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Many thanks for your feedback! I will try to make the learning curve a bit less steep in the next update. The current AI is putting so much pressure that there is no room for experiments ... not the best choice for the first level I must admit :)

Many thanks for your feedback. I will add more versatile AI opponents, with different strategies and difficulties, in the next update. And hopefully also a tutorial.

The buggy rush is really hard to stop. I will put another AI as the first level. What helps to defend is: 

• sync up production when you have more than one factory
• sacrifice some hitpoints on buildings. If balanced right, it is possible to tech-up, keep your buildings alive, and defend with one less factory than the opponent has
  

Thanks for your feedback! I will work on a tutorial and improve the singleplayer in the next update. Actually the units have different color (black or white parts), but you are not the first one that complained that they don't. I think it is not noticable enought - I will try to improve that!

It is possible to write reviews before the votings starts ... and then people forget to come back later to give there vote. Maybe that happended to you.

I joined a few jams now. It is always like that: Only a minority of the participants are doing reviews and votes.

No I have not yet put any effort in that. I first would like to have a game that is worth promoting. And I got a lot of feedback here, that will keep me busy for a few weeks ... :)

Thanks for the feedback! I am glad you liked it. Teleporting should not happen, that is probably a performance issue in the web-version. I will add a setting, so that the graphics details can be reduced in the browser version.

The scout just moves quickly around to give vision to the map - currently not very useful I must confess. But that should change in the future.

When the construction facility is destroyed, it cannot be rebuild. In theory it is still possible to win, but very unlikely. Maybe you are right and I should let the match end when it is destroyed.

Many thanks for the valuable feedback and that you took so much time!

Your suggestions are very good, I definitively will keep them in mind. I am planning to tackle the "rush"-problem in the next release. And you are right: The builder-bot ist not working as intended, I will fix that.

A nice game. Feels very smooth, good controls and a nice concept. I saw that other complained that it was to easy, but not for me! I guess I am just not very good at jump-and-runs.

One thing that confused me is the time limit becoming negative...

From the developer point of view I find this interesting.

But from a players point of view it is not that interesting: As a player I do not care about the mathematics, I just run around, collect what I can and expect that everything is "solvable". I do not care how the develper achieved that it is always solvable.

I think you have an interesting alorithm you can build upon. But for the game to be really interesting to play I think you have to add a bit more. What you could try is to add several minigames to make the journey more interesting. Ideas are:

- Replace the signs by NPC that have to be persuaded to provide the information

- Make fights interesting

Thanks for your review. You are totally right. I did not update the AI after I added upgrades and new units. Based on the feedback I got so far I decided to improve the single player experience by creating different AIs that use different strategies.

The tank looks nice and the controls for the camera are fine. What you could improve are the controls for placing plants and stones: Instead of the x,y,z arrows it would be nice if I could move plant with the mouse along the ground surface (adjust the height automatically). For the other props (wood & stone) it could be nice if they could just be dropped and are then placed via a physics simulation using colliders.

I had a bug once where one of the fish was trapped outside of the tank.

Many thanks for your feedback. That are some good ideas. I will definitely do something about the "buggy spam problem" in the next release! Thank you!

This game has a nice concept. I like it.

Tutorial: The tutorial is good. It does a good job to introduce the different mechanics while still offering some gameplay already.

Difficulty: It is way to high! The first level after the tutorial is totally overwhelming. I would suggest that you have a level system with a slow increase of difficulty. Especially I would put much less items, curses, etc. in the first levels.

Graphics: Simple, but nice.

Other: It is not so easy to keep track of the 3 resources (time, energy, and life). I might be helpful to visualize the effect of equipment, consumables & curses on these values. Maybe also show the current effect of a move on these resources, taking into account the effect of all equipments & curses. Or even a "moves left" counter that shows the available moves when nothing changes.

Thanks for your feedback!

"a tutorial is super important"

I guess you are right on that. I avoided it, because it does not seem much fun to implement. I will raise the priority of it ...

"It was really frustrating when I couldnt move my construction bot"

I get your point, but I have no solution yet. Maybe it is a fundamental flaw in my concept that might be difficult to overcome. Adding direct control over units would bring me into the realm of "normal RTS", a world where I cannot compete.

