itch.io

So I revisit this now and then. In some ways this reminds me of an indie twin-stick Utopia 9 (dev Whalegun went ouf of business I believe). 

Lots of us players kept complaining the game was simply too stingy with health potions, medkits etc., and it was just too hard to ever find a way to heal damage. You'd end up spending more time trying to find slivers of healing than enjoy the shooting action in the game.

I feel similar in Beacon. I just repeatedly take heavy damage very early on and have no way to get the health back. Or I run into bug attacks that do devastating DoT, and I've got no way to alleviate it.

And I still just even with the overhead map reguarly into areas where there simply seems no way to progress. Or if it is, the game isn't making it obvious/intuitive enough to know what to do to progress. I don't know if's an issue with the procedural generation, or with my brain. :)

Revisited the game this weekend. I got slightly better at it, and the genome sequencing stuff makes a bit more sense to me now as to how to use it -- hope the full release has a proper tutorial for it. :)

In the 2nd area, once I get to the sort of eastern side of the map, I just can't grasp how to progress further. I over-rolled trying to drop down to some elevated area (don't see any way back to it). Eventually the walkway to the starting area in the east crumbles away, and I don't see a way to return to it. Other blocked areas there require a keycard or detonator to progress, and I don't have either. 

I suspect once the game releases, some smarter player will have a Steam game guide to get through this, but just thought I'd ask now. :) Although i realize with the procedural generation, there may no walkthrough to speak of. 

Sure, this is very fresh compared to a lot of what I play/see in this genre and eager to see how it works out. :)

I guess one question is whether it's OK for us to talk about the game over on Steam (if it was OK I would just share some general thoughts on gameplay, not bug-reporting and the like that belongs on itch for now). If it's best to wait until it's actually available on Steam, then I would of course wait. :)

OK thanks!

A few questions:

-Is there any way to take a screenshot in-game? Does itch.io offer any functionality like that?

-I just can't almost never find a way to heal in Beacon and on most runs once I find the first beacon I'm immediately flambe on the next level (or whatever the next area is called). I'm at a loss how one ever progresses in this. A few scattered things early on my runs offer marginal heals but otherwise nothing.

-Since I almost never find any other weapons (once or twice one has shown up on a run, otherwise, I find nothing), is there a way to improve the basic plasma pistol somehow?

-I never seem to find any DNA strands, so after many runs I have no idea about the mutation stuff. What do you have to do/achieve to actually get any DNA to work with? Or is it not working in this early build? The interface could use some tutorials in that regard imho.

This 'working out the kinks on itch before moving into Steam worked pretty well recently for the German devs of twin-stick Synthetik. I have like 60 hours or so in that. 

The boon and bane of getting onto Steam is there your audience might zoom up a thousand-fold and a small dev team may have its hands full trying to respond to all the feedback at that scale. So if they can get this relatively polished on itch.io before its Steam release (or if they go into a Steam early access period), then that should be for the best.

I like Beacon's ideas enough to get it on itch yesterday (my first ever purchase here). :) I'm not very good at it but appreciate what it's trying to do and the general twin-stick shooter gameplay feels good.