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squee22

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A member registered Jun 09, 2017

Recent community posts

I see that does make sense. As far as the missions go and maybe this was just my experience but all of my objectives were South on the map other than the tutorial mission and each had it's loot in a little square room. That's more what I meant by looking similar.

That's how I understood the story to be, but I like to write in my spare time so it's just something that sticks out to me. Hopefully the feedback helps at least some. :)

Okay, it definitely has the roguelike vibe for sure. If you wanted it easier might be cool to have a melee enemy that's weak in the beginning. Still have some scavengers but their shots aren't as damning against your cover so gives you a chance to learn? Though I'm sure it's tough to balance the brutal roguelike aspect and making your players feel like they could do better.


I'll take a look when the poll and update comes out! Cheers!

Hey guys! Met one of you at Momocon, but I'm bad with names, sorry! I was the guy wearing a Wonder Woman shirt. Anyways, just got around to cracking open your game and wanted to give you guys my first impressions as I played as I thought it might be of help. Cheers!

Build 29.3 - Preface: My understanding is the main focus right now is gameplay, but I've included notes on the story as well. Take as you will. Also these are my first impressions so feel free to take them as such as well.

1st Mission

The initial dialogue for why I was running the tactics instead of the lead tactician felt a bit stunted. The reasoning didn't flow very well for why she had to go either.

Once in the tutorial, it was fairly straight forward (Move, cover, skills) and I thought that was good. 

Artwork is nice, but there's not a clear distinction between anything which makes the battlefield look confusing. For example, a grey box looking thing that is cover takes up two up and down squares exactly. Makes it looks like it could almost be cover in 2 squares on each left and right side instead of just the one. 

So far it looks like some (or maybe all?) cover is destructible, but if there is a difference between destructible and non-destructible, I don't really get the difference. Visually, I also don't see why some weapons are destroying the cover. 

The Your Turn popup is nice when switching between enemy and friendly turns, but is a bit annoying waiting for the pause for every single one of my units. Might just need less of a lag for when I can control though moreso than the visual itself. I think just centering it on my character would be enough though. That's all Final Fantasy Tactics/Ogre Tactics does and it uses the same initiative system.

So in the 1st mission, all my characters have different guns, but it's not really explained until I see them shoot. Might be okay if intentional but I didn't realize they had different guns until I saw them shoot. Character models could help infer what is what or could just adjust the learning curve so you learn gradually or just someway let the player know that it is different so they can fool around with them.

One thing that I expected from playing other games is having the hotbar along the bottom match to number keys. I see overwatch and reload have hotkeys, but that general control is a common staple in PC Tactics games (such as X-Com).

At the end of the first mission, dialogue did a decent job of why what we found is important, but I feel like the characters would have realized how shiny and new the androids were earlier when they fought the first group. Also, the ending where everyone assumingly died. It just kind of ended and had to be explained. Probably better to reveal danger (bot comes to life or fires or more androids come) and then have action/dialogue by characters then cut.

In between 1st and 2nd Mission

For some reason, they're letting a raw recruit be in charge of their troops again. I'm all for a little suspension of disbelief, but there should be a reason why I (in story) am in charge of a group of soldiers (even if they're other rookies.)

2nd Mission

Okay, I think I figured out the bars on my character now. The green bars I believe are health. The big yellow bars are AP. The hover helped on that. And the orange things I think are ammo. I appreciate the information, but it feels busy all over my character. Also if AP can increase later, it makes sense to track it, but in the 1st mission, it said everyone gets a move and an attack so not 100% sure why we need a bar for that. If it can increase, Fallout 2's mechanics was to have it on your hotbar. I can see the idea for a minimalist design and I like the choice, but just a consideration.

I'm going to be Overwatching a lot. Might make sense to include the hotkey on the tooltip on click. That way I can learn while playing. Also, trying the hotkey. If I press it, it just pulls up the tooltip and I have to click anyway. Kind of defeats the purpose of a hotkey.

Okay, looks like all cover is destructible. I can click on it. Good to know. Speaking of the cover symbol, it shows it on all of the outside walls of the map. I can't really imagine why you'd need to know you have cover to something attacking outside the bounds of the map. Just makes the map busier.

For these two square grey boxes, these are really screwing with me. I can stand behind them which is nice. Could really use something showing that visually like you do with some of the other cover pieces.

So when I click on a green square it has what looks like "Aim - 50%" but when I moved and when I did not move, it kept my chance to hit at like 46%. Not sure if that's an actual plus to dodging attacks for my character or if it's actually an aiming penalty that I'm not noticing in my attacks.

Okay, I think I see why attacks are destroying cover now. They're "missing" me and damaging my cover. That wasn't very clear in the first mission to me. 

Used my first frag. It shows the area on the ground, but when I click on a target it doesn't show me the AoE of it. I just either have to count or guess, throw and hope.

Lost my first guy. I don't really have a good sense of where the cover's health is at. Would be nice to see that at a glance or some artwork showing it crumbling.

Found my first loot and got a shotgun. Might be cool if the "treasure chests" stuck out a bit against the other artwork. A golden outline or a little halo or something.

Sometimes getting several seconds of delay between character turns.

Cool. Leveled up one of my characters. So there are "stars" on the ability track, but they're really hard to see. Didn't realize until I hovered over them.

3rd Mission

Okay, killed all my guys on that mission. I started in a basically open field where I had to sprint to the next sparse cover. I tried to get closer to the bad guys (and to better cover) and I pulled more bad guys. I could only fall back so far while the four of them picked me off quicker than I could pick them off.

Overall

Not sure if it's randomly generated or not, but feels like the cover is sometimes sparse. Since cover is so important, I don't get an opportunity to actually position myself since I'm forced to move from limited cover to limited cover. Other than when I had a tiny chance to hit Overwatch never felt like a viable option. Running in didn't feel like a valid option either since I just risk aggroing another pod. With those considerations and the fact that I can't get more guys, it seems silly not to stack health on all your characters. Unless there is more and/or more durable cover, it makes it hard to systematically move up and only take risks when you need to rather than constantly hoping for RNGesus to bless you. 

Overall, I really like the game. I didn't get very far (I could have been more careful for sure) but I think it shows a lot of promise. Maybe this is just because I didn't get far, but losing a single character seems like too big of a deal. Losing one person in the 2nd mission made the 3rd almost impossible (without also losing another character.) Ultimately what that means is losing a character has a lot of player impact but little impact on a run if that makes sense. In the future when I play, I'm just going to quit when I lose a character since there's no point in only playing with two. Maybe that's what you guys are going for. More FTL than X-Com, but it does lessen the impact of having favorite characters and of wanting to protect them. 

Also at one point during the 2nd Mission, I killed all the bad guys on map (I'm pretty sure) and then spent the next 10 turns Move/Overwatch toward an objective. Might be nice to have a "No guys detected" kind of functionality so I don't have to waste my time slowly moving towards an objective when there are no bad guys on map to fight me. Once I got the objective, a scavenger spawned near my extract point and once I killed him I was home free so that was good at least.

The three maps I got didn't seem very different at all in function or appearance. Maybe I was just "unlucky" but variety is the spice of life. 馃槂 Cool game though, guys! Don't take my feedback as completely negative. I really like the artwork and setting. I think the core mechanics of the game are definitely there and if you're going for more of an FTL rather than X-Com vibe, you're on the right track. (Though X-Com > FTL 馃槈 )