itch.io

Thank you for the kind words! MGS is a very unconscious influence on me, I rarely intentionally try to emulate it but I listen to the soundtracks and ideas from there just sneak in, lol.

If you ever need a writer for a game, i am open to help!

I’m intending to release this game this year and need to do a little writing for it, I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible but when I get to it in a few months I can bounce some ideas off you if you like.

A RPG inspired by fallout or deus ex with you would be amazing.

My big space game is taking a lot from Deus Ex and Morrowind, it’s those kinds of games that seem to be what I’m most naturally suited to. It’s just a shame they’re so much work to get together!

Glad you liked it! There won’t be too many more levels as they take a while to make and I want to move on to other projects, so at launch the game will probably only have 7 full levels plus a boss fight at the end. I’m currently on track to release around Q3 next year.

I noticed the cosmic call ad and wanted to ask if you are actually selling those ads? How much if so?

No charge, just send me something in the right dimensions, you can even just reply to this with it. Keep in mind I will add a 1px border to counteract mipmapping artifacts. I intend for most of the ads to be in-universe goods and services but I’ve still got plenty of room for more AGDG references.

Ah that will mean gibberish to you then. Odd, Windows only has one sound API so I wouldn’t think it should have problems. Do you have Git Bash installed? (Not that that would cause it, this is just the easiest way to get terminal/command-line output) If not you could try launching the game using cmd and see if it prints anything out. I believe most of the output should still be enabled on Windows it just doesn’t go anywhere by default.

Might not be a bad idea for me to set up some logging to files.

D: That’s not very good. Are you running on Linux? Can you give me a terminal printout? I probably can’t guess that much but there’s probably an assumption I’ve made that doesn’t hold properly.

Thanks for trying it again, glad you’re enjoying it.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2291816761?t=1h14m49s

Dammit, there’s an offset applied for ultrawide monitors that I wasn’t properly defaulting to zero. That must be why your hud wasn’t showing fully. I just noticed it wasn’t being applied to the keycards which are supposed to be anchored to the same point as the health display. I’ll upload a hotfix as this could affect Windows as well.

The enemy behaviour in this game is really nice, not too simple, but not too clever either.

I made a point of modelling Doom and Quake behaviors without really going too much further

Wow, glad that you enjoyed yourself! I’ve spent years on and off working on this game and oft-times it does feel like polishing a turd with all the really good boomer shooters coming out these days. If I can find a couple thousand more people like you to give it a shot I’d probably be more confident in it!

I think games like these weren’t even called “boomer shooters” back then.

The first prototype of this game was made way back then and yeah I don’t remember “boomer shooter” until a few years later.

As a finished product, though? Count me in.

I do hope to see you play it again for money! Apart from polishing up the existing four levels I’m only planning a handful more as I’m kind of sick of this project and want to move on to something else, but I can’t bear to just abandon it so I’m aiming to release around Q3 next year.

Thanks again for giving it a shot!

although the hotkey for it didn’t work and I could only select it with the scroll wheel.

If you’ve played the demo previously then you need to reset the keybindings for it to work. I’ve got an idea to make that less necessary in the future though.

I wish the spike has a bigger hitbox, it says it does more damage while moving but it’s not easy to land reliably unless you’re running straight at the enemy.

That is actually the intention, it doesn’t check which direction you’re moving in, just your speed. I may as well rephrase that point actually.

Hoping for more levels soon, I want more chances to mow people down with the autoshotty

Next demo day I’ll have a level finally pushing forward again instead of adding to the start, and the later levels will prioritize more enemies and larger (or at least more difficult) encounters. I’m getting quite sick of working on this game though so unless it randomly blows up (unlikely) I’m going to only have seven levels.

Also loved how running into cacti can hurt you.

