itch.io

Hell no, this mechanic will stay, I have plans for it, it is really satisfying and cool-looking, it makes gameplay more strategic and slower-paced and this is the hill I am willing to die on.

Yeah, I am already reducing the volume all across the board anyway.

>Main game doesn't have any music outside the titlescreen
As intended
>Only two hearts to start with? Then why show 5 heart containers?
That's maximum amount, any heart collected over the limit converted to 5000 points instead.

>particularly the lack of music, which reminds me of dx ball
Someone clearly haven't tried pressing Ctrl-F5 in DX-Ball.

>I think with enemy accuracy it'd be fairer to have 360 turret and not 180 one
Honestly I would've preferred 360 degree traverse myself, both as player and developer (I still haven't solved turret getting stuck on enemies), but propellers are in the way, unfortunately, and there's not much I can do about it. That's part of the reason why I want to make a game about tanks rather than boats. Although as I found out later, BattleTanx actually solved that issue already, but I don't like how it looks:

>I don't know if you can shoot the torpedo
You can't, but you can abuse i-frames on the dash to ram it.

>I liked the music, it feels like "sea resort" and not like "battle" but I don't mind
That's especially ironic because I borrowed it from FreeDoom.

>By that I mean missions felt samey

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head - I messed up the game design. My main source of gameplay inspiration was BattleTanx, but later on I pivoted towards PS1's GiTS game, and scrapped most of the subweapons, hoping that depth of the few mechanics that remain can carry the game. Turns out that mechanical depth was mostly a busywork. Tangible, visible upgrades or customisation is what would've kept the player in, it's what I would've personally preferred and it is certainly possible to achieve that in this engine, but it would be way too much work, and I'd rather not waste too much time on GZDoom if possible. So the plan right now is to to make a couple more levels, give it some kind of closure and then focus on learning another engine. That being said, I'm not going to keep the nautical theme either - while I heard some feedback that it makes my project rather unique, I'm not that big fan of it and it makes level design hard so I'd rather make a game about tanks or mecha instead.

A bit rough around the edges, but with some polish it could become great. Ship controls are probably the weakest part, some items need bigger hitboxes (skulls and coins in particular), map needs player indicator. Still, player controls are good, the artstyle is great and is perfect fit for the theme. And I really, really liked the cannon SFX for some inexplicable reason :)

Nothing. Unfortunately, it's just a barebones prototype, I was just learning the engine with it. I'll try to make something out of it later on.

The dash is one of your most important tools, to the point that it may be borderline broken. First of all, your turn rate depends on your speed, and thus dash allows you to do extremely sharp turns. More importantly, however, it has i-frames on it, shown by force-field effect - you don't need to shake off torpedoes and missiles, you can just plow right through them if you time your dash correctly. And while enemy homing projectiles do have infinite fuel, their guidance system runs out of juice after 10 seconds and they stop tracking you.

I'm going to rebalance player torpedoes in the next update, albeit I'm not sure how. Either a bigger splash damage, or maybe launching two or three torpedoes at once.

Oh, there will definitely be a story, the original version had text cutscenes that I removed for this version as I need to rework it and add some new characters.

>Needs a basic text tutorial at least
F1 brings up a help screen, although I haven't added info on items yet.

>Also maybe add a way to tell if a torpedo came from you vs the enemy?
Enemy torpedoes have different color from yours, but it can be hard to see, I'll try to add some indicator over the homing projectiles to make them stand out, maybe a sound effect as well.

>Stopped playing on third level since it got too difficult too fast
There are only two real levels so far, the third one is just a stopgap that spawns infinite waves of enemies.

>purple robots
Honestly the more I look at them, the less I like them. The whole idea of an enemy that makes you helpless in a single-player game seems flawed. I need to think up a new attack for them, or at least make it so that they can't prevent you from shooting altogether, just limit your RoF and prevent you from using high-speed and charged shots. That being said, you can shake them off with a mortar.

>What are the two triangles after the pickup text supposed to be?
Forgot to fix them.

>The box with the secondary weapon/battery/repair icons feels a bit cramped.
I have an alternative HUD for smaller resolutions, maybe I should make it the default one.

>The secondary weapons still aren't really worth using.
Before I get to balance them, I will need to make some proper non-placeholder levels first and see how they perform. For one I am going to make levels more cramped and prevent the long-range shootouts for the most part. I will try experimenting with manual lock-on for torpedoes, but the problem with mortar being AoE weapon right now is that the enemies are usually low in numbers and spread apart, so it's hard to get them to bunch up. There is an AoE on mortars already, by the way, but it is pretty small.

>The batteries should be blue to differentiate them from the repair kits better.
I am trying to avoid using color blue for the objects because, you know, the ocean, but yeah, I just noticed that it is way too red. I'll play around with the colors, maybe make it more purple or do bluish-gray gradient. 

>Enemies should require line of sight to shoot, especially when they lead their shots.
I keep forgetting to add LoS checks for attacks.

