itch.io

Available again. I noticed that beds mess up the pathfinder the most, particularly in the morning and evening. I've noticed colonists stuck on useable tiles like fireplaces or walking into walls (This is why I use doors more than walls). In one other case, I saw a colonist stuck walking into a tree, and another made its way up to a roof area and started pacing like it was in an infinite loop. Sorry if I made it sound like owls were too hard, I actually found them too obnoxious. I recommend looking into Minecraft phantoms, which suffer from the same problems. In particular, most of the owls' kills probably were byproducts of bugs or other things not controllable by the player, if not outright player stupidity. Currently, owls seem defeated by a floating roof. Optional combat or defense orientated nighttime events would probably be a substitute for why I wanted it kept (Padding the resource count/keeping a bed clear). Just a heads up though, blocking resource gathering/building outright at night may frustrate some. A system based on lighting conditions may be better. The simplest way is to expose the priorities to players in some ways. CDDA's base building system, Minecraft's village mechanics, and No Man's Sky's settlements would be good to look into for this as they feature very different approaches. Something I mentioned indirectly (and just now caught it was not directly), a configurable sandbox mode would be immensely useful to test the game properly.

Yes, I would not mind seeing this updated. I cannot respond to this properly right now and it will be several hours before I can.

I mentioned a different counter since sufficient bed and shelter can be unobtainable at times (Especially when you add 4+ settlers in one night), the bad pathfinder can invalidate the run for cover, and it simply feels like owls are too weak in their current form.  Corn would work well as a third food source, reducing the pressure on traps, which often eat into the building resources. I suggested disabling owls since it would allow me to move and do things freely at night, which would help significantly (Unless you are not supposed to gather resources and build things at night.). Danger should be telegraphed simply as a notice of who, how, why, and sometimes where. For references on threats, I recommend the Rebuild series and Hive Time (You easily could go down the semi-educational route Hive Time did).  No Man's Sky's settlements is a great reference for settlement management (Especially in 3D games like this) and Minecraft continues to be a good source of things done wrong and right for sandbox games. (Your owls resemble phantoms, which that community considers a nuisance). A few more things I remembered, I would be careful with linear progression in this game, since players may use it to optimize the fun out of the game. I recommend keeping stone and wood as separate upgrade trees, as a player who wants to switch from one material to another can replace the walls. This fixes another issue I noticed: upgrades lose resources. If you are willing to deal with a game with a complicated relationship with SFWness, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an excellent resource. That said, I would also be careful with open progression, as some players flounder when guidance and objectives are absent. While I do not know of something on balancing linear aspects, acgaudette (who is on itch) wrote several blog posts on balancing openness and sticking to your level of abstraction. Lastly, two things with construction. Firstly, built objects should not cost the full amount of resources until it is built. You should allow partial construction (The most common) or block construction until all resources are present. In addition, a proper planning mode would be very useful and help keep the settlers from bottlenecking on their auto buildings.

Notify me if you want me to put the suggestions on separate lines.

Definitely interested, as this is already very strong. I only have five right now, since I am struggling to keep the colony functional long enough for me to properly test the game. Firstly, a means to disable the owls would be useful. the option would provide more of a sandbox option. As for the owls themselves, I would recommend giving the player some means to counter them, or at least making the current form a random event. Similarly, colonist deaths should be better telegraphed. Currently, the only indicator is the owls screeching. Corn does nothing currently, which is costly to find out. Is it supposed to be another kind of food? Lastly, I still notice some pathfinding issues, notably with trees, anything above the ground level, and anything placed near beds. I will be eating shortly, so it may be some time before I respond again.

Edit: Added the feedback on owls. It is now the second recommendation out of five. (Sorry if I am too thorough.)

Seeing as the last comment was four years ago, are you still looking for feedback?

• Not what I expected for the blurriness, but it makes sense. Google is bad about that with textures, doing the same in slides, docs, spreadsheets, and most other programs in Drive. Firefox works well.
• I needed to merge my second and fourth points in the original post. The first instance where seamless tiling between two is desirable is with multi-tile doors. The image I put with red and black (I just realized how bad it was to include black) shows an ideal tiling (You can safely assume that multi-tile doors are rectangles split in half horizontally somehow). Elsewhere, it is more decorative than anything, though it allows a more complete auto tiling in Tiled.
• So you cannot increase the number in the palettes? 64 seems more logical to keep to a power-of-two scale.
• I covered that in my second above, but if you want to add some more decorative elements, you may wish to add chair, desk, wire, and electrical box-like decorations (distortion is fine). Possibly add enemy/player generation?
• The specific art style is meaningless if we can modify it. In my case, I wanted the ships to match the tiles generated.

