced by the range against some enemies. Minigun has some nice dynamics where you want to push forward aggressively while keeping the spin going for efficient ammo usage.

Kind of reminds me of Alien Swarm but without coop.

It should probably be weapons that break the basic playstyle muscle memory through major advantages and drawbacks, or have different ways to win encounters. Maybe the chain having spin up move that can deal AOE damage over time having you stay close to groups for maximum efficiency, and finishes with long range pull attack? Throwing weapon with multiple charges for safer execution (could actually be good at teaching player to use it more often on regular weapons). Charging attacks that move player and require you to commit. Something with kick synergy could be cool. Molotovs for area denial. Even completely shite weapons that make you want to throw them out immediately could be a cool twist.

The line between weapons and environmental hazards could be blurry too and you could have level elements that require you to plan around them.

It could result in bloat though and focusing on encounter design would be a safer bet. Gun shooting enemies (or whatever that was in 3rd and 4th level) are a great idea but they need careful placement and it's not something that should be introduced at the end of a level in an open space.

Absolute slop but somewhat addictive regardless. I bet players will love it.

Shame it's incremental by design as there could be an interesting build variety like with sacrificing defense for rage meter.

Really cool game. Gold'd 3rd level and secret level on mid difficulty, then gold'd the 2nd on hard.

Didn't utilize much manual throwing or jump kicks. Just combo hits, aimed kicks and strafing, as well as strategic gun shots. Hitting and then kicking stunned enemies for quick kill is the best mechanic of the game for sure as without it combat can get stale.

The game definitely shines more with higher difficulty, surprisingly despite throwing in tankier enemies, though not with difficulty spikes as those make me think twice whether I want to replay the whole level. While there's theoretically a decent selection of weapons, the gameplay variety feels stale because of limited selection of enemies and simple arena structure, as well as weapons having miniscule differences in the end (maybe outside of splash damage ones). I liked the third level shotgun on mid difficulty, as I at least had to make a long term decision to save it for the bossfight. Adding that sort of routing elements could make levels more interesting.

It's potentially fun but it's too janky.

Walking is really slow to the point you are better off doing dash cancelling for adjusting your spacing except for when you are locked out of it. Dashing mid crouch is weird. When you are suddenly dashing in the opposite direction it's likely to execute a short dash instead of a regular one, it needs a longer time window in case you pressed direction immediately after dash. Weapon mode not letting you move is a really weird decision and I'd rather not use it as it will get me killed in multiple ways no matter how strong it is.

The way the first actual combat enemies are introduced make it feel like a joke difficulty.

The way attacks range, combos, controls, movement and weapons work make it seem to me like you either steamroll entire groups of enemies with a single long combo chain, or you die due to bad initial spacing screwing you over as all your escape options are locked for quite a long time after attacking. There are also other options like jumping attack quick kills on single hobo enemies being quite reliable, but I don't think it's the intended playstyle.

Reached the end first try, didn't even use up any lives and barely engaged with the mechanics. I think it's pretty good but needs rebalance.

Encounters are pretty fair despite how chaotic they appear to be. The full wall of turrets having you maneuver across a line of platforms is a nasty bomb bait though. Aggression towards turrets is overwhelmingly rewarding and killing just a few the moment they spawn will let you have much more breathing room - this funnels you into a single strategy for opening encounters.

I'm not sure all spawns are telegraphed, l was surprised when a swarm of the small white drones spawned almost on top of me.

Player is way too tanky. A different way to balance this would be a bit more punishment, less healing opportunities but gradual ramp up in encounter threat.

Edit: I played the old version, I swear I didn't even notice the update notification and wasn't prompted by that to try it.

It's really buggy. Menu on game over and level end doesn't work. Bullet time doesn't end. I have no idea how to get out of the mech in the second level. Chainsaw doesn't do anything.

Mouse sensitivty is really weird. If it's supposed to be a limited turn speed thing, I think there should be two "crosshairs", one for actual mouse position (and it should be visible to communicate that it's actually responsive to the input and where player will end up aiming) and the other for actual mech orientation getting interpolated to the mouse position.

