itch.io

I gotta say, I didn't expect lvl 4 damage to oneshot me when I have +375 HP and -75 damage :-(

I feel like in the end, the insight trick is the only way to beat the game, and it makes me a little sad- I wish other strategies were viable.

It might be interesting if it involved the need for some sort of automation, even if just writing scripts/functions - as it is, your role as a player is just to smash the keyboard while the thing happens, no real agency. I'm sorry, but it's boring, as good as the audiovisuals and concept are.

1375 here B)

Feels a little easy, but really cool aesthetic.

This is unironically one of the best roguelite concepts I've played so far. If you can figure out ways to add more variety later on, you've honestly got a hit on your hands. :3

I think this is a super awesome idea!! Though you'd need to balance it around something other than stalling battles to optimize numerical values of your cards, and particularly avoid the exponentiation of the attack N times for M card.

If it's based on the assumption that the outcome is positive, you should probably guarantee that enough pellets hit to kill the piece.

I've already had a situation where it let me shoot and then I lost, and this sucked.

1. Volume slider, please t.t
2. The tooltips about what an ability does only show up sometimes and for a moment.
3. Getting more gold in later stages eventually leaves you with far too much to spend.
4. Stacking armor seems both really boring(it just normal attacks) and insanely powerful - you become invulnerable and one double next+heal is all it takes to stay topped up until very late stages(I stopped upgrading around 27, got to at least 50 without my health ever dipping below 70% HP. I was actually unable to die and end the run)
5. Stat upgrades being so cheap and infinitely stackable might be overpowered. Might because I have no clue what it actually does. What if they were instead per-stage and based on your monster type, so as to guide ability choice?
6. More modifier abilities would be fun - multiple target, lifesteal(based on distance to reward melee more than ranged), two next abilities at once with -35/30/25% damage and 2t cooldown, etc.
7. Being able to remove abilities for a price would be really great, at some point you don't want the same stuff you originally wanted anymore.

Well, the inflow of credits is relatively constant, you could tune it relatively easily, or add sinks. E.g. have repairing consume credits without a "repair all" card, and more limited or niche repair/upgrade cards

After that, to limit frustration, perhaps you could switch turrets over to consuming ammo rather than passively decaying, with some kinda faux system, like... say, each next shot within a wave uses less ammo, so that turrets are unlikely to run out within one wave, and almost guaranteed to run out in a few of shooting at all.

For interactivity, I think it'd be cool if turrets were on turret slots, with the ability to replace individual ones using cards - maybe even add new slots, or give tiles abilities like "pay 1 to switch lane direction", "pay 2 to erect a destructible blockade", that you can add/replace with one-time cards, so you develop your tiles over time(ones that go to stack wouldn't regenerate their turrets, here, I think)

Could also be cool to have a bigger map, since currently horizontal tiles don't have much of an use.

This is nice, but sadly poorly balanced. A lot of the tiles aren't very useful, and the optimal strat is extremely static and ridiculously powerful.

Namely, you want to build a network where hostile packets go through as many turrets as possible, and then use STK.TRASH to get rid of everything except: 1x RSTR.BKP, 2x UPGRD.DEF, 1x STK.TRASH (since you can't get rid of it)

This way, you are guaranteed to be able to restore all turrets from backup every turn, as well as upgrade 4 times per turn on which you do not use RSTR.BKP, or an average of 3 if you do, which with turrets decaying over 3 turns, means you can keep 4-5 tiles upgraded at ALL times - and if they're tiles with 4 turrets on them - nice.

There also seems to be three bugs that I can tell: Lategame(wave 70+), only virus packets spawn, they seem to spawn mostly on the left(unless it spawns more in lanes with more turrets?), and turrets on the rightmost edge of the map do not get repaired by RSTR.BKP.

Ex. typical lategame wave(all in leftmost lane were killed, there is never any in rightmost):

Hey, I ended up being super disorganized and other mental state stuff, so I never worked a whole lot of it, although in the time I did, I did this:

It's kinda horribly messy, but eh :P

I was also thinking of adding a Damage- property, and renaming Damage to Strong/Weak, the current Strong/Weak to Durable/Brittle, keeping Armor/Vulnerable, Reflect, Heal.

Also changing bone generation, so that "Adjacent", "All", etc. qualifiers count as more value, perhaps adding a "left/right side" qualifier, vulnerable/armor applying to the same bone get conflated, and for bones to be more likely to have fewer stronger rather than a ton of weak effects.

Anyway, it never particularly got anywhere, but I wanted to share the thoughts anyway.

Thanks!! So far at least seems to work dandy. Would you mind if I were to contribute/modify the game just a tiny bit?

