itch.io

There’s a key you need to get to access the control tower, but I’ve had another playtester point out the keycard is in a spot where it really blends in with its environment. I’ve been trying to keep the pickups consistent as simple objects on the ground, but I may need to start making some of them glow or float or something.

If you stay in their line of sight you won’t see many differences, it was more about improving performance and handling edge cases so they don’t blindly dive off cliffs or run into walls trying to chase you.

Thanks for trying it, I still need to come up with more reasons to go underwater.

Standing partially behind an obstacle, mechs will stand still and shoot but not hit you while you can shoot back

I don’t have an easy way to deal with this, a lone AI is never going to outsmart an experienced player.

There’s a crack between two rocks near the end of the first level where I got stuck jumping between them, not sure if you can tell where it is from this pic

Thanks for pointing it out, I can’t find all of these myself.

Oh good catch. I think I’ll just start surrounding these with clip brushes eventually, it’s the only way to be sure.

Thanks for trying it again, not much new to see.

the kill counter sfx at the end of the level is very loud

It’s based on just the regular menu volume level but all the menu sounds files are quite a bit quieter. I’ll change it to the lower of either SFX or Menu sounds.

i always struggle to find the blue key card in the final level, even though i already know where it is. it just doesn’t pop up enough, it almost looks like a normal armor pad or health kit from afar

I can see this being a problem, I don’t really know what to do other than maybe just try to move it elsewhere in the room like maybe on one of the couches. I could put it next to the two dudes in there but you can sometimes alert them from outside and it won’t be much more visible all the way at the far end.

the mech AI seemed smarter at aiming? it actually hit me a few times while i was strading circles around it.

I don’t remember intentionally doing this, but I tweaked the tracking speed and the projectile spread a bit when I was adding the torso twist which definitely would’ve had an effect.

I don’t get how you can stand turning off music, head bob, AND weapon bob. Whatever, the options are there for a reason.

The menus aren’t intended to work with less than 720p, but the HUD shouldn’t be so messed up. I added an extra offset to restrict the corners to 16:9 in ultrawide but forgot to put an fmin in the equation to stop it applying to other aspect ratios. Easy fix.

Spooky game. It took me a bit to work out how the map worked. I also didn’t look at the screenshots until I was done so I didn’t end up building any furniture, is that what the scrap metal is for?

Really not a fan of the CRT filter, it works for the hud but not as much for the game. Maybe I just don’t like this particular one but I’d rather just not have it at all.

Would be good to have a gauge to fill up when you’re resting or repairing so it’s more obvious how much time it’s going to take.

I thought the yellow dots were enemies on the radar so I avoided them, didn’t realize until later that the histogram around the radar is what gives away enemies.

It’s cool that you can really spread out the map with the procgen, though it does stutter sometimes when moving around. Having it actually match up with the map is also useful, though it doesn’t always help much with those overpasses as I had a couple that were pretty useless.

It’s neat, you kept me driving around for half an hour or so while I listened to some music.

EDIT: Worked fine on Linux over wine.

I definitely don’t play a lot of shmups but I can confidently say my failure to last longer than a minute is purely a skill issue. The incoming bullets are all nice and distinct, the art style looks neat and the game runs fine over wine. I’m a little iffy on the glow used to show selection in the menus, it stands out a lot as non-pixelated compared to the rest of the game. It also took me a sec to realize I had to use ZXC controls, but that’s probably normal in this genre.

A solid and pretty game for only a couple weeks’ work, good job.

I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to submit for this one, there’s isn’t much new to see. I did however finish the AI overhaul and redesigned the HUD to make it easier to add new stuff. Railgun/Sniper is currently being textured so that will definitely be in the next demo day.

I don’t have anything in mind for the spike, the rocket launcher already alt-fires the rockets as grenades which do extra damage but bounce around unpredictably

Darkness has been the most consistent complaint I’ve gotten, the lighting changes a lot on different monitors. In the current demo I did add a flashlight, though it can give your position away to enemies who otherwise haven’t seen you yet.

Thanks for trying it! It’s been a long time but it’s coming together.

I’m in the middle of an optimization pass on the AI to allow for a significant increase in the enemy count which should make the encounters in later levels ramp up. I will be adding some difficulty options later that can limit ammo and health pickups as well.