Oh, I've seen it on /v/ threads before. It's so cool that I wouldn't even care if there's no depth. Having any feedback on hits would improve it a lot.

To be honest I doubt I would break even on the 100$.

Got chroma turtle and shroom, but primavolt seemed like it would take some grinding because I wasn't certain about the timing.

It's a very interesting concept, but I think it wears off quickly. Frontloading all the information even if theoretically optional doesn't let players be clever and explore the game on their own. Immersion is also sacrificed as a result. 

Locking progression behind exploits is a banger idea, though focusing on timed execution rather than pure knowledge checks adds a lot of friction (but I can respect the brave design decision).

Amazing. At first I didn't even notice the level selection because UI doesn't communicate that well.

This game is way too forgiving for all the bullshit I was pulling off. Dropkick is kind of too good, you can skip blocking mechanics, though rarely it can be countered.

Some NPCs in the onsen can get stuck on walls and other NPCs creating tricky situations. First target got stuck on a woman in a perfect defensive position on a bridge with lookout at the door, with a body shield while sniping with shurikens. Thank god for smoke bombs.

I had lots of funny moments, like finding a guy who poisoned himself with a banana, sneaking up on him to figure out what's happening and getting jump scared by a ninja right next to me, and then finally slipping on the banana peel. I also suicide banana bombed another target by dying and dropping all the items, so he started eating them with his bodyguard. When I found them with another character they kept slipping on the peels. Would be even funnier if slipping could make people fall out of the windows.

One of the things I would change about the controls is letting pick the Yes/No decisions with mouse (if you click on No it will select Yes because it simply accepts whatever was selected). The other is letting player interact using mouse instead of using looking direction of the character (so I'm next to a table and I can't interact with it until I turn to it using WSAD, instead it could just direct player on mouse click and interact as long as it's within range).

The combat is fine as it is. There were other options like letting player play more defensively (as a health vs time tradeoff), so aggressive playstyle actually ends up simple in practice. The timer gives you lots of design options, like getting items from fleeing enemies, destroying crates mid-combat to save time and having different room difficulties with more risky combat but better loot. Running from encounters could be fun too using the acrobatics mode to its fullest and you can always band aid fix it with balanced item drops.

Amazing progress. It looks great with actual assets. No problems with controls or mechanics (outside of some mouse and keyboard minor gripes, but that's not the main control scheme).

Turns out when I'm time, money and health limited at the same time, I'm more aggressive than doom guy. The pressure mixes well with the combat. It could be way, way simpler and it would still work. It doesn't mix well with resource gathering though, since there's no decision making, just picking up what little crates you can get with no dynamics outside of multiple descents. I'm not sure about acrobatic mode controls, but it works well enough.

The shop on the other hand gave me a bad experience. I was stuck in a low food price loop with barely any market changes across many days. I could swear at some point the newspaper said the food prices stabilized, yet it still traded for lower that day and forward. I got to 180$ and stalled out there for multiple days.

Works fine, plays well. Got all the bones. Only the roof one was tricky and I have no idea what the intended route was.

I managed to find a bug that blocks your ability to jump, reproducible by jumping and immediately crouching. Can softlock you unless you find a ledge to fall from to execute the buffered butt slam.

The button was tough to press, I had to cheese it by wall climbing from the bottom and then dashing.

Clumsiness is fine, but it needs positive or interesting effects that add to the gameplay variety rather than just nerfing basic controls. For example warioland series has a lot of different effects from falling, rolling or being hit by enemies.

In the end the core platforming should be predictable to the player. I just read about and tested the stamina system and it doesn't feel like it should be like that. The stamina information is visible diegetically on the wings, but those aren't shown before you execute the jump. In platforming sections it just adds wait time which I need to guess each time. It also funnels me down a loop of: basic jump is really low -> use flight all the time -> use up stamina -> basic jump is even lower. The worst part is the jump not executing on sprint startup which is required to even do the jump, but alone does nothing other than reduce friction. It's possible to account for all of that with distinct animations, but I wouldn't recommend that regardless.

