I must say that I am not an RTS player and my brain is weak mode when it comes to these games, but Hypercoven was relatively simple to get into. From my limited time with non-custom maps in Warcraft 3 this seems to be a simpler version of the traditional RTS.
There's a lot of love that's been put into the unit and structure art. I mostly encountered a clashing of more classic retro pixel art style graphics and what I assume were sprites converted from 3D models. I think they look good on their own, but I am not a fan of the mixed visual styles and mixels. If the mixing was based off of whether something was a unit, building, or item I think that would work, but it isn't pleasing to look at (for me, at least). I know the style mixing is intentional and mentioned in the itchio page so I think you should go ahead with your vision and make what you think looks cool regardless. I hope my feelings on the visuals end up being in the minority of those who player your game. Some of the screenshots and videos of the mixed-together visuals DO make me chuckle a bit.
The music was solid. I got a little irked at the menu music since it repeated a lot in the beginning, but then it changed and everything else was fine. All of it seemed fitting for the theme and genre.
I had no issue with any part of the gameplay and encountered zero gameplay-related bugs while playing the game. I'll list some issues I had and critique in the list below:
-Tried to play in browser, but for some reason I couldn't click anything unless I used "TAB" to select it first.
-Not a huge thing, but it seemed like the initial melody of the main menu music repeated for quite sometime before it changed. After that it was fine. Maybe cut the intro repeating melody down a bit?
-When trying to scroll the screen near the limits of the map and the movement conforms to the diagonals of the map limits, the diagonal movement becomes very jittery except when moving top right to bottom left on the bottom right quadrant while holding my cursor at the bottom of the screen. In that same bottom right quadrant, if I hold my cursor to the right side of the screen I get a jittery screen but no movement at all (I would expect the screen to slide diagonally bottom left to top right in this ' / ' kind of motion but I get nothing but horizontal back-and-forth jitter (oh and I can't move the mouse up or down here without first moving it away from the right side of the screen).
-I may have missed it, but it didn't seem like there was a way to adjust game speed once you started the campaign. Would be nice to have this feature (excuse this point if I'm just blind and missed it).
Excited to see where Hypercoven goes in the future. Seems like it's nearly at release date based on its Steam page (Q3 2025). Hope launch goes well
By the way I really like THIS structure's look a lot. I forget what it was called. Haunted something. Has a really nice kind of PSX pre-rendered background feeling to it. It's almost a shame I feel like some of the units/structures need you to zoom in to appreciate them more.
I know the style mixing is intentional and mentioned in the itchio page ... I hope my feelings on the visuals end up being in the minority of those who player your game
Well, it’s intentional because it’s the best I can manage. (All assets are from itch.io, I haven’t made any myself.) Unfortunately it DOES seem to filter about 90% of players so far, but what can you do.
Tried to play in browser, but for some reason I couldn't click anything unless I used "TAB" to select it first.
You mean TAB once to select the canvas element, or TAB before every click? What browser and OS are you using?
Though it’s a lot of fun technologically, the browser version is unfortunately a hassle to keep working to a tolerable degree, let alone as well as native.
I may have missed it, but it didn't seem like there was a way to adjust game speed once you started the campaign. Would be nice to have this feature (excuse this point if I'm just blind and missed it).
You would have to return to the menu; you can freely skip to any mission there. I will probably change it so the player is forced back to the menu after every mission regardless, as that will make it easier to tell the story, too.
I’ll see about the music and the scrolling - which indeed I haven’t been able to get right once, in 3 years.
By the way I really like THIS structure's look a lot.
Funny you say that; the buildings have gotten quite a bit of hate. Generally half the problem with this mix of styles is everyone can find something they absolutely loathe the look of. Good to see it also works the other way around. :D
Played until the third mission. The StarCraft vibes are definitely there but I think it's unfair to call this a StarCraft-like, since the best thing the game has going for it is that it's a non-standard RTS with a unique way of managing your forces. Without that I would have been much less interested in the game at the start, however the execution is where it gets a lot more messy, so even though the game is fresh enough to grab your interest at first that's not enough to compensate for the problems for long. It's an impressively competent game that on a base level has a lot of potential. It doesn't fail in any technical or fundamental way - every single problem comes from minor design decisions and balancing. You clearly know what you're doing on a technical level and would have had a real diamond on your hands if you had found a way to focus the gameplay experience. Since the game is close to release I think it's too late to change things in a major way but it's still valuable to know what was done well and what wasn't.
