The story is really nice, however it is a bit difficult to tell what is happening on the log. How many of my people died? How many aliens? How much fuel do I have? So it's difficult to tell if I should fallback or stay there.
That said, the game concept was really cool. With some sound and a more understandable log (with the option to speed up the time because it takes a while to get enough fuel from that), I think this game would really stand out.
You implemented something really cool :D
Viewing post in Commander, we have not much time jam comments
Thanks! There are a bunch of problems, as I see right now.
Log is one of them. Game idea basically started around this simulation of the battle. It was fun looking at the logs in debugger, seeing how battle was going. First 10 times. Then I was sitting drinking tea and wondering how would it be nice to somehow speed up or even "clash - show result, no logs artifact (like jump in time to see the result instantly)".
Lack of time, lack of brain juice because of instense work on the game, aaand I ended up just making log. Without buttons "get this done at once", without screen of stats, without "stop auto-scroll and let me see", without "colors for different names/ranks".
You can see when battle is active there is a huge empty space, which used for storing artifacts for now. There had to be more things (battle stats, fuel marines got, artifacts marines got, morale of the marines). They were actually already implemented, but because it was ~2 hours before end of jam, I was afraid I will break something (spaghetti, spaghetti code everywhere), so just did not attached them to the core of the game.
Most things in the game are invisible for player. They can be discovered only through logs or artifacts (well, result of artifacts in the logs, lol). There are some uncertain mysteries, as well as many references to different sci-fi books/movies/etc
Due to the eh... log nature of the game, only most patient players will discover them. Because sometimes you would have to play more than one time to find all references. Hell, you can finish the game without finding all the artifact types (not much of them, actually).
P.S. At first, log was much, much longer, because in my chase to make battle "full of life" I ended up filling logs with much more variety of different phrases, reactions to phrases and situations. Because I had only one way to present this "life of the battle" to the player, and this way was slow as hell, I ended up cutting maybe 60% of content. Gotta think of way to improve this, if I decide to work on the game further.