The better way would be not using stamina for the basic jump in any way, and making it tight and controllable, but making the extended flight be stamina heavy with little control (like it is now) and landing penalty because it's a high commitment move.

It's neat, completed the demo 2 times. There's a lot interesting going on, but it's hard to experiment because of lack of healing (outside of that one crit perk) and lots of pressure from layer 2.

The spells were meh for the most part and it felt like a damage supplement rather than significant option for combat. That might be due to little feedback and how much is going on while I'm trying to not lose precious hp (while fireball feels good to use with its knockback, eventually it devolves into fire and forget just because it's an effiicient use of the timer and mental focus). The passive perks are great though, especially the random elemental effect scaling with combo since it gives an incentive to tighten your playstyle (even if it might not practical).

The finisher is definitely a great idea. It's easy to abuse by greedy spamming, but since it can be used strategically it's not even a big deal. Love the visuals on combos.

I can't read that one font, so it was hard to decipher how to do the special.

The room transitions give me DMC3 vibes for some reason.

That's really experimental, I like the vibes. Controls like ass though, it's way too slow and too little control considering how long the air time is. Melee attacks have something interesting going on especially with blocking bullet hells.

It feels like a downgrade from previous demos. The world so far is overstretched without much interesting going on. Instead of uniformly placed enemies, making encounters with more pressure in less comfortable spaces would be more memorable.

I hope the music at the end of the demo isn't the new marble oasis track. I loved the previous rendition.

It plays really well but falls into simon-says and circle strafe for me where I just use super effective chemicals. Last run on medium difficulty surprisingly had only one recipe and no challenges so in total there was no space to push me out of comfort zone. Friendly fire is a great touch and there should be more shit like that. The boss battle is neat but it's way easier than any elite combat encounter.

It really makes me wish for a roguelike ripoff of Magicka with min maxing combinations of magic and interesting chemistry to figure out, weapon pickups and unique spells.

I'm ashamed to say I didn't touch it in a long time. In the meantime I had a hard drive failure and lost my entire pile of design notes for the project. Thankfully by some miracle I managed to get back source code for the full graphical revamp so it's not that hopeless. It's not too much of a step back, since most of the notes were brainstorming and at least the filenames are intact, but it will be an even bigger pain to get back into the project.

The only problem I found is sometimes jump not executing at all which screwed me over in some bossfights. Turns out if you stop running and jump at a precise moment it will do nothing.

Unfortunately the log is the same minus the "Segmentation fault".

I tried renaming the directory in case data from older version was breaking it but it didn't help.

I'm getting a segmentation fault on windows 10

Godot Engine v4.4.1.stable.official.49a5bc7b6 - https://godotengine.org
Vulkan 1.2.142 - Forward+ - Using Device #0: NVIDIA - GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
Segmentation fault

Plays really well. The combo system really ties this game together. It has a terrifying flow state potential as I learn the cube movements intuitively.

Tutorial helped a bit with getting some moves down, but it all goes down the toilet anyway when under pressure. 

UI mouse zones were fucked when I first launched it #justunitythings

I somehow missed the door from the start to the arcade and went to the stairs, which suffers from bad visibility and being able to walk off screen.

I managed to get stuck by walking towards the rubble near the arcade, I can walk from there towards different camera angles but never see the player on screen. Same thing with the rubble next to the first vending machine closest to the starting area - the spot is even lighted by the lamp so it looked like a path to progression.

From the starting area if you walk down right up to the camera, player will start spinning very fast.

Kind of weird how tamagochi menu can't be closed with X key.

When camera angle changes controls direction becomes relative to previous camera angle which is good, but it doesn't feel right to have it sustained when the inputs change right until release of all direction keys.

Shooting works well. Promising concept, but janky at the moment.

There are several indicators, but everyone misses them. Don’t know if you got an idea?

Oh right, I caught a glimpse of that at my first coven in mission 1 but I didn't make a special note of it because of all the other things getting absorbed at the time. It's still something that player should have control over while trying to keep the witch king safe and i.e. have the UI option to stop producing dropships even if it's at the cost of half the overall unit production, because once they are accidentally produced it's kind of awkward to clean up.