I can justify it on two counts: 1 - I’m looking for any possible excuse to cut things out of scope, and I wouldn’t want to do quick melee without proper animations. 2 - Even integrated into her arm, she still has to pull it back to throw a punch. Changing weapons represents having to commit to that. There’d be this annoying delay every time you hit the quick melee button, whereas in the melee stance it’s near instant.

My only gripe is that the scope on the SMG feels a little pointless with that recoil.

It’s really intended to give you an option before you get the railgun which will be the dedicated sniper weapon.

It’s effective, but feels a little cheesy.

There’s only a couple right now, but I intend to have some enemies that hold their ground and wait for you, especially on unreachable ledges.

Also, I feel strangely compelled to play Cosmic Call.

…no comment

Initially I didn’t plan on having any, but in my own playtesting I always catch myself sneaking up to do melee kills and I’ve had other agdgers say they do the same. It is intended to be viable, but there will be ambushes and encounters where the enemies spot you immediately, particularly at close range. Which does mean it will be situational rather than consistently useful. You’ve raised a good point, I’ll have to ruminate on this for a while.

One issue I found was that if I went up the stairs at certain angles (diagonal? against the wall?) my movement would go jagged where it was seemingly getting caught on the steps?

One of a never ending list of corner cases. Never ever use Bullet!

Are you getting this high? Less?

Nowhere near that high, about as much as just jumping normally off of the lip

Hell of a unique shader, makes a rather plain walking simulator a bit more interesting.

I couldn’t get the shrimp in the bikini bottom zone, the macaroni tube didn’t shoot me nearly high enough. Assuming that was the intended way to do it, the velocity boost might be framerate dependent or something. The game was using up way more CPU than it probably should have and I use a 144Hz monitor so anything framerate dependent would be screwed up by that.

Edit: was playing on linux with proton, other than the shrimp problem everything looked fine.

The game overall reminds me a lot of Oni for some reason. Like Oni if it were made into an FPS. That’s a very good feeling to be giving me.

I’ve been meaning to try Oni, I still haven’t played it. The visual style is definitely similar to what I’m going for so I’m happy to hear it’s working.

I found the first enemy type to be kind of odd, though. I assume they’re going to be changed, but the amount of time they spend in their ‘huh?’ phase seems too long to me.

Some of them have an “ambush” flag set and they respond much faster because they skip this cautious phase. At the moment the phase goes for a fixed time which does look silly up close. I’m thinking of making it based on a detection meter like the standard ubisoft game style (the meter won’t actually be shown to the player) so that the spotting time is dependent on how far away you are.

That may just be over-complicating it though, reducing the caution time to half a second might work better.

I was vaguely disappointed that falling glass doesn’t hurt you

I know, I really wanted to add this but because they’re driven using Bullet itself rather than me tracing them through the level, there’s no straightforward way to detect particular hits. Otherwise I would’ve had this in ages ago. The cactuses do poke you if you run into them though! That one was much simpler to set up.

I only found a single secret, and while it doesn’t bother me, I wonder if it’s something to do with how the secrets are laid out.

That one with the broken wall is definitely the most obvious one, I don’t actually know if anyone has found any of the others at all. Many require you to crouch at the peak of a jump or blast-jump with the shotgun alt-fire to reach.

They look like professional types, but sound like street toughs.

lol, this is intentional for lore reasons. The bad guys are a rogue mercenary unit that took over the island without meeting any resistance. So while they are well equipped, they lack discipline and have their guard down expecting this to be a big milk run.

I need to come up with a way to actually present this in game somehow. After seeing the codec calls in your game I’m considering something similar.

Still, I found the AI in general pretty easy to deal with, and noticed them acting a little stupid. Dumb choices at times

It might not be the best idea but I’m going for a quantity over quality approach with the encounters so I don’t want individual enemies to be super competent when the plan is to build up to fighting 10-20 of them at the same time.

The mechs in Downtown got stuck on roof overhangs twice.

They’re still using the old AI, only the regular goons actually use the navmesh this time around. I should have everybody switched over in time for the next demo day though. The mechs actually get a second, dedicated navmesh for larger enemies just like how Quake had a separate BSP tree for the Shamblers

The recoil on the bazooka is great. I used the Lockon Missile a lot more this time around, I remember it being really unclear how it worked before while now it’s Streak SRMs in MechWarrior where it gives you the lock tone immediately, really good.

