Post by WebCough in Sipho DD46 jam comments

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Hey, This was my first time playing Sipho. I tested on Linux.

I always say best part of Spore was the cell stage, and it looks like your game is like that, but much better.

At first I accidentally played the aquarium mode, and I thought that was the whole DD content, which is why I was given all the sandbox options (which I did not use).

I built this thing:

it always felt like the movement was too slow for me.

here are the aquarium stats

All that aquarium was done in one sitting.

I came back to your game the day after because I really got into it and wanted to try out building something different, and I found out there is an actual campaign.

As I was playing I found out there are bosses in the game. I think it's great.

One bug I experienced while fighting one boss was:

and sometimes orbs wouldn't get collected when my mosters mouth was shaped like a half moon, but it's not that important. Other than that, I did not experience/notice other bugs.

As you can see in the image above I was a coward and was just slowly destroying the monster from one side, which took really long time.

With more experience in later runs (I played many runs), I learned to go straight for the head, and using the spikey balls.

I was pleasantly surprised there are different bosses in the game. I really enjoyed figuring out how to defeat them e.g.

I kinda freaked out when I saw the size difference. I thought to myself surely I just dive too early, but I found my way to beat it. Here's a short description how I fought, I am not sure if you intend players to do all that, but that's what worked for me:

I used my superior mobility to outmaneuver the boss, and have him pin me against a rock with one of it's side (his "mouth" was around another rock). I was constantly trying to stay out of its jaws while being pinned, and him locked thanks to aggro. I knew I was not going to win with my 3 spears, and I did not want to use, because that would risk changing our positions. I hit TAB, and edited my moster, making his whole side facing the boss into poison weapon. The boss kept growing weaker, and smaller. When it was too small to have me pinned I switched to frontal poison and I finished the beast!

And that is how I ended up getting to level 6 on that run.

I am not sure if you intend players to edit monsters when they are in combat, but that's what I did, and it was great experience.

As for gaining new parts from slaying bosses, I think it's a good idea. I would like to choose more parts in future.

Great game

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Dominas2 years ago

Heya, thank you for thorough feedback. Knowing your experience and train of thought helps a lot.

The leech bug was fixed, thank you for reporting it
For the boss that you've been chipping away and then learned to kill head-on - have you noticed the buffs that spawn out of holes and have they been useful for defeating it?
The mid-fight editing is somewhat conflicting feature. It was intended from the start - I want to foster creativity and have confidence in game that it can be with this feature as its core. And it's really cool. Although it gives psychological burden of knowing that you can do this tedious mid-fight editing to give yourself an edge most of the times. Once discovered, how do you feel about difficult encounters? I wonder if it could be limited somehow to prevent abuse and free the player from thoughts that they could have used it to dodge an encounter that ended in death. Or maybe reduce its drawbacks - have an undo stack so you can restore your design after abuse (often requested feature) and manage powerups in a way that regrown zooids keep them.

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WebCough2 years ago

>have you noticed the buffs that spawn out of holes and have they been useful for defeating it?

I was mainly using them to heal myself, and not for the actual buffs.

As for the mid fight editing. On one hand I had great experience with it as I already told you, but on another I think jumping to editing at any time could be abused, and most importantly would end up breaking the flow of the game. I only used it twice in combat, but I can imagine some people could e.g. have all mobility parts, get closer to an enemy and switch to all weapons. That would result in some "power gaming strategies", but would mean constant switching between action, and pausing the game to make adjustments.

Here are some of my ideas:

Probably the simplest "solution" would be to give less currency whenever some part is sold. That way it would allow players to change positioning of their already acquired parts, but penalize them for selling and buying different ones.
Another potential solution could be to have all the changes not to be applied instantly. You already have the system for regeneration, so you could make it that player must plan some sort of progression blue print for the next x amount of parts, and would grow based on that blue print whenever more resources are collected.
Another potential solution is to have limited number of edits that can be used in combat. It could either be one combat edit per level, or maybe have combat edits as some sort of collectible power up.
Another idea is to always have two different monster designs that can be changed with one key, but only allow the two designs to have only few changes based on zooids cost. That way players would be able to quickly switch from e.g. attack to running away without breaking the flow. You could have some nice, quick animation for different zooids ungrowing and regrowing.
My last idea is to just have a cap on how many changes you can make per level. So let's say players are only able to edit their monster 3 times per level. They can edit mid battle if they want, but that would mean less out of battle editing for their planned build.

So yeah, that's something to think about. I think coming up with solutions for things like that is one of the best parts of game development. It's creative problem solving.

Let me know what you think about my suggestions. It is probably going to take some time to digest everything, and maybe test some things to see what would work best with your vision. I look forward to your reply.

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