I used to get a lot of complaints that the game was too easy/pointless, so I guess it’s good I managed to swing the pendulum the other direction at least. Now to perhaps find a middle ground.

Maybe the game is inherently hard to balance. Normally the resource economy dictates the tempo, but here dynamics are different with big payoffs from calling dibs on free covens as early as you can. But maybe I'm wrong and simply mission 3 obliterates me too hard. Mission 2 seems impossible to fail because there was no offensive pressure and I could take my time.

Here you go https://files.catbox.moe/8v8prp.zip

Not my genre for sure.

Visually it looks like a mishmash of different asset packs but it's not that bad on its own. The bigger problem is that it undermines any sense of world building and atmosphere due to lack of consistency. Interesting ideas are being thrown in with the naming but then all interest goes away because of that. I can imagine that the concept of controlling different enough factions while keeping general cohesion is hard as fuck to do without resorting to generic fantasy.

It seems like a very simplified rts at first, but in turn the pacing can really ramp up when taking over covens one after another while having to manage each previously taken, and my APM is too pathetic. Mission 3 is completely kicking my ass even at slower tempo. The gates are bulky as fuck and can appear literally next to me without me noticing. I guess I'll need to find a Juggernaut coven first to prevent them from sweeping everything.

The tutorial wasn't really needed because mission 1 does a good job. What's missing is some info on buildings - I don't know what they do before I actually place them. Same goes for items, I can't see any information on what they do. This might be extended to units too, not sure.

The fog of war is really ugly as it is - not a deal breaker but because of how it works with obstacles you are forced to look at it in close proximity to the witch king. It's easy to mistake summoning circle unit preview for actual units when you are in a hurry. Normally moving cursor to the edges of the screen moves the camera, but that's not the case when selecting units - this is a bit annoying for large covens. Some prompt texts are too small like invasion gates appearing. I didn't realize through the entire mission 2 that mechs have stances, I just thought the ones with guns out were special unmovable scripted units. Should mechs and dropships be summoned both at once? I don't want to keep producing dropships which then I have to send to death to get back my unit slots. When you have a lot of units selected the unit UI collapses into unit type counts, but the unit icons are all over the place. The launcher window cuts some elements at its default resolution.

The skeleton gimmick is clever, though it's annoying to do because of how aggressive witch king is. Same goes to overtaking covens, I need to constantly execute hold position. The music is great, though I'm not sure it matches at the moment.

tldr skill issues

Unfortunately I'm not too good at linux so let's just leave it at that. I'll try to upgrade the build tools and port over crash logging for the future.

Yeah, no idea. It could be some AMD cpu quirk or a cpuset setting, and the problem is so far below abstraction level I would have to try different compiler settings or turn off thread pool completely. Thanks again for testing.

Hey, what was the exact distro again?

Thanks for testing. Seems like it fails to wake up threads from the pool, but no idea why would that happen. I guess it's time to install arch.

Thanks! Yeah, those are things I have to add next if I decide to take the leap. The trailer has a preview of the weapons (with a few more to come). The second minigun is accessed through a breakable wall below. Seems like I broke the casings for it in the last update, whoops.

Sorry for the delay.

I thought it was unity slop, but it's actually some completely different engine, neat.

The whole 3d free movement format is way too bloated, especially if you are just prototyping the game mechanics. This would work much better as a VN-like with less friction. Unless you are going for specific sort of interactivity that would give you an edge, it seems detrimental on all fronts except for some potential immersion (that would require massive amount of polish anyway).

I didn't get in depth with the game and I'm not familiar with the genre, so I could only judge some technicalities, and all problems stem from being to navigate in 3d and being in early development stage so it might be useless. Having several text boxes and a loading screen before entering each rooms sucks especially since there are a lot of rooms to visit. Camera controls are too sensitive. Exiting the swimming pool brings you to gambling room's entrance.

Sounds like the character roster is critical for the game, so it would be good build up the familiarity and parade the characters on screen as often as possible, maybe even use them for the tutorial. Due to that it feels weird that hanging out would cost energy, but let's see how it plays out when it's implemented.