itch.io

The sound design and the atmosphere remind me of Inscryption. :D

I’m not sure if you need nitpick-level comments, but it’s very easy to click through the text accidentally, especially the black-screen text. In a game that has good text, it could be an issue. Why it happens? Because the player will tend to zealously skip through the text they’ve already seen (e.g. the “your estimations were…”), but then sometimes there is something new in-between or after the sequence and they end up skipping the new stuff.

I was somewhat confused to read about the compass tool before it was introduced into the game, but it’s probably a jam build limitation.

The different scale shapes confused me a bit at the start. For some reason, I thought that I should draw these triangle-shapes to calculate the distance while I was expected to calculate the total length of a shape. Since it’s possible to lose very early in the jam game, I guess the main game would introduce these new mechanics in a less punishing way.

The compass is quite cool, I liked using it. It wasn’t very convenient to use it from a laptop without a mouse, but otherwise the controls were good enough (although I couldn’t see what RMB does). Maybe it would be cool to have a pen in my other hand to make a mark while holding the compass tool?

I find it quite hard to be spot-on precise (unless you already know the answer). It’s usually +/-5 or so. It’s not a big deal, but some players will want to have a 100% score and I wonder how possible that is with the precision of tools one has. It’s probably much more realistic when you get a compass as it can be used as a ruler tool.

Other than that, it’s an interesting idea for a compass tool. Drawing on a map is also fairly entertaining. Do you know the direction you’re going to extend the game? Will it have more map/route related features? Is it going to be focused on the story (could be challenging without introducing more elements, like the actual character or cutscenes, etc.)

Ahaha, so you implemented the reversed pipeline from the game, kinda. :D

It’s especially good that you handled 1->n transformations and managed to work around the loops.

It’s cool that you used your programming skills to aid you! I wonder how much code you had to write to solve it, which libraries were used, etc.

Well, it is possible to solve the puzzles by hand. A “terminal” panel gets upgraded as the story levels are cleared. It gives the player hints about the level that should help in manual hacking. It might require a text document for some levels with ambiguity (there are only a few) so you can track multiple branches.

The game was created for a game jam (although a long and chill-paced one), so the game lacks the polish. The difficulty curve is also all over the place.

The bonus levels are opened if you manage to decipher the compound cipher of associated story levels.

It requires a lot of effort though. :) There is a single hint about the compound cipher in the in-game manual I think.

P.S. - finishing all story levels is an accomplishment as well as the second half of the game requires a good understanding of the game. Nicely done!

Here is my LD56 compo game, and it’s a deeply tactical one. Just how tactical is it, you ask? Well, as deep as Ludum Dare compo games go I guess!

I would make many things differently, if not the time constraints, but at least the combat part is good enough to make me feel proud. Many levels have at least two optimal solutions and it’s also possible to play against an army that is a counter-pick to yours if you’re extra careful.

I would like to know what you think!

And by the way, this game is made with Ebitengine. The engine that is, unfortunately, doesn’t even have a tag here. I would really like it to be a first-class engine for itch io, because it has many-many games published here.

Thank you for playing and providing the feedback!

The “change units” option was added near the deadline as my friend pointed out that there is a high change of soft-locking the player without it (as they might make a big mistake, forcing them to start the game over again). Since it’s just a little jam game, I though it’s easy for me to allow a 1-level re-roll.

The card selection is awkward. :D The closest thing to a card re-roll is “surrender” during the battle, “retry” after you won the battle and “continue” after you lost the battle.

I love this set. I used it to learn how to draw spaceships myself. Thank you.

Not gonna lie, this is pretty impressive for the first game.

Make animals poop and let the player clean this mess up and you get a Cult of the Lamb lol.

I think the game difficulty is more of less static, this is why I felt overpowered after a few upgrade levels. The main danger is your own army because in the end I was surrounded to submission.

I recorded myself playing the game if you’re into that weird kind of stuff (such as watching other people play your games):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3SVna1wLuM

This game is heavily inspired by Space Rangers. :D It was hard to implement all of the ideas in a given time span, but the game does handle the world simulation quite fairly.

Oh, this is quite a good first entry for an RPG!

I’m just jumping in here to say good luck and have fun. 🎉

I got to a second level, but the game crashed when I entered a boss (?) battle.