It hurts the enemies too, but I haven’t found a good way to actually make use of that.

i think i found an… unintended route to the yellow key in the tutorial? lol

Dammit, I made a point of removing things you could jump on near that beachhouse but the bridge is a very recent addition and I’ll have to redesign it. I’ll probably just move the cliff further up or something.

railgun ammo seems pretty scarce, i was barely able to test it out

I’m adding the difficulty options soon so I’ll go around and rethink where all of the weapon and ammo pickups are, for now I just wanted the railgun thrown in anywhere. There is actually another one in secret on level one as well.

in general, starting out on level 4 makes it so you are EXTREMELY low on ammo with all weapons. i even died because of it

It really hasn’t been designed around the level select. All levels can be finished from an empty start as I regularly try them out like that when I’m iterating on them, but isn’t always particularly easy. That said, there’s also another semi-hidden shotgun right near the beginning that you didn’t see.

Thanks for trying it again and uploading the gameplay, always useful to see what people are doing.

Nice to see this again! Keep it up!

Not sure why, and it’s only your game that does this, but it defaults to the wrong sound device on launch on Linux. Almost like it’s picking the first device in the list instead of detecting the default.

Could really use an FOV setting, climbing that first ladder in the tutorial is a little disorienting.

In the boiler room on the ship you can run right up the hull of the ship despite the steep slope. If you don’t want to modify the character controller to disallow this then ought to cover it with some vertical invisible walls

I like the new UI, I think this minimal look is very effective. Would be good to work in the old wood paneling somehow though. Would be cool to multiple levels of UI like in modern Doom and Quake ports, or how Hedon has extra UI layers enabled in the DLC.

Aaaargh! I can get using E for interact instead of F, but I can’t abide scrolling “up” to get to the “next” weapon. Why the hell did everybody universally decide to do it this way after Crysis did it!?

Upon ascending the dumwaiter (fun idea btw, very Duke 3D of you) the enemies in the room all immediately unload on you which seems a bit cheap. It didn’t seem like there was a way to avoid being hit at least once.

I like the new ship level overall, there’s some fun ideas in there like the new enemies at the end. Polish it up with a bunch of art like the other levels and I think this one will be pretty good.

Actually some substantial updates this time. There’s a bunch of graphical improvements regarding lighting (geometry now obscures lighting on entities). There’s a new weapon in the railgun, a new enemy in the form of a flying drone that shoots bouncy grenades, a new starting level that will actually function as an intended tutorial.

There’s a key you need to get to access the control tower, but I’ve had another playtester point out the keycard is in a spot where it really blends in with its environment. I’ve been trying to keep the pickups consistent as simple objects on the ground, but I may need to start making some of them glow or float or something.

If you stay in their line of sight you won’t see many differences, it was more about improving performance and handling edge cases so they don’t blindly dive off cliffs or run into walls trying to chase you.

Thanks for trying it, I still need to come up with more reasons to go underwater.

Standing partially behind an obstacle, mechs will stand still and shoot but not hit you while you can shoot back

I don’t have an easy way to deal with this, a lone AI is never going to outsmart an experienced player.

There’s a crack between two rocks near the end of the first level where I got stuck jumping between them, not sure if you can tell where it is from this pic

Thanks for pointing it out, I can’t find all of these myself.

Oh good catch. I think I’ll just start surrounding these with clip brushes eventually, it’s the only way to be sure.

Thanks for trying it again, not much new to see.

the kill counter sfx at the end of the level is very loud

It’s based on just the regular menu volume level but all the menu sounds files are quite a bit quieter. I’ll change it to the lower of either SFX or Menu sounds.

i always struggle to find the blue key card in the final level, even though i already know where it is. it just doesn’t pop up enough, it almost looks like a normal armor pad or health kit from afar

I can see this being a problem, I don’t really know what to do other than maybe just try to move it elsewhere in the room like maybe on one of the couches. I could put it next to the two dudes in there but you can sometimes alert them from outside and it won’t be much more visible all the way at the far end.

the mech AI seemed smarter at aiming? it actually hit me a few times while i was strading circles around it.

I don’t remember intentionally doing this, but I tweaked the tracking speed and the projectile spread a bit when I was adding the torso twist which definitely would’ve had an effect.

I don’t get how you can stand turning off music, head bob, AND weapon bob. Whatever, the options are there for a reason.

