Ok, thanks for the feedback!
Tellyandrew
Creator of
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Thanks! Jimmy made the bankers
Nope, there's no rotate button, I wanted the direction you build out your sewer to have strategic implications (i.e building south east will give you less room for rat pits and north west will give you less room for armouries); I also wanted players to have to think about leaving connection points open for future rounds, so they would have to do some long term planning in order to let them keep scaling their sewer efficiently.
Hey, thanks so much for the high praise!
Yeah the off-centring thing is because this is my first html5 port and I only tested fullscreen in gx.wasm and windows; now I know for next time!
I used Gamemaker engine because that's what I'm used to, but the faux 3d stuff can be done in any engine. I made a tutorial last year on the Gamemaker subreddit, because I also wrote a isometric game last year for the GMTK game jam (it's also a bit closer scale to Into The Breach). But with more experience I don't think the methods I used in that tutorial are very good (This game would run at like 1fps if I used the same method from my tutorial); the maths and basic concept is still alright though, it's just that the implementation details are very questionable.
The route we used in this game was to just draw every chunk from the back to the front, adjusting their x and y position on the screen using their virtual x, y, & z positions (their real in-game coordinates) using some maths. Before the draw step, we just added every entity to a priority queue that each chunk owned with their priority based on how close to the camera they were, during the draw step for every chunk, we just draw the entities in that chunk based on their priority. Here's a pastebin link for the draw stuff in GML (beware, it's very messy because it was obviously written in a short amount of time for the game jam).
This is not a good long term solution if you're making a non-jam game, because it meant that we had to draw the rooms and then manually set define where the ground, water, and walls are in code. Rats also have small clipping errors when they're at the borders of chunks because of this. I would probably recommend (with like low-middle level confidence/conviction) making your game with a real, 3d, orthographic camera (with a fixed 45° pitch & yaw) and then bill-board the sprites in that 3d space if you're planning on doing a long-term project. I just wrote it this way because real 3d would have taken too long to set up in the short-term in Gamemaker.
Ah, yep that would do it. The game only checks serially if the instructions are complete, so if you moved it before the text popped up it wouldn't have been recorded. And yeah, I should have probably disabled that message. Thanks for letting me know, I've been trying to improve the onboarding for my games over the past year and feedback like this is the only way I improve
THIS IS SUCH A COOL CONCEPT! I wish you had leaned more into the puzzle solving aspect with the rescaling, I felt like the platforming bits didn't really gain much from the mechanic, whereas the puzzles (like dropping a platform out of the small world to make a path for yourself) were super interesting. Also title screen is a vibe, I just sat there for a minute listening to the music before I went through the door.
Thanks, I appreciate it! I might polish up a few things code-wise and release an updated version after the jam (but probably no new content). However, I've another isometric rat strategy game (different from this one, I just have rats on the mind) in the planning phase right now for a long term project after I release my other game, Dead Oculus, on Steam.
Thanks for the feedback! Setting up the fake 3D stuff in Gamemaker took longer than I would have liked, but I think it paid off in end. I appreciate that you like my art-style!
I agree with your critiques, the game certainly has some issues with communicating to the player. -- I think a free dummy timer/delay troop might have been a more elegant/self-explanitory solution to letting players split up waves (assuming I also coupled that with better communication of the abilities).
Thanks again!
Thanks, I really appreciate the feedback!
I hear you, I wish I had time to add some indicators or a tutorial, although there's some info on the potions in the game's itch description.
If you want to give the game a second shot, here's a longer description of the potions:
- [R] Teleports the selected tower to a random location
- [T] Disables the selected tower for the round
- [Y] Gives your units a speed boost in the selection area
I really enjoyed the ATTACKWORLD's music variation, its unfortunate that most of the game takes place in the other dimension. The player controls a tad finicky due to the delay in hammer swings, but it does allow you to swing the hammer and fall off a platform to jump further, which feels really good. Interesting design conundrum.
Can the final platform only be reached by comboing a hammer swing and jump?