>Either the player's hitbox or the hitboxes of enemy projectiles are too big.
Well, as I said multiple times already, hitboxes are an engine limitation - despite all the bloat, it's still a Doom source port deep underneath, and so not only hitboxes are strictly square (not even rectangular), but you can't even rotate them. I don't think I can do anything about it short of writing my own collision system from scratch somehow.

>I feel like the piercing railgun is fairly useless, as it seems to leave you unable to attack (and requires you to beforehand) for a while and only does the same damage as a single normal shot.
In fact it does double the damage of the regular shot. As I said, it's supposed to be an AoE option with less DPS.

>Enemies overall could also use having less health.
Current enemies are buffed and I added some new weaker basic enemies already.

>Also, please make middle mouse rebindable,
I should've made it more clear, but you can rebind it by rebinding "Zoom".

>I feel like it would be nice if the turret would start rotating once you look towards "the other side", even if it's not an "acceptable angle" it can rotate to.
Turret rotation gives me a lot of headache, but I'll try to rework it. I think you gave me a valuable hint on what to do here.

>Hitboxes feel a tad larger than they are, at least for the player's hovercraft.
Oh, hitboxes are a big mess and there's nothing I can do about it because of how they are implemented in GZDoom. Namely, they are square and do not rotate. I will try to implement some multi-hitbox solutions for bigger enemies, but this is gonna get janky.

>I think I'd make the dash work even if you're not holding a movement key, provided that your hovercraft still has some velocity either forward or backwards.
Sure thing.

>I've seen some enemies getting stuck for a bit too long on islands; maybe their turn rate  could be increased for a bit when that happens, or have them move in reverse?
I've reworked their movement code already, now they will stop, then back up and turn when they encounter obstacle. Doesn't really improves their pathfinding (if it can even be called that), but at least it looks like they're doing something instead of blindly ramming the wall.

>Stuff like hovercraft customization, swapping parts with stats or so, could be fun too.
I absolutely love that kind of thing, but I don't think it will be done in the current iteration. It can be done in GZDoom, but I'd rather avoid any feature creep on the current iteration, I want to release a finished game as soon as possible and focus on working with a different engine.

I don't think I will do proper mouselook in this version of game. That being said, I do hope I'll get around to remaking it on a proper engine later on, or making a sequel.

I have some ideas why weapons feel underwhelming right now besides the lack of damage. To address that I will introduce weaker enemies, and current enemies will be used more sparingly (although their attacks are much more threatening now), and you will see some indication that your shots are having  effect on them, like smoke coming out at lower health.

Finally, some actual feedback on balance and stuff. Also thanks for dunking on my ESL, although I'm not sure this is gonna be helpful since I'll be changing script a lot in the future.

>The dialogue box overlaps the selection box if the text is too long, and it barely uses half the width of the box before wrapping. 
Were you playing with a low resolution, or high scaling? Dialog box was kind of a mess at lower internal resolutions and I reworked it already.

>The turret doesn't take the dead zone into account when deciding which direction to traverse in, so it gets stuck if you aim to the other side too quickly or switch to the other side around the back.
I am aware of this issue and I'm looking for a way to fix it. By the way, enemies suffer from it too.

>I didn't have any trouble hitting enemies, but an indicator showing the turret's target rotation would still be nice.
I am planning to implement a laser sight or at least a targeting reticle.

>The railgun and torpedoes feel underwhelming.
Torpedoes I have buffed already, but railgun balancing is a tricky thing, it should have a lower DPS against single targets compared to regular cannon. I may increase cannon rate of fire across the board, plus I have already added a consumable item that temporarily buffs the railgun as one of its effects.

>One of the gray enemies at the start of level 2 remains stationary and doesn't respond to being attacked.
Did you "woke" it with a railgun shot? I know that it is one of the reasons for that happening and I found a way to fix it.

>Game crashed on level 2 shortly after I killed a supply boat
Can't do much about it without seeing a crash message.

>The delay before the supply boats drop their item is pretty annoying.
Fixed it, it does looks better if item is dropped right when the explosions start.

>Enemies have too much health.
Yeah, that's a problem because I only had time to implement one enemy type and hovercrafts had to fill the role of a basic enemy. Right now I am working on some smaller, weaker "popcorn" enemies while hovercrafts will have their attacks buffed to turn them into medium-level threats and they will be used more sparingly. That being said, I will probably reduce health on yellow and black boats.

>Enemy shots are too easy to avoid if you have enough space to not get surrounded, and the gray and yellow boats are too samey (if there's any difference at all).
Again, didn't had enough time to implement a proper difference. Right now the yellow boats are just souped-up gray boats (faster, more agile, more health, higher RoF). I am planning to add torpedo launchers on a yellow boat as well as adding more turret types. I'll try to implement leading shots across the board as well.

In the interests of clarity, the water effect came by default with the engine.

Thank you! I'll just warn people not to use it with OpenGL renderer then.

Hmm, weird. Can you take screenshot?