itch.io

I got filtered.  I found it pretty hard to stay alive for significant periods of time.  It was pretty cool to spin around and delete enemy fighters, though.

Good stuff, looks great, I had fun.

I'm not sure if it was bug or poor wording but the perk that grants a big multiplier on the first word placed doesn't get applied if you discard tiles before placing a word.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, this is like a clicker, but without the clicking. I'm not sure I get the appeal, but I did like it when I got the weapon power up enough to notably damage the cube before it regenerated half a second later.

I had fun.

• Using AD to turn the turret and mouse to shoot is slightly weird.
• Once, after I started a new game after failing, I found myself in a glitched-out map with a weird background full of invisible resource blocks, and no central dome.  I haven't been able to replicate this.

I enjoyed this, I had fun, but I feel that some of the mechanics might undermine the staying power of that fun.

• Play seems to boil down to picking a selection of items that will allow you to meet the point quota with an optimal selection of stacked cards.
• As there is seemingly no correlation between the specificity/difficulty of a triggering condition and point reward, it is entirely too easy to pick really valuable, easy-to meet evaluators and rack up points with an easy-to-achieve minimal-thinking-needed optimal stack.
• Using broad evaluators as a basis, it is easy to identify what to add/remove/upgrade in your deck.
• Once cards are forcibly added to your deck, there is a risk that you'll get screwed over by digging through your deck too much, or just getting unlucky.  Yeah, risk-reward, but ehh.
• I suppose I wish that I was incentivized to make more impactful decisions during play more frequently.  I enjoy putting together a set of evaluators that will easily exceed the point quota, I just think that it is too easy to have all of the game's important decisions happen on the shop and cardmage screens.

Stuff that I think would be improvements:

• Make the effect descriptors a bit more verbose and/or add tooltips that explain what each keyword means, precisely.
• Maybe tweak your item procgen so that more specific/more difficult to meet conditions give better rewards. Don't have to go full point-buy over it, but it was entirely too easy to assemble a selection of items that rewarded me handsomely for just having the stack be all cards of one suit.

Likes:

• The intro was cool.
• Movement feels great.
• While I frequently felt lost, I always managed to find my way anyway, so good job on the environmental design.

Gripes:

• In regards to the gravity indicator, when you are going straight up a wall, it's hard to see the gravity indicator, as it is now behind the player camera.
• Having the legs leave marks is sort of neat, but it gets silly if the player has been trying an failing  to get up an obstacle the wrong way for a while.
• I managed to get up the obstacle that requires you to do a wheeled jump to get over the wrong way by jumping from the black wall, then jumping again to grab onto the ledge.  I can't do this consistently, and it's not like this would be a game-breaking movement tech anyway, but I did manage to confuse myself into trying and failing at the technique in subsequent runs before I tried doing a wheeled jump to get across instead.

Ran into the same probably-a-bug twice:

In this section of the first mission:

 I go swinging out to navigate to the other side and promptly get shot out of the air.  After I respawn, the mech can't seem to move, turn, or shoot:

Respawning works correctly when I plummet to my death instead.

New this build:

Content/Features:

• Added Raid Missions:  After defeating a Demon lord, you can research and generate a Raid mission to seize a piece of that demon lord's territory, hampering their efforts and clearing the way for a decapitation strike.
• The governing council may now reward you with authorization for research projects, or completed research data.
• Once you have completed the Deployment Forecasting research project, you can change your units deployment positions on the first turn of a battle.
• Once you complete the Contingency Orders research project, you gain access to reserve orders: and extra order that can be used once per mission.
• Implemented four other demon lord boss enemies, each of the five demonic armies present in the demo now have their own demon lord.
• Unit abilities can now be accessed from buttons that appear over the unit when it is selected.  This is in addition to using ability hotkeys and activating abilities from the unit status panel.

Balance changes:

• Each demonic army now has a different force composition, and prefers different kinds of missions.
• Reduced the  initial number of enemies and the initial spawn rate of enemies in missions.  In exchange, the enemy spawn rate will increase each turn.
• Reduced the starting minimum squad size to 4 (down from 6), and the starting maximum squad size down to 6 (from 8).
• You now start the game with some council reputation built up.

Audio/Visual:

• Upgraded all ability special effects.
• Added UI sounds and animations.
• The strategy layer now has music.
• Reworked the unit animation system.
• Aura units will now animate the deployment of their aura effect.

Thanks for playing!

so i kinda liked the game, but having only 3 actions means that more people makes the battles harder, which is very strange. this is especially strange considering that the first 3 available missions require me to take 7 or 8 characters already.

