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Death Star online and fully operational!

Share the coolest ships you have built in the game or coolest battle screenshots.
Here's one of mine, infinity edge bugged in an awesome way:

Last line failed to dispay in red:

Got a chemical rocket thruster for the 100% movement speed bonus. Still ended up getting surrounded and killed because couldn't kill stuff fast enough but ye the movement felt fine imo. I couldn't tell if the chemical cloud worked though, didn't really seem to be damaging stuff behind me dunno.

Is there a way to rotate the connector pieces?

As for the ability cooldowns, it looks as if it resets in about a second but actually it's much longer so hard to judge when it will be up, end up just spam-clicking and inevitably missing often.

Edit: Oh I guess maybe it was something to do with the heating system? Still seems really unclear tho. Especially since the cooldowns and heating bar are on completely different sides of the screen, doesn't seem intuitive to have to consider both together.

I'm a big fan of roguelike games in general, and the shipbuilding aspect seems really cool.

I wasn't able to get further than wave 3 so far and I feel like I'm pretty bad at the game so just giving first impressions:

- So many numbers and text thrown at me in the upgrade menus, so I'm basically ignoring most of it, which I think is what most players should do at the start. I feel like the only two numbers I care about so far are the strength and energy use of weapons and I can figure out the rest later if it becomes relevant.

- Sure movement is a bit slow and clunky at the start of the game, but at this stage I'm expecting it might get better with thruster upgrades, don't know if that's the case. There's plenty of spaceship games with similar feeling controls I think. The one thing is that once you start adding lots of modules on it kinda makes it harder to tell which direction the ship is facing.

- Having a weak early game weapon but with manual targetting using the mouse cursor direction feels like it would make more sense at the start. The special skills don't trigger when I expect them to, either I can't tell properly when the cooldown is up, or it's not triggering properly, maybe I'm just being dumb though.

Anyways I'll try some more, hopefully it doesn't crash again. I think this game can be really fun and has plenty of potential.

Got this crash on my 4th restart when clicking retry.

Uh sure I suppose, I'm Morgenthau on discord, just joined the server.

Suggestion:

For the Apple game would it be feasible to have the pace of the game accelerate the longer you do not take any damage or would that cause lag or some other issue? Then it would revert to normal speed the moment you took any damage. So like faster spawnrate, faster apple drops, faster projectiles, faster timer depletion, until the first instance of damage taken.

Cause just holding left and mashing spacebar for the first 10 minutes till you get to a boss that requires any amount of dodging gets old after a while. And I don't think this is just exclusive to endgame, maybe it could be relatively balanced somewhere just above the "slimes time" or "boss bonus" upgrade or around there so it has some midgame impact.

Version 3.2 Highscores


About the same highscore as on previous version for rock digging at 42M. Should go a bit higher with floating upgrade now but I didn't try for too long.

Fishing game 20M, I didn't go as high in upgrades as before since I'm playing on "tougher enemies" mode so quite a bit lower highscore.

Apple game I'm maxed on Health upgrades and turret power and laser damage costs in the billions so that 37.1M score is pretty much where I'm capped at.

I guess on pacifist mode could get higher upgrades with the x10 passive income but don't feel like redoing everything on pacifist mode so these are my highscores for now.

Heh, I was on the 10M version for the new idle game, didn't know that was a bug, thought it was just the super-easy mode XD, hence the instant insane auto-buy ;) .

I mean ye, you're not wrong, it's most dramatically visible in the mining game where in my top 5 i'm getting x5 or x10 of my previous score every time because I've got a fairly good idea of the optimal order to get the upgrades in. And yeah for fishing as soon I unlock going deeper I'm pretty much gunning it for the very bottom.

With the apple game, the skill component would be just dodging everything to get further than you should, but that would still take a really long time, and frankly isn't feasible when the whole screen is filled with attacks. But no matter the skill you can't influence how fast you get through the game, you can't choose to fight the first 10 bosses at the same time to skip past the slow start once you've gotten stronger.