EDIT: Whoopedoo, I completed a run :D I was really worried about how strong Death might be, so I swapped some bones out and had to do two attacks instead of one but I did it ;)

So, um... I hate to say this, but I just downloaded and launched the latest build, and... the inventory doesn't render(hovering works, though), your ragdoll doesn't update(even when losing or replacing parts), and the attack list doesn't match - it says Reaching Chop, but it's always grayed out, hovering says it's actually leg sweep(and it in fact is), and all my bones are shown as only e.g. "'s femur" on the ragdoll(correctly when dropped).

Seems as if you have borked a few things ^^`

Aahhh, that's really neat :D Might link the game to a few friends!

Thanks man, looking forward to the next cause of a crash ahahaha.

This time I had Body Slam(attack torso using torso, 3 damage) with +2 damage on chest and +2 armor on it too, as well as +2 damage on my hand, so I was kinda unstoppable.

Ahh, yeah. I updated now, but.. alas..

Bah :-(

The game crashed for me on such a fun/good run :-(

I have in fact skimmed through the encyclopedia, and read the dialogue. I've completed several quests, but fact remains that games are games because they are built upon gameplay. They can center around a story, sure, but you do need at least barebones mechanics to draw the players in.

If there's no player choice/agency involved, the dialogue and quests really aren't much more than padding. Perhaps if they told a story, but they're really not up to that level.

Also, that 3-4h of gameplay becomes 20m of gameplay if you use a speedhack to skip the walking, since that's what most of the game consists of.

Sorry for kind of being a really critical asshole, btw. But the art is really good, and your setting while perhaps not fascinating, is unusual, and it would be a shame to see nothing come out of your hard work.

Not to mention the walking is done across atrocious distances, wasting quite a lot of time.

Sure, the game is pretty, but some gameplay would be nice. I don't understand the goal of this project.

The leveling up turns this from a pretense of any skill being involved into something really meh.

Fullscreen did not work for me either, the mouse cursor is limited to a smaller part of the screen, and the issue is otherwise similar:

I have the same issue as Elreyboro, the game is unplayable as the displayed mouse cursor does not match up with where the click happens.

Hello, I'm a person who plays tons of games with something of an interest in game design. I recently played this game, and found it really nice, which is why I thought I'd drop by and leave some feedback.

I know it is a very high volume of things, and that I am an extremely critical and nitpicky person, who can often come across negative, so I would just like to note that I like the game, and I think it has good potential. For an early version of an ambitious(open-ended-ish) project, it has great amounts of charm.

• E-spamming - I feel like the game gets too clickergame-y, with focus on quantity over quality, of what you do and how. Replanting and harvesting, or especially chicken farming, involve far too much E-mashing, and at times progressing feels like progressing your carpal tunnel syndrome.
  
  • One suggestion would using lower-tier resources as foundation to make sure you can get, or produce, higher-level ones. One possibility would be refinement, e.g. wood->planks, scrap metal->refined metal, stone->stone blocks, so as to cap the amount of low-level resources you need.
    
    • For that matter, delinearizing progression as much as possible would be great, too.
  • For chickens, and animals overall, what if their birth rates were to depend on proximity to other creatures, so as to enable them to automatically get born, but taper off if they're in too small a space, or too infrequently close to each other?
• Trading - this ties into my previous point, IMO,  a simple supply-demand system so you reach a cap on how much of a resource it is worth to produce/sell would do a lot for the game.

• Performance - the framerate seems to be alright, but the game appears to still slow down when you dip below, what, 200? That's really unacceptable, and unless you need deterministic simulation(e.g. planned multiplayer), using framerate-independent code would be vastly better - and even if you want it deterministic, you should run the sim at a fixed framerate independent of rendering.
  • One thing that is a common cause of poor 2D game framerates that get worse with objectcounts is not batching your sprites to be rendered in one drawcall rather than individually, or not splitting your large maps into chunks of which you only render 1-4 currently onscreen. Simple quadtree partitioning works well for this. Drawcall counts hurt more than overdraw, and texture switches hurt even more(compile your sprites into atlases if you don't already!).
• Furniture - I think that it should occupy tiles, rather than any spot, as that feels more... "coherent" with the game's tile-based world, and fitting furniture(especially barrels/crates) into tight space feels so messy. It has some flavor for premade structures, but otherwise leaves a bad taste in my mouth
  • Storage - In fact, IMO storage should individually matter more, perhaps eventually even specialized. Spamming tons of crates is distasteful to me
• Items - I think that "list of resources" type of inventory tends to contribute negatively to how the player perceives them, e.g. as numbers rather than individual items they've obtained. I think that a more inventory-like UI, as well as manually storing(or even one-click dropping off into storage) resources would reinforce the sense of these items being "physical"(inside the game's world) items that the player handles.
  • It would also be more future-proof, for if/when you want to introduce more different items, or perhaps material subtypes(say iron vs steel vs plasteel)
• NPC - I think that it would be nice if they were a little like RimWorld NPCs, with some traits, though for the immediate time, I think they should feel like less of a resource, and more of a part of the colony. Instead of "press E to recruit", give them a simple interaction menu, perhaps add some rudimentary(for starters) ways to control them, like "guard post", "patrol waypoint", eventually stuff like "farmer's shed". And def give them names.
  