A few more things:

• Is the blurriness fixable? I have seen it mask some issues and details in generated sprites
• Is there any possibility for generating transitions between two generated tilesets?
• Is there a reason the program accepts palettes with less than 50 colors?
• Is there a possibility to generate a door-orientated tilesheet? Something like below, with the top showing the tileset base and the bottom showing an example.

• Are you sure the ship generator would be useless? I could use it as a basic blueprint for level design, and I figure others could use it for placeholders.

Thanks. Yes, it does.

These probably should be explained in a help tab within the program.

Thanks. I got the larger of the two images set up properly in tiled. Getting the autotiles set up.

So, it is effectively a shadow sprite?

It throws me off when I attempt to clean the images in Piskel (which does not support tile padding).

I got a different sprite sheet working in tiled. May try the other tiles, though I noticed uneven spacing in one of the sheets.

Unfortunately, some tiles are even larger. On the first image, check the widths of the tiles. One of the corner tiles is 2 pixels larger than that.

I also noticed "outline in background" exports wrongly:

I noticed almost all of the outputs do not fit the grid and are larger than the option selected. I notice erratically sized blocks that throw the whole sprite sheet off. Below are examples.

Ok.

Currently, the name tab only shows. Is this intentional?

Thank you for looking into it.

Any Progress? You may wish to take the page down until you fix it.

Ok.

Are you still working on the server? It still seems down for me.

Ok.

Any progress?

Yes, they would be good additions, and I am aware of the gender issues. I also did not know about coloration rules, the heights might be off, and I copied the human's head to others simply because I did not know how you did it.

So the image in the post is the update?

I was talking about adding the versions humans do in the tileset to the other races. Yesterday I did a player base for all of the races and a few others.

Is the updated tileset the image? You did not update the tileset files on itch. Additionally, do you plan to expand the tileset to include fantasy races in the player and Modern tilesets?

You are welcome.

Some things to improve on:

• The combining characters are not aligned at all.
• I noticed some combinations of characters overlap. (‘Gotchas’ page in the Bulletproof Font Tester shows it directly)
• The quotation marks do not match the style at a distance.

Currently the itch app cannot install this as well.

I think it uses my Nvidia Geforce 1500. Which of my graphics cards is the dedicated graphics card is something I do not know.

Thank you, and your welcome.

I cannot see anything as it is covered with a flickering checker pattern.

I will leave this open for others to note.

I would like to report some more bugs in recent versions:

• The overlap capability is somewhat worse. At one point in an earlier update, I and several builders placed about 10 buildings in the same place, with many suffering from rotational glitches.
• The plane's AI should not do abrupt changes in direction. Subtle directional changes are more accurate and less powerful.
• As with the mech in earlier updates, the bomber can have too much control over the tide of a battle, turning the game into a bomber spawning war between the player and AIs.
• Builders do not stop building, even after winning a game or being told to idle. Additionally, they work on a separate resource pool. Forcing players and builders to work on the same resource pool will force more strategic usage.
• There is no way to coordinate builders strategically. This will allow for builders on both players and AI to create more strategically and will reduce the need for a hard limit on builders since the player will be responsible for crashes.
• Opening this program and the "Groove Music" music application that comes with windows simultaneously crashes both programs and causes flickering on the screen.
• Potentially setting up an AI tactic in Sandbox of limiting placed buildings to a certain distance away from enemies and pulling back when they push to that distance is another way to allow endless wars in Sandbox while allowing opportunities to optimize battles (Builders staying at base, only a small number going to the front lines).
• The store is completely broken.
• I notice there is a tendency on the picnic map for all AI to swarm the shed, even if a minimal benefit comes from swarming it and, in some circumstances, it is on the opposite side of the map.
• Sound also seems reversed for this game.

Fixed

It appears using any item crashes the game.

So, there is not much you can do?

This was the real issue. I was not familiar enough with typography to catch my mistake, so I assumed it was a problem with the program. If it gave a notice for why it did not render the font, I would not report it as an error.

Whenever your settings cause errors, the program does not notify you. This makes troubleshooting problems harder and tends to cause false-alarms from people unfamiliar with typography. I noticed you also track duplicate characters. That also will help with large character sets that checking each character individually is not worth doing.