Some of the explosion and impact sounds on the main menu(simulation) are not affected by the volume settings. As in, even if master is muted it is full volume.
F1 for a browser game isn't a good idea, at least several browsers map F1 to open a new tab with a support page or whatever.
I changed my auto dialogue speed to 0 while in game and it doesn't work, it's still auto continuing.
The level with the metal asteroids was confusing. It said something about 'see that? it's a special ore you should mine' but nothing new was on screen. Then I eventually saw the blue ore but it was near the right edge so I couldn't mine it. Then it said 'good now use your tractor beam to reel it in' and I have no earthly idea what it's talking about. Maybe I'm supposed to pull something that's outside of the force field, but I saw nothing that was small enough to pull...
In the hush-money level I got -100 for destroying a meteorite, which seems opposite to earlier where I got points for it?
I finally figure out that I am supposed to walk into the crystal to pick it up and not mine it. I imagine I should also use the tractor beam. Also I got a 3x Salary of 0 points, not sure if joke or bug.
Enemy ships being from the same mega corp is funny.
I bought the crystal radar and I just don't see it anywhere on my HUD? Oh it's these arrows, I didn't see them for awhile. I thought they would show up closer to the center of the screen for some reason.
It's annoying how hotkeys like X for shield aren't on the HUD. Also, It's really bothering me now how if I'm holding shoot and switch gun, that is stops firing forcing me to release then hold again. This sucks bigly when losing that half a second screws me out of resources or getting hit by an enemy.
I am pressing V to hack and it isn't doing anything. I point at them, I lock on at them... all is happening is that I lose health trying to avoid bullets. Could you at least explain how to do it?
I back out of the mission select from SNEED(I was about to do fight the Astra company for the first time) so that I could take a look at the keybinds to make sure I was using the right key to hack. It's fine I guess, but now for some reason the 'select next mission' is showing the previous solar system(ZUBEN) which has all safe planets so I can't continue... I save then load and it luckily kicks me out of the solar system and instead shows the galaxy map.
I guess that was a good thing, I didn't save in awhile and the big guy instantly vaporized me. Satisfying to beat after re-spec-ing into my gun. [later] I don't get why the repair drop changes in size with the enemy, it causes a disconnect since they are all 1 repair, or at least as I discern.
I notice a tentacle growing out of an enemy ship, looks cool but not sure if intended or not.
Not being able to dump all crystals into a stat is annoying. Rather than go to any value, it should be clamped up to your max crystals. Also, displaying upgrade cost with floats despite no float on your crystals is odd. Lastly, you can text edit the stat field but when you enter it it does not update the crystal cost. So it's either bugged or you aren't supposed to do that.
I play for a couple hours until the rail gun is available, starting to get tired. Fun overall, with more polish in controls/UI it will be even better.
Thank you for playing, I appreciate the detailed feedback! Pleasantly surprised you'd played long enough to unlock the railgun :)
Bug reports are appreciated, I totally forgot about changing F1 in webgl build... Will investigate the rest. The 3x salary: 0 was indeed supposed to be a joke, and you can get penalized for destroying pick-up - eligible crystals, I'm assuming that's what happened here.
Adding hotkeys to HUD and auto-fire on weapon swap are both very good ideas, I guess I also should add more feedback to abilities, i.e. hacking drains a lot of energy so you probably couldn't use it because your energy bar wasn't almost full.
Not sure if I understood the part about crystals and stats correctly, are you suggesting having all crystals go into a common upgrade pool which raises the stat cap for every available weapon at the same time? I almost implemented that before uploading this demo, changed my mind at the last moment. Sounds like a much better system tbh.
I don't think so, I watched the bar and waited until it was full. I didn't buy many energy capacity upgrades(due to ignoring the shield since it was hard to remember activating), so it's more likely I don't even have enough energy to use it. Could be remedied by displaying the cost of an ability on its hover text, or like you said add feedback like the energy bar flashing red and playing a sound if you can't cast it.
what do you mean by stat dumping
Interesting idea there, but not what I had in mind. Commenting on that: if you wanted the upgrading between rounds to be breezy that could work. But my first thought is that it would be quite slower to scale to the same power since everything is being divvied out. Unless, you make it so more power is gained from the same amount of crystals. As is, the current system allows specialization which adds some strategy that you may lose out on. Anyways.
