itch.io

That's a LOT - keep up the awesome work! O_o

I hope the full game, when it's ready, is available here as well as Steam. Valve has been moving toward being abusive trash for the better part of the past decade (with some of their abuse affecting me personally since 2019, but other problems going back further). The game looks great, and feels fun, but I'd love a full version (preferably downloadable) to be available somewhere that hasn't spent 7 years illegally denying me access to my game library.

And when I say "illegally" I mean that by all metrics, my account is "in good standing" but in spite of no bans or anything, they're refusing to give me any way to actually install or play anything I've previously bought on their platform. So yeah, please don't lock the finished product behind that abusive trash heap when you launch?

I'll be looking forward to it! Thanks for a (surprisingly) quick answer!

So uhhh... any word on the game being actually available or... are you sticking to Steam exclusivity for a while before that point?

Sorry to add more pressure to you, but when trying the new build out in mission mode...

...Killing any enemy in a "kill all enemies" mission causes everyone to explode and the fight is won instantly. Pretty sure that's not working as intended.

I'd been planning to write a mega feedback post today with compliments (lots of them) and suggestions... half the things I was going to ask for have been fixed with this update.

And in related news... the explosions on enemies feel so satisfying O_o And I still have trouble navigating but that's a me issue lol.

Additional feedback now that I've experimented more with melee:

-Energy Saber is my favourite weapon so far. Damages on activation and on swing, and can be comboed several times.
-Hydraulic Fist feels underwhelming, but with the low cost, it makes sense. Also, dual-wielding them along with kicking gives infinite combos! 
-Pilebunker is chonky but the slow reload relegates it to a secondary weapon in my mind, not something I'd be comfortable using as a primary.

I really like that the ammo limits effectively act as a combo meter on the saber and fist, and the pilebunker explosion was bigger than I expected going into using it. If it didn't have the blast radius it has, I'd probably find the pilebunker to be underwhelming, but as it stands, it feels really solid.

The only thing I wish I had was the ammo/combo count being listed in the stats page for the weapons, because right now, there's nothing showing how many attacks you get before reloading. It's easy enough to check, of course, but would help to have that information displayed in advance.

And for a final note: It's a really tough choice for me between using a shield backpack and a booster backpack when running a pure melee build. Aerial enemies are tricky to chase down, and the extra mobility helps a lot with that, but the extra survivability that energy shields provide is really beneficial (although building around nanites and other healing options can compensate for that).

I'm a big fan of the way movement works here. The turbo boost having lasting momentum is super fun for drifting past enemies while firing, and the way jump and dash interact (upward and downward dashing) feels really solid. Having the ability to walljump upward or horizontally depending on the movement input is intuitive and dynamic in a way that's hard to get right, but it feels like you've nailed it!

From the variety I've played with so far, weapons all feel very distinct from one another. I've only tried out the basic energy saber and kick so far, but I'm curious to see how other melee options feel as well. So far, I've put together a surprisingly durable but also fast and agile machine with a shield backpack, dual missile launchers, and a militia AR and SMG in the hands. I've fought enemies with a variety of weapons I haven't gotten my hands on yet, so I'm curious to get a chance to try some of the other weapons out as I progress and unlock more crazy options!

Keep being awesome and I'll be looking forward to more being added!

I hope so! Either way, game's really fun, so thanks for making it!

Over about the past decade. they've been doing a lot of things to piss a lot of people off. In my personal case, issues started when they turned the Steam client into a health hazard in 2019. I can't use it, and I've functionally had my game library (worth around $3000) stolen from me because of it.

Their responses to being made aware of the problem (which happened within days of them causing the problem, but I didn't find out until later) include:
-promising to do nothing, in spite of knowing it's potentially going to hospitalise people.
-following through on that promise for 7 years and counting.
-deliberately violating privacy rights of affected (former) customers.
-at least 2 instances I know of where they've tried to coerce people affected by this issue into self-harm, and confirmed they're doing so deliberately.

Given how severe their abusive behaviour relating to the issue has been, at this point I'm never going back even if they do fix the original problem.

Also, it'd be nice for the game to have a download on here.

I hope this doesn't go the route a disappointing number of games do, and abandon this place to become Steam exclusive on launch. Stay here, or release elsewhere as well (at this point, I'd even be happy with Epic - at least they'll let me actually play a game after I pay for it, which is more than Valve have been willing to do for the majority of the past decade).

You'll notice I wasn't saying the game needs to release on Epic. I was saying that some of Valve's conduct with regard to privacy rights makes them look even worse than Epic. I was saying that a developer who already has a store page here, should probably consider releasing the full version of their game on here AS WELL AS Steam. I didn't mention releasing the game on Epic at all in that.

There's SO MUCH more I could say about your fallacious arguments here (like assuming that only the one issue which involved both Valve and Epic is the only instance of privacy issues for either company, and getting the story hilariously wrong while doing so). But I'll stick to the point I was actually making here, which is "the developer already released the game here, why not keep doing so ALONGSIDE the Steam launch?"

Any reason you're not making the full game available here? Because for some people have reasons to avoid that platform. Including multiple instances of abuse by Valve, violations of privacy rights (serious enough to make Epic look good by comparison), and other problems.

