itch.io

i tried this game again. hoping you'd fixed the design flaw where you reset all poxel upgrades when a new stage is unlocked.

nope :( :(

really kills the fun having the whole field start populated with a ton of stuff. that's not how you make an incremental game.

should be empty and you build your first thing and dick around with it until you save up enough to build another thing which increases your income, etc. etc.

my water producer wasn't broken... and i had power... and it was empty and not producing water. i died from that.

this is amazingly solid. great work

is there a way to deconstruct?

you said that 8 days ago. i just had it happen to me.

you won't get another play by me on any game you make in the future.

'r' is far too weak

rolling not stopping on its own may be "realistic" but feels wrong

the invisible walls around the play area are infuriating. lots of stuff you want to grab, constantly just out of reach.

you claimed every repair will add benefits. just increasing your max carrying capacity is not "benefits" when your o2 is still the limiting factor.

all in all, this game is impressive, technically, but you made design decisions, consciously, that should have been made very differently.

we? you are one person. it's very weird to refer to yourself as "we"

we'll see. i'll give it an actual shot now and then submit my feedback to the dev-judgment committee.. i warn you though you may be awarded a seat on the committee but not recognized as a dev-who-desperately-doesn't-want-everyone-to-pass-on-their-game-instantly.

why uh.. why does loading the game blast you with 100 tutorials on screen at once.

what in the dev-who-desperately-wants-everyone-to-pass-on-their-game-instantly is this?

lol you can just accidentally click an x... right by a ship and delete one of your cannons with no refund. awesome!

all in all, great aesthetic. decent idea. execution needs major work.

above all, i hate the way the cannons shoot. half the time you look at them and their firing animation isn't in sync with the projectile. or anywhere close. the other half time they're shaking like they're shooting and nothing is coming out.

also why do they shoot in such dumb directions? sometimes top or bottom ones shoot right out of the map completely.

funny. but why does retiring not stop the calls?

this was very good. i approve. and my approval means far more than the combined feedback of everyone else.

trust me on that, kid.

lol except it definitely doesn't.

You don't think you're being insanely toxic to me right now? We both know that you simply screwed up and weren't thinking about it correctly when you made the currency "watts"

How would one collect a "watt"? Given that a watt is just a measure of a joule per second?

You're too deep (in your mind) and can't just fix it, so instead of just saying something like, "oh I screwed up, just like the SPACEPLAN guy did and it's too late for me to change it but it'll just have to remain as a kind of gag/joke/whatever"

No one would think anything of that.

But that's not how you approached it. You went the toxic/gaslight/intellectually-dishonest route and doubled down.

So it's you who's being extremely toxic, not me.

Btw I'm an editor @ IGR (indie game reviewer) and I'm the one always trying to funnel incremental games onto our front page. Was planning on trying to do so here since the metroidvania/platformer formula applied to an incremental was innovative.

But just to be clear you're going to take a troll stance and push back on the watts thing that I pointed out?

That would be beyond embarrassing.

Wow you guys are actually uneducated af. A Watt us a unit of power and a Joule is a unit of energy.

Wow you guys are actually uneducated af. A Watt us a unit of power and a Joule is a unit of energy.

Wow you guys are actually uneducated af. A Watt us a unit of power and a Joule is a unit of energy.

oh my christ. i refreshed and made three train tracks and added trains to them until i have 6 trains and that didn't trip the "have 5 trains" requirement for hubs.

i'm sorry but this is impressively bad. nothing about it makes sense or is fun or playable whatsoever.

kids should not be allowed to vibe code with LLM's.

not being able to delete nodes makes this so unplayable and dumb.

and if the intersection needs to be a node... then how is that possible when a node that's already created.. can't be clicked again.

there is no way to place hubs.

this is terrible.

uh... hubs go on the intersection of two lines? the only way to get two lines to intersect.. the only way whatsoever is to make an x pattern with two lines. and right clicking that intersection does absolutely nothing.

do you think i have any interest in defending my accurate criticism against a fanboi? (boi emphasizes that it's a very feminine archetype. opposite of masculine)

my criticism was aimed at the dev.

not at you.

and it'll never be aimed at you

i'm a developer. i have multiple games released on steam. i know what game development on a scale equal to, below, and above this entails. i also know what constitutes good game design, good UX, and what generally maximizes virality/sales/reception/etc.

hopefully that will make you actually listen to my feedback and take it seriously, but i consider that unlikely.