  • I also feel like it would be nifty if rather than having NPCs spawn, you were to meet them, for starters even just in randomized monuments - perhaps needing multiple visits/chats with them to recruit them, or helping them with some tasks, etc.
    • Eventually they could come with individual skills, that they can offer for a charge either before/without or after recruiting, their monuments coming with tools, and the possibility of you doing trade caravans to peruse those. Of course that's a "far off" topic.
• Fonts -   tiny fonts are very difficult to read, and people with disabilities or certain conditions like heavier autism might be incapable of reading them at all. I think fonts are the one thing where staying true to the lo-fi is the objectively bad choice. The font is already upsized, so just develop a 2x or 3x sized version. It would be of great benefit.
• Weapons - Spear has embarrassingly low range, imo. Whip has a bit too high, but such low damage. Bow is crazy strong, but it's somehow counter-intuitive to aim, with other ranged weapons also. Pistols are fairly low damage, so I think it'd be okay for their projectiles to be faster at least. What if bows required you to hold LMB for a bit, also so enemies would telegraph attacks?
  • I think that overall, ranged weapon ammo should be craftable, rather than free, with arrows/bolts having break chance. It would also be nifty to one day have ammo subtypes.
• Misc Balance - Floors should cost 1 rather than 4 like walls, wells should store a little more water, small batteries likely ought to take 1 electronics,
• Misc - Escape should pause the game, not just show a "do you want to quit" overlay while the game continues, IMO. Ideally eventually the world should be one

I have more thoughts, also, such as about the world, or further thoughts about the first point and resources overall, but I do not want to so to say "cramp your style", because I know that I am a very opinionated person, and tend to overdo imposing my vision on others. However if you would like, I can share more thoughts.

English please?

I agree with your philosophy. My ideal for "random attributes" is the kinds of bonuses TF2 has: Even when they're number-based, they nonetheless distinctly change how the item is used compared to the default ones. Stacking junk for bonus damage or crap like that is bland and boring.

I know that the development of this is over, but still, a few basic thoughts when I was playing it:

 * Try to not stack your guys in the exact same spot, like when exiting the armory, etc.

 * You need some visceral feedback, like little satisfying sounds or effects "confirming"
that you've damaged/killed an enemy, healed/revived an ally, or issued a move command. You have some for resources, but you're also missing some.

 * Watchtowers are kinda useless if they don't extend attack range - you can't even cover full 25% of the main building's side with it,
and you *need* AoE attacks to deal with the big enemy groups, anyway, making watchtowers useless

 * The preplaced huts should block placement of new buildings. In general, I think you would keep things more "organic",
if the huts and the central building weren't "special case" objects, but rather stuff that's possible to build or reposition normally

 * Relying on AoE attacks and spells instead of individual combat, makes your game feel kinda MMO-ish:
Instead of striving against dangerous creatures, feels like your guys are mainly just wiping mobs
with the occassional miniboss after which they need to heal up.

 * You should do some basic formations: Ranged guys stay a bit further behind waypoints, armor ones a bit ahead

 * Let your guys eat food from their backpack first, rather than starve.

 * I agree that some recurring threats are needed, but I don't think spawning the same enemies in the same spot when you pass through it is the right approach.
What if you instead had some props that serve as potential spawnpoints for enemies?

 * I think it's important for things to feel like consequences of other things, rather than something that blatantly happens as a consequence of simple scripts, e.g. resources respawning,
animals eating food in the wild, wandering, idk.

In general I didn't feel like I had a lot of agency in this game, since it was fairly obvious what the best things to do are,
and I didn't really feel like I had the ability to set any
particular goals for myself, or had room to experiment with things.

Yeah, it turned out pretty confusing :P

No worries, good luck with whatever it is that's overloading you!

It'd probably be considerably better if there was an indicator for the amounts of sun/water needed to up the production, or if there were floating point numbers here, rather than only integral amounts of sap being produced.

Why is poison so horrible? Every run I do, I eventually lose to poison :( One peck from a mosquito and your whole snake turns green and you're dead no matter what you do. It's too much.