itch.io

Hi, I just found your game while searching for space outpost theme games on /r/roguelike. It's fun and interesting and the design and visuals are really neat, thanks for working on it and I hope you continue!

Nice post, I liked the screenshots of progress. 

This is not necessarily a failure, but the game wasn't very innovative. As stated, my objective was only to finish a game, but if I want to improve, I will need to try out new mechanic ideas next time.

I noticed some folks have kept devlogs and I've enjoyed reading them. I wrote a recap of the jam from my perspective, if you do a post-mortem perhaps share it here.

https://ergodicbreak.itch.io/xenoamob/devlog/140174/post-jammin

Thanks to the organizers and the participants for a fun jam.

I played the Windows build -- thanks for looking into it!

I believe it is this one, in the New York Times,  but it is behind a paywall and I can't get to it unfortunately.

It's an i5-2410M (2nd gen, Sandy Bridge) with integrated graphics, HD 3000, running Windows 10 -- in other words rather old HW with poor driver support in the OS. However I've learned some new tricks running games in the jam so if you have ideas I might be able to improve things on my end.

I enjoyed reading your devlog, especially on flexible interactions. 3D has always been a mystery to me so it's all very interesting and you write very well, so thanks!

Side note, I couldn't run this at first on Windows 10 because there are no official OpenGL 3 drivers for my hardware (which does support OGL 3.1 at least) but I was able to shim it with the help of the mesa-dist-win project (hosted on Github).

Very enjoyable! A nice introduction to an assembly-type language too as I have no experience with that sort of thing. I'm definitely going to explore this more. One note, for some reason in Firefox the left hand column of the notebook was cut off (i.e. the first column of characters) but it worked perfectly in Chrome.

I was wowed by the size of the maze, it did justice to the title of the game! It reminded me of doing a giant jigsaw puzzle and I thought I was doing so well, until I ran into Mr B. My @ is still in the deep...

Unfortunately I wasn't able to get this to run natively on Windows 10 because of OpenGL driver issues on my old laptop, but I did get to try it on WSL Ubuntu albeit without sound, and I think the game was lagging because of it being forwarded to the X server
on the Windows host. Nevertheless really cool visuals, I liked the enemy sprites a lot.

This work did a nice job of immersing me in a different perspective and mindset. It reminded me of another text game called Whom the Telling Changed. By coincidence I read today an article where there was a quote from a political leader in the Americas who I won't bother naming, who said something to the effect of why should a prehistoric/primitive person expect to live on the Earth in the way that they have always done, in modern times. Thinking of that article and playing this game it was especially affecting, I appreciate that you gave me the chance to experience that. 

Wow, I was hooked right from the title screen! Actually I didn't even start the game because I sat and listened to the music and chilled out with the spinning polyhedral. Superb visuals, sound, and even though I'm actually terrible at these kinds of games the generous health bar made me feel like I was really good at it. So thanks for also increasing my self-esteem ;). The boss fish sprite is especially good, but the scenery is excellent as well. Great job and I hope you make more games. Oh and I forgot to mention. love the title Amethyst Waters.

I've definitely been in that situation you describe when you realize you have way too much on your plate at once. The nice thing about it is now you have way more familiarity with the tools and now you can do something twice as hard :)

A thought-provoking piece, it was very hard to take it all in at first but as I gave myself some time to just observe and become familiar with the patterns it made more sense. I felt this was an interesting analogy for the pandemic itself and the flow of information these days that's sometimes hard to make sense of.

I enjoyed adjusting the simulation parameters as well and seeing their effects.

Funny side note, this wouldn't run in Windows on my old laptop because of OpenGL issues, but I was able to run it with WSL and a Windows X server. There's nothing that can't be solved with a little indirection.

The intro screen is fantastic, the game itself a fun creative idea in the spirit of LIsp.

Love the bullet glow effect, and it's a cool visual when you run into an asteroid too. I was able to run this in Ubuntu on my Windows laptop, but curiously I couldn't get an OpenGL 3 context in DrRacket running natively (I'm on an older laptop). I'm wondering if Linux Racket automatically downgrades the context somehow? I have no idea how these things work unfortunately.

Fun game, I liked the open-ended feeling of it. I felt that the control HUD could be placed more prominently and/or in a large type, though that could just be my terrible eyesight :)

Note to Ubuntu users, I was able to get this to run by copying my libpcre.so.3 into the yirl-loader dir and renaming it as libpcre.so.1.

Good music, visuals, controls and sound effects! And a very polished presentation overall, nice work. I may have encountered a bug where ships don't collide, they just overlap each other? Or maybe it was a boarding party, who knows? It was still fun.

I liked how there were multiple opportunities for success in the game and not just one garden path to the win state. The navigation commands of forward/back etc. were interesting to me as well as someone who's played a lot of text adventures with the standard cardinal directions. I enjoyed reading the source too, when the source and the gameplay are all text it gives a unique feeling to experience both. 

Really good mechanics and sound effects! The waiting on a vulnerable bug to fire is a nice twist. I'm glad the game is easy to restart because I died about every five seconds :).

Great job with developing a cohesive game where all the elements supported each other, like the ragequits stat creating a feeling of helplessness that probably mirrors the mindset of people in the situation of the support staff. Not to mention the meta/scripting level of the game which fits the idea of a Lisp game jam to a tee. The debug powers were a great addition though I felt the map to see where players were or were going confused me (if in fact that's what it was? I'm still not too clear on it to be honest). The lines drawn to players in distress were more helpful. Excellent work overall!

I appreciate that Gollum, I mean the Golems, finally get the happy ending they deserve in this game. 

Btw I quite like the one-action get control key combined with the roguelike keys right next to it. You could make an interesting roguelike with a combo of bumping (scrumping?) and a one key action.

You have an evocative visual style in this game, and I think overall a feel for communicating a mood, the rain and the city scene are just lovely, and the sprites look great! I think the umbrella could be a very workable mechanic/gimmick for a longer platformer -- I didn't realize at first I could put it away and take it back out again but you could design some nice levels with that in mind. 

I really like the contrast of the schematic visuals and the swingy physics, they complement each other in a cool way with fun controls. Great job on polishing the game too with options, menus, etc., and love that you included the editor! Nice work.

edit: can you make a fullscreen option? That would be great.

hi! I got this error right after saving the second cat on level two:

Error

functions-draw.lua:253: Cannot create image (OpenGL error: out of memory)

Traceback

[C]: in function 'operational amplifier'
functions-draw.lua:253: in function 'f'
lib/gamera.lua:183: in function 'process'
lib/tiny.lua:325: in function 'update'
systems.lua:114: in function 'draw'
[C]: in function 'xpcall'

Wow the visuals are unreal, and the physics feel very smooth. 

For some reason I feel a skateboard would add a lot to this game.

I really enjoy the visual style of this game! As an aside I think it would work great if you added ranged and mounted combat just because of the visual relationship of the sprites to the field of view.

Anyway I digress. The sound effects are effective and (I think?) the zombie sound effect was especially spooky.

The combat was difficult for me because I found it hard to target an attack instead of switching to a movement command, but it could be because my mouse is half broken it's mucking it up. Perhaps some kind of target reticule could appear when you're in combat mode. Also I'd suggest fixing the drop of the first spiderant so that you get some type of weapon, this would make the progression curve a little easier at first, but I could see how this might not be desired. 

I'd certainly play more of this if you were to expand on it, good job.

Thank you! Yes, I didn't get to this in time for the deadline.

This is what happens when you don't code negative feedback on a rapidly self replicating population: