Huh, the Android version is gone from the Play Store. Will the .APK be uploaded here?
KeronCyst
381
Posts
30
Topics
8
Followers
143
Following
A member registered Nov 16, 2016
Recent community posts
Long-term: I think the biggest killer of the potential of everything you've sunk into here is simply its arcade format. What I envision is a great title like this going beyond the confines of the screen and having a scrolling space map of a roguelite, with increasingly difficult, complex enemies in a campaign, perhaps even with multiplayer. Have a home base with different types of missions to take on: politicians to escort and convoys to protect, enemy superpowers to assassinate, and armed-to-the-teeth space stations or helpless colonies to defend or take down. Your payments for completion of such missions are what you'd use to buy power-ups, and maybe even upgrade from ship to ship. You should be able to lose drones in combat or even have power-ups damaged and destroyed over the course of a lengthy interstellar conflict. And having one monster boss at the end would be glorious to see and overcome.
Oh, and it needs tons of asteroids.
There is SO much potential here!!!
As a veteran hobbyist beta tester of indie games, I've been mulling over what holds back this title from greatness. The sound effects are okay, the music is excellent, the graphics are well-thought-out... but how is it foiling itself?
I replayed this and am trying to think further about what prevents this game from becoming incredible. There is clearly a ton of potential for this sort of game to be a hit, but I think its design as an arcade game fundamentally harms its chances at FTL-level capability.
Using the second ship, I willingly died at level 21, loop 4, because by loop 2 I was so overpowered that I basically didn't even need any more power-ups to trash any enemy within seconds of its appearance on-screen. Even 3 drones were able to make mincemeat of most enemies. For balance, this kind of ship should make its weapon accuracy go terrible the more you move.
Short-term:
- Graphical Effects could go further:
- It would be more emotionally satisfying for bosses to give a tremendous explosion that pushes away the player ship.
- The double-damage critical-hit power-up shots could be colored a different color for visual feedback.
- The shield-generating enemies in the later stages (and your own ship, when you get a shield power-up) could see a more interesting shield collapse electrical fizzle than the graphic simply disappearing.
- Power-up balance is totally off:
- The Overclock power-up should slightly debuff the strength of each individual projectile to compensate, and there should also be an overheating mechanic that forces cool-down to punish players who just keep spamming it. Once this is unlocked, then there could be a Heat Sink power-up to reduce the cool-down, which would then scale with more Overclocking.
- The Cannon should also make each missile a bit weaker at higher launch rates. Increased range should also slightly weaken your shots, as well as the Radio's individual zaps.
- Enemies should scale with your power. I was disappointed to see that the only noticeable change was the final-stage green enemy with circulating smaller drones being literally the only one to change by adopting +1 drone per loop. There is so much more that could be done!
- All enemies could incrementally move and shoot faster, especially the mines.
- The Gauss sniper ship could charge faster, and maybe instead become a cruiser with multiple independent turrets per loop; it could fire off 2 or 3 shots in rapid succession instead of just 1.
- The purple beam ships could extend their beams so that by loop 3 they could reach across the map.
- There could be bullet-sponge enemies that require flanking to hit weak spots to defeat.
- There could be enemy battleships with point-defense that shoot down some of your missiles. Or they could even launch chaff grenades that throw off their heat-seeking. That would be a sight to see!
I have... mixed feelings about this title. The presentation is probably the greatest aspect; the music is awesome (I had never heard of Nomyn before but now I have!), the art is gorgeous, the effects are smooth (or at least as smooth as they can be on my current potato), and the menu is attractively stylish, even if the fonts and buttons could be way bigger and scale according to screen resolution.
The biggest problem, though, is the gameplay. Nowhere does it say in any description or help menu that you exclusively lay down blocks by pressing the space bar; even left-clicking does nothing. The instructions also didn't say anything about the next block forming exclusively from the sides of the last-placed block; at first, I thought it would randomly pick a joint from all parts of your structure. Another issue is the lack of an exit button; making gamers have to physically press Alt+F4 to close the game feels... unnatural.