Pretty much everything still needs a layer of polish, but some things that stood out this time:

• The really sudden freeze upon completing the level or dying
• There’s no way to skip through dialog, either in-game or the cutscene
• The enemy snipers should probably have some sort of tell that they’re about to fire
• The directional damage indicator doesn’t seem very reliable, I was losing huge chunks of HP from the little spider dudes and it was making me look up to the side instead of down beneath me.

I think I mentioned this on the discord but now that you’ve got the rotation on the gatling gun, the other weapons need some sort of cooldown indicator. In the short term you can just have a little transparent gauge show up beside the crosshair for the weapon on that side which flashes or just disappears once the weapon is ready. Along with some sort of charging or mechanical sfx this would be fine. The really classy way would be to have some sort of over the top pumping animation on the weapon itself on top of the above.

My favorite secret so far:

Something seems busted with the lighting on the Linux build, it’s way darker than the screenshots and changes not only as you move but even as you look around. The default volume also seemed to start on overmax and after turning it down I couldn’t turn it as far up as it had been.

I ended up just playing the windows build using proton, the mouselook wasn’t as smooth but the lighting worked correctly. I’m assuming Unity’s Linux export is doing something wrong.

The midi guitar really gets my Doom-brain going. The snappy recoil on the shotgun makes it immediately more satisfying to use than before. The Dorito pope enemies are really cool, all the new textures and sprites are looking great. The new level’s layout is like a lost Quake map, it’s great.

I think I missed only one secret. I found a machingun, the peeping tom room, and the nugg

Lots of excellent progress on this one.

It seems a lot more challenging than last time, in particular you seem really dependent on the slomo now and pretty much need to have it turned on every time you round a corner. I’m not sure if that’s a good way to do it, considering the main mechanic is building up slomo juice you reach a point where you’re just using it all the time. At that point I’m questioning why you wouldn’t just have the agility benefits of slomo as a default. I say this because I’m comparing to playing FEAR which I usually play on hard without using the slomo at all and the difference in your game seems much more prominent.

I swear you used to be able to powerslide because I remember having way more mobility the last time I played. Now if you don’t focus down on shooting someone if they’re in the same room you’re pretty much dead.

You can hear Fate’s VA stifling a laugh after she says “maintenance closet”, lol

I kept going back and looking for the starting gun, not realizing you pull it back out if you drop your current weapon. That’s probably on me.

You need to put in walls extending down and possibly up outside the level. Also, definitely need to make the outside glass breakable, just be careful of physics costs. It may make more sense to just do it with mostly particles.

In canals, I wish that when the advertisements are shot, they would be shorted out. Maybe this is going too far, but maybe they could even make a small shock explosion, kind of like a light weight red barrel.

I really want to do this too, but at the moment I can draw all of them at once in a single draw call and splitting them up into destroyable statics will likely require extra optimization. It is on my to-do list but as a “nice to have” rather than a “need to have”.

I realize that the mecha shots are so wide that I can just stand between the guns and never get shot… intentional? I kind of like, it’s funny. Suppose it’s worse than just strafing around, especially when other enemies are around.

As I’m aiming for other enemies to be the main source of difficulty I’m thinking I will leave it be. I do have a separate code path that fixes it, but I’ll see how it goes in the later levels.

I didn’t get a you’re dead screen, but at least I can open the menu and exit that way.

There’s no timer for the death screen, it will only show up if you left click. I should make it so Escape puts you in the death screen too though, I don’t think it does.

Like last time I just spend the entire time in Sights view, it would be good if the C for free look toggle would work in that mode too as it is much easier to use. Though it does mean you end up either circle strafing or long range sniping. The camera orientation also really needs smoothing on gradient changes, it’s way too sharp right now.

On the second level I could easily snipe all the buildings and the tanks in the second base with the 47mm from a great distance and they wouldn’t react. Probably if a shell lands near them they should become active and at least try to evade.

I tried the second level with the crunchsader and got worn down by bullets. The APHE shells do a lot less damage which makes sense for a smaller gun but their little baby firing arc also means you have to charge in super aggressively to get into range (I believe the real crusaders had to do that too, lol).

I really like the repair mechanic, its nice and simple without resorting to a health bar, and having to do the minigame is really tense when you’ve still got cannons shooting at you.

