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Thanks for playing!

That'd be great.  You can find the saves at:

Users\{user}\AppData\LocalLow\Zorch43\Deep Forces\Saves

Thanks for playing!

The base UI could use some improvements: Right clicking on a portrait on the living quarters hides the panel on the bottom left, double clicking does nothing. Maybe you could change it so you open the unit panel with right click and double click to select them for a mission. Also events should appear in a log somewhere.

I absolutely agree.  These are good suggestions. 

There's still that old bug where hovering over an enemy disables your hotkeys.
I had a bug after beating a mission with a dead lord where upon returning to the base I couldn't research anything, recruit anyone, the buttons did nothing and scanning did nothing:

I'll take a look, see if I can't figure out what's going wrong (the second one particularly).

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

What's New:

• Implemented Augment skills - passive abilities that improve the capability of a unit's active abilities.
• Added 4 new defensive abilities.
• Added 7 new offensive abilities.
• Every ability has 2 applicable Augment skills.
• Reworked unit generation rules.
• Nerfed the first boss mission.
• Increased the encounter and learning speeds.

Thanks for playing, and thanks for the feedback!

Into the Breach feels binary, like chess puzzles: Either you solve a round, or you don't. Xcom (and Deep Forces, it seems) is a numbers game: You maximize resource gain vs losses taken, so you can invest into more impressive weaponry, to snowball into even better numbers outcomes in future levels.

Personally I don't see a fundamental difference. ItB also requires you minimize losses and maximize gains so that you can equip more impressive weaponry.  You are right that ItB is much more all-or-nothing, as there is always the looming threat of permadeath game-over.

May be interesting also to keep the ItB combat, but make the levels larger, closer to Xcom.

It's an attractive idea, but I'd like to keep the action to what can fit on a single screen, and I've always been annoyed by the need to have units walk long distances to get to the action.  At best I might add multi-stage, multi-map battles.

Another thing. I noticed that usually the first round was clearly the hardest. Maybe it could be alleviated by making you assign your team members to spots after enemy movement

Interesting idea.  I'll experiment with that.

Encountered one bug, where dragging a unit with 0XP into training got me stuck in the dialogue, unable to choose a skill to learn and also unable to cancel

Thanks for the catch.  I'll look into that.

Thanks for playing!

Yeah, limiting your options is essentially their entire point, and so long as there aren't too many of them at the same time, they should be priority targets, but manageable threats.

Thanks for Playing!  Thanks for the catch.

Notes:

• Cursor is displayed behind UI elements.
• No way to quit/restart if you fail the mission, and no way to restart without quitting.
• (I assume) terrain height is key for positioning and line of sight, and it's just really not clear given terrain shading, and without a line-of-sight indicator outside of debugging tool.
• Mission is pretty difficult.  2 minutes to move ahead of the convoy is not very much when your units are so slow compared to the logistics trucks, even on roads, and when on the roads, you're vulnerable to ambushes from an elevated position.
• I dislike that recon vehicles are completely unarmed.
• Undetected units' particle effects (dust from moving) are still visible outside of detection range.

Bug: around half of the time, whenever I load a save (loading into the overworld), a blank gray screen with background sound is displayed, and I have to force-quit.

Minor issue: in the opening tutorial, if the player skips past the opening dialog, the box highlighting the frontline just floats in the middle of the screen until the scene pans down far enough for the frontline to appear.  This issue also popped up during the overwatch tutorial, as the frontline had advanced, thus the highlight box was below the overwatch label instead of around it.

Combat issues:

• It may be that I don't understand some vital part of the combat system (I mean, nobody else is mentioning it, so...), but the first mission beyond the tutorial is really hard.  You get two units to the enemy's three, and both of your units are pathetically weak compared to the agents in the tutorial.  Made can only attack (weakly)  by retreating, and Masieu takes 2 AP to perform his basic attack, which does a whole 1 damage and never actually seems to apply bleeding, which means his second, theoretically more effective attack, is useless.  I eventually won by ganging up on the two raiders on the right first (Made doing all of the damage), then moving Made into the empty left sector to kill the last raider.
• Contrary to the tutorial's explanation, flanking from unopposed sectors doesn't seem to inflict stun, outside of the tutorial mission.  Or I misunderstood what flanking does.
• Getting wiped out doesn't end the combat encounter. (Yeah, I know combat can be skipped)
• Are there supposed to be any combat encounters after reaching the nomads?  All I got were maps with 3 empty sectors, and no opportunity to place units.

