As a well known modder in the old Stick Soldiers community of the early 2000s, I really got a kick out of seeing the helmets fly! I'm really floored by the individual take-control feature for what is essentially an RTS-like. It reminds me of Battlezone-like games. The flying bodies and high-pitched voices are hilarious! The point system for upgrading characters and the dynamic accuracy cone are really cool, too! The aesthetics rock and everything is really well taken into account. Frankly, this game reminds me of a PVP sort of version of Infested Planet, or more specifically, its defunct predecessor, Attack of the Paper Zombies.

Is this game still receiving work done? I have some thoughts, if so:

• The game feels wanting, audio-wise. I would add the following for real immersion:
  • Footstep sounds, at least for your character and nearby ones whenever you're not controlling a building
  • A reload sound
  • A dodge-roll sound
  • A grenade-throwing sound
  • Aircraft sounds
  • A tree-shaking sound when a tree gets hit (as well as a tree-tearing-down sound)
  • A sound when parachuted objects touch the ground
  • A sound when getting into/wading through water
  • Pickup sounds
• Some things about the art could be enhanced, too:
  • Sprinting should have a more exaggerated movement animation; it's a bit awkward to simply see your character move a bit faster but with zero change in the animation to emphasize it.
  • The direction in which you roll should be the direction towards which you're going with WASD, not where you're looking with the mouse; it currently looks awkward with backwards rolls.
  • Muzzle flashes in the cartoony style would be great!
  • Brief pools of blood that collect where bodies are, instead of only spatters, would make for a more realistic touch. The bloody water is already very cool!
  • I would slow down the movement animation when wading through water; it looks awkward to still look hectic otherwise.
  • I feel like the leg-scurrying animation when prone is also too fast and doesn't really fit, given the speed of the characters.
• Enemy behavior: it's kind of awkward to see prone enemies slowly crawl all the way back to get ammo, when I could run up to and execute them in front of their faces. When they are out of ammo, even if they have previously been shot at they should be locked out of prone position as an option, and run and roll as much as possible (if AI can roll).
• The UI:
  • I would make the map still zoomable, even when you take command of a building (although the initial zoom-out is fine), mainly because I couldn't read what the signs are for the building I'm taking control of! Maybe if those box options were doubled in size, then that'd be fine.
  • A hotkey for a full spectator mode would be a delight!!
  • The tooltip popups are very small on my 1600×900 screen; some of the letters actually get cut out, pixel-wise, making them hard to read. If the tooltips could be made twice the size, that'd be great.
• Quality of life ideas:
  • I would add in the tutorial the fact that you can cancel a grenade throw by left-clicking. I'd also mention the scroll wheel right from the start (I don't think I saw it). A final message saying "That's it for tutorial missions!" would be nice because I wasn't sure if those three were it.
  • A brief explanation of bleeding would also be nice, as well as, uh, noting that there's almost no way to stop it apart from the ultra-rare medical kit drops...
  • An explanation in the tutorial about special weapon boxes and why nothing happens when you walk over them as the basic rifleman would be helpful too, as that was confusing at first.
  • A "friendly fire!" warning when you hit one of your own men would be nice.
  • If you enter a building while prone, you should step out of it while standing up. It's a bit awkward to exit still prone, then press Space to try to stand up, only to enter the building prone again.
  • It's kind of awkward when a mission starts that has only one character on your side, but you have to keep remembering to left-click. It would be nice to automatically be in control of that character from the immediate beginning.
• Bugs:
  
  • I somehow ended up looking like this, yet was fully controllable. I'm not sure of what happened... https://imgur.com/a/2dUpklR
  • In that same scenario above, I was able to continue moving around and killing enemies despite the "Defeat" screen showing while they just stood there and didn't try to attack me, which was awkward. I would suggest that, at the moment of defeat, the game launch into a full spectator mode and strip you of character control while the battle goes on until only one side has any characters left.

Now, I want to make sure that you know that even despite all these thoughts, this is a real indie gem that I've enjoyed very much, and that it's super-cool that a campaign/map editor is included!

Hey there! Thanks so much for all the thorough feedback and for the kind words. I played Battlezone back in the day and Infested Planet and hadn't actively thought of them in some time. It's funny that some of those ideas must have been hiding out in my mind and then found their way into There Will Be Ink's design.

The game is very much still in development. Things have slowed down a bit lately (I had to take ft job in addition to part time jobs, darn pandemic), but I've never felt more devoted to or enthusiastic about the project. Lately I've been working through the next 8 missions (Act II) of the main campaign, adding tanks, new terrain, new badges and stats, and working on a full revamp of the stat system to make it more dynamic, scalable, and maintainable. More on all that in the next game update and dev log.

As for your feedback, thanks again very much for that. Some of the items are already on the to-do list, while others I hadn't previously thought about or are possibly already in the game. Here are some responses:

• Game sounds: Things do need fleshing out, and many of those are on the to-do list, but some I hadn't thought about. Thanks!
• Art: Adding sprint and roll animations are on the to-do list as well. I'll look into the blood pool, and good call on the animation speeds (and maybe additional water effects for wading).
• I think the idea for AI units going for resupply was that they crawl away to a safer distance and then stand up, but I'll have another look at that and revise as needed. AI can roll, but only units of rank 2 and up as I recall (rank going from 0 to 4). I think they will only roll when moving to cover or when dodging rockets, but having them dodge bullets makes sense too. Rank 3 and 4 will also run when going to resupply.
• I'll see about having the HQ icons expand in size when a player enters the building. I can turn zoom on for that too, sure. Tooltip scaling is on the to-do list as well. There is sort of a spectator mode right now, with the inspired name of "Grabby Mode" (Alt on keyboard, Select on gamepad). It essentially relinquishes control and replaces the cursor with a little hand, which you can use to take control of any (friendly) unit. Would you like to see something else in terms of a spectator mode? I have a rough kind of "free cam" mode that I use for trailers and such. I could perhaps polish that up and enable it in public builds.
• I'm not quite finished with the tutorials yet. I'll likely add one more for "advanced tactics", but thank you for pointing out the gaps in the existing tutorial missions. You can also use medics to stop bleeding (if they are available), either by direct control or by calling for a medic ('M' on keyboard, d-pad down on gamepad).
• "An explanation in the tutorial about special weapon boxes and why nothing happens when you walk over them as the basic rifleman would be helpful too...". Hm, which special weapon boxes do you mean? The ammo crates should work for all units, but there is no effect if you have full ammo.
• For friendly fire, there are I believe three custom death sounds ("Gaw, I'm on your team!", "Traitor!", and "Aw why'd ya do it?") for if a player-controlled unit kills a friendly unit. Maybe I could add something for just hitting a friendly unit. The aiming cone also turns red when there is a friendly unit in your line of fire.
• Good call on having units in a standing state when exiting the HQ
• I see what you mean about the left-click/A to join, but I'll probably leave that in place. The idea is that, for local coop games, I'd like for any player to be able to take control, essentially taking turns when there are fewer units than players. But, now that I think about it, I could probably set it to automatically take control with kbm if there are no gamepads connected.
• Haha, yeah I ran into that bug recently myself. I don't think I'll hotfix it at this point but instead just put the fix in the next update. In most games other than countdown missions, when victory/defeat is reached it's because there are no more units left on one side. Fixing the bug you mentioned should eliminate the need of relinquishing control except in those countdown missions. I'll still probably leave things as-is, in part because I'd like to add something like an "unsportsmanlike" badge for when a player kills a unit after the battle is over. (Badges are turned off by default in single player because some badges don't make sense in a single player context, but they can be turned on from the options menu if you want to see what they're about. I plan to rework the badge system to include single-player specific badges and have them on by default in the future).

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback and for playing the game!

