itch.io

Ahaha this is fun, i like it!!

Thank you very much @leafo! Appreciated!

Empires in Ruins - https://sgth.itch.io/empires-in-ruins

Hello guys, 

I recently noticed that some months ago, our game had been "bombed" negatively with a handful of fake reviews. In 4 minutes, 5 accounts with very similar names, freshly created for that, left each a 1 star review (the game doesn't have many reviews, but all the other ones are 4 and 5 stars).

Now, beside who might have done it or not (that i don't care much), it's quite bad looking because our itch page shows up among the first ones on google, and having few reviews, these fake ones are pretty impacting on the score.

I did write to the support email, but I got no answer, have you had similar cases, and how did you handle them?

Cheers and thanks in advance!

H.

Brilliant! And well deserved anyway guys!

I love the idea, nice visuals too, simple but very well made!

I love it. I love simplicity, good color palettes and games that are fun without being overthinked. Well done.

Thank you very much @CoconutMousse, and really really glad you liked the beta this far!!

Woop wooop, looking forward to the feedback Laurie!!

https://sgth.itch.io/empires-in-ruins/devlog/48634/to-tame-a-beta-v0841-076

So, the adventure continues, the FAQs are still valid, now the game has 1 month+ of fixes, one new enemy (Zeppelin), and above all it also sports a bit of the dialog system  of the full game, I hope you guys have a sec to try it and let me know what you do think of it!

Simple but really really pleasant to play. AI is a bit too simplified, but UX is delicious. I love the growl SFX and the visuals. Well done.

Eheh thanks @leafo glad you like it! I didn't want to re-start another devlog from zero specially now that the game is in a quite advanced stage, but I still wanted to begin somewhere its itch.io presence and at the same time i got quite some questions from our testers in this beta round, so I thought to merge all of it into a single entry as a starter ;)

Hello guys,

after 2 weeks of beta of our Empires in Ruins we did put together quite some questions we were asked by the testers and here's a set of FAQs that we think it could help whoever is interested in trying it but doesn't want to go mad because of some of the features of this beta ;) !

https://sgth.itch.io/empires-in-ruins/devlog/44083/empires-in-ruins-beta-faqs

You can take a look at the beta if you like it, soon I will start adding some more logs to this thread as well!

Cheers,

H

Hello guys,

https://sgth.itch.io/empires-in-ruins

after years of development (countless ones :) ) our game Empires in Ruins enters a first early public beta stage.

Empires in Ruins is a story-driven strategy game that mixes Tower Defense and 4X gameplay, with a sprinkle of RTS on top.

The beta has a single battle map in, not including any of the story or the 4x-like elements of the full game. Our objective is now to get as much feedback as possible (and bugfixing) on the battle system while we finalized the rest of the game. 

If you guys have time for it (Windows64bit only for now) please, I would love to hear what you think about it!
Cheers,

Hogan, Lead Dev

Thanks leafo!!

Thanks guys, glad you like it!!

Hello guys, the game's in release, so any question or any doubt or anything, just ping me here and I will make sure to answer ;)

Emiliano, @DokHgn

https://sgth.itch.io/razerwirenanowars

Hello everybody, 
Emiliano here, and not without a bit of pride, announcing my very first game release (even though this game is the last I begin working on of my ongoing projects).

A necessary premise is that this is my very first solo project (beside the music made by a friend), so despite being a programmer, I had to take care of design, and art as well. I went for a sort of "simplified" pixelart, where, well, where I could hide a bit my artistic lackings ;) Therefore for example all the animations are handled in the engine and are not "pixel perfect", and all the VFXs are procedurally generated as particles.

The game itself is simple, comes from an idea i had 2-3 years ago. Two generators, one static large one and one small moving one, and a wire/laser (technically it's a monomolecular filament wire :D ) between the two.

The generators have to be protected/avoid the enemies, the wire does the killing. If the big generator takes too many hits, it's game over, if the small generator (the WireDrive) takes hits, the shields go down until it's incapaticated for a given time before recovering. The shields recharge over time, the main generator health doesn't.

The enemies are represented by 7 types of nanobugs looking to extinguish humanity (shallow plot but i needed a touch of color ;) ), each with completely different movement patterns, 2 variants in case they are able to shoot or not, up to 4 different shooting types and up to 2 levels of armor.

All this is managed procedurally according to the wave progress.

The overall game approach is a bit "rogue-lite" in the sense that as said the Generator health doesn't recover in any way,  so each run lasts as long as possible (there are checkpoints every 20 waves), then upon destruction of the generator the player can spend points to buy upgrades (9 different ones with 3 tiers each) or unlock powerups (8 different ones that will spawn on map once unlocked, each with 3 tiers as well), to then restart the battle (either from the checkpoint or from the beginning again).

The game went through 3 rounds of beta testing already, the average time to max it out is between 3 and 4 hours, with the best players having reached wave 900 (past waves 3-400 the game becomes pretty hardcore, around wave 800 it becomes REALLY hard)
I have loads of ideas on how to possibly extend the game for the future, but for now i wanted to have it really optimized in terms of performances (and it is as it was born with the objective of learning more in that sense), robust gameplay and enough contents for the value of 1$. The testers all said it should have been sold for 2$, but i'd rather leave it like this and have player more satisfied by the value for money than cashing in more.

The plan is to release now, see how the people like this version (it's releasing both year and on Steam) and then decide if to pick up a whole lot of ideas i have in a drawer and maybe make a sequel or a XXXL version of it. (Not to mention the larger project I am now working on since 5 years, but that I can't disclose yet :P ) 

As we came out pretty happy about the soundtrack as well (10 tracks, 2 minutes each, synty-/vaporwave 80s inspired), we did put that one for sale as well, the money will go to pay the composer in that case. Ah, in order to enhance a bit the cheeky visual feeling, I did provide the player with optional camshake, and three optional retro filters (80s, Arcade and Old TV), hope you will like them, personally I can't play any longer without the 80s one activated ;) )

Every feedback is welcome, I home you have the same fun by playing it as i did have it by making it!

Cheers,
Emiliano, @DokHgn

Brilliant art! The fact that in combat the units are not animated and look that shaky gives a little of a "clumsy" touch, but I can imagine the incredible additional work that doing so would have involved. Well done all in all!