Combat suggestions:

• When a unit is deployed, some skill should be selected by default, OR the player should have the option to deselect skills, if you want a unit doing nothing to be a valid option.  This tripped me up first time playing the tutorial, as I didn't select a skill for the agent in the left sector, and subsequently got massacred.
• Restricting movement between sectors by simultaneously limiting it to once per turn and stunning the moved unit feels far too restrictive.  It means that if you end up with an empty/understrength sector opposing a significant threat, you're pretty much screwed.  Maybe that's okay if you want to emphasize the importance of smart deployment, and/or if you give the player more units to place, but it also means you can't spring mid-combat surprises on the player without unjustly screwing them.
• Something should happen when the players and enemy units are in mutually unopposed sectors.  Having them mutually flank each-other is silly, nonsensical, and doesn't move the battle towards resolution.

Thanks for Playing!

No idea what could have caused the errant submerge effect, but I'll keep an eye open.

There really isn't much of an upside to bringing more units to a battle.  Not no upside - each unit that survives the battle gets experience regardless of whether they did anything,  but this is definitely something I'm mulling over.  A couple of options that I'm toying with:

• Disabling enemies - Adding enemies  that disable your units as an instant effect.  Bringing fewer units then means risking that a significant portion of your options for the turn are disabled.  These are getting added regardless, the question is how hard to go with these.
• High Risk/High Reward - Bringing more units is tactically disadvantageous, but strategically rewarding.  Same idea as the mission exp already present.
• Options are Power - Adding powerful abilities  with limited uses. The idea being that units with these abilities are powerful enough to justify expanding the size of the squad, while the limited number of uses means that it's risky to use too many of them in smaller squads.
• Alternating Activation  - A unit that acted last turn can't act this turn (or is otherwise limited in when/how frequently it can act).  Smaller squads become far less flexible, but it's one more thing to keep track of.

I'm not sure how much of this is supposed to be functional, but:

• First issue: the game is windowed, and the window is larger my monitor's screen (1440x900 & 1600x900).  I can still see the entire window by dragging the window across my screens, but it's a pain.
• Why  is the only method to control the character via clicking directional buttons with the mouse?  Really clunky.

What's new:

• Added a scripted tutorial mission that should hopefully ease you into the basics of combat and the strategy layer.
• Added more types of missions with more varied mission objectives, and mechanically implemented rewards.
• Every 30 days, you will meet with your governing council, which will allow you to cash in your favor with them for supplies and new units.
• A boss fight is scheduled for a week before the end of the month.  The council meeting after that should be considered the end of the demo, though you can still play random missions after that if you'd like.
• Maps are now generated with a natural border that units can be pushed against/into.
• Added an options menu.  Sound volume and keybinds can be changed here.
• Enemies have slightly better AI and spawning behavior with respects to splash damage.

Thanks for playing, and thank you for the detailed feedback!

the background could be a little more dynamic, or fitting, I just found the red bubbling to be a weak option for background elements, especially considering how much of the screen it takes up

I'll see what I can cook up.

Please try to get the contextual selection while saving to automatically select the text entry box.

Will do.  Thanks for this, I would probably never felt the need for this if someone didn't point it out.

I wasn't convinced I was making tangible progress despite getting experience points. I tried researching a few times but didn't seem to get anywhere with a lot of results grayed out.

Hmm.  So here's what's probably happening, and this is on me for not explaining things:

• You can open a unit's detailed status panel by selecting them, then clicking on their portrait.  I now realize the only place I've mentioned this functionality is in passing in my  update notes, and there's no indication that this would do anything otherwise. Whoops.
• Here, you can view what abilities the unit has, how much experience it has, and how many open passive slots they have.
• You can view a unit's trainable skills (they may not have any if they started out with good abilities) by opening their inventory.
• Mastering a skill in the training yard costs 100 exp per skill star, and lasts 6 days per skill star.  Once training is complete, the skill can be dragged to a valid slot from the unit's inventory to equip it.
• The Skill Discovery task, once complete,  will add new skills to the unit's inventory.

I saw three mission types. If there are more please let me know, I'd loop back for them.

Yeah, there are currently only three mission types, though really they're only permutations of the three mission objectives I've implemented.

Also, are you planning to have resources and crew recruitment, or is it in and I missed it? Not sure, a lot o options are grayed.

Planning to implement resources, recruitment, and the rest of the game's skeleton next Demo Day.  Probably won't be many options when I get there, but the framework for content will be there.

Thanks again for playing!

Thanks for playing!  Glad to hear I'm on the right track.

Thanks for the new build, I can see the whole screen now.  Here's a log of all the times the game crashed:

• Aggroed the skeletons, ended up using a fireball at point-blank range, reduced self to 0 hp before the game crashed.
• Fighting the wolf (it drops a wolf hide at least, the sprite looks like more like a moose), was getting my butt kicked, game crashed after using my third potion (I may have died here, not sure).
• Defeated the wolf and the boar, returned to the ship, game crashed after I clicked the Complete Mission button. (This happened twice)

Now that I've "completed" the first mission, some thoughts:

• I'd prefer that the inventory window was attached to the camera rather than the unit.  Or at least, I'd prefer to never have to move the camera to view the entire inventory window.
• Dunno how this would work out when there are more party members, but I'd like a notification for when equipment runs out of durability or a tome runs out of magic, as opposed to checking equipment after each fight.

