itch.io

Oh, and I’d like feedback on the music\sound, too! I plan on adding a more dynamic music system later that reacts to your progress and some other stuff, getting really into drum’n bass probably.

Hello there,

for the past months I have been chugging away with my first proper game: Waste No Space. It’s about exploring space while at the same time juggling nuclear waste away from your planet.

https://ximossi.itch.io/wastenospace

The idea was to make a game that gets harder based on how you play it - putting a lot of strategic thinking onto the player. Or, of course, you can just shut your brain off and shoot radioactive trash into the exosphere until everything turns green.

I am at a point of feeling quite good about it, but so far testing has been mostly with a few people only and the feedback I got has shaped the game now. I need new feedback on this, so please: Play my game :)

There is a tutorial at the beginning, guiding you through the major concepts. Expect not too much content, but it should give you some 15 minutes of play. Late game is there but i doubt you will reach it. Not because I don’t believe in you, but because it take a lot of resources to unlock.

My basic questions I’d love you to answer:

1. Do you understand how to play the game after the tutorial?
2. How difficult was the game for you?
3. Would you (or did you) play a few rounds?

Also, feel free to tell me what you would like to see added to the game and share a screenshot of your score.

Thank you very much for your time, I appreciate it! Oh, and for what it’s worth: no AI was used on this game so far.

The tutorial is back!

Congrats on sticking to your plan and getting your game there! I played a round and here is my untainted feedback - of course, personal opinion only.

• Logo font is very hard to read
• It takes a lot of effort to understand which resources do what and how to get them. Especially, because there is no indication for change AND no consistency between resources.
• The buildings give no proper indication for what they do, how much they cost and what is happening.
• I’d appreciate other controls. WASD would work just fine.
• Resting at hotel with no money works just fine…? Bug?
• Are the stocks random? I don’t really like the Stocks being all about ETCs and not proper Stock.
• Would appreciate a key for going to Stock market and back in categories.
• Also would appreciate a time indicator for how long until stock will re-calculate.

Keep at it, this seems like it could become a fun game! :)

I’ll just put down some notes matching your effort level ;) “Perforator” sounds like many small projectiles that scatter in all directions, like needles. Long buildup to give players chance to flee the room. “Revenant” obviously has two lives. “Maelstrom” similar to your ink zombie but deforming their perimeter. Think vortex around them. “Vindicator” does more damage the more you damage them. “Sentinel” will have massive damage reduction when standing still. Has to be damaged while moving. “Hatchet” Throws limbs at you with high damage but limited to limbs. “Carnage” moves in rapid but straight motions, shredding everything in its path. Think of sticking to walls, jumping from one wall to another. “Fissure” slams ground and casts a barrier\damage path while standing still. Great for making player movement difficult, not got in self-defense.

Uploaded a small hotfix straight away:

• Fix a typo during tutorial
• Goal to scan the moon (or other bodies) only appears after having access to Satellites
• Time indicator in dialogue bubble always visible

I’ve disabled the tutorial for now. Because of some of the changes the tutorial no longer applies for some stuff. Is it still easy to understand what to do?

Not WASD? :D

Sadly this does not seem to support mouse input besides the “Start” button.

Sadly i can’t play the game as I have no windows machine here. Still came by to express how much I like your color palette. Simple, but so on point. :)

I can fully relate to lesson 3! Especially in the last few hours I kept on sinking time into problems I could just not assess anymore instead of pivoting to something else. Very important, indeed :)

And to lesson 2: This is probably one of those things that need to be learned by hard. Because in a professional environment this is very usual. I don’t know much about the 3D-pipelines of other engines but in Unreal it usually is not a big problem, once you know where the limitation of pre-viz are and how to keep world scale throughout the whole thing. I guess for Unity it should be the same. Can’t think of a reason why it should not be in Godot, too. What have you been using? And maybe that is something to give Kay feedback about :)

Very cute concept and setting! It got me engaged really fast. I have one suggestion: what if you could switch characters directly by pressing 1-3 or at least shuffle through them with a seperate key and leave the use-key for only that purpose. I have two rationals for that:

1. I accidentally switched characters too often with RED, because dust keeps generating right next to another character.
2. The two seconds of walking to another character and switching are, compared to the rest of the game, just not fun.

In my game you have to slingshot waste boxes into space until you drown in the mess you made :) It is a balancing challenge between producing enough power to shoot waste into space, while producing ever more waste.

I’d love to have feedback on it while i continue working :)

https://ximossi.itch.io/waste-no-space

Very gladly: https://ximossi.itch.io/waste-no-space

Great idea! I like how you made the placement of the houses and the balancing aspect!

I just wish you had not used that liquid shader and added a number for energy instead ;)

That sounds sad. Sorry for your experience :/

Ouf, this is great! :)

Very cute and very addicting! Congratulations on making this! :)

It feels very slow at the beginning, but as soon as crystal efficiency is unlocked, it suddenly becomes fast. You will certainly find better math there :)

Also connected to math: why not use whole numbers only? Probably is personal taste, but my brain did not approve of the decimals from the cost increase. With whole numbers you can also easily fix the digits jumping around.