Having this be a web game kind of puts me off of it, but I suppose it is still just a prototype. The main problem is that it means the mouse sensitivity is crazy high.

There’s no spin up sound for the miniguns which made me think they didn’t work at first.

Your textures look good. Crunchy, grimy industrial is a timeless look. Though the comic skittering of the mech’s legs do undercut the tone. Either embrace the goofiness or maybe make the legs slower or something if you want it to be more serious.

I was keen to try it out but over proton the post-processing freaks the fuck out and slows the framerate to under 20fps. The menu works fine, and the spyglass greatly improves the framerate though it doesn’t fix the bloom. Screencap for reference:

I did try playing it a little bit and the controls seem very intuitive, I’m sure I would’ve had an easier time if it wasn’t lagging so badly. I couldn’t tell if there were any mechanics for wind? And I assume there will be some sort of islands at some point in the future?

Not sure if you’re taking it this way, so consider it a big scope jump, but this would be a very solid foundation for an open-world game like Endless Sky, just Caribbean themed. I think that’s what Sid Meier’s Pirates is supposed to be but I’ve never played it.

I don’t know what I just played. I do want to know more though.

Attacks don’t seem to have any feedback, I don’t think I could attack at all and the only way to see that I’d taken damage was to check the inventory.

Worked on Linux with proton, my controller worked as well. Grateful that “tank controls” didn’t apply to the controller.

Hm, that might be tricky. Maybe not an actual gif as OpenGL doesn’t really support them natively and I’d have to upload the frames on every draw, but flipping through a series of still frames on an atlas would be pretty easy as long as there isn’t too many. That’s pretty much how the monitor heads for the sawblade dudes work and I could add a script to do that on plain world statics too.

the new AI stuff seems to work nicely

They can sometimes lose you a little too easily still, but yeah they can definitely give chase much better than before without diving off cliffs.

Machinegun could have a less recoil

I have a dedicated railgun in the works to have as a more reliable sniper weapon, but I want to redo the hud a little bit when I add it so it didn’t make it into this demo day. I’m hesitant to make the Machinegun any more useful as it’s already a pretty good jack of all trades.

shotgun could have more

It starts to look really silly the way the animation works if I increase it further. However, I’ve been thinking of altering the animation so it kicks up higher and takes a while to recenter. I think that’ll give it that extra bit of oomph.

I definitely want to make an add, perhaps not as a commercial for my game, but something funny you can use.

Sure, I’d appreciate it! Ads you’d find in a tourist trap would be perfect, the kind of stuff you’d see at the air/spaceport in a tropical country/planet like overpriced bottled water. That or dumpy local businesses like expensive hotels, overhyped realtors, “financial advisors”, shady lawyers, dodgy tour guides, private investigators, pawn shops, convenience stores, that sort of thing.

Just note that all the Your Ad Here spots have a little 1px border around them to help with mipmapping artifacts so your actual workable area is 2px less than what’s listed in each dimension.

I think everyone has said this already, but this game’s aesthetic is seriously on point. The music is great, the story immediately sucks you in, it’s really compelling stuff. You need a unique hook to sell a JRPG and it’s pretty clear you’ve got one.

A minor issue: I had the menu cut off during name entry so I just guessed that confirm was in the bottom right corner.

Gamepad controls work, although on my PS3 controller dash was with square rather than circle, and the rebinding menu is in numbers rather than the button symbols. Otherwise it worked find on linux with proton.

Another bug: I went up north to fetch Sarah after Billy butchered the carcass but before talking to him again and he disappeared when I came back. He showed up again if I came into the camp from the south so it wasn’t game breaking.

I only played for about half an hour because I have more demos I want to play today, but this is really good stuff.

I’d need to sit down with it for a few hours to get used to the controls but this is looking really good, like WW2: Total War. I was trying to pull off flanking maneuvers and stuff but I’m not very good at micro at the best of times and wasn’t pausing much because of how far End is from WASD.

There was one part where I was ambitiously trying to have two infantry squads hold still and apply suppressing fire while two others advanced but it seems their range was too short to pull it off, even though the LOS makes it seem like it should work from much further? I tried pressing T and then clicking to have troops fire on a position from a distance but it didn’t seem to work.

Definitely need numkey groupings, especially if you can assign them during the briefing section and especially if they can be assigned independently. I think a lot of my panicked micro problems could be fixed with that.