I didn't get very far.

The first problem I encountered was that my monitor's resolution (native 1440 x 900) was too small to display the entire screen.  I managed to partially fix that by setting my resolution to 1920 x 1080, and even that wasn't quite large enough (cut off the bottom of the mission description, and could only see part of the formation command panel), but it was enough to start the game.

The other problem was that the game would keep crashing.  I'm not sure what caused the crashes, though I was always in combat when a crash occurred.

Moving on from bugs, I found it mildly irritating that the prince would rush enemies to attack them, even right after I had given an order.  Having melee units move to engage the enemy on their own is great, but only if they were idle beforehand.  Ordering the prince to move, only for him to charge the nearest enemy right after I give an order, repeatedly, is annoying.

What's new:

• Added selectable difficulty settings when starting a new game.  To play at the previous version's difficulty, select 'Brutal'.
• Battle difficulty will slowly escalate as time passes.
• Added a bunch of Passive and Aura skills.
• Units will now gain experience during battle
• Units can spend experience and time in the training yard to master or discover skills.
• Skills can be viewed and managed in the advanced unit status panel, which is opened by selecting the unit, and then clicking on their portrait.
• Scanning is now continuous: Scan will continue until something happens, or scanning is paused.
• Updated and modularized the UI.
• Reworked the functionality of the  Save menu to make it easier to use.
• Normalized the loudness of the background music.

What's not:

This is still an incomplete game.  There are no victory or loss conditions, there are only a couple of mission objectives, and the rewards or penalties for those are not implemented.

Please add a way to exit the game beyond ctrl-alt-del.

Bugs:

- The particle effect that probably goes with the sheathe appears like a foot behind where it should go.

- Also seeing some crazy camera drift as a result of the game thinking I'm pulling down on the right analog stick. I'm not experiencing this on any other game I play with a controller, but it might still be just me.  Maybe my controller does have issues, but other games aren't as sensitive? I dunno.

- It's possible to use fallback to clip through certain objects and fall out of the map.  I managed it a couple times with the blue stairs.

As far as the character controller - seems pretty functional.  The camera definitely needs some work, particularly when the player is going up stairs.  Being able to pick up and discard objects works great, though I'm not sure you want to make it that easy to just yeet your shield (or if you do want to make it that easy, make it so that you can aim whatever you're throwing).

Cute.  The core gameplay is good, but it ended up feeling repetitive by the end of the dungeon, even with how short it was.  I figure that more skills/gear/enemy variety will fix this over the course of the full game,  but you may want to consider granting the player a new skill in the last third of the dungeon to play with, or something.

Not really much to comment on here, but I'll give it a shot.

- Since I didn't fully read your comment, six copies of the player model appearing in the center of the room really took me off guard.  Hilarious.

- As you refine the combat system, I recommend not allowing enemies to consistently get their attack off before the player can act.  This scenario played out a couple times:  I'd walk in a circle, fighting random encounters, (as one does), my health steadily depleting, then I'd suddenly get kicked out to the main menu because an encounter started, and a rat attacked me immediately.

- I can't put my finger on it, but the walk animation looks off somehow.  Too slow? not enough hand movement?  I dunno, looks lifeless.

- What the hell is up with the 'fi' in the font you're using?

Cool and atmospheric environment, sluggish movement and combat.

Played up to getting the double-jump module, ran away from the spawned miniboss after dying to it a couple times, then couldn't figure out how to proceed.

Regular movement is too slow, I wanted to sprint everywhere.  On that note, sprinting works strangely:

- While moving, once I start sprinting, I can release the shift key, and keep sprinting.  

- This makes sprinting seem like a toggle, which would be nice, except as soon as I jump or change direction, I stop sprinting.

The dash and aerial attacks don't work how I expect (read: want) them to work:

- What I expect from aerial attack: jump up, then crash down, damaging anything below or in front of me.

- What I get: Bounce off the helicopter enemy, then flop onto the ground.

-What I expect from the dash attack: dash forward, damaging the enemy in front of me.

- What I get: Accidentally activate the dash attack (because I'm sprinting everywhere) as I try to attack the enemy in front of me, charge into, then smack face-first into it, without (apparently) attacking or damaging it.

On Modules and parts:

- What Modules are when first picking one up is poorly communicated.

- Bug: Clicking the [x] button after installing a module to a location, without installing a part doesn't do anything.