But as others pointed out already: it has a nice atmosphere and i really enjoyed the shards flying around and not just clicking on one point the whole time :)

The game in itself is very fun and the core mechanic is great! I’d love it to explore more on the possibilities with it!

The style itself is not in my taste. It’s very noisy and offers no visual consistency. I bet you could have made the game with those pixelated assets alone.

I selected the minigun as my second gun and could not get level 2 done because the minigun keeps missing every shot.. :/

Save you little planet from flooding with nuclear waste: shoot it into space!

Play in browser: https://ximossi.itch.io/waste-no-space

Shoot some nuclear waste into space - try not to drown in it :D

https://ximossi.itch.io/waste-no-space

Heja! This was my first game jam and also my first published game so far. Doing that in two days leaves me with a proud feeling - not of the game itself, but of managing to produce something in such a short time. I started coding just a few months ago and did not think it possible to get into it so quickly. And I bet this is true for a few people around here.

So, my question is: what did you learn from this?

Here are a few of my thoughts right now, while going through my (Godot) project files:

• Controls are about feeling. I have spent a lot of time tweaking little numbers on my control mechanics and it was worth it. My main control is a “pull” movement with the mouse that calculates from drag distance and angle. There is a threshold as well as a progressive effect to it. At first I kind of winged the numbers but quickly realized I had fine-tune them. So I put them all in variables, added some slider and a quick debug panel and played the game while adjusting the values during runtime. That was very helpful to actually feel the difference between various values!

• Thinking in Globals: in the beginning I had a lot of variables/data in individual scenes to manage all of it in understandable “chunks”. After a few hours I realized, that I need to access a lot of data in other parts of the game, too. One question I started asking myself was: Is this thing here important to others? If so, I would put it in a global singleton and use that. I do this not only for individual variables, but for whole scenes, too. I’ve got a singleton keeping track of important scenes and giving them shortcuts, so I can always just address those. Need the space gun? -> Global.spacegun! Need the lower HUD bar? Global.buildHUD! This brings me to the next one…

• Separation of interest is not a joke. I mean, the concept is taught in every course, book and video about object-oriented programming - but I now started to understand what it actually means. To think about where a function belongs and what its scope is, was a bit hard in the beginning, when I did not know, what the structure of the game would look like, but it surely paid off! My main game loop is fairly organized through this, because most elements have their own “live” outside of it - while I still can call them from everywhere. This is some esoteric brain tofu but sometimes it feels like my game performs better by doing this clean :D So, as a general rule, I started to begin every new scene/object by thinking about its input and how to get/set that input. Combined with globals this gives every new item a solid beginning.

• Think ahead of inheritance! This I will have to learn better. I started with the Waste Box as the first space object you fling out. I added all the functionality it needed - orbiting, collision, damage calculations, debris spawning, little animation elements and so on. And then I added the next object based on it: the satellite. And realized, I needed to overwrite a lot of functions, because some minor details in behaviour were different. So, I kinda thought about inheritance, but not abstract enough. In this smaller scale this was manageable in the end, but I’d hat to have more objects to handle at the moment.. :)

• Time doesn’t care about your standards. I needed “just a few more minutes” on about every feature in my game. I knew, I had 6 hours to go. I set myself time blocks to work on specific elements. And in the end, I spend the two hours I planned for sound design and music on adding transitions for game start and game end that turned out buggy like a drunk monkey. And to be honest: I think this was a mistake. I should not have traded those two elements. For one, I know that music/sounds is just as important as graphics and heavily supports player experience and every other system in game. All of it. This might be the biggest take away for me: stick to blocks and parts of the game that need to be there first. Polish later. And I think I will start with making some music first next time. I missed having a soundtrack on during development.

• Technology is weird. I mean, every piece of software has its quirks and knowing them is part of learning, I know. Still I’m surprised how messed up everything is. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, as I am sure you have that one or two things that come to mind. My take away here is: Test everything at least once quickly before diving in. I should have tested GPU Particles in web exports with Godot, for example. GPU Particles sounds faster than CPU Particles. It sure is on my machine… Well, now my game freezes for a second when having an explosion for the first time to initialize the particle system. Great :D

I’ll keep breeding on this a bit more. Thank you for your time and I hope you had a sweet weekend!

In case you want to take a look: https://ximossi.itch.io/waste-no-space

I intend to work on it a little bit more to fix some bugs and add a proper sound design. But I like how it turned out - despite the obvious last-minute bugs. In case you got time, feel invited to test it and give feedback. How do the controls feel like? Was it quick to understand? Did it meet yous skill?

This is a cute implementation of this game mechanic. The colors are a bit harsh on my eyes though :)

The shader usage is very appealing but i’m not sure if this is covered with the jam’s rules. Otherwise, this is fairly impressive for just two days :)