Idle fishing never uses the up or down buttons and sometimes goes into vibrate mode with left/right, its kinda funny, you weren't kidding about it playing "poorly".

The apple game by comparison plays practically optimally, dash on cooldown, bomb and laser only when boss appears, just not too good at dodging.

Loool, I tried idle mode, and tried the auto-buy upgrades feature, thought I was having a seizure for a second there lmao. By the way you can continuously keep clicking the auto-buy button, nothing much happens, just the counter x/infinite keeps going up.

Happy to help. To be honest I think I missed the point of the autobattles between the version where the game crashed and being near the end afterwards. I guess the idea was if you grind the mini-games too much without fighting to be able to speed through the fights without running around?

I, for some reason, initially thought it was more like a sort of endless mode with auto-generated enemy teams.

Bug:

Trying to do autobattles after beating the rest of the game softlocks the game. Get stuck in idle-animation standing next to the ghost, none of the buttons work.

I would say I spent at least 10x as much time on the apple game as on the others if not more.

I'll try going for some more upgrades and some highscores now.

And the team I beat last fight with:

Sure, just for reference, here's the scores and stats with which I beat the last fight of the game with (46 total talent points per character):

"Can’t wait to hear what you think about the new and improved apple game!"

It's absolute mayhem and I'm so here for it :D. The game has become a bit more whimsical and a lot of button mashing dash waves and I think that's a good thing.

Firing the giant laser is very satisfying, while being a bit risky trying to position under the bosses, bombs are usually the safer option.

At some point I stop keeping track of all the different turret effects but stuff goes pew pew, one of them even heals me (poor thing has to put in overtime XD) so it's all cool.

- It is still the game with the slowest income progression compared to the other two by a significant amount, perhaps the boss bonus scaling could be tweaked a bit. But overall I don't mind this discrepancy as much as in the previous version because the apple game has become more fun.

I still have quite a few upgrades left though, and I can see how the income will spike eventually with the health upgrades that will stop you from getting 1-shot by the later bosses.

- Had a fishing game where the red fish were not being converted while the red to blue to gold powerup was still active (red line at top of screen was still there). Maybe stopped working when a different power-up expired.

- Auto autobattles always gives me the endgame boss battle fight 5k difficulty, while i'm still at 2k power on my team, and havent unlocked the area with the bossfight yet, also I'm still at 0 wins since it didn't save when it crashed before. Dunno if this is a glitch from using the save of the other version. Or maybe cause I collected all the different heroes in the meantime?

Thanks, redownloaded, still had my save and was able to turn off autobattle.

Had the game crash during autobattle through the ghost guy to the left of start area when I pressed escape and then autobattle:on (I was trying to pause or exit out of the autobattle as it had gone on for 25 battles already XD).

Hey there again, been trying out the 0.32 version, still got a ways to go, loving the new stuff. Just wanted to ask whats the most convenient way to contact you for bug reports? Do you have a discord perhaps? (Might get a bit clunky here with screenshots I think).

Really happy I found this game. Highly recommend anyone who stumbles upon this page gives it a proper try. Devs are very active on discord as well.

So the game is quite janky and buggy for now but can still be fun once you get into it a bit. It is indeed quite grindy though. Fastest way to progress at start seems to be to spam fights against brown rats on the very first map in the fenced in area, mostly for the cat's fur which you need a lot of every 10 levels to level up further, and do the weekly quests which give enough XP to level straight to about level 30. After that next area for fast-ish farming is 1 zone right and 1 up (teleporter at top left of screen), enemies in the fenced in area as well there. Mage seems to be by far the easiest thanks to aoe and ranged attacks giving him initiative and more damage in every fight, while still being able to tank just fine once you get a few level ups. (To be fair though I haven't tried all the characters).