Al right, I played more with these thoughts in mind and tried to think of what else could improve the player's quality of life (and since you're matching item per item, I'll go with a numbered list this time):

1. To make for the clearest indicator that one is reloading, it would be nice if the accuracy cone is simply removed entirely.
2. This is the same reason for why I was looking for a more blatant friendly-fire indicator: sometimes it's so hectic that:
   1. You can't hear when someone says "Traitor!" because so many other deaths are going on at the same time. Actually, those statements sound like injury exclamations, not death exclamations (which could help oneself realize earlier to knock it off).
   2. Sometimes a friendly soldier steps right in front of you and turns your cone red before you can react and change your mind to not click in time, so a brief "Friendly Fire!" notification would be nice (not in Hardcore, naturally).
3. So when it comes to friendly fire, it would be really nice if soldiers who are right next to each other (especially a soldier standing behind one who is prone, even if they're aiming vertically/diagonally right through the prone soldier's body) do not hit each other as they wouldn't in real life. Maybe I'm not paying enough attn but it seems that prone soldiers spawning out of a barracks-under-fire tend to hit each other unnecessarily.
   1. This is especially a huge problem in Beta Mission 16: Hold Steady, in which you're the only one with the bipod gun, only to be shot from behind by a friendly, oblivious rifleman.
4. One of the biggest problems that I see with the game is determining whether you are in cover or not (which is why I think the neighboring-soldiers avoidance of friendly fire can be implemented, because cover clearly has no problem ignoring nearby projectiles): sometimes you can hide inside a sandbag and be fine, and those giant rocks seem completely impervious to bullets. So is movement collision going to be added to the game? It's hard to tell if I'm protected by a tree stump or not, or what exact angles it protects from.
5. Oops, the special weapon boxes were the weapon-icon boxes that appear as not part of any building nor the ammo crate. For example, the bottom enemy barrack in Alpha Mission 5: One By One has a gun icon near its sandbags, just northwest of the ammo crate, which seems like it doesn't do anything. I was hoping to be able to swap out my gun for a superior one.
6. Yeah, I did not initially understand Grabby Mode at all, haha. It would be clear if "/Spectator" was added to it, since I thought it was a cheat mode of sorts so I unsuccessfully tried to pick up enemies. Maybe some sort of mouse-over graphic showing what can be grabbed before clicking would help cement this (or a 🚫 for non-interactives).
   1. Speaking of Grabby, it'd be nice to be able to press Alt again to resume normal play.
   2. Being able to zoom in and out in Grabby would be great, too.
   3. Be able to go into Grabby Mode when you die as the last soldier on your team and have to wait to respawn
7. Ooh... I did not know about Unsportsmanlike; makes sense now! Maybe they could do some sort of idle animation, then, to reinforce the end-of-battle event (like the helmeted ones taking off their helmets or something).
8. When I'm really trying to repeat a mission like "Rockets!" (Alpha Mission 6), I actually don't want to have to wait out the "game over" music every time before pressing R to retry. It made it more aggravating lol.
9. In the map editor: my big, custom mouse cursor itself covers over the name of the building I'm trying to read to place. If the name showed above the cursor instead of below, that'd be nice.
10. The mission font is a bit... weird to see periods suspended in mid-air like "·"...
11. I've now noticed a major problem: your rounds fly completely outside of the accuracy window, even when staying still. This is most noticeable with a veteran sniper; when aiming east, I have to set the cone slightly south of where enemies are for my shots to place (so I'd assume I'd have to over-aim above western soldiers' heads).
12. In the menu's Barracks for upgrades, I don't understand what the upper-rightmost sticky note means.
13. Being able to somehow flag enemy buildings for takeover instead of destruction could be nice... or at least for your soldiers to not grenade buildings whose flag are in positive movement towards their side.
14. It'd be nice if personal fires could be extinguished by medkits (unless that's intentional).
15. Nothing seems to happen when you try to surrender early in a timed mission; the timer keeps counting down and only at 00:00 does it show Defeat, even if your entire side has been eradicated.
16. Now that I played Hold Steady, I think it'd be fairer if the ranking-up formula for soldiers is dependent on rate-of-fire + range + area of effect of their weapon, so a bipod gunner shouldn't be able to rank up with the same number of kills that a rifleman makes, for example (unless I really was just slaughtering that many blues, lol).
17. The sniper's accuracy cone no longer turns red when you have snipers' piercing ability enabled, I think.
18. It'd be cool to see powerups that fall onto rivers slowly float downstream!
19. Playing "Run Through the Jungle" and seeing toooons of mines trigger near the enemy barracks made me think that enemy Engineers were spamming them there throughout the entire session. I'm thinking that there should be a minimum placing distance between mines so that this weird experience of the screen massively shaking for a moment doesn't happen.
20. There's no way to go to the Barracks directly from the surrender-defeat screen.
21. It's a bit odd to see idle base defenders facing the wrong direction...
22. Somehow I ended up with -7 points in general training after a battle, so I unchecked something and then could no longer recheck it until I returned to a positive number. I think the problem is that, even though I've been in the Beta campaign for a while, the barracks must have thought it was counting points for a different campaign (because I checked the barracks before playing that mission, and it didn't show any Advanced training even though I had unlocked it).
23. I haven't been able to adjust my resolution to max, even if I quit and restart (it keeps returning to 1440×900 which it's always been at).
24. So I found out about the special weapon in the Beta campaign's "Blast 'em" level, and I was just thinking: wow, it'd be SO cool if the entire screen had a dark-gray filter over it to simulate night-time fighting, complete with muzzle flashes, helmet-mounted lights, and tracer fire!
25. Pressing Escape instantly ends a Quick Battle instead of pausing the game first, sadly...
26. I hope to see some Quick Battles in which the building spawn positions are swapped!
27. Despite reading the version release notes, I was still able to control a dead character and even walk and roll all the way over to enemy buildings and take down their flags. Aside from this, it'd be a nice touch if soldiers see that their buildings' flags are not at optimal height and go to raise them.
28. Map editor woes:
    1. When test-battling a timed map, Escape doesn't appear to do anything, even after the enemy has been eradicated.
    2. It would be nice to have an instruction saying that right-click deletes objects that you can click-drag to reposition stuff.
    3. Instructions to click on Barracks to select what units they can produce would be nice.
    4. It would be nice if all of the river art could be rotated in the four directions (or mirrored) for more variation without further art having to be manually made. Come to think of it, mirror images of... well, literally everything including buildings would be a nice touch for graphical variation.
29. Campaign editor:
    1. Adding an instruction that Available Missions need to be dragged over to the Campaign Missions column would help. I'm also seeing that if you stay in the game the entire time and edit a map and retry the campaign it's in, the campaign still goes off of the old map (even if you saved the file over the same name). It'd be nice to auto-reload all maps when you visit "Missions" in the menu.
    2. Given all of the space that there is for instructions on missions, I wish I could use line breaks in the .TXT files to add multiple paragraphs of text.