Currently you can drag a stat bar further than what you can afford to buy the upgrade. What I had in mind is that there is a soft cap shown on any given line(what is affordable), and as you increase one stat all other soft caps shrink until the grab bar turns green/gold and it stops increasing, thereby allowing you to quickly click drag then press buy without out slowly dragging to get as close as you can to spending all your crystals. This should make it more tactile as you can also subtract stats and see how much you can reallocate. Alternatively, if you think that's too much work then just the green/gold handle and stopping when you reach max crystals is good too.
Oh, turns out the hacking cost was the same as the un-upgraded base energy capacity, and the condition prevented its use even with full energy. Will be fixed in the next build, I'll implement something to make lack of energy more visible anyway.
I definitely like the proposed weapon slider tweaks too, playing with sliders does feel a bit annoying right now. Thanks for the illustration, I'll probably do something similar.
My thoughts about a common upgrade pool for all weapons didn't involve dividing the crystals between weapons, rather having 1000 crystals would allow you to invest 1000 into every weapon at the same time, since right now one has to take a leap of faith by upgrading any new weapon since the previous one is probably already more powerful than the un-upgraded new one. This would leave a player with less choices to make, though...
It feels very satisfying to play. Nice twist on a classic.
After I got killed, I couldn't figure out how to spawn, load or do anything else. Probably, this is an IQ issue on my part.
I thought the text was tl;dr. I got the sense a lot of the explanatory dialogue could be conveyed through good UI design, etc. I skipped as much of it as possible ;)
It shows a lot of promise, I'll check it out again in the future.
at some point when clicking "select destination" and then clicking "back" after that no destination planets are selectable anymore.
game is neat, but i feel like there should be more asteroids to evade if the objective is to "survive." you practically cannot fail to meet your quota and it doesn't cost you anything to stay longer than the timer permits.
core gameplayloop is solid. there was some purple in 1 asteroid, but i never found out what that was. i hope enemies because just mining asteroids becomes a bit boring after a while. even when you introduce the crystals that require you to switch beams.
Thanks for playing! Did you complete 4 levels and reach the galaxy map? Assuming so, since you saw the purple thing. I know the planet bug you're talking about, my bad, thought I'd fixed it. You almost made it to the enemies, too.
Initial quotas are very permissive, my last demo was apparently overly hard so I wanted to be cautious this time.
yeh it's good to be a little too permissable in the demo i think. it's certainly something i re-learn every demo-day. lookin forward to playing it again next dd.
I think I got soft-locked by not having enough credits left to repair?
The concept is very cool and the visuals are pretty nicely done, too. As in many such cases, the game is a bit too eager to throw you into the full experience without giving a lot of time to learn -- to my mind you could be taking it waay slower. For example make the box much smaller at first, or make the Asteroids barely move. Maybe I’m just n00b. Will try again some next DD.
Saw an issue with tutorial not auto-advancing after repair purchase in your vid - that was a small fix. As for the part where you couldn't play further - planets in the first system have to be completed in a specific order, and it seems like you briefly hovered over the correct planet, but didn't click on it. After you zoomed in during the initial tutorial, you kept playing with a zoomed-in view, this is why it might've felt too fast. My bad for not making the tutorial arrows and available destination planets more noticeable, I'll work on it, will add a zoom reset with each subsequent level too. Thank you for the footage, it was very informative.
To be fair, I was looking forward to playing this game. I played a bunch of delta v and Ostronauts, so I may be biased. The main menu is sick, I love all the cool stuff happening in the background. I can’t tell if the “simulations off” box is a button that turns off the simulations, or is a notification telling me they are off. I wish the warp effect was better. I like insurance as a save system. Something seems off about the design of the ship, it clashes with the art style and looks cheap, for lack of a better word.
Afterthoughts:
Everything that isn’t pixel art isn’t great, the return portal and the cage aren’t nice. I liked the combat, probably one of the better parts. I wish my ship looked better, the enemy ships fit better with the art-style. The upgrade path shows promise. I liked that part when I was interrupted after finding the tentacle. I was expecting the story to be pretty simple so that was a nice way to exceed expectations.