If you do get bored of pure grinding though the map is quite huge with a lot to explore and there are teleport keys that let you teleport anywhere, even the highest level areas without really taking risks (most enemies don't attack on their own but there are a few exeptions).

Most of the quest drops can be gotten from any enemy including those brown rats after you accept the quests, so you can just accept like 10 quests same time and then spam the fights.

When it comes to upgrading stats, you shouldn't try to min-max, mostly you either want to tailor them to the requirements to be able to equip the gear that you find or buy, or to the spells that you intend to learn which also have stat requirements.

The game can often get stuck on 99% or 100% loading when you first load your charcter, you might need to refresh once or twice to get it going.

Looking forward to playing some more once the major bugs get ironed out.

I take it the game was heavily inspired by the Kingdom series of games? Makes me think there was no room for this poor archer on the boat so they got left behind to fend off the Greed on their own after the king/queen left.

Gonna be honest I'm pretty trash at aiming the arrows properly XD took me a while to start hitting stuff but eventually got to 3 red dots at the top (12th wave I guess?) before getting completely overwhelmed.

Noob like me wouldn't mind an upgrade that gives at least a partial visual guide of the trajectory the arrow will take, but I totally understand if you don't want to take that direction cause it might make things too easy.

I stopped bothering with most of the active skills after some tries and mostly just relied on poison and burning passives to do most of the damage on the tankier enemies. I was hoping the explosion would do aoe damage but it seems like it only affects those enemies that are burning and it doesn't spread. Not really sure how to manage when there start to be a lot of enemies and the big guys make it tough to hit anything else around them.

There's probably a lot more enemies, upgrades and room to improve that I haven't seen but I played through a couple times, and the pacing is a bit too slow for quite a while at the start to make me want to try again.

But it's fairly fun for a little while, worth a try for sure and the aesthetic made me super nostalgic for the Kingdom games. Sorry for the wall of text. Hope you keep working on this.

Not too bad but you're not yet at the numbers where RNG is the difference maker :P other than for apples where its just about how many fancy fliers you get (I feel like getting more fireball damage and turret shots won't really improve the score past a point).

I played for a couple more days before stopping and improved quite a bit: 43.4M on digging, 31.6M on fishing 986k apples (gave up on breaking a million r.i.p.). That said I'm certain there's room for improvement still.

In the digging game I'm maxed out on useful upgrades, having more stamina doesn't matter since it's the bombs you need to not run out of to keep the multiplier going. First thing is to realize you have 23 moves to work with in between hitting multipliers not 12 by preparing a bomb in advance and detonating midway (not 24 since you cant use the last step of first multiplier). You also want to not take multipliers when you still have moves left and dig laterally first to bring you closer to your next target. So a lot of counting steps and running back and forth goes into it. I've never managed to get 100% of the multipliers in a game but that is the goal so I'm pretty much going from one end of the screen to the other and back again. 

With fishing I only went as far as level 14 upgrades on bomb explosion size which is the most impactful in the end (costs 33.6B) lv 13 on bomb and powerup frequency. This is the game where more upgrades will drastically improve score further but with how long it would take to get them I just decided to stop. My strategy for this one is just to bank 3 anti-red fish powerups then get a 4th one before I start actually chaining multipliers. So a lot of resetting to get 4 of that powerup early enough. After that you should be able to reach the bottom without losing the multiplier as long as you dont hook anything other than gold fish, just trying to hit the most bombs and some upgrades then finally grab the highest value fish which will reset the multiplier.

At my current scores I still feel there's room to get better at the games before RNG becomes the main variable in scores. To be fair I probably played more than you :P

Anyways I might play some more once someone beats or comes close to my scores or there's a new version but gonna let it rest for now. 

I realize this might be too tryhard and irrelevant for game progression, just bragging rights, but in case it does become relevant for future content I hope I gave some useful insights into what the games look like at the higher end. And if I just said obvious stuff then sorry for the wall of text XD.

Thanks for posting your scores btw. Love a dev that plays their own game!