I have to say kudos for the excellently efficient, homebrewed programming. I have a 5-year-old laptop that doesn't summon forth any considerable processing power when running this game, unlike literally every Unity game I've ever tried on it! Making a campaign with tanks and garages sounds sweet. The procedural quick battle is amazing

EDIT: All right, I now see the soldiers rolling away and getting-up-and-running that ammo-less soldiers do! I just didn't play long enough. There is just way too much thought put into this.

One thing that I'm really hoping for is larger maps for marathon missions, like 2×2 sheets' worth of papers connected to each other! I don't know how the camera works in multiplayer though, so that may be impossible, sadly...

EDIT #2: So I'm now trying out making my own campaign, and it was awkward for a level with prisoners to finish right after killing all enemies, even though the prisoners weren't actually untied. If freeing them up could be made a condition to win on such levels, that'd be nice.

All right, got this error when trying to edit a map I had saved (though to be fair, it did warn me with "Error loading map ;_(" once I tried to load it up a second time): 

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event0
for object oME_SaveMap:
Variable <unknown_object>.<unknown variable>(100116, -2147483648) not set before reading it.
at gml_Script_editor_save_map
############################################################################################
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
stack frame is
gml_Script_editor_save_map (line -1)
gml_Object_oME_SaveMap_Step_0

Should I send the map file to you for inspection? Also, now I see your mastery... GameMaker! That underrated tool has come such a long way.

Hey there! Whoa, ok let me run through these one at a time :)