- Bug: Removing a module from a location with a part still in it makes the part vanish.  The module can be added to another location, but the part doesn't appear in either the module or the inventory.

- I tried adding the Module + Explode to On Receive Damage and On Jump locations.  No apparent effect.  NBD, probably not implemented yet.

- From a design standpoint, I don't really like having both modules and parts being freely equipable/unequippable.  Either you install the module permanently, and can switch out parts (if you do this, I suggest making modules have fewer slots, and having the ability to install multiple modules per location), or parts are permanently affixed to modules, but the modules can be swapped in and out of your locations.

Overall, a good amount of content for a prototype, a good aesthetic, but the core gameplay needs refinement.

You are standing in the child.

Pretty cool, love the concept and gameplay.  Played through everything.  One change that this desperately needs is to make the cards in hand a consistent size - when I only have a few cards in hand, the cards get stupidly huge.

Pretty fun. I played a round with the Scorcherer and Light Knight against bots.

I'd like a quick rundown on class abilities somewhere on the character selection screen.

My monitor resolution is 1440 x 900.

This is a pretty neat concept with interesting execution.  Took me a while to figure what I was supposed to be doing (exacerbated by not setting my resolution in the settings like a dummy), and longer to start doing it smart.

Bug: When I first started the game with the resolution too high, the locations of buttons and their interactable areas were disjointed - the interactable areas were where the buttons would be if I had set my resolution correctly.  It was pretty weird.

Fun, but currently pretty shallow.

I like running around on a tiny planet and punching dudes, and that's implemented well.  I look forward to having more varied enemies with more diverse attack patterns.

Janky, but fun.  I liked that each enemy seems to have a quick combo that takes them out, kind of like an organic QTE finisher system.

Getting launched into the stands by Maxotaur was funny a couple of times, but really, the arena force-field should go up higher or something.

I'd just like to preface this comment by saying that I am terrible at this game.  I found getting the timing right to hit the ball even with basic moves took some practice, and consistently activating diagonal moves was challenging.

That said, this looks pretty cool, I like the concept, and I'd like to see it played by skilled players.  If you were inclined to raise the skill floor at all, you might consider shortening the attack wind-up.

A few random issues: 

• The word tutorials page title gets close to getting cut off by the edge of the screen. 
• Seems to be some issue with the screen size, as there's a large black area on the right side of the window.
• I don't know what I have to do to complete the dash cancelling tutorial.
• The "Super attacks" tutorial doesn't get greyed out after completing it.

• I kinda like the doodle aesthetic.  Really leans into the Pokemon-but-grungy feel.
• I'm not completely sold on the auto-battler thing.  Just having everything play out is fine when you win (even if you get chewed up in the process), but feeling helpless while you lose sucks.  Maybe I just need to git gud.
• Evolving  is pretty weaksauce.  Doesn't necessarily mean you need to change the mechanic, might just need to adjust expectations by calling it something else.  Also, the evolution effect doesn't quite fit in the stat box.

Pretty fun.  One change I'd like to see is to be able reply to a post by dropping the reply post on the parent post (or something similar).  It's kind of a pain to: 1: click the reply button 2: place your reply post 3: unclick the reply button so you don't reply with your next post when you don't need to.

3rd for nice little puzzle game.  Nice variation on the classic block-pushing puzzles.

• Cool Artstyle - Looks especially great for the portraits.
• The letter-looting mechanic seems to not do anything as of yet.  Which is fine, just confusing for the demo.
• I have no idea what's going on during battles, but if it's random, and I have no way to change the outcome, that's fine, as it does look cool.
• Both Jack and the monster whiffing their rolls on the first turn, and then combat ending feels bad.
• Having minesweeper as the recovery minigame is bizarre, absent deeper association with the rest of the game's mechanics.

• Fun puzzles - I liked how you layered on puzzle mechanics as I progressed, and I liked how the harder puzzles made me feel smart for beating them.
• Endearingly shitty Soulful artstyle - I liked the fairies' smug expressions and gimpy limbs, and I loved the cute tutorial illustrations.

One nitpicky suggestion: I'd like an indication on the world map when a level is a bonus level, or if the level is the last level in a world.  It kinda annoyed me when it turned out the branch I chose to follow led to the end of world 2, and I was presented with my end-of-game stats without having tried the bonus level.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, Rally only affects units once they die and respawn, and currently it's only possible to select living units.  I'm planning on allowing the selection of respawning units for the purpose of setting their rally point (and later-on, changing their class), and I suppose I could make Rally double as a move order for units in the spawn zone.

Clicking and dragging on the minimap to quickly pan is a good idea, I'll be sure to add that to the next major version.

I'll check out the bug on Tempest, thanks for the heads-up.

Edit: Bug fixed in newest version.