Hey, it’s me again! I just played a few levels, it looks promising, here is some feedback:
Gameplay/UI:
- easy to understand and play, esp. after playing other programming games and your other games
- I admit I was trying to edit Orders by clicking on some bot in the Team building phase though and it kept removing the character… but after that it was okay. If you find some way to unify the two phases though, it’s cool too
- would be nice to be able to accelerate (or decelerate) gameplay speed with a parameter (this may require frame-independent time, see Performance more below)
Level design:
- still like the secret paths in this game, esp. the fact that if you programmed your bots so they find both exits, and wait enough on the success after a bot found the standard exit, you can still unlock the secret path when the 2nd bot goes there!
Art:
- units are distinct and gameplay elements are clear
- pixel art could be more consistent in scale though
- when going fullscreen, the pixels start to blur a bit or some triangle artifacts, instead of being pixel perfect (a problem encountered in other game engines not made for pixel perfect art - you seem to be using a custom engine based on DX9, so it could happen too if you work with standard rectangular patches, but I haven’t been using low-level graphics lib for a while so I couldn’t help you much on this)
Performance:
- ok windowed
- fullscreen 1440p unfortunately drops speed by 20% or so
- the app speed affects the gameplay speed, i.e. the timer in the bottom-left is really showing longer seconds. It could be fixed with frame-independent time (i.e. skipping rendered frames when needed but preserving physics updates - not super hard to code, already did it a few times)