Yeah, it is kind of counter-intuitive that bringing more dudes makes for a harder mission.  Just something I'll need to acclimate players to.  I do think I'll lower the initial minimum and maximum squad sizes though, as a way of reducing difficulty.

 units quite often get stuck with the run animation

I get that bug rarely, but I can never consistently reproduce it.  It'll get fixed when I rework the unit animator.

I'd be happy to if you can tell me how to find it/what to look for.

I like the idea, but it's pretty clunky.

• Dragging units to positions on the battle grid is really buggy.
  • Occasionally, I'll drag an adventurer to a position, then try to drag another one, and then the first on will teleport to that space.  
  • One time, after placing my guys, right after I clicked the button to start the battle, one guy teleported into a space already occupied by another guy.
  • One time, I started a boss fight (fairy boss + goblins), and I could not move my guys around.  I thought that maybe this was an ambush mechanic or something, so I advanced to the battle, but the issue persisted.
• The extremely low camera angle on the adventure map makes it a real pain to go backwards.
• Not knowing what tiles units can attack really detracts from the experience.

Excellent and polished.  Each puzzle concept is introduced and combined well, and I like how you implemented hints.

One thing that sort of threw me off was the introduction of the wall pivot:  The key prompt given was W+W, so I spent a few minutes double tapping forward in the direction of the pit, and only accidentally triggered wall pivot when backing into the wall behind me.  Then I remembered that this was the game with the wall walking and felt silly.

Thanks for playing!

That being said having the full 7 guys on the field at once feels like a bit much; it seems like you can cheese it by just bringing 3-4 guys and moving out of danger each turn - without immovable buildings like into the breach the number of things you have to protect is just limited to your team.

Yeah, I force the player to bring a minimum number of guys on each mission so they can't cheese it, and the units you give orders to have to protect the units that you couldn't give orders to.  I'm still on the lookout for ways to incentivize the player to bring more guys than they have to outside of giving out more exp.

Would be interested to see how the 7 deadly sin theme fits in with the different armies, are you planning on having more unit types between them?

That's the goal.  My priorities are (from will-be-implemented to would-be-nice):

1. Each army gets a unique demon lord.
2. Armies have different spawn weights of various types of enemy.
3. Each army gets a number of units unique to that army.
4. Each army has a distinct visual theme for their units.

Played the newer version, worked on my machine, didn't get very far (skill issue).

Upon startup, saw a bunch of null reference exceptions in the console.  Seemed to work fine though.

The game desperately needs slower onboarding of concepts involved in solving puzzles.  Something like:

1. Here's a cube.  Grab it and place it on the pad.
2. Here's a 1x2 block.  Grab it and place it on the pad.
3. Oh shit, here's a ledge!  Don't go down it until you have what you need.
4. Double shit! Here's a gap! Grab and place a set of blocks to act as a bridge, then carry a block across that bridge and place it on the pad.
5. Here's a big set of blocks that you need to move, but you aren't strong enough.  Figure it out.
6. Etc.

Thank for playing!

Are any of the assets placeholders or do you consider it set?

I'd LIKE to replace almost everything with better assets, but well...

The strategy background buildings are definitely getting replaced at some point, as are the unit weapon props, ability effects, and all of the sound effects.

Thanks for playing!  Seriously, thanks posting that video of you getting brutalized, it is very helpful.

For how specific and unique the units were they seemed very frail and disposable. This may be a skill issue on my part but some of them seemed doomed to death from the start of the map. I feel as though I may have been softlocked due to too many KIA in the missions. A lot of them died before I even used their abilities once, which is a shame because of the whole deal with upgrading them during the base sections.

My takeaway from your playthrough was that you consistently made plays that damaged the enemy over minimizing damage to your units, whether that was from moving your units out of the way, pushing attacking enemies out of position, or killing attacking enemies before they strike.  I may add a section to the tutorial that clues the player into  (what I consider) basic tactics.  Of course, being familiar with what all of the abilities do is also really helpful for giving good orders, and the difficulty curve should probably account for that.

For a menu heavy RPG such as this the UI could be a lot more responsive in terms of the little things. Mouse over and click sounds and animations.

SOON(TM)

It was a pain to have the skill buttons on the bottom left of the screen when the units are in the middle, some kind of popup around the character might've helped to better assess all my choices. It was a pain to have the skill buttons on the bottom left of the screen when the units are in the middle, some kind of popup around the character might've helped to better assess all my choices.

Given that I use the hotkeys nearly exclusively at this point, I agree.  I'll see what I can whip up in the upcoming UI refactor.

The combat screen worked well, but visually hard to parse. I can't tell who is on what team. I'm not sure if there were different types of enemies, as they look the same.

Noted.

Not super deep yet, but I had fun.