I'm not going to comment on the artstyle too much. I will admit that for the longest time I didn't pay any attention to the game because the graphics made it look like an unserious project. The assets clash with one another but I will say that I didn't have that much of a problem with it while playing. It's more of a problem when trying to attract new players. It gives the game a unique surreal quality but it creates the impression of a messy game.
Two missions into the game and the game is already as relentless and unforgiving as the late Brood War campaign. The StarCraft campaigns are still fresh in my mind and I don't think that even Omega (last Zerg mission) ever got that brutal with how absolutely inhumanly it treats the player. I would call that more unfair than difficult, because difficulty has some relation to skill. Here it's about replaying the mission enough times to learn and get around the ways in which it steamrolls you, which reminds me more of a challenge run than it does of any RTS campaign I've ever played. I've never played RTS games in multiplayer but I assume that this is what it probably feels like. Zero time to recuperate and think, just beat the opponent as fast as possible before he beats you. That might be fun for elite players, but it's baffling to see it in a single player campaign. A good campaign is typically a sequence of interesting scenarios that have some kind of strategic gimmick that has to be overcome.
It's fine if the game's target audience is limited to top RTS players, but considering that this is an unconventional RTS with its own rules, even the most hardcore players would need some introduction or tutorial to get the the hang of things. If not that then at least the first few missions should be more forgiving to give some breathing room to experiment and figure out how to play without enemies constantly breathing down your neck.
The two weakest aspects of the game are the sound effects and presentation. If we compare this to StarCraft that game would be diminished massively if it didn't have its amazing sound effects and story presentation. The sfx of Hypercoven are not punchy or memorable enough, sometimes there outright aren't any. This isn't just for atmosphere but it's also because in a genre like RTS sfx are one of the ways in which information is communicated to players extremely quickly. There's not even an alert when you're being attacked here. At least have a jingle when a mission is completed, Presentation is very important for user satisfaction, more so than difficulty or anything like that. For story, even a small improvement like displaying the mission briefing in a new window without any distractions and some sound effect would improve the emotional player experience a lot.
The game is ultimately too unfocused. From a technical perspective, amazing work, this is a big accomplishment. From an abstract perspective, it could have been amazing, but that's usually the hardest part .
>Since the game is close to release I think it's too late to change things in a major way but it's still valuable to know what was done well and what wasn't. … Two missions into the game and the game is already as relentless and unforgiving as the late Brood War campaign.
Well, I was running a much different campaign at Next Fest. The first three missions, you could basically not lose, except out of explicit stupidity. But player retention from 1st to 2nd mission was so abysmal, I wanted to try something new now. I can’t really judge if it has been a success (DD player numbers and sentiment being much different), but I guess toning down the difficulty is in order.
>Here it's about replaying the mission enough times to learn and get around the ways in which it steamrolls you, which reminds me more of a challenge run than it does of any RTS campaign I've ever played.
The interesting thing is, I was replaying Sc1 campaign a few years ago, and while I did play a lot of multiplayer back in the day, I actually failed a few of those missions – not even the hard ones – on my first attempts. Because they are in themselves like puzzles; they are not like the Sc2 campaign where basically every mission is a multiplayer match of varying difficulty.
So this puzzle-like quality has kinda been my goal (idk if there is an audience for it, but whatever). Only gotta see if I can make it more approachable, maybe instead of making sure there are 2-3 good strategies, make sure there are 2-3 bad ones and the rest are good.
>The two weakest aspects of the game are the sound effects and presentation.
Yep, the sound effects are incredibly weak, which interestingly most people don’t seem to notice. It’s just grabs from different sound packs, and yeah, unit confirmation sounds and death sounds would go a long way to improve the experience, but those are even harder to find and match.
At least for the presentation I should be able to get some good improvements in, I’ve barely been paying attention to that part so far.
Thanks a lot for your honest feedback, it’s very motivating.
The game looks very weird, but it's pretty impressive. It's rare to see such a mechanically well polished game by one (?) person. Controls seem flawless. I didn't feel any jank typical of indie games. Everything I wanted to do when it comes to managing selection, movement, shortcuts and so on was possible, based on my previous RTS knowledge.
Small issues I encountered: >Menu before starting game does not work correcly with screens above 1080p. I needed to move my cursor to the side to click the buttons. >There was only one thing where the game did not behave as expected: when pressing SHIFT + 1 + 2 I expected the game would select both groups. >Also unit upgrade buildings could use some some description how exactly they're improving the untits.
I'm not a fan of RTS games, so I can't comment on whether the gameplay is good or not, since this is not a game for me. I liked not having to micro-manage the base so I guess it's accommodating to a casual like me in that case.