The menus aren’t intended to work with less than 720p, but the HUD shouldn’t be so messed up. I added an extra offset to restrict the corners to 16:9 in ultrawide but forgot to put an fmin in the equation to stop it applying to other aspect ratios. Easy fix.

Spooky game. It took me a bit to work out how the map worked. I also didn’t look at the screenshots until I was done so I didn’t end up building any furniture, is that what the scrap metal is for?

Really not a fan of the CRT filter, it works for the hud but not as much for the game. Maybe I just don’t like this particular one but I’d rather just not have it at all.

Would be good to have a gauge to fill up when you’re resting or repairing so it’s more obvious how much time it’s going to take.

I thought the yellow dots were enemies on the radar so I avoided them, didn’t realize until later that the histogram around the radar is what gives away enemies.

It’s cool that you can really spread out the map with the procgen, though it does stutter sometimes when moving around. Having it actually match up with the map is also useful, though it doesn’t always help much with those overpasses as I had a couple that were pretty useless.

It’s neat, you kept me driving around for half an hour or so while I listened to some music.

EDIT: Worked fine on Linux over wine.

I definitely don’t play a lot of shmups but I can confidently say my failure to last longer than a minute is purely a skill issue. The incoming bullets are all nice and distinct, the art style looks neat and the game runs fine over wine. I’m a little iffy on the glow used to show selection in the menus, it stands out a lot as non-pixelated compared to the rest of the game. It also took me a sec to realize I had to use ZXC controls, but that’s probably normal in this genre.

A solid and pretty game for only a couple weeks’ work, good job.

I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to submit for this one, there’s isn’t much new to see. I did however finish the AI overhaul and redesigned the HUD to make it easier to add new stuff. Railgun/Sniper is currently being textured so that will definitely be in the next demo day.

I don’t have anything in mind for the spike, the rocket launcher already alt-fires the rockets as grenades which do extra damage but bounce around unpredictably

Darkness has been the most consistent complaint I’ve gotten, the lighting changes a lot on different monitors. In the current demo I did add a flashlight, though it can give your position away to enemies who otherwise haven’t seen you yet.

Thanks for trying it! It’s been a long time but it’s coming together.

I’m in the middle of an optimization pass on the AI to allow for a significant increase in the enemy count which should make the encounters in later levels ramp up. I will be adding some difficulty options later that can limit ammo and health pickups as well.

I can justify it on two counts: 1 - I’m looking for any possible excuse to cut things out of scope, and I wouldn’t want to do quick melee without proper animations. 2 - Even integrated into her arm, she still has to pull it back to throw a punch. Changing weapons represents having to commit to that. There’d be this annoying delay every time you hit the quick melee button, whereas in the melee stance it’s near instant.

My only gripe is that the scope on the SMG feels a little pointless with that recoil.

It’s really intended to give you an option before you get the railgun which will be the dedicated sniper weapon.

It’s effective, but feels a little cheesy.

There’s only a couple right now, but I intend to have some enemies that hold their ground and wait for you, especially on unreachable ledges.

Also, I feel strangely compelled to play Cosmic Call.

…no comment

Initially I didn’t plan on having any, but in my own playtesting I always catch myself sneaking up to do melee kills and I’ve had other agdgers say they do the same. It is intended to be viable, but there will be ambushes and encounters where the enemies spot you immediately, particularly at close range. Which does mean it will be situational rather than consistently useful. You’ve raised a good point, I’ll have to ruminate on this for a while.

One issue I found was that if I went up the stairs at certain angles (diagonal? against the wall?) my movement would go jagged where it was seemingly getting caught on the steps?

One of a never ending list of corner cases. Never ever use Bullet!

Are you getting this high? Less?

Nowhere near that high, about as much as just jumping normally off of the lip

Hell of a unique shader, makes a rather plain walking simulator a bit more interesting.

I couldn’t get the shrimp in the bikini bottom zone, the macaroni tube didn’t shoot me nearly high enough. Assuming that was the intended way to do it, the velocity boost might be framerate dependent or something. The game was using up way more CPU than it probably should have and I use a 144Hz monitor so anything framerate dependent would be screwed up by that.

Edit: was playing on linux with proton, other than the shrimp problem everything looked fine.