But the core issue is just understanding weight distribution. I have no idea of how my structure was able to stay as long as it could, as I basically made an upwards spiral with no visible leaning until its sudden end. So it was confusing for me to see it finally fall when I was simply mashing the space bar immediately upon spawn almost half the time as I got irritated by the lack of predictability of the structure's sway, especially since the yellow blocks are effectively a trap that is simply better off being avoided, because you would ideally want to use a bomb to destroy an accidental outcropping that could topple the tower, yet it might drop a bunch of blocks there instead and cause the very thing you intended to avoid—and there's no way to know which it'll be, so it would be way better to not make it guesswork and simply color bomb blocks red or something, if not show an actual bomb icon.
Given the description, I thought it would be a truly zen, fully turn-based, not real-time, quick-reaction, block-builder. I feel like a better implementation of this kind of concept would be to turn it into some kind of card-based roguelite with tower cards of different weights and types: like, when you place and are restricted to the last placed block, it could show you 3 out of 30 possible types of cards of different weight and you'd be forced to pick between them. Roguelikes are all the rage these years so this would probably be exponentially more popular.
This game is also falsely tagged "tower defense," but it would be interesting if, say, there were machine-gun blocks that would actually fight off flying invaders which would add way more sophistication and strategy to the card selection pool: see how many waves you can last defending your tower (which would just be on flat ground or atop a mountain, not suspended in mid-air), or something like that, like maybe a space station that you could modularly build out, where gravity doesn't matter too much, with shield generators, oxygen levels, possibly even crew and passageways for them to easily reach turrets, etc.
All in all, while the presentation is solid, I think the simplistic and aggravatingly unpredictable one-button gameplay does a great disservice relative to what a game like this could magnificently be—and I'd be very interested in trying that, if it were ever to be realized.
Absolutely incredible arena wave shooter the more I got into it.
I would say the biggest detractor is how small projectiles are. I wish they were even just 1 pixel wider, although I understand that you were probably going for a highly specific strike zone.
I wish the relics could be moused over for descriptions in the pause menu.
I wish shields changed color depending on how many impacts they had taken. This wasn't clear, nor was it clear that recharging your shield as the police cruiser when you already have a shield up doesn't "supercharge" it or anything like that, so it's effectively wasted. I sorta wish it wouldn't let you reactivate the shield if you already have a fully charged one going, just to prevent player-vs.-UI mistakes.
Man, wave 14+ is suuuper-interesting, but that's where I picked up the relic Backshot that says "Fires behind you" but as the police cruiser, it ended up instead firing 3 shots still in front of me, but at a slower pace that expired closer to my ship than my default buckshot. Is the description misworded, or is it not supposed to do that?
I understand that the long time before waves is to allow the ability to cooldown to run its course, but it's kind of awkward. Why not just have the cooldown insta-reset instead and just summon the next wave, or at least make it somewhat faster?
Man, the boss at wave 21 is extremely unfair against the police cruiser because all of its shots are shield-piercing. What gives? There's no warning of such a massive debuff like that. Is this a bug?
Anyway, clearly I love it and want it to be even better. Great work!
The game appears to occasionally glitch, allowing the client to take 3 turns in a row. Great, smooth implementation, though, otherwise. I would also say it would be nice if the Local - Host - Join options were clearer in a drop-down list to immediately find "Join" because "Host" is otherwise visually in the way which makes it a bit odd to find.
The instructions also don't say that a triangle can hit two enemy targets in a row, nor do they say that it can shoot over an allied piece. Lastly, the turning mechanism is also problematic for users on a laptop with a touchpad who don't have access to a scroll wheel.
Interesting. I think there is a lot of potential to this concept, like a whole campaign with supply runs, convoy escorts, heists, and more. I think graphically speaking it would look better if you were controlling individual, rotating turrets on a ship that is otherwise facing the same direction.
More variance than the kamikaze butterfly enemies would be very helpful, too.