What I liked:
Combat and physics are nice. Menus are sharp. I liked mining and cutting the asteroides into pieces. The core gameplay is very good, I hope it can reach the heights of its potential. The upgrades looked fun.
Things that didn’t work the way I thought they would:
I wish I could leave the cage area and fly through a crowded asteroid belt, but I think that comes later. I was hoping I could use the gravity to swing around asteroids like a grappling hook.
Appreciate the feedback, thanks! Did you find the controls agreeable? They've been the biggest source of complaints last time around, I've reworked them since.
Glad you enjoyed the tentacle bit, I plan to do a lot more with them down the line.
Fair point about the visuals, I've largely neglected them in favor of simply adding more stuff. Definitely will need to spend some time on them. By warp effect, do you mean screen warping on time slowdown/damage taken, or when you enter a portal? There aren't really any effects for the latter, yet.
Asteroid gravity has been on my to-experiment-with list for a while now, I'll give it a try, but as for free roaming - not sure I could make it work when so much stuff is already designed around having a limited playable area to catch asteroids in.
Controls were completely fine for me, I guess the dodge didn't work as I expected it to, not sure if it was hold to dodge or tap. I tried tap. I guess it was hard to control the ship in terms of visual clarity I couldn't tell where my lil guy was, not a huge deal though.
By warp effect, I mean the exit portal thing that shows up when you're done.
😵💫you are getting very sleepy 😵💫 you will make the play area unbound 😵💫 it will be infinite and procedural 😵💫asteroids will come from the sides of the screen with no issue. 😵💫It will be a story thing for good prisoners to have more space. 😵💫
Can't believe I'm getting psyopped into scope creeping my game, on a DD jam page of all places! Must be those hypno portals at work smh.
Honestly, it doesn't sound bad, I'm just wondering how worthwhile it's going to be compared to an already well-tested limited area gameplay. Not much to procedurally generate other than backgrounds anyway.
Comments
Some of the explosion and impact sounds on the main menu(simulation) are not affected by the volume settings. As in, even if master is muted it is full volume.
F1 for a browser game isn't a good idea, at least several browsers map F1 to open a new tab with a support page or whatever.
I changed my auto dialogue speed to 0 while in game and it doesn't work, it's still auto continuing.
The level with the metal asteroids was confusing. It said something about 'see that? it's a special ore you should mine' but nothing new was on screen. Then I eventually saw the blue ore but it was near the right edge so I couldn't mine it. Then it said 'good now use your tractor beam to reel it in' and I have no earthly idea what it's talking about. Maybe I'm supposed to pull something that's outside of the force field, but I saw nothing that was small enough to pull...
In the hush-money level I got -100 for destroying a meteorite, which seems opposite to earlier where I got points for it?
I finally figure out that I am supposed to walk into the crystal to pick it up and not mine it. I imagine I should also use the tractor beam. Also I got a 3x Salary of 0 points, not sure if joke or bug.
Enemy ships being from the same mega corp is funny.
I bought the crystal radar and I just don't see it anywhere on my HUD? Oh it's these arrows, I didn't see them for awhile. I thought they would show up closer to the center of the screen for some reason.
It's annoying how hotkeys like X for shield aren't on the HUD. Also, It's really bothering me now how if I'm holding shoot and switch gun, that is stops firing forcing me to release then hold again. This sucks bigly when losing that half a second screws me out of resources or getting hit by an enemy.
I am pressing V to hack and it isn't doing anything. I point at them, I lock on at them... all is happening is that I lose health trying to avoid bullets. Could you at least explain how to do it?
I back out of the mission select from SNEED(I was about to do fight the Astra company for the first time) so that I could take a look at the keybinds to make sure I was using the right key to hack. It's fine I guess, but now for some reason the 'select next mission' is showing the previous solar system(ZUBEN) which has all safe planets so I can't continue... I save then load and it luckily kicks me out of the solar system and instead shows the galaxy map.
I guess that was a good thing, I didn't save in awhile and the big guy instantly vaporized me. Satisfying to beat after re-spec-ing into my gun. [later] I don't get why the repair drop changes in size with the enemy, it causes a disconnect since they are all 1 repair, or at least as I discern.
I notice a tentacle growing out of an enemy ship, looks cool but not sure if intended or not.