I’d prefer just having Q+E be rotation keys instead of needing to hold down a modifier. The F1 readout also shows space opening the pause menu, this didn’t work for me but having it be another way to freeze would be great.

Unit barks are sorely needed.

I think the first mission is a bit overwhelming for a newbie, too many troop types to manage from the very beginning. For a tutorial level I’d start with only infantry, and then introduce the other units one at a time, including trucks as a separate thing.

I could see people complaining that your troops die too fast, especially with the disadvantage of assaulting enemies waiting in ambush without softening them up first with artillery. If you want a simple difficulty setting I’d just make the player’s troops tougher and ballsier and keep the current way as the intended/hard difficulty.

This looks seriously good, keep it up! I’d need some more time to get used to it but add a basic campaign map like the one from the original Medieval: Total War and I’d play this for weeks at a time.

I gave it another shot but the after starting a new game it shows one line in a dialogue and then drops me onto this screen. The dude gets a red outline if I hover over him but otherwise I can’t do anything.

The linux version works, but you have to launch the executable, not the shell script.

Really frustrating game, you move like a sack of potatoes with arthritis, all of the meters are constantly going down, the enemies are a pain in the ass. The name “Hopeless” is very apt. I gave up after I died four times without finding anything.

I saw on stream later that the grab function works on the enemies, really need to make that more obvious as it’s the only way to not just get instakilled over and over.

There’s a bunch of game-feel things that make the game more frustrating than it should be:

• The crosshair is pretty pointless so far down. Considering there is no verticality you might as well get rid of it entirely
• It’s very unclear how accurate weapons are and their range is frustratingly limited, causing you to miss with zero feedback as to why.
• Reloading the shotgun has this annoying pause right at the end where it looks like it’s ready but you still have a second to wait. You should always strive to match the animation to the reload time, or at worst, allow the player to shoot before it finishes. Never add an extra delay after without some sort of visual indication that it’s not done yet.
• Doors are very strict that you have to smash your face into them to open and then they shut the instant you move away. You really should increase their range if you don’t want enemies to be able to open them, otherwise a crowd can form on the other side that you can’t do anything about without getting hit.
• Projectiles are very popular but your movespeed seems too slow to reliably dodge them, especially up close where the enemies have perfect tracking.
• This might be asking a lot from Unity but you really need to have your billboards oriented relative to the camera’s orientation at all times.
• Your environment textures are about double the resolution of the sprites which isn’t great. I’d recommend saving yourself some time and make them lower res.

I gave it a shot because I do love FPS but this one isn’t really tickling me the right way. The idea sounds fun but the gameplay just isn’t there yet.

Is this a real offer or just a placeholder?

Both. I intend to slowly replace them all myself but if anybody wants to send me something over discord or post it in the thread then I’ll be happy to include it! Just don’t add scanlines as that’s an overlay layer in Krita, and include “ctes” somewhere in the post in case I have to Ctrl+F for it.

The bug about resizing the window still happens.

I have been able to reproduce it by trying out the Windows version over proton, but I haven’t looked at fixing it yet. I want to switch my window handling to GLFW for a bunch of other reasons as well so I’ll look into it then, currently in the plan for around DD59 or so.

I like the new Ai

It has some quirks but I think it’s already a big improvement. The new system also has them only doing pathfinding and LOS queries on a tick timer so I should be able to get away with quite a few enemies in the later levels.

could eb turned down a little bit

I’ve gone and reduced them a tiny bit for next DD. I’m too used to them and so they don’t stand out as much to me. Gunshots I’m also not certain on, I keep thinking I should turn them down too.

Yeah that’s expected, they’re still using the old system and so have zero understanding of their surroundings beyond running at the player in a straight line.

i found the AI to be somewhat… dumber? like, sometimes it would get stuck in a container, or below some stairs, or in the corner of a room.

The guys with the SMGs are the only ones using any new AI but admittedly their system is more complex and prone to breakage. They deal particularly badly with anything that isn’t accounted for on the navmesh. I’m also trying this thing where if you’re behind them they will run away for a bit first before they try to shoot you, this includes going up and circle-strafing around them.

That said, all enemies have now had their “psychic” time reduced from 5 seconds to just 1 so they lose track of you much easier than before.

It’s going to need more tuning. The main thing for now is that Goons shouldn’t blindly jump off cliffs anymore.