If you want more player involvement and longevity to the game, I would definitely recommend some sort of upgrade-able shield system instead of 1 HP/sudden death for the player. Upgrading turret rotation speed, etc.
The game could use way better music which I may be willing to write!
I have no idea of how to play. I just put the flag around a few times because I couldn't seem to build anything else until I finally managed to accidentally lay down a couple of Barracks, and by then I was at $0 and could do nothing. Shouldn't that sort of scenario be prevented from happening? Could you add a tutorial?
Dang, the browser version crashed on week 8!
An error occurred running the Unity content on this page. See your browser JavaScript console for more info. The error was:
RuntimeError: indirect call to null
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[342...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[347...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[347...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[460...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[347...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[347...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[630...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[655...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[853...
invoke_iiii@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.framework.js:10:386026
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[655...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[655...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[846...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[815...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[668...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[782...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[814...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[814...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[759...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[758...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[760...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[760...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[760...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[664...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[664...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[853...
@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.wasm:wasm-function[853...
browserIterationFunc@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.framework.js:10:206175
callUserCallback@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.framework.js:10:159744
runIter@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.framework.js:10:161000
Browser_mainLoop_runner@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9759549/Build/1.0.4.1.framework.js:10:159280
Great roguelite concept, but the enemies become just so immensely strong by waves 6-7 that I just don't see how anyone could possibly keep up. A video tutorial of someone beating any level would be great. It would also be nice to see a fancier, serif font.
Other than these matters, I'd say the biggest remaining problem is that once you buy a tower into your bottom bar, you can't reread what it does before deploying it (my memory sucks!) So instead of clicking to read, I would suggest popup boxes to appear on mouse-over, to much more quickly access info as needed.
I think some ways to build a lasting community around this game would be to add a map editor, or even a seed-based random maze generator!
You're right about making it your own and expanding on the concepts. I like this more than VS because of the interesting features like ranged enemies and terrain. It was also cool to see at least one boss change behavior based on remaining HP (or time or something). There are a few problems, though:
- Typo: It says "Feather: increases speed by %5" instead of "5%'
- If you keep kiting a horde around a mountain/forest, eventually several enemies get stuck inside it, so the pathfinding could use work. This is especially (too) effective against bosses.
- I thought it's a bit too easy compared to VS in that I never got down to even half health at any time. Perhaps later enemies could deal more damage to make it tenser.
- The bosses didn't actually align perfectly with me horizontally to apply their horizontal attacks, but it looked like they were trying to. Was this intentional? I wonder if giving them diagonal and/or vertical attacks might solve this.
Backslash Ballet Time in Deep Space with Nasty Aliens comments · Posted in Backslash Ballet Time in Deep Space with Nasty Aliens comments
Impressive for just 3 hours. If you are looking to improve it, it needs two things, maybe three:
- Fairer enemy generation (so that if you're right at an edge, an unavoidable enemy doesn't spawn right next to you)
- Slowly auto-heal over time to really turn it into a marathon game
- A very gradually expanding map, so if you're very deep into a run, the map has zoomed out to be so large that you're basically a pixel among an ocean of enemies lol. That would be crazy!
It was very nice. I like the educational aspect of the game as a novice to cooking. However, there was a text bug in day 2 that caused all of Nainai's responses to immediately display off-screen and force me to scroll down to read them, and then the next ones would all appear at once the moment I picked a reply.
Then I took a photo of my food while eating it and was able to restart the entire conversation beginning with naming the food. So there are conversation bugs, but the cooking was amazing and very fun!
Oh, was it the pricing? I already had it through a bundle that mixed free + paid titles so I didn't realize. In that case, mosey on over to One Finger Death Punch 2!
Okay, I thought there was a bug because I acquired multiple spells across all of my playthroughs but have never been able to trigger them. Perhaps some sort of reactionary "This spell won't do anything at this time" or something might help, because I've never been able to get any to work. Anyways, interesting game! I'll try the spells again later.