itch.io

Game has been updated, and a fullscreen mode has been added among other things! Once again thanks for playing, and hopefully even though the gameplay loop is still pretty simplistic at the moment, you'll enjoy the concept

Pushed an update that fixed a lot of the bugs/issues people were running into, along with changing the controls. Again, thanks for hosting the jam!

Neat. Yeah I skim read through stuff so you may have made it super clear and I might have just missed it because of the skimming of the content aspect, not that you didn't explain it well enough, because it definitely was implied with what I was reading.

Hey, no worries! Not everything about the play experience was positive for those who have tried it, and knowing what feels bad about the user experience is how we fix those issues...and issues with UX are big problems that we should have put more focus into addressing prior to features.

Thanks. I've fixed most of the issues that have been brought up, just want to wait until after the jam to release so that it doesn't skew the voting.
The only thing that won't be coming out soon are some of the mechanics pitfalls brought up by Neo, which are going to require more backend stuff to get into a state where it feels really tied together.

Fair points all around. Most of those things were like 90% finished before submitting, we just didn't get the final push to get everything done. Like the UI hooks I made are in use in an internal build now, there are ammo counts, your reticle is clamped, there is a fullscreen option and mouse lock, etc.

As far as game balance and enemy balance goes, you are absolutely correct with your assessment; weapons just aren't fully there, and the AI didn't have enough time to cook, so to speak, and is a very bare bones GOAP implementation that I started to implement a bit too far into the jam. The intent was for Melee to be used as a form of counter to reload timings, but the reload timers were too short for it to feel fun, and the stun mechanics didn't make it in either.

The vision though, was for something similar to Armored Core VI's ACS strain where you could set the mech into a system restart sort of deal that would have allowed melee to really be something that would mechanically make sense, or do something like disrupting the opponents reload timers so that there was an ebb/flow to the combat where you'd get rewarded for taking the risk of being close range. The biggest issue though is that I just wasn't solid enough on the math to use in order to make the AI do a bit better of a job predicting where to shoot in order to actually land hits, which would have been necessary to hone in on the concept of being close being riskier, etc. So there basically would have needed to be 3 or 4 more systems fleshed out in order for things to actually all snap together in a cohesive way.

In short, we sort of let scope creep get in the way of finishing certain systems. I also took too long coding up all the 3d collision stuff because we used an engine that doesn't have 3d colliders, and even though it is billboarded 2d, everything actually uses 3d collisions, raycasts, etc. Either way, even though very critical I appreciate the feedback because nothing you said was wrong by any means.

Didn't read through everything or have the ability to playtest, but everything I am seeing looks super cool.

I also am a massive fan of d100 systems and degrees of success and failure, so I might be a bit biased, and the whole theme seems to be a weird mix of mech's and magic which has a lot of potential to have really interesting world building stuff going on/ and or it is taking inspiration from WH40K and the "magic" is just lost tech.

Either way, I like what you have.

Thanks! Yeah just waiting for voting to end and then going to push a new release that fixes the lack of fullscreen and mouse lock, which are honestly things I should have accounted for early on, that puts things in a truer state.

As far as the hit detection feeling wonky, what aspect in particular? I myself was thinking it had more to do with the perspective itself and not being able to gauge the distance to the enemy very well when I was thinking there were issues, but would be interested if you have a different take on things.

Main reason I ask is because I had to manually write the raycast function used by your main ranged weapon and could have screwed something up somehow....In short all colliders were manually programmed because I wasn't familiar with the existing 3d collision libraries for Gamemaker...so I wrote them myself, and could have really screwed something up between the sphere/ray collision code I wrote that your laser shots use.

Yeah, we have a fix internally for that now, but pushing that to the live version seems like a reeaaaaally gray area as far as whether it is acceptable or not this far into voting/the jam being done.

Would love your feedback once the jam is over though what your thoughts were once you can experience things a little more polished/working for you

That is the plan. We had a lot of ideas on this one that would have been far out of scope for the jam, but wouldn't be out of scope for something like a month later post-mortem update. Hope is that sometime here in the near future something closer to the minimum viable product we all had envisioned from the start is able to be released....also would give time to ensure certain things are set up properly to even do an in browser release rather than requiring a download.

Thanks for the feedback.
Yeah, that is something that honestly I think would be a simple thing to add but fell through the cracks for whatever reason. I would implement it now, but it feels against the spirit of the jam to go and do a bunch of polish now or do anything other than bug fixes at this point...but post jam I definitely intend to at least get things closer to the vision the team had, even if it still doesn't end up as a fully fleshed out game.

Appreciate that others are enjoying the billboarded aesthetic!

Yeah, we busted something in our final push trying to get some stuff tied together and didn't catch those things.

Thanks!

Yeah, there were a couple of things that I believe broke in the final push (things breaking after trying to do another round) and as mentioned elsewhere the UI/UX not being implemented really for weapons/subweapons. Every one of your concerns is totally valid and is something I would like to fix in the near future when I have time, especially the mouse lock (it annoyed me too, but ran out of time)

Lastly. vertical movement exists because originally we wanted to have terrain and buildings you could fly over along with a more proper fps camera setup, but had to pick and choose along the way which art we had time to make/search for and integrate. There also was intended to be more AI patterns that would focus on staying above you, but it didn't make sense to implement without the AI fully cheating and having unlimited vertical boost...which they have, but doesn't feel as unfair because they aren't utilizing it really themselves. If we had buildings and other scenery though, I think that the vertical boost would have made way more sense.

the more you spam spin, the faster your movement vector gets it seemed. Still fun and silly though

Cool concept.

Something I really disliked though was that there seemed to be no reason at all to wallrun or even jump, because shooting required you to aim, and aiming broke your wallrun, and the level design didn't really provide a way for wall riding to be a better dodging tool than just strafing.

Thanks! The cursor itself looked wrong when I was attempting to clamp the distance the cursor would get away from you, so I ended up reverting to it just existing entirely in world space.  There were just a lot of little things that needed to get hooked up that I couldn't find time for, which is why there isn't a proper UI for your weapons/subweapons when you unlock them even though technically the code is all there, just not stitched up.