For not being a fan of RTS, you sure are an expert on how they work. Thanks a lot for the kind words and the footage.
>pressing SHIFT + 1 + 2
The behaviour of "SHIFT + N" is to add the current selection to control group N. I see your idea though and it seems useful, maybe I can add an option or an additional bind for it.
>I liked not having to micro-manage the base so I guess it's accommodating to a casual like me in that case.
There's enormous amount of great work done here, models look good, pathfinding is flawless, UI is well integrated with the game. Buildings don't always seem to fit in thematically but building and spawning works well on mechanical level. In many ways it's fantastic.
Being completely honest though, when RTS itch hits I'd much rather play Warlords battlecry or other well polished title, rather than an indie. Creating what you did is extremely impressive, but in order to pick it over one of the classics I'd need a greater push, intriguing plot, improvement in general RTS mechanics, something special to pull me in.
As for bugs only thing that I noticed was minimap, I was in two places at the same time, was using browser build.
>improvement in general RTS mechanics, something special to pull me in.
Yeah well I am trying to do some new things. Honestly for me the biggest pull is the potential to have some crazy diversity in multiplayer games, including the option to completely randomize what units (Coven) are on the map; but that is hard to convey of course and also not what everyone is interested in.
>As for bugs only thing that I noticed was minimap, I was in two places at the same time, was using browser build.
The map repeats infinitely at the edges (depending on game mode), this is represented by showing two differently coloured frames on the minimap, as every point of the (isometric) map will be present on the (square) minimap twice.
Hey there, thanks for playing the game for so long and the recording.
From what I see, I would say you figured it out quite well. The only problem was, you did not notice the newly available building in mission 2. It would probably have helped you quite a bit, though you basically had the mission in the bag on your second and third attempts regardless.
I don’t know if you missed the mission objective for the new building, or just couldn’t figure it out because the tooltip was mismatched, I will try to improve clarity in both regards.
>felt like a lot of waiting for units to spawn.
Yeah, I understand. Maybe I can come up with some improvement here.
I like sieging and unsieging the big robot. where/when seemed like a nice tactical choice.
loading/dropping with dropship was a good bit of micro requirement.
the "hero" I expected to have like abilities or something. otherwise I just sent everything as a big ball and hoped for the best. Even now I'm not sure what building the building did. It would be more exciting if they produced units or sped up production or something.
Comments
I must say that I am not an RTS player and my brain is weak mode when it comes to these games, but Hypercoven was relatively simple to get into. From my limited time with non-custom maps in Warcraft 3 this seems to be a simpler version of the traditional RTS.
There's a lot of love that's been put into the unit and structure art. I mostly encountered a clashing of more classic retro pixel art style graphics and what I assume were sprites converted from 3D models. I think they look good on their own, but I am not a fan of the mixed visual styles and mixels. If the mixing was based off of whether something was a unit, building, or item I think that would work, but it isn't pleasing to look at (for me, at least). I know the style mixing is intentional and mentioned in the itchio page so I think you should go ahead with your vision and make what you think looks cool regardless. I hope my feelings on the visuals end up being in the minority of those who player your game. Some of the screenshots and videos of the mixed-together visuals DO make me chuckle a bit.
The music was solid. I got a little irked at the menu music since it repeated a lot in the beginning, but then it changed and everything else was fine. All of it seemed fitting for the theme and genre.
I had no issue with any part of the gameplay and encountered zero gameplay-related bugs while playing the game. I'll list some issues I had and critique in the list below:
-Tried to play in browser, but for some reason I couldn't click anything unless I used "TAB" to select it first.
-Not a huge thing, but it seemed like the initial melody of the main menu music repeated for quite sometime before it changed. After that it was fine. Maybe cut the intro repeating melody down a bit?
-When trying to scroll the screen near the limits of the map and the movement conforms to the diagonals of the map limits, the diagonal movement becomes very jittery except when moving top right to bottom left on the bottom right quadrant while holding my cursor at the bottom of the screen. In that same bottom right quadrant, if I hold my cursor to the right side of the screen I get a jittery screen but no movement at all (I would expect the screen to slide diagonally bottom left to top right in this ' / ' kind of motion but I get nothing but horizontal back-and-forth jitter (oh and I can't move the mouse up or down here without first moving it away from the right side of the screen).
-I may have missed it, but it didn't seem like there was a way to adjust game speed once you started the campaign. Would be nice to have this feature (excuse this point if I'm just blind and missed it).
Excited to see where Hypercoven goes in the future. Seems like it's nearly at release date based on its Steam page (Q3 2025). Hope launch goes well
By the way I really like THIS structure's look a lot. I forget what it was called. Haunted something. Has a really nice kind of PSX pre-rendered background feeling to it. It's almost a shame I feel like some of the units/structures need you to zoom in to appreciate them more.