1. no mute button or volume controls or even any kind of options/settings for saving/exporting/etc. is unforgivable. and hitting escape and reaching an overlay that is clearly not integrated with the game (it's very clear that it's a disjointed feature and not integrated into the game's organic UI) doesn't count. that's actually worse in some ways than having no menu at all.

2. clicking ANYWHERE to switch to the simulation view is weird. misclicks will be VERY annoying. you already have the camera button in the upper left. that is enough. this is a particularly annoying UI choice on your part because when something pops up, the player's usual instinct is going to be to rapidly click off it to close it, and because of your weird UI choice, that action won't close it but rather open up the simulation/camera view.

3. i don't like the boss guy's dialog popping up every time i claim the reward for completing a quest. the quest card already contains the information about it. and the popup for the reward is also plenty. it's just spam and annoys the player. if you want, you could have the guy show up and say his dumb bit and have the quest reward text included in what he says so that there aren't two popup texts.

4. it does not make sense that automation of intern hiring is in the research tree. that is an HR task. i.e. the bottom tier HR worker should not promote interns. they should be hiring them. that is kind of obvious imo.

I made some further notes. If you implement these needed fixes/improvements, then I'll provide more feedback. My experience has been that when devs give solid feedback to devs, newer devs tend to have an arrogance that precludes acceptance of said feedback so I tend to wait to provide the meat of feedback until I've determined that's not the case.

For one thing, since the positioning of your cursor matters so much for "area of attack", it's annoying that you auto-attack. The player should definitely click+hold to attack. Also the view should be a little less tilted so we can see stuff behind stuff and fully utilize the area patterns for simul attacks.

Nothing in the playfield is dynamic. No enemies or anything moving around. Just trees/shrooms/rocks sitting there.

Also these things we're collecting should be crafting not upgrading. Wood/stone/etc. are physical materials for crafting. Upgrades are purchased with things like "experience"

And upgrades should feel like they do something. Upgrading attack for example... feels like it does NOTHING. You way overtuned the health vs damage. I don't like when devs do that. They're way too preoccupied with making sure nothing is too "OP" that they don't realize they've sucked empowerment out of the player loop.

I could say a ton more but that's enough. The game loop is not empowering and that's why it simply wasn't that fun for me.

it's just really boring. i barely feel stronger when i buy upgrades.. even many upgrades. and it's just grinding the same thing over and over again.

there were a bunch of pretty obvious things you could have done to make it more engaging and fun.

here's one idea: you could add an upgrade that will auto start a run ever X seconds. and have it start as a pretty high X with upgrades to reduce it.

but not if you are dead set against idle play in which case nm

pretty weird for an incremental game to pause when it doesn't have focus. literally even clicking out of it, but keeping focus on the tab.. still freezes it... so this game has zero idle to it. if it did, i'd be quite interested i think.

i don't like the way you don't introduce content slowly but just have the full game and UI unlocked at the start.

so i like the idea. the presentation is criminally bad though. why are we so zoomed in on the coin.. board.. whatever you call it.. thing. and then the dice are just bounding all over the place idiotically with no real physics..

just make the coin board.. or pathway or whatever you call the thing the coins are falling on (do you see how bad of a design you went for if the player doesn't even know what to call the central focus of the game?) smaller. and give the dice a little tray they roll in.

You sound like chat gpt or a microsoft tech support drone.

Yeah. I live on Earth so my browser has clipboard access. The bug is on your end.

exprot does nothing. NOTHING.; it puts nothing in yoru clipboard. it doesn't even overwrite whatever you have in your clipboard. it does nothing. YOU DID NOTHING with your export feature.

also when the game starts, the 'catch food" button does nothing. is there some other UI element somewhere else that I'm supposed to interact with first? "catch food" seems like the thing i'd want to do.

are you just horrible at development?

boy you jumped through some weird hoops to ensure that full screening this game would not increase the size of the game. why exactly did you feel the need to do that?

what a horrible choice.

none of the areas were overly difficult at all. in fact they were cleverly designed to have multiple solutions with more efficient routes available when more metroidvania units are collected.

watts are power not energy. this is a big mistake. many games make it. spaceplan made it. it's embarrassing on the part of the dev.

it's joules we're collecting.

The standard browser that everyone uses.

can't see enemy health. i saw someone else comment about it and you reply "surprised"

nah. nice try. enemy health doesn't show.

also, oftentimes i have a full dash bar and can't dash. i have to click multiple times. this occurs at the START of levels. particularly the boss level. i'm wondering if it's because the dash isn't really charged at the start and has to charge up but the UI shows it as full because it was full as of the last level END