The minigames can already get quite time consuming late-game and the infinite upgrades get prohibitively costly eventually, so i guess unlocking new minigames later on might be cool rather than making current ones longer. 

I thought of a couple minor qol suggestions for the apple game though they dont solve the income difference:

- Make spacebar alone dash in the last direction you pressed. A lot of the time I try to press arrow and space same time but it registers space first so just faceplant into bullets. Also would let you dash in tighter spaces. 

- Not have turrets be able to destroy the bad apples or at least not 1-shot.

I'm not sure about this one, maybe this was intentional to limit how long you can survive. The run- killer is usually not being able to replenish turrets cause existing ones destroy all the bad apples before they fall into dash range.

- Also there's no reward for beating any of the bosses and your income stops completely during boss fights, it feels even more punishing when you get a flyer just as the boss spawns. So maybe either a multiplier for each boss defeated or a lump sum apple bonus when the boss dies might be nice. (Early game I would intentionally leave when first boss spawned because it was such a huge time loss even if I could beat it).

Multiplier for kills in a row without getting hit and powerups sound awesome for sure!

I remember there used to be a few of those flash games where you launch a plane or a penguin or whatever with progressive upgrades. Maybe that might work as a minigame but with the witch on a broom. Though it looks like you already had some ideas, judging by some of the scenery, the axe seems to suggest a game to collect wood, and I see the same signs as on the current minigames next to the red tree and the ladder in the caves, so I'm guessing you don't really need suggestions for that.

Oh by the way, lategame when going for highscores in the digging game I remove the Super Special Potion upgrades as much as possible (still forced to get the first level to unlock multipliers), since most of the time they force you down making you miss multipliers that you could've reached otherwise and it can be hard to just avoid hitting them with bombs. Maybe some highscore hunters might find this tip useful. Similarly you want more red fish not less lategame in the fishing game so can set that upgrade back to lv 1. Don't think there's any trick like that for the apple game currently.

Looking forward to seeing future versions!

Obligatory highscore flex (would love to see what scores everyone else manages):

Hey there, created an account just to say I loved this game. Super satisfying when you start to snowball in the minigames like unlocking the depths in the fishing game and trying to reach the bottom straight away with barely any other upgrades, or when you finally can chain multipliers in the mining game.

First time around i bribed my way through all the exploration and kinda regretted it so ended up restarting to experience the combat system as well. So much room for trying different parties and builds, completely respeccing units for some fights. The copy-cat is so versatile and fun especially. Love that resetting is free and that you can speed up combat animations, and zooming around on the broom, just quality of life stuff that makes the game so much more fluid and encouraging for experimentation.

Bit sad that by the time you get the last few characters there's not much left to fight to test them out.

Are the bad apples in the apple minigame a Touhou reference by any chance, since it becomes a bullet hell game by the end basically?

Out of the three minigames I found myself having to rely on the passive income for the apple one the most and it felt like more of a tedious grind than the others. I don't know if this might need some slight balancing or I just happened to be worse at that game, maybe others had a different experience. The fishing one felt the most "speedrun-able".

Freeze effect seemed a bit disproportionatly good compared to the other effects since it negates threats but also lets all characters attack behind the frozen units, but it wasn't overbearing considering there were enemies immune to it. I think I used shock the least, cause burn did the job better most of the time for taking out big waves. No idea if bleed is any good was done with all the fights by the time I found bleedy. Not saying any of this needs changing just giving my impression.

Buffbuff seemed a bit difficult to use mostly because of how slow he is compared to all the other units, by the time he took a turn the fight was already decided mostly. I did use him to speed up the sisters' fight, but thats about it.

Oh almost forgot, anyone else got an issue with the window opening too far up and left when you launch the game from the exe file? Have to rightclick the preview from the taskbar icon -> move -> then bring it down with the arrow keys since the top bar to click and drag starts off-screen.

As others have said already, the depth of the gameplay is really impressive! Had a lot of fun.