Hey there, thank you for playing!
Well, it’s intentional because it’s the best I can manage. (All assets are from itch.io, I haven’t made any myself.) Unfortunately it DOES seem to filter about 90% of players so far, but what can you do.
You mean TAB once to select the canvas element, or TAB before every click? What browser and OS are you using?
Though it’s a lot of fun technologically, the browser version is unfortunately a hassle to keep working to a tolerable degree, let alone as well as native.
You would have to return to the menu; you can freely skip to any mission there. I will probably change it so the player is forced back to the menu after every mission regardless, as that will make it easier to tell the story, too.
I’ll see about the music and the scrolling - which indeed I haven’t been able to get right once, in 3 years.
Funny you say that; the buildings have gotten quite a bit of hate. Generally half the problem with this mix of styles is everyone can find something they absolutely loathe the look of. Good to see it also works the other way around. :D
>You mean TAB once to select the canvas element, or TAB before every click? What browser and OS are you using?
I tabbed to select the element and then could click on it. I'm using Chrome on Windows 11.
Played until the third mission. The StarCraft vibes are definitely there but I think it's unfair to call this a StarCraft-like, since the best thing the game has going for it is that it's a non-standard RTS with a unique way of managing your forces. Without that I would have been much less interested in the game at the start, however the execution is where it gets a lot more messy, so even though the game is fresh enough to grab your interest at first that's not enough to compensate for the problems for long. It's an impressively competent game that on a base level has a lot of potential. It doesn't fail in any technical or fundamental way - every single problem comes from minor design decisions and balancing. You clearly know what you're doing on a technical level and would have had a real diamond on your hands if you had found a way to focus the gameplay experience. Since the game is close to release I think it's too late to change things in a major way but it's still valuable to know what was done well and what wasn't.
I'm not going to comment on the artstyle too much. I will admit that for the longest time I didn't pay any attention to the game because the graphics made it look like an unserious project. The assets clash with one another but I will say that I didn't have that much of a problem with it while playing. It's more of a problem when trying to attract new players. It gives the game a unique surreal quality but it creates the impression of a messy game.
Two missions into the game and the game is already as relentless and unforgiving as the late Brood War campaign. The StarCraft campaigns are still fresh in my mind and I don't think that even Omega (last Zerg mission) ever got that brutal with how absolutely inhumanly it treats the player. I would call that more unfair than difficult, because difficulty has some relation to skill. Here it's about replaying the mission enough times to learn and get around the ways in which it steamrolls you, which reminds me more of a challenge run than it does of any RTS campaign I've ever played. I've never played RTS games in multiplayer but I assume that this is what it probably feels like. Zero time to recuperate and think, just beat the opponent as fast as possible before he beats you. That might be fun for elite players, but it's baffling to see it in a single player campaign. A good campaign is typically a sequence of interesting scenarios that have some kind of strategic gimmick that has to be overcome.
It's fine if the game's target audience is limited to top RTS players, but considering that this is an unconventional RTS with its own rules, even the most hardcore players would need some introduction or tutorial to get the the hang of things. If not that then at least the first few missions should be more forgiving to give some breathing room to experiment and figure out how to play without enemies constantly breathing down your neck.
The two weakest aspects of the game are the sound effects and presentation. If we compare this to StarCraft that game would be diminished massively if it didn't have its amazing sound effects and story presentation. The sfx of Hypercoven are not punchy or memorable enough, sometimes there outright aren't any. This isn't just for atmosphere but it's also because in a genre like RTS sfx are one of the ways in which information is communicated to players extremely quickly. There's not even an alert when you're being attacked here. At least have a jingle when a mission is completed, Presentation is very important for user satisfaction, more so than difficulty or anything like that. For story, even a small improvement like displaying the mission briefing in a new window without any distractions and some sound effect would improve the emotional player experience a lot.
The game is ultimately too unfocused. From a technical perspective, amazing work, this is a big accomplishment. From an abstract perspective, it could have been amazing, but that's usually the hardest part .
>Since the game is close to release I think it's too late to change things in a major way but it's still valuable to know what was done well and what wasn't. … Two missions into the game and the game is already as relentless and unforgiving as the late Brood War campaign.
Well, I was running a much different campaign at Next Fest. The first three missions, you could basically not lose, except out of explicit stupidity. But player retention from 1st to 2nd mission was so abysmal, I wanted to try something new now. I can’t really judge if it has been a success (DD player numbers and sentiment being much different), but I guess toning down the difficulty is in order.