Not being able to dump all crystals into a stat is annoying. Rather than go to any value, it should be clamped up to your max crystals. Also, displaying upgrade cost with floats despite no float on your crystals is odd. Lastly, you can text edit the stat field but when you enter it it does not update the crystal cost. So it's either bugged or you aren't supposed to do that.
I play for a couple hours until the rail gun is available, starting to get tired. Fun overall, with more polish in controls/UI it will be even better.
Thank you for playing, I appreciate the detailed feedback! Pleasantly surprised you'd played long enough to unlock the railgun :)
Bug reports are appreciated, I totally forgot about changing F1 in webgl build... Will investigate the rest. The 3x salary: 0 was indeed supposed to be a joke, and you can get penalized for destroying pick-up - eligible crystals, I'm assuming that's what happened here.
Adding hotkeys to HUD and auto-fire on weapon swap are both very good ideas, I guess I also should add more feedback to abilities, i.e. hacking drains a lot of energy so you probably couldn't use it because your energy bar wasn't almost full.
Not sure if I understood the part about crystals and stats correctly, are you suggesting having all crystals go into a common upgrade pool which raises the stat cap for every available weapon at the same time? I almost implemented that before uploading this demo, changed my mind at the last moment. Sounds like a much better system tbh.
I don't think so, I watched the bar and waited until it was full. I didn't buy many energy capacity upgrades(due to ignoring the shield since it was hard to remember activating), so it's more likely I don't even have enough energy to use it. Could be remedied by displaying the cost of an ability on its hover text, or like you said add feedback like the energy bar flashing red and playing a sound if you can't cast it.
Interesting idea there, but not what I had in mind. Commenting on that: if you wanted the upgrading between rounds to be breezy that could work. But my first thought is that it would be quite slower to scale to the same power since everything is being divvied out. Unless, you make it so more power is gained from the same amount of crystals. As is, the current system allows specialization which adds some strategy that you may lose out on. Anyways.
Currently you can drag a stat bar further than what you can afford to buy the upgrade. What I had in mind is that there is a soft cap shown on any given line(what is affordable), and as you increase one stat all other soft caps shrink until the grab bar turns green/gold and it stops increasing, thereby allowing you to quickly click drag then press buy without out slowly dragging to get as close as you can to spending all your crystals. This should make it more tactile as you can also subtract stats and see how much you can reallocate. Alternatively, if you think that's too much work then just the green/gold handle and stopping when you reach max crystals is good too.
Oh, turns out the hacking cost was the same as the un-upgraded base energy capacity, and the condition prevented its use even with full energy. Will be fixed in the next build, I'll implement something to make lack of energy more visible anyway.
I definitely like the proposed weapon slider tweaks too, playing with sliders does feel a bit annoying right now. Thanks for the illustration, I'll probably do something similar.
My thoughts about a common upgrade pool for all weapons didn't involve dividing the crystals between weapons, rather having 1000 crystals would allow you to invest 1000 into every weapon at the same time, since right now one has to take a leap of faith by upgrading any new weapon since the previous one is probably already more powerful than the un-upgraded new one. This would leave a player with less choices to make, though...
It feels very satisfying to play. Nice twist on a classic.
After I got killed, I couldn't figure out how to spawn, load or do anything else. Probably, this is an IQ issue on my part.
I thought the text was tl;dr. I got the sense a lot of the explanatory dialogue could be conveyed through good UI design, etc. I skipped as much of it as possible ;)
It shows a lot of promise, I'll check it out again in the future.
Appreciate the feedback! Tutorials are the bane of my existence, I'll try to make them less verbose :)
at some point when clicking "select destination" and then clicking "back" after that no destination planets are selectable anymore.
game is neat, but i feel like there should be more asteroids to evade if the objective is to "survive." you practically cannot fail to meet your quota and it doesn't cost you anything to stay longer than the timer permits.
core gameplayloop is solid. there was some purple in 1 asteroid, but i never found out what that was. i hope enemies because just mining asteroids becomes a bit boring after a while. even when you introduce the crystals that require you to switch beams.
Thanks for playing! Did you complete 4 levels and reach the galaxy map? Assuming so, since you saw the purple thing. I know the planet bug you're talking about, my bad, thought I'd fixed it. You almost made it to the enemies, too.