The game overall reminds me a lot of Oni for some reason. Like Oni if it were made into an FPS. That’s a very good feeling to be giving me.

I’ve been meaning to try Oni, I still haven’t played it. The visual style is definitely similar to what I’m going for so I’m happy to hear it’s working.

I found the first enemy type to be kind of odd, though. I assume they’re going to be changed, but the amount of time they spend in their ‘huh?’ phase seems too long to me.

Some of them have an “ambush” flag set and they respond much faster because they skip this cautious phase. At the moment the phase goes for a fixed time which does look silly up close. I’m thinking of making it based on a detection meter like the standard ubisoft game style (the meter won’t actually be shown to the player) so that the spotting time is dependent on how far away you are.

That may just be over-complicating it though, reducing the caution time to half a second might work better.

I was vaguely disappointed that falling glass doesn’t hurt you

I know, I really wanted to add this but because they’re driven using Bullet itself rather than me tracing them through the level, there’s no straightforward way to detect particular hits. Otherwise I would’ve had this in ages ago. The cactuses do poke you if you run into them though! That one was much simpler to set up.

I only found a single secret, and while it doesn’t bother me, I wonder if it’s something to do with how the secrets are laid out.

That one with the broken wall is definitely the most obvious one, I don’t actually know if anyone has found any of the others at all. Many require you to crouch at the peak of a jump or blast-jump with the shotgun alt-fire to reach.

They look like professional types, but sound like street toughs.

lol, this is intentional for lore reasons. The bad guys are a rogue mercenary unit that took over the island without meeting any resistance. So while they are well equipped, they lack discipline and have their guard down expecting this to be a big milk run.

I need to come up with a way to actually present this in game somehow. After seeing the codec calls in your game I’m considering something similar.

Still, I found the AI in general pretty easy to deal with, and noticed them acting a little stupid. Dumb choices at times

It might not be the best idea but I’m going for a quantity over quality approach with the encounters so I don’t want individual enemies to be super competent when the plan is to build up to fighting 10-20 of them at the same time.

The mechs in Downtown got stuck on roof overhangs twice.

They’re still using the old AI, only the regular goons actually use the navmesh this time around. I should have everybody switched over in time for the next demo day though. The mechs actually get a second, dedicated navmesh for larger enemies just like how Quake had a separate BSP tree for the Shamblers

The recoil on the bazooka is great. I used the Lockon Missile a lot more this time around, I remember it being really unclear how it worked before while now it’s Streak SRMs in MechWarrior where it gives you the lock tone immediately, really good.

Pretty much everything still needs a layer of polish, but some things that stood out this time:

• The really sudden freeze upon completing the level or dying
• There’s no way to skip through dialog, either in-game or the cutscene
• The enemy snipers should probably have some sort of tell that they’re about to fire
• The directional damage indicator doesn’t seem very reliable, I was losing huge chunks of HP from the little spider dudes and it was making me look up to the side instead of down beneath me.

I think I mentioned this on the discord but now that you’ve got the rotation on the gatling gun, the other weapons need some sort of cooldown indicator. In the short term you can just have a little transparent gauge show up beside the crosshair for the weapon on that side which flashes or just disappears once the weapon is ready. Along with some sort of charging or mechanical sfx this would be fine. The really classy way would be to have some sort of over the top pumping animation on the weapon itself on top of the above.

My favorite secret so far:

Something seems busted with the lighting on the Linux build, it’s way darker than the screenshots and changes not only as you move but even as you look around. The default volume also seemed to start on overmax and after turning it down I couldn’t turn it as far up as it had been.

I ended up just playing the windows build using proton, the mouselook wasn’t as smooth but the lighting worked correctly. I’m assuming Unity’s Linux export is doing something wrong.

The midi guitar really gets my Doom-brain going. The snappy recoil on the shotgun makes it immediately more satisfying to use than before. The Dorito pope enemies are really cool, all the new textures and sprites are looking great. The new level’s layout is like a lost Quake map, it’s great.

I think I missed only one secret. I found a machingun, the peeping tom room, and the nugg

Lots of excellent progress on this one.

