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kurt_c0caine1 year ago

I beat the game, replayed some levels with newly unlocked crew members, most of the times I got killed eventually, but just managed to beat one mission successfully, and I want to make several points:

  • The game lacks visual clarity. Enemies often blend into the background and so do some airships(e.g: black corporate one). And when they explode into gems, it adds a lot of visual noise, it gets hard to tell where the enemies and their bullets are, and afterwards they can be hiding behind the gems lying on the ground.
  • You feel like a bull in a china shop. I understand that this was a deliberate design decision, to show that you're piloting a big-ass airship in a cavern, but without the ability to make finer movements(e.g: holding a key that slows it down) it feels like artificial difficulty. It gets especially annoying when you run out of energy for the shields(cause apparently you can use it to pick up gems, don't remember that being mentioned in the tutorial), so you have to just let them be, cause otherwise you're risking your HP and it's often not worth it.
  • The levels after beating the demo feel kinda like a slog. First it's fun to shoot enemies and pick up gems, but then you run into another room with enemies, then another one... and it stops being fun. I guess this happens because you don't feel like your skills are being tested: enemies and bullets are fairly easy to avoid(as long as you see them), so the main hazard is running into walls, which as I've already addressed, feels like artificial difficulty, so you just hope that the game won't spawn enemies that are hard to see and won't cover them with gems.

I'm being negative, but I kinda liked this game, it seems like it has a lot of potential and the graphics are beautiful, especially the character portraits.

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Lofty1 year ago

I appreciate the detailed feedback!

There is a balance we are still working out with enemy visuals which is especially relevant in the dump tileset.
Most of the enemies use colors already present in the tileset because it makes sense for the enemies that live in the dirt to be the same color as the dirt, so we are relying heavily on the motion of the enemies to make their presence obvious. Certain enemies like the cats rely on their coloration to blend in before pouncing, which puts some pressure on the player to keep alert.

Some ships are definitely larger than others, but we've tried to make sure that all areas are navigable for all ships. There are a few spots with especially-tight squeezes that will probably be getting minor updates in the coming weeks.

Different tilesets have different ways that they express the shapes of their terrain, and the tight, claustrophobic feel for the dump is definitely intended. As more tilesets move toward completion hopefully some of that feeling of being compressed too tightly will be alleviated \o/

Enemy health scales with mission difficulty, which can make longer caves feel like the slog you mentioned without backup firepower. The gunbuddy powerup adds an autonomous drone to provide support during missions and you can have up to five of those at a time. We're still working on adjusting their drop rates so that they show up often enough to be relevant but not so often that they make the player useless. For a taste of what they feel like though you can punch ACUTEKILLINGMACHINE into the cheats menu a few times.

I'm glad you like the art! Some of it's still kinda' rough but we're constantly iterating.

Thank you for trying out the demo ♥

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kurt_c0caine1 year ago

I understand that from the lore point of view it makes sense that the enemies blend in their surroundings, but from gameplay point of view it just feels like artificial difficulty. Cause I gave the game some more tries today and it's really hard to tell where the enemies and their bullets are, especially when you get a crew that has a big bonus to gems and the whole screen gets covered in them. I dunno, I would probably make enemy bullets a bright color(typical choice: red) and make gems a single color that's different from the color of bullets and bonuses(e.g: blue or green). And give enemies a white outline.

If you think that it's so important that the player is kept alert, maybe you could add crew members who have a passive ability of highlighting them? Or drones dedicated to that? And yes, I gave that cheat code a try, those drones are really useful(even if they tend to get stuck), not only due to their firepower but also the fact that they highlight their targets, which let me detect enemies that I wouldn't have noticed.

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