By the way, I maxed the bomb skill near the beginning of the game and it carried me along up until this crash. It 1-hits everything on the screen and there is no need to ever do anything else during the combat as enemies never get their turn. :)

Oh, this game gives me a lot of retro jrpg games!

It looks quite polished, but it has a few little things that make the experience less exciting.

1. I stuck at the first screen for some time, pressing Space, Enter, clicking the start button. I’ve read the instructions, but I thought that J was only an in-game thing, like you press E for interactions in games, but you rarely use it to activate a button like “new game”. A text like “Press J to start” would help me out there.

2. I couldn’t get pass the first zone. I got stuck in the wall after collecting the second key in the first section of the game. :(

I’ll try this game out again to see what else it has to offer, but I’ll continue with my thoughts nonetheless.

1. I don’t know if we get a new party member after that section or not, but I’m not sure guard action function is clear to the player. In most games, guard is only useful for a party, so a weakened (and focused) party member could survive while the other members are trying to save them. If the game has a single party member, the guard feature may not have an intuitive usage.

2. The first 10+ battles are quite simple and repetitive. This is not a show stopper for a game of this genre, especially for a game jam, but it would be much easier to handle with a faster battle loop (faster start and finish sequences). I think I managed to beat everyone with a simple shoot-until-they die tactic without using anything else (I don’t think that I reloaded once, even with 3 enemies).

3. The in-game UI is quite good for a jam game! The only extra touch I was missing is something like a tip saying what you’re hovering above. This would help me to understand the stats, for instance. I don’t need the numbers/etc, but knowing that it’s “power” or “defense” would be helpful. I ended up increasing everything by 1 point because it wasn’t clear what I’m doing here. :D You could partially solve this issue by providing a mini manual on the game page (like list the stats with their icons, names, and mechanics).x

With that being said, I’m going to give it another go because I like RPG games. :D

Also, please describe what was your core idea with this one? It’s hard to design an RPG game, so I’m interested to know what you were trying to build (like what are the main ideas behind the game).

I think I had a couple of issues with the game, like the map being fully discovered from the very beginning. I watched the gameplay video and it should have been filled with the fog of war.

It was hard to understand what to do first due to the lack of any tooltips, but little tutorial text on the game page helped to get me going. I also watched a video after I played the game to make sure I got the things right.

I like the unit evolution idea. The music sounds fitting. It’s always great to see an RTS submission. :D

Hey, this game is nicely polished for a game jam entry.

It’s easier to comment on the visuals as they’re so stunning here. But the game mechanics work quite well too. I haven’t expected this game to have more than one “tool”. :D It also has way more levels than I would expect. You also used mechanics stacking to some extent, which is always a good thing for a puzzle game.

Good job.

I made it to the end. :)

A simple scoring system with a timer would probably make this game much more game-y with minimal effort. It looks like there is more than one route at times, so players can be motivated to try out different ones to see how it affects their rating. Sometimes it felt that I managed to find an unintended route by running up instead of running to the right, so maybe some paths can contain extra coins for more score.

I created my own XM music player library some time ago. It was pretty easy for me to add something like an event listener to it.

The player emits the Note events every time it’s about to play a note. That Note event includes the note value (an XM note value), its volume, channel, and some other info.

It would also be possible to change the BPM on the fly and add dynamic speed changes to the game, but I ran out of time.

Here is the library itself: https://github.com/quasilyte/xm

I wanted to use my XM player library for something cool. :D

I found at least a couple of places that cut some of the distance. :D Good job on the level design.

I did it! :D It took me around 10 attempts, but I finally did it. It was crucial to save a lot of time by being very efficient in the first easier half part of the game, so you have some safety bag in the later part. :)

I enjoyed the game in its current state, and it can be even better with a polished controls. Maybe a shift for a “careful step” would be nice, where you can move with 25% speed, but never trigger a bad cell. This feature is needed to align yourself properly for a jump without stepping into a pit just because you pressed a movement key for 1/60 seconds more than you should. :D

Let’s do another test, shall we? :) If you choose the smallest world size, does it change anything?

This is an interesting bug that I was unable to reproduce. Are you using a 32-bit or 64-bit version?

Are there any other details you can provide about your machine? Does it happen every time or is it a flaky thing

If you play web version on itch io, does it happen as well?

I’m glad that you like it! I tried to make the biomes unique with special resources and environment mechanics.