It seems a lot more challenging than last time, in particular you seem really dependent on the slomo now and pretty much need to have it turned on every time you round a corner. I’m not sure if that’s a good way to do it, considering the main mechanic is building up slomo juice you reach a point where you’re just using it all the time. At that point I’m questioning why you wouldn’t just have the agility benefits of slomo as a default. I say this because I’m comparing to playing FEAR which I usually play on hard without using the slomo at all and the difference in your game seems much more prominent.

I swear you used to be able to powerslide because I remember having way more mobility the last time I played. Now if you don’t focus down on shooting someone if they’re in the same room you’re pretty much dead.

You can hear Fate’s VA stifling a laugh after she says “maintenance closet”, lol

I kept going back and looking for the starting gun, not realizing you pull it back out if you drop your current weapon. That’s probably on me.

You need to put in walls extending down and possibly up outside the level. Also, definitely need to make the outside glass breakable, just be careful of physics costs. It may make more sense to just do it with mostly particles.

In canals, I wish that when the advertisements are shot, they would be shorted out. Maybe this is going too far, but maybe they could even make a small shock explosion, kind of like a light weight red barrel.

I really want to do this too, but at the moment I can draw all of them at once in a single draw call and splitting them up into destroyable statics will likely require extra optimization. It is on my to-do list but as a “nice to have” rather than a “need to have”.

I realize that the mecha shots are so wide that I can just stand between the guns and never get shot… intentional? I kind of like, it’s funny. Suppose it’s worse than just strafing around, especially when other enemies are around.

As I’m aiming for other enemies to be the main source of difficulty I’m thinking I will leave it be. I do have a separate code path that fixes it, but I’ll see how it goes in the later levels.

I didn’t get a you’re dead screen, but at least I can open the menu and exit that way.

There’s no timer for the death screen, it will only show up if you left click. I should make it so Escape puts you in the death screen too though, I don’t think it does.

Like last time I just spend the entire time in Sights view, it would be good if the C for free look toggle would work in that mode too as it is much easier to use. Though it does mean you end up either circle strafing or long range sniping. The camera orientation also really needs smoothing on gradient changes, it’s way too sharp right now.

On the second level I could easily snipe all the buildings and the tanks in the second base with the 47mm from a great distance and they wouldn’t react. Probably if a shell lands near them they should become active and at least try to evade.

I tried the second level with the crunchsader and got worn down by bullets. The APHE shells do a lot less damage which makes sense for a smaller gun but their little baby firing arc also means you have to charge in super aggressively to get into range (I believe the real crusaders had to do that too, lol).

I really like the repair mechanic, its nice and simple without resorting to a health bar, and having to do the minigame is really tense when you’ve still got cannons shooting at you.

Having this be a web game kind of puts me off of it, but I suppose it is still just a prototype. The main problem is that it means the mouse sensitivity is crazy high.

There’s no spin up sound for the miniguns which made me think they didn’t work at first.

Your textures look good. Crunchy, grimy industrial is a timeless look. Though the comic skittering of the mech’s legs do undercut the tone. Either embrace the goofiness or maybe make the legs slower or something if you want it to be more serious.

I was keen to try it out but over proton the post-processing freaks the fuck out and slows the framerate to under 20fps. The menu works fine, and the spyglass greatly improves the framerate though it doesn’t fix the bloom. Screencap for reference:

I did try playing it a little bit and the controls seem very intuitive, I’m sure I would’ve had an easier time if it wasn’t lagging so badly. I couldn’t tell if there were any mechanics for wind? And I assume there will be some sort of islands at some point in the future?

Not sure if you’re taking it this way, so consider it a big scope jump, but this would be a very solid foundation for an open-world game like Endless Sky, just Caribbean themed. I think that’s what Sid Meier’s Pirates is supposed to be but I’ve never played it.

I don’t know what I just played. I do want to know more though.

Attacks don’t seem to have any feedback, I don’t think I could attack at all and the only way to see that I’d taken damage was to check the inventory.

Worked on Linux with proton, my controller worked as well. Grateful that “tank controls” didn’t apply to the controller.