"if I dont immediately and constantly invest in buggies I still feel like I am going to just lose even if that is not the case"

I think that is a similar problem as the point above: A fundamental flaw of the concept. In fact spamming buggies is a bad strategy. It just "feels" strong. The behaviour of the buggies gives enough advantage to the defender, so that defending and expanding/teching can be done. If there where a "metagame" I think no one would rush with buggies. Maybe I could ease out this problem by changing the behaviour of the AI to not only focus on buggies. (Actually I did not update the AI after adding upgrades and new units.)

"multiplayer is really tough to pull off for any indie dev"

That is true. But there is a glimpse of hope: There are multiplayer RTS on Itch that have an active player base. For instance "Tzared Online" or "Little Wargame" always have active players. But they are ranked on Itch even below my game. Which is ridiculous. So those players are clearly not coming from Itch. I think Itch has a good community to get feedback like yours ... but you will not find any players for multiplayer RTS here. So I think it makes sense to get early feedback here ... and if I every reach a point where I think the game could be fun I will move to a platform for multiplayer games.

I just started it again and found out that you replaced the mercenaries with towers and drones ... not sure if they have the same issues I had with the mercenaries ...

Wow this is a great improvement over the last version I tested! You solved all the issues I had with the previous version, without sacrificing the basic concept (permadeath, etc.). The different options of retreat, along with the choice to sell ore early or not, creates meaningful decisions. Overall the mecanic feels very balanced now.

The only thing which felt a bit underpowered to me are the mercenaries. It never felt like a good idea to invest into them. Maybe there is a theoretical window where it makes sense to hire mercenaries to complete a mission that otherwhise would fail, but that is very hard to predict. Maybe you could make them cheaper so that there is always the question "How many mercenaries should I hire?". Or they come with increasing prices.

Overall the game is really fun!

Pretty cool game! I took me some tries to beat the 700, but I did it! (I played the v2 version)

The game is already fun, and feels complete.

Things you may consider:

• Furter improve the controls, sometimes it is hard to hit an exact spot
• The maze goes rather quickly from super easy (~800) to impossible (~1000). Maybe you could ease that out a bit. One idea could be to allow infite bombs, but make them more expensive every time (maybe -10, -20, -30, ...).
• You could change the algorithm so that at some point the maze gets more complicated, but does not block completety: Not only add walls but also remove others, so that the path to the exit becomes longer but still exists. (I am aware that this may be very difficult.)

Many thanks for trying it out. Both (a tutorial and a single player campaign) are on my list. But I am still not sure if I will be able to do it in the next release ... especially a campaign would be a lot of work.

Many thanks for your feedback! And of course it is influenced by Starcraft, I also played that a lot. :)

That is not a standard approach. If you need dynamic lights, you are probably better of with dynamic lighting. But if you want to mess with the lightmaps, then you can access them via the LightmapSettings-Class:

var lightmaps = LightmapSettings.lightmaps;
lightmaps[0].lightmapColor = new Texture2D(256, 256, TextureFormat.ARGB4444, false);
LightmapSettings.lightmaps = lightmaps;

This code will replace the color component of the lightmap with a black texture.

When you bake lighting, a single lightmap is generated for all your lights and your static game objects. i.e. there is no easy option to turn these lights on and off. Probably you can do some hacky solution like replacing the entire lightmap with a completely black lightmap at runtime. There is no standard Unity feature for that. Static lightmaps are just not meant to be used for dynamic lighting ...

It was easy to understand what to do. But I have difficulties to understand the mechanic: How do I generate food? I have build food storages, but still sometimes food dropped low and I did not know what to do about it. I build a lot of stuff and explored 3 biomes but I did not manage to reach 50 population. Maximum was actually 49 :).

In the end my food dropped to -20 (sic!) and my population to 0. I did not understand why. I had a lot of houses, storages and wells.

I found some issues:

• food can drop below 0
• zooming works, but it would be nicer if the zoom direction would be in the view direction
• build/terraform buttons are not really necessary, I would rather have both menus open all the time anyway
• when clicking on buttons, the click goes through to the tile underneath so both actions are triggered

Overall I like the look and feel. For a first prototype really nice!

Hi I gave it a try:

• For me the progression feels too slow
• When spending essence it always drops to 0. Maybe it is by design, but it feels like a bug.
• Upgrade costs are sometimes shown as 0. But the correct amount is charged.
• Music/SFX did not work for me

But it looks interesting! I am curious where it will end up... :)

You could think about creating a "Accessible Games Jam". Explane what disabilities you are aiming for and what are potential accessibility features. You could aim for new games with accessible features, or making existing games more accessible, or both ...

