Keep up the great work. This concept is certainly unique and incredibly interesting.
I look forward to testing the unlocking system.
Viewing post in v 0.4.4 (persistence) comments
Thank you :) I'd be grateful if you'd share what you think of it.
Note that there are a few things coming, as it is all work-in-progress:
1. I will be adding simplified unlocking, where you don't care about data blocks, data chunks and knowledge points. You just gather KP and they are automatically converted to data blocks. No Data Block Assembler.
2. I will be adding means to organise EXM grid a bit. But that's when more EXMs are in the game.
So after playing only a few hours with my buddy, we really enjoyed the data block assembly. It quickly made sense and became an enjoyable puzzle. It was a compelling system and something we want to delve deeper into.
The unlocks made the EXMs a lot less daunting as well.
I do recognize it is somewhat complicated however. Maybe a tutorial that explains exactly how to make the shapes match up properly would go a long way to make the system clearer.
I expect that without tutorials, only a bunch of people will get into the unlock system. If you know what's going on there, you start having fun (and you realise that sometimes it is better to wait for better pieces to get higher value). Tutorials are coming quite soon. They'll be explaining bits of the game. I also want to introduce a system that suggests tutorials to check out (if you have a few data chunks and haven't tried Data Block Assembly, it will point to that tutorial, if your reactor run out of energy, you'll have a tutorial about that and so on).
Also, I'll be adding filters to Apparatus Grid to make it easier to find EXMs you want to unlock. I'd like the grid to be much much larger.