Hey everybody,
Thanks for reviewing my game! I figured I'd address a few of the topics I've seen brought up and some things I wanted to share. You might want to brace yourselves for this essay of a post...
Firstly, the explosion radius. I am aware that it could be larger, but whenever I made it larger during testing, it became too powerful and allowed the player to survive for much longer than anyone would want to play this game. I'm no game designer, but I wanted to at least leave a bit of a challenge. There is an area of effect with damage falloff, but I realize now that I did not accurately portray that. Enemies on the edge of this falloff take at least half their health in damage, but without any health bar or visible change, it looks like the enemies are untouched. Given more time, I would have liked to put a white or red flash on each of the enemies that were damaged (since health bars would have gotten cluttered). I also used Unreal Engine's radial damage system so I am not sure if I somehow misused it. Perhaps the damage does not penetrate enemies like I thought it would so any agents behind one that was hit may not have taken damage as intended.
As for the game's size, I know it's big, but I haven't learned how to avoid bloat in Unreal yet. It was a problem on my last game jam as well, but (believe it or not) it was much better this time. I apologize for the long download times and absurd size of the game as it was not my intent but I did not have much of a choice.
If the game ran slow for anyone, then I apologize for that as well. I still need to conduct more research on Unreal to ensure I'm not using any wildly unoptimized features that drastically slow things down (like GameObject.Find in Unity or something similar).
I am also aware that I did not put any effort into the story and that I could have at least put a one line explanation somewhere. My basic idea was that you were attacking this town for some reason or that the town was under attack and you were defending, but I never really fleshed it out and I couldn't think of anything that wasn't cringey/made the player seem like the bad guy so I scrapped the story altogether.
For anyone interested, some of the bigger extra features I had hoped to include given more time were different types of enemies, more intelligent AI that would take cover or run away when low on health, and adding realistic physics to surrounding cars and other objects so the player could shoot them and push them around to increase the chaos.
Thank you again for all your positive comments! This gave me a lot of motivation to keep at it and do even better next time!