A couple of other biomes were also planned, and an urban biome was one of the ideas. Unfortunately, my artist partner is not available anymore, so I had to be quite conservative with my resources. I managed to draw forest and inferno biomes myself, some new drones, and even 2 new colony types. But it takes ages for me to pull it off, not to mention that sometimes the result doesn’t look as polished as it could.

For now, I’ll take a break from content updates and focus on the new platforms. The native Android build is on the way (I’m planning to distribute it via Google Play).

My other goal could be something like a campaign/story mode where you would have an evergrowing colony and maybe a world map. I dislike when an RTS takes away all your progress after the mission is done, so it would be different here (like in Warzone 2100, etc.)

It’s done!

I uploaded binaries for Linux and Windows on itch io as well. There is no reason to keep it web-only here. :)

I updated the web version so that you can play directly on itch io website. I may upload the native binaries later as well, but you can play this game on Steam for free if you want to play it natively.

There is a chance that a native Android build will be available in the future. All it needs is some mobile experience polish.

I’m planning to update this browser version to match the latest Steam release.

One issue I had is that Roboden is no longer a small game. It has tons of sfx and sprites; it even has 1 extra music track now. With everything combined, a browser version of this game would be painfully slow to load (especially for the first launch, until the browser caches it).

I have a solution now. Stay tuned.

Please note that itch io contains very outdated. :) I have plans to update it, but it takes time to optimize a bigger game for a web export.

I found this music at https://modarchive.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBPQd42yNo0

Я вообще в тортиках видел карты с американских горок, в которых сидят люди. И типа крокодил кушает людей…

Мне даже пока не очевидно, как такое делать с технической точки зрения. :D Но обычно такие мелочи дают игроку возможность продержаться ~бесконечно, если они не совершают ошибок. Вроде бы ерунда, а ощущения от игры меняются, ты начинаешь чувствовать, что она честная.

Но это конечно так, просто размышления. В рамках короткого джема редко полишинг успевается, особенно если не все двое суток использовать. :D

Приятно видеть людей, которые знают такую классику. :)

Thank you for playing this little prototype!

I totally failed to finish MVP of the game during the 2-day jam. :D The game lacks a tutorial, hints, quality of life things, etc.

I wanted to make a scroller-style RTS with unique base construction mechanics. 2 days were not enough it pull it off. I may create a proper game someday that will use these ideas.

Сразу видно человека культуры.

Немного неудобно управлять и враги ещё так умело уворачиваются. :D Только в углах их зажимать получалось. Или перехватывать, когда они хотели другого скушать.

Если в самом начале поедать тех, кто вот-вот станет красным (крупнее тебя?), то в какой-то момент ты настолько крупнее остальных, что все будут зелёные.

Кажется, что было бы логично давать больше 1 score за ребят покрупнее.

Я так понял, что рост чем-то ограничен, так как после 5-6 score я не замечал изменений в размере персонажа. А так в целом залипательно, но геймплей может свестись к нулевой опасности и 3 зелёным шарикам на карте.

Стал самым крупной штукой на районе:

Вот эта игра мне кстати понравилась пока больше всех. :D

Графика интересная и вроде как даже в одном стиле. Если сами рисовали, то респект.

Видимо, приду посмотреть на длинном джеме, как ты и просил в игре. :D

А ещё прокликал всё, что нашлось. Очень удобная стрелочка “назад”, чтобы разные ветки просмотреть без рестарта всей игры.

Вроде бы примерно понятно, что надо делать, но с другой стороны, если уйти от ноутбука и оставить игру включенной, она минуты полторы успешно выживает. :D Не очень понятно чего надо избегать и что нужно подбирать: отследить эффект одного предмета трудно, так как персонаж постоянно в движении и может успеть ещё что-то подобрать в процессе. Вообще игра больше похожа на какое-то высказывание или пост-иронию, потому что самого геймплея тут маловато. :D Я хотел заскринить свой “результат”, но не успел - игра вышла на splash screen с ползунком. Там были такие горы из всяких продуктов жизнедеятельности и пустых стаканов от кофе.

1 day, 8 hours before the deadline

Вот это speed coding.

Иногда кажется, что игра посылает такую волну, которую почти нереально пройти: одновременно с разных сторон тортики достигают персонажа примерно одновременно. Из-за этого наивысший score получит тот, кому больше повезло с рандомом.

Это мой лучший ран (раз 10-13 пробовал):