1. Done! I find the sudden disappearing during reload a bit jarring, but probably because I'm just so used to it always being there. Generally I think it's a good idea and I'll tweak it further as needed.
2. I'll see about changing it so that hitting instead of killing a friendly unit gives a sound cue. This would also help resolve the issue where a wounded unit who dies long after being hit by a friendly unit will cry "traitor" but it's not really clear why.
3. Done! I essentially made it so that friendly fire works the same way as cover, where there is a 'safe zone' for nearby friendly units.
4. Although I haven't ruled it out, I don't currently have plans to add movement collision (though I've been playing a little more with pathfinding, so who's to say). As for cover, each cover object (sandbag, tree stump, rock, etc) has a cover value (actually two, but we'll say one for argument's sake). For instance the big rock might be 100% while the tree stump is say 50%. On top of that, weapons have varying cover penetration values, which increase with unit rank. So rank 0 rifle infantry might have 0% cover penetration while rank 3 sniper might have 50% cover penetration (which would reduce the big rock cover value to 50%). I don't remember the exact numbers, so I'm just guessing on the values above. I plan to address some of those mechanics in the next tutorial, but it might also be helpful to have an info overlay so the player could see those numbers if needed.
5. I think you might be seeing the icon that indicates which unit is being trained, in this case rifle infantry. That being said, I would like to add crated weapon powerups at some point.
6. Grabby Mode does indeed need some work. I will probably make the icon context-sensitive as you mention so it's more clear what you can do with it.
7. Idle and victory animations are on the to-do list.
8. You can do Ctrl + R to force restart a mission any time, with the downside being that it doesn't save stats or progress towards unit upgrades.
9. I've been meaning to hide the cursor when placing items, as the regular cursor sometimes gets in my way too.
10. I went through a lot of fonts and settled on that one, but yeah, that weird period placement bothers me too. I may try some other options.
11. I think what you're seeing is the effect of wind on bullets :)  There is an indicator up in the top centre that shows the wind speed and direction, but probably I could make this more obvious.
12. The upper-right most sticky note is for powerups that are unlocked throughout a campaign (presently ammo/medical/dino drop).
13. Units are indeed a little too eager to destroy buildings. I'd like to put some work into this so that the AI can capture buildings as well.
14. On the to-do list :)
15. Good catch! That is certainly a bug.
16. You're probably right. I have the rate at which ability points are earned scale based on unit but not for rank during a mission. 
17. Snipers are "immune" to (causing) friendly fire :)  It is a unique perk of theirs.
18. I agree. Investigating that is on the list, but it's a ways down.
19. Probably a good call. I think I also still need to ensure they don't place mines next to their own buildings that eventually end up destroying them.
20. I think I removed that option so that it only shows up if you've earned a new point. I should probably re-add it, especially since I introduced the option to re-spec skills.
21. I've thought of a couple solutions that will fix this in most but not all cases (eg. either team's units & buildings can be placed anywhere on the map), but I should probably just implement one of those fixes so that facing is at least usually right.
22. That one's very interesting. Data is stored in separate files for each campaign, but it's possible something in-game carried over. I'll have to check that one out. Ability unlocks need a bit of a rework in general, as they don't update dynamically when a new ability is selected (or deselected)
23. That's also a strange one. What is your display's resolution? I might just be missing it as an option.
24. Hm.. I'm actually having a hard time remembering what the special weapon was in that level! I guess I'm due for another playthrough of the Beta campaign. As for night missions, there may be something in the works in that area, but no guarantees ;)
25. I will look into that. Quick Battle currently behaves like loading a map from the Map Editor.
26. Do you mean that the team that normally starts on the left would start on the right, and vice versa? You can currently join either teach (right-click to join second team), so swapping starting positions might not be necessary...
27. This bug should be fixed (again) in the next build. As per #13, I hope to make AI a little more proactive about flags.
28. Map Editor definitely still needs some work. I'll look into those. Thanks!
29. Campaign Editor is probably in need of even more work :)  The text system could definitely stand to be a little more powerful. I'll add that to the list.

You bet, Game Maker is pretty well optimized for 2D games like this. I've tried a few times to move towards Unity but it always feels so cumbersome. 

I'd love to do larger maps, but it would indeed be hard to fit everything on one screen (less so with 4K+). Something like that may come along down the line, after the 1.0 release.

Prisoners are fairly new to the game. I mostly made them for a specific mission in the "There Will Be Ink" campaign. I'll see about expanding their functionality though.

Yes, please that map along and I'd be happy to take a look. I'd be curious to check out any other maps/campaigns you wanted to share as well. Please send along to hi@summitfevergames.com . I've also created a (so far pretty lonely) Discord server, if you're into that sort of thing.

Thanks again for all your thorough feedback. It's incredibly helpful and very much appreciated!