>Here it's about replaying the mission enough times to learn and get around the ways in which it steamrolls you, which reminds me more of a challenge run than it does of any RTS campaign I've ever played.
The interesting thing is, I was replaying Sc1 campaign a few years ago, and while I did play a lot of multiplayer back in the day, I actually failed a few of those missions – not even the hard ones – on my first attempts. Because they are in themselves like puzzles; they are not like the Sc2 campaign where basically every mission is a multiplayer match of varying difficulty.
So this puzzle-like quality has kinda been my goal (idk if there is an audience for it, but whatever). Only gotta see if I can make it more approachable, maybe instead of making sure there are 2-3 good strategies, make sure there are 2-3 bad ones and the rest are good.
>The two weakest aspects of the game are the sound effects and presentation.
Yep, the sound effects are incredibly weak, which interestingly most people don’t seem to notice. It’s just grabs from different sound packs, and yeah, unit confirmation sounds and death sounds would go a long way to improve the experience, but those are even harder to find and match.
At least for the presentation I should be able to get some good improvements in, I’ve barely been paying attention to that part so far.
Thanks a lot for your honest feedback, it’s very motivating.
The game looks very weird, but it's pretty impressive.
It's rare to see such a mechanically well polished game by one (?) person.
Controls seem flawless. I didn't feel any jank typical of indie games. Everything I wanted to do when it comes to managing selection, movement, shortcuts and so on was possible, based on my previous RTS knowledge.
Small issues I encountered:
>Menu before starting game does not work correcly with screens above 1080p. I needed to move my cursor to the side to click the buttons.
>There was only one thing where the game did not behave as expected: when pressing SHIFT + 1 + 2 I expected the game would select both groups.
>Also unit upgrade buildings could use some some description how exactly they're improving the untits.
I'm not a fan of RTS games, so I can't comment on whether the gameplay is good or not, since this is not a game for me. I liked not having to micro-manage the base so I guess it's accommodating to a casual like me in that case.
For not being a fan of RTS, you sure are an expert on how they work. Thanks a lot for the kind words and the footage.
>pressing SHIFT + 1 + 2
The behaviour of "SHIFT + N" is to add the current selection to control group N. I see your idea though and it seems useful, maybe I can add an option or an additional bind for it.
>I liked not having to micro-manage the base so I guess it's accommodating to a casual like me in that case.
Well, that’s something!
There's enormous amount of great work done here, models look good, pathfinding is flawless, UI is well integrated with the game. Buildings don't always seem to fit in thematically but building and spawning works well on mechanical level. In many ways it's fantastic.
Being completely honest though, when RTS itch hits I'd much rather play Warlords battlecry or other well polished title, rather than an indie. Creating what you did is extremely impressive, but in order to pick it over one of the classics I'd need a greater push, intriguing plot, improvement in general RTS mechanics, something special to pull me in.
As for bugs only thing that I noticed was minimap, I was in two places at the same time, was using browser build.
Ty for the positive words.
>improvement in general RTS mechanics, something special to pull me in.
Yeah well I am trying to do some new things. Honestly for me the biggest pull is the potential to have some crazy diversity in multiplayer games, including the option to completely randomize what units (Coven) are on the map; but that is hard to convey of course and also not what everyone is interested in.
>As for bugs only thing that I noticed was minimap, I was in two places at the same time, was using browser build.
The map repeats infinitely at the edges (depending on game mode), this is represented by showing two differently coloured frames on the minimap, as every point of the (isometric) map will be present on the (square) minimap twice.
Hey there, thanks for playing the game for so long and the recording.
From what I see, I would say you figured it out quite well. The only problem was, you did not notice the newly available building in mission 2. It would probably have helped you quite a bit, though you basically had the mission in the bag on your second and third attempts regardless.
I don’t know if you missed the mission objective for the new building, or just couldn’t figure it out because the tooltip was mismatched, I will try to improve clarity in both regards.
>felt like a lot of waiting for units to spawn.
Yeah, I understand. Maybe I can come up with some improvement here.
Did you find any fun in this otherwise or no?
I like sieging and unsieging the big robot. where/when seemed like a nice tactical choice.
loading/dropping with dropship was a good bit of micro requirement.
the "hero" I expected to have like abilities or something. otherwise I just sent everything as a big ball and hoped for the best. Even now I'm not sure what building the building did. It would be more exciting if they produced units or sped up production or something.
FINAL DEMO BEFORE RELEASE
Demo content is identical with Steam and both versions also connect to the same multiplayer server.