I think there are a lot of developers on itch that are willing to try out something new. But I think that it is important that you give some guidance: For the current project I am working on I have no idea how to make it more accessable (except for color-blind mode).

Many tanks for your feedback and suggestions. I will improve the coloring, and will add a tutorial eventually.

I am glad that you liked it. I will continue working on it to add more versatile gameplay. Many thanks for your feedback!

Many thanks that you did such and extensive test! That is very useful feedback for me. Not having a queue for unit production was a design decision, but you are probably right, not a good one. I will add a queue in the future. I will put improving zoom and sound on my list as well.

I really like this one! If there where more levels I would have continued playing. I think with all the character in the game you have enough to build very challanging levels. So my preference would be to add more levels instead of new mechanics. Maybe you could think about letting the player choose the difficulty: tutorial (basically what you have right now, but a bit easier),  easy, medium, hard, ...

Another Idea could be to create a random level generator that can create levels of different difficulty ... than you would not have to create them all by hand. But I am not sure how realistic that is...

The game looks really nice but the gameplay lacks some strategic depth. I could easily play through the game without thinking about strategy. I just randomly mixed offensive and defensive cards and it worked out.

You could think about:

• Make the game longer so that the deckbuilding aspect of the game really kicks in
• Add some kind of permanent effects that force a proper response (Like damage over time, buffs, debuffs, etc.)

I also had some issues with the UI scaling. (I played on my laptop with a resolution of 3000x2000.)

The game very well creates the atmosphere of fear you are aiming for. Combat could be a bit more versatile, with different attacks/skills to use. The difficulty of the combat was fine for me: In theory I should be able to kill a rat without taking any damage, but in practice I only managed to kill 4-5 Rats in my best run. I did not find a way to heal (I see in the screenshots that there are potions, but I did not find any), that limited my ability to kill all the rats...

Things you might consider:

• Slowly heal over time (When I went outside and found a dungeon, I was still bruised from the dungeon in the town so that I did not come far.)
• Let the rats drop some loot (like healing potions, gold, etc.)
• Add something to find when outside of the town: Healing Herbs, etc.
• Let the NPCs wander around

Many thanks that you did such an extensive test! I put your points into my backlog: an easier introductory/tutorial mission, additional units for more versatile strategies, more responsive UI

One possibility to beat the AI is synchronizing buggy production: Doubleclick a buggy factory to select them all -> wait until all have completed production and you have enough resources to build in all of them -> build in all factories simultaniously

Tried it again. I had no problem to beat the level now.  Maybe it is a bit to easy now. :) Honestly I was not aware that I could end the level early to collect money and muster up my army. I like the concept, but I think it still neads some balancing/streamlining...

Thanks for trying it out. I am planning to add a tutorial to give an easier start for new players.

Maybe you could add an additional resource that the player gets for killing enemies. This resource is not lost when losing and can only be spent between runs. In that way it would be possible to grind a few runs and then start with a stronger army. Also the player should have always at least 1 marine ...

Wow, very impressive. The visuals(the black hole!) and sound are very good. A chilled atmosphere, but a challanging puzzle game. I understand that you aim at mobile devices, but maybe you could add keybord controls for the web-version.

I like the graphics and controls. Looks promising to me. What I noticed is that the inventory does not scale well on high resolution screens. On my laptop it is almost not readably.

I like the game and had some fun playing it. It has a good progression model: When you loose you get a bit stronger the next time. That prevents frustration but is not to easy, well done.

It would be nice to see the exact stats of the units, health, damage, attack rate, DPS etc.

Cool game, I had some fun! The difficulty is very high - I did not found a way to win the first mission. I tried a lot different strategies, buying mechenaries, upgrading mariens, different placements and combinations of these.

Issues I found:

• Somethimes the money jumps backwards
• As money and army is lost after a defeat I was forced to restart the game to start a new run

Many thanks for the feedback! I will add more units in the upcoming updates (7 additionaly unit types are planned). I hope the scout will become more useful when there are more options for expanding/units/upgrades. The minimap is a good point, I will add that in the next update.

This question has been asked very often. The answer is: It is difficult. There are multple new games released on itch every day. A lot of them have good or decent quality, but most of them will attract no attention at all, just because there are so many. So either you have to stand out a lot, or get very lucky.

What I recommend: Trade feedback with others and constantly improve your game. Maybe you can create a really good game in that way, or you learn from your mistakes.