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Signals

Signals is a casual planet hopper strategy game. Explore systems, harvest resources and repair alien devices. · By MKDBStudio

Feedback for Signals Demo

A topic by Jotok created Sep 23, 2021 Views: 215 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 4

Greetings.

I see the demo was just posted yesterday, so you might want some comments.  I was able to play the demo through to the end, which is good.  I did not encounter any major bugs, which is good.  The demo ran in Wine, which is good, though if you do a Linux build you might send it to GamingOnLinux whose editor seems to love games like this and would probably write an article.

The only issue I noticed was that after I went to the second planet with the snow tileset, when I went back to the first, or any other of the first type, the rendering was much slower than before, so scrolling around the map was slow.  But the snow types remained fast when I returned to them.

I don't think the demo experience would engage me beyond the first area, except to see if there was something else to the game in the next stage.  Requiring more thought from the player in resource gathering could introduce some challenge, but I also hope you have an interesting story to keep the player wanting to move forwards.

I saw that two of the dev logs had to do with art and colour-with-a-u.  I am not an artist, so I can only say that I thought the art was fine, and colours tended to the side of understated rather than garish, a good choice for the player to look at for long periods in my opinion.  Some of the resources didn't immediately jump out, especially on hills, but it wasn't a real issue.

Anyway, I liked what I saw, and good luck to you.

Developer

Hi and thanks for the feedback, much appreciated!

- I will have a linux build of the demo available in a few days, the full game will also be available on linux.

- Interesting issue, we'll have a poke around it's not something we've encountered on Windows so it might be Wine related or hardware related. What hardware are you using?

- When you say "beyond the first area" are you referring to the first planet? The first system?  Or the first sector? We have a small campaign planned that is tighter than the current experience and has a story attached. Although we definitely plan on having the current experience as an available game mode that is more score oriented than story oriented.

Once again thanks for the feedback and playing the demo!

I'm using an FX-6350 and an R9 270X with 16GB of RAM and the game on an SSD.  The demo looks like the map should be traversable much faster than it is, to the point of bringing a minimap to my mind as helpful (click on the minimap to jump around), but as you say Wine or more likely DXVK (if the demo is using DirectX) could be slowing things down.  I'll check back for the native version and have a look.  Plopping down objects seems suitably snappy though.

By 'Beyond the first area' I meant nothing more than the first sector.  Although I only went to the first three star systems necessary to gather the three materials, then repaired and researched the first signal and the demo ended, so I was assuming nothing different was available on the rest of the map, which maybe I should not have.

The campaign sounds interesting, and I'm sure a score-based mode will have its crowd too.

Cheers.

Developer

- I'll be pushing a patch tomorrow that might help with the first issue, seems there is a weird interaction between camera speed and framerate that might cause this.

- I see, yes I can see how that would be confusing. In the score-based mode which the demo is based on there are 3 signals to fix & research which leads the player across all sectors. The demo should really only have the 1st sector, I'll change that on tomorrow's patch.

Thanks again for the feedback, much appreciated!