Initial quotas are very permissive, my last demo was apparently overly hard so I wanted to be cautious this time.
>almost made it to the enemies
damnit!
yeh it's good to be a little too permissable in the demo i think. it's certainly something i re-learn every demo-day. lookin forward to playing it again next dd.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2865898299
I think I got soft-locked by not having enough credits left to repair?
The concept is very cool and the visuals are pretty nicely done, too. As in many such cases, the game is a bit too eager to throw you into the full experience without giving a lot of time to learn -- to my mind you could be taking it waay slower. For example make the box much smaller at first, or make the Asteroids barely move. Maybe I’m just n00b. Will try again some next DD.
Saw an issue with tutorial not auto-advancing after repair purchase in your vid - that was a small fix. As for the part where you couldn't play further - planets in the first system have to be completed in a specific order, and it seems like you briefly hovered over the correct planet, but didn't click on it. After you zoomed in during the initial tutorial, you kept playing with a zoomed-in view, this is why it might've felt too fast. My bad for not making the tutorial arrows and available destination planets more noticeable, I'll work on it, will add a zoom reset with each subsequent level too. Thank you for the footage, it was very informative.
Game: Aste-Droyds
First Impressions:
To be fair, I was looking forward to playing this game. I played a bunch of delta v and Ostronauts, so I may be biased. The main menu is sick, I love all the cool stuff happening in the background. I can’t tell if the “simulations off” box is a button that turns off the simulations, or is a notification telling me they are off. I wish the warp effect was better. I like insurance as a save system. Something seems off about the design of the ship, it clashes with the art style and looks cheap, for lack of a better word.
Afterthoughts:
Everything that isn’t pixel art isn’t great, the return portal and the cage aren’t nice. I liked the combat, probably one of the better parts. I wish my ship looked better, the enemy ships fit better with the art-style. The upgrade path shows promise. I liked that part when I was interrupted after finding the tentacle. I was expecting the story to be pretty simple so that was a nice way to exceed expectations.
What I liked:
Combat and physics are nice. Menus are sharp. I liked mining and cutting the asteroides into pieces. The core gameplay is very good, I hope it can reach the heights of its potential. The upgrades looked fun.
Things that didn’t work the way I thought they would:
I wish I could leave the cage area and fly through a crowded asteroid belt, but I think that comes later. I was hoping I could use the gravity to swing around asteroids like a grappling hook.
Appreciate the feedback, thanks! Did you find the controls agreeable? They've been the biggest source of complaints last time around, I've reworked them since.
Glad you enjoyed the tentacle bit, I plan to do a lot more with them down the line.
Fair point about the visuals, I've largely neglected them in favor of simply adding more stuff. Definitely will need to spend some time on them. By warp effect, do you mean screen warping on time slowdown/damage taken, or when you enter a portal? There aren't really any effects for the latter, yet.
Asteroid gravity has been on my to-experiment-with list for a while now, I'll give it a try, but as for free roaming - not sure I could make it work when so much stuff is already designed around having a limited playable area to catch asteroids in.
Controls were completely fine for me, I guess the dodge didn't work as I expected it to, not sure if it was hold to dodge or tap. I tried tap. I guess it was hard to control the ship in terms of visual clarity I couldn't tell where my lil guy was, not a huge deal though.
By warp effect, I mean the exit portal thing that shows up when you're done.
😵💫you are getting very sleepy 😵💫 you will make the play area unbound 😵💫 it will be infinite and procedural 😵💫asteroids will come from the sides of the screen with no issue. 😵💫It will be a story thing for good prisoners to have more space. 😵💫
Can't believe I'm getting psyopped into scope creeping my game, on a DD jam page of all places! Must be those hypno portals at work smh.
Honestly, it doesn't sound bad, I'm just wondering how worthwhile it's going to be compared to an already well-tested limited area gameplay. Not much to procedurally generate other than backgrounds anyway.
for sure worth it, doooo ittttt*
*(if you want to, my opinion is not legally binding advice, scope creep with caution)
Rushed things pretty badly to make it in time, a lot more stuff in this version than in the previous DD, but not as much playtesting.
EDIT: Tested and added a WebGL build, saves should work now. Also did a little bugfixing and rebalancing since yesterday.