Thoughts:

• Not wild about having your energy regeneration tied to a single, irreplaceable unit on your field.
• Speaking of energy, contrary to what I expected from the UI, energy does not reset to 3 after combat, nor is it capped at 3.
• This really isn't much of a deckbattler.  It shares some superficial similarities, but you have no deck, you don't draw cards.  This isn't a bad thing, but gameplay-wise this is really more like anime-girl Automon.

Now if you want suggestions for refining the combat, here are my ideas:

• If you want to keep this more like an autobattler, focus on the current game play loop of constantly refining your team by adding more powerful members and removing the weaker ones while building your whole team's synergy.
• If you want to make this more of a deckbuilder, focus on building a team based on a randomized assortment of units drawn from the deck at the beginning of each combat.  Maybe dead units go back in the deck, and survivors stay on the field.

Really like  the UI aesthetic.  

I found the controls fairly clunky:

• When ordered to move from point a to point b, the tanks will frequently just try to force their way through any obstacles.  This is actually cool when they are able to, but they have a tendency to get stuck on stuff they can't move (like destroyed enemy tanks).  Also, they should be able to roll over bushes instead of pushing them all the way down the street.
• Clicking on a tank to select it didn't always work the first time.  I concur that being able to select tanks by number would be a positive change.
• I kept missing the capability to tell my entire squad to go to a location.  I suppose the game wants to encourage creeping down the street with careful orders (or manual control), but you should still give the player the capability to be reckless until they learn better.

At any rate, I had fun.

Fantastic as always.  I still haven't beaten it, but I always have fun along the way.

New this build:

• Research: Improve your organization's effectiveness by completing research projects in the Laboratory.
• Building construction: Spend resources to construct new facilities to empower your operatives.  Added four new buildings:
  • The Laboratory: Perform research.
    
  • The Temple: Heal your operatives faster.
  • The Workshop: Discover new skills for you operatives to master.
  • The Chamber: Unlock additional skill slots so that your operatives can maintain more skills simultaneously.
• Added campaign events and goals.
  
  

Do you remember which ability they had? 

Thanks for playing!  I appreciate the feedback.

Thanks for playing!

And am I supposed to kill all enemies in one turn for tutorial objectives? Cause when I don't, it's kinda stun-locked, I need to reset mission.

You shouldn't need to reset the entire mission, just the turn.  Though, that you have to reset the turn if you mess up the tutorial objective is a consequence of me half-assing the tutorial system.

Don't get, what Aura Of Force do. Does it buff collisions for units around it?

Mechanically, what aura of force does is puts a status effect on every enemy (and you can see the status effect if you hover the enemy) that causes them to take 1 extra collision damage.

Got this error when trying to create a game:

___________________________________________ 
############################################################################################ 
ERROR in action number 1 
of Async Event: HTTP for object o_lobbyEnjoyer: 
json_parse : expects a string argument 
at gml_Object_o_lobbyEnjoyer_Other_62 
############################################################################################ 
gml_Object_o_lobbyEnjoyer_Other_62 (line -1)

Well, it sure is a survivors-like.  I like the enemy designs.

Pretty fun.  I managed to crash the game at 9.3k combo.  The game was at its most fun when blasting through a densely-populated area.  The least fun was when the ball got into a stable trajectory in which it could bounce infinitely along the same path, and I'd have to halt my momentum to break out.

Stylish visuals, I like it.

• I don't think that the basic trooper enemies should be fast enough to outpace you and catch you from behind, unless you've chosen options that slow you down, or it's much later in the run.
• The options presented on level up feel both too complex, yet too simple at the same time.  Too complex, because each option presents multiple stat changes with various trade-offs, yet too simple because they are only incremental stat changes, nothing really game-changing.

Anyway, good stuff, keep at it.

I'm not sure how much of a shitpost this was, but I had fun.  Did seem too easy to stunlock the enemy by mashing light/medium attack until they fall off the ledge.

I guess this is a tech demo for testing mechanics and displaying weapon effects?

• I like the barrage effect.
• The bombard effect is far too big to be meaningfully aimed.  Took up basically the entire screen.

New stuff this update:

• Prettied up barrier and water tiles.
• Added various kinds of destructible terrain.
• Added multiple new unit abilities focused on various kinds of movement.

Thanks for playing!

That'd be great.  You can find the saves at:

Users\{user}\AppData\LocalLow\Zorch43\Deep Forces\Saves

Thanks for playing!

The base UI could use some improvements: Right clicking on a portrait on the living quarters hides the panel on the bottom left, double clicking does nothing. Maybe you could change it so you open the unit panel with right click and double click to select them for a mission. Also events should appear in a log somewhere.

I absolutely agree.  These are good suggestions. 

There's still that old bug where hovering over an enemy disables your hotkeys.
I had a bug after beating a mission with a dead lord where upon returning to the base I couldn't research anything, recruit anyone, the buttons did nothing and scanning did nothing:

I'll take a look, see if I can't figure out what's going wrong (the second one particularly).

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

What's New:

• Implemented Augment skills - passive abilities that improve the capability of a unit's active abilities.
• Added 4 new defensive abilities.
• Added 7 new offensive abilities.
• Every ability has 2 applicable Augment skills.
• Reworked unit generation rules.
• Nerfed the first boss mission.
• Increased the encounter and learning speeds.

Thanks for playing, and thanks for the feedback!

Into the Breach feels binary, like chess puzzles: Either you solve a round, or you don't. Xcom (and Deep Forces, it seems) is a numbers game: You maximize resource gain vs losses taken, so you can invest into more impressive weaponry, to snowball into even better numbers outcomes in future levels.

Personally I don't see a fundamental difference. ItB also requires you minimize losses and maximize gains so that you can equip more impressive weaponry.  You are right that ItB is much more all-or-nothing, as there is always the looming threat of permadeath game-over.

May be interesting also to keep the ItB combat, but make the levels larger, closer to Xcom.

It's an attractive idea, but I'd like to keep the action to what can fit on a single screen, and I've always been annoyed by the need to have units walk long distances to get to the action.  At best I might add multi-stage, multi-map battles.

Another thing. I noticed that usually the first round was clearly the hardest. Maybe it could be alleviated by making you assign your team members to spots after enemy movement

Interesting idea.  I'll experiment with that.

Encountered one bug, where dragging a unit with 0XP into training got me stuck in the dialogue, unable to choose a skill to learn and also unable to cancel

Thanks for the catch.  I'll look into that.

Thanks for playing!

Yeah, limiting your options is essentially their entire point, and so long as there aren't too many of them at the same time, they should be priority targets, but manageable threats.

Thanks for Playing!  Thanks for the catch.

Notes:

• Cursor is displayed behind UI elements.
• No way to quit/restart if you fail the mission, and no way to restart without quitting.
• (I assume) terrain height is key for positioning and line of sight, and it's just really not clear given terrain shading, and without a line-of-sight indicator outside of debugging tool.
• Mission is pretty difficult.  2 minutes to move ahead of the convoy is not very much when your units are so slow compared to the logistics trucks, even on roads, and when on the roads, you're vulnerable to ambushes from an elevated position.
• I dislike that recon vehicles are completely unarmed.
• Undetected units' particle effects (dust from moving) are still visible outside of detection range.

Thanks for Playing!

No idea what could have caused the errant submerge effect, but I'll keep an eye open.

There really isn't much of an upside to bringing more units to a battle.  Not no upside - each unit that survives the battle gets experience regardless of whether they did anything,  but this is definitely something I'm mulling over.  A couple of options that I'm toying with:

• Disabling enemies - Adding enemies  that disable your units as an instant effect.  Bringing fewer units then means risking that a significant portion of your options for the turn are disabled.  These are getting added regardless, the question is how hard to go with these.
• High Risk/High Reward - Bringing more units is tactically disadvantageous, but strategically rewarding.  Same idea as the mission exp already present.
• Options are Power - Adding powerful abilities  with limited uses. The idea being that units with these abilities are powerful enough to justify expanding the size of the squad, while the limited number of uses means that it's risky to use too many of them in smaller squads.
• Alternating Activation  - A unit that acted last turn can't act this turn (or is otherwise limited in when/how frequently it can act).  Smaller squads become far less flexible, but it's one more thing to keep track of.

I'm not sure how much of this is supposed to be functional, but:

• First issue: the game is windowed, and the window is larger my monitor's screen (1440x900 & 1600x900).  I can still see the entire window by dragging the window across my screens, but it's a pain.
• Why  is the only method to control the character via clicking directional buttons with the mouse?  Really clunky.

What's new:

• Added a scripted tutorial mission that should hopefully ease you into the basics of combat and the strategy layer.
• Added more types of missions with more varied mission objectives, and mechanically implemented rewards.
• Every 30 days, you will meet with your governing council, which will allow you to cash in your favor with them for supplies and new units.
• A boss fight is scheduled for a week before the end of the month.  The council meeting after that should be considered the end of the demo, though you can still play random missions after that if you'd like.
• Maps are now generated with a natural border that units can be pushed against/into.
• Added an options menu.  Sound volume and keybinds can be changed here.
• Enemies have slightly better AI and spawning behavior with respects to splash damage.