Game's cool but Steam exclusivity isn't.

Sucks to see you've abandoned the itch.io version. Keeping this and labelling it as "prototype" and releasing the full game here would be a good idea. Better than making the game exclusive to an abusive trash heap of a storefront. By every meaningful standard, my account is still "in good standing" there, but Valve has spent most of the past decade being abusive in a variety of ways to different people, including functionally stealing $3000 of games from me. This game is cool, but unless it's available somewhere else, Steam is a no-go. The abusive conduct that followed up the effective theft of my game library has made it clear that even if Valve does eventually fix their mess, I'm still never giving them money.

There have been numerous issues with them removing tools for power users, with repeated feature removals going back more than a decade. More recently than the beginnings of that, but still around 10 years ago, GabeN had laser eye surgery. Before that time, Steam had really solid support for larger fonts and options to enable which made it easier for people with vision trouble to navigate the app. Within a month of his surgery, he removed those features, but users made skins which act as replacements, so it was ok for a while. Several times since then, the exact tools those skins relied on have been removed, with the process repeating multiple times when a new solution was found to allow those users to have a comfortable experience using Steam. With the power user tool removals, they at least keep presenting "only X% of users bother with these tools anyway" arguments (ignore that their X% is usually larger than the number of MacOS and Linux users combined and they maintain support for those platforms because they know they'd have legal backlash if they didn't, but this issue is fine because they can't get sued over it).

My personal issue, however, is more serious. In 2019, the Steam client was turned into a demonstrable health hazard for some users with a variety of photosensitive medical conditions, including migraines and epilepsy. I get migraines severe enough to sometimes result in hospitalisation, so while that's not (usually) as bad as epilepsy, migraines aren't something to just shrug off. There are some less severe issues being triggered by the client as well, but those two are the big ones, and were the first for people to identify. Which, for reference, happened for some people within days of the update, and Valve have directly admitted they knew about the problem at most 2 days after causing it. I didn't find out until a while later, after having assumed something else was going on (because obviously Steam wouldn't get an update that stupid and not have it fixed instantly, right?) until someone pointed out there was a known issue. Even then I didn't take it seriously (because, obviously, again, Valve has a great reputation, they wouldn't do something like this -_- I feel dumb for having believed that now). I took steps to test and confirm it before asking them to fix it, and provided demonstrable proof that the Steam client was the active and proven cause of the problem. They didn't just confirm it, but admitted they'd known basically since the update went live, and were deliberately refusing to take steps to fix it.

Since then, I've seen the company take additional steps to remove tools they knew were being used by people to work around the problem, violate privacy laws, and behave in deliberately abusive ways, including 2 instances where staff have literally tried to coerce people into self-harm over requests for them to fix the problem.

So yeah, at this stage, even if they eventually do fix the issue, I'm never going to be spending money anywhere that results in Valve getting a portion of it.

Oh, and for a bonus round: Remember that story ages back when Epic was "stealing data" from Steam users? Fun fact about that - they didn't actually "steal" the data. They were using directly provided API tools that Valve had been making available with full instructions on how to access that information for almost 10 years to other companies, and accessing data which Valve had a legal responsibility to keep secure but which they were instead rolling out the red carpet for anyone to ask for and all Epic did was make people realise their data was at risk. But nobody talks about that part of the story, because none of the news sites which reported on it had that information when the news broke (and most didn't even bother with updating their articles, let alone any of them actually publishing a proper follow-up to correct the misinformation).

Yeah, it feels very roguelike in a lot of those ways, but most popular entries in the genre have weighted RNG more in line with what I suggested, and less extreme scaling as you progress, because of the exact problems with an overly-random (not overly-punishing) early game. Likewise on the stacking of layers, most games try to limit how many steps of RNG will hit the player before their own choices come into the picture again.

Game is still super fun, though!

I'm really enjoying this game - like really enjoying it. The premise is fun, and it feels like the way the game works is doing the relevant concepts justice in really fun ways. Unfortunately, the amount of layers to the game's RNG feels like it's a bit too far. On top of just having too many layers on the RNG, the randomness feels too heavy in the early game (but also like it ramps up too fast into the mid-game as your crew levels up).

On that latter point, I wish the baseline for most checks was in the 70-80% range instead of being a consistent 50% for most things.

When your best of the best "expert" doctor who's famous for their work in the medical field, is basically tossing a coin to see if they can figure out how to treat normal human medical troubles using the appropriate medical tools for the job, that feels like the game being arbitrarily harsh instead of punishing in a plausible and thematic way. This could be further benefited by more nuanced modifiers for the various types of "injuries" your crew can experience. The "depressed" modifier could have a -5% modifier per level on events which require physical exertion, while physical injuries would have the full -10% but only reduce your effectiveness at say, analysing radiation data, by -5% instead of everything always being -10% for every level of any injury you've suffered. These people are supposed to be the most capable experts the planet has to offer, so adding some weight to their abilities - at least when dealing with familiar problems - makes sense. Save the 50% baseline for challenges that are uniquely alien and unfamiliar.

Alongside this, you could shift the progression system in the opposite direction to make it feel less like you jump from underpowered in the beginning to overpowered in the midgame, by turning those per-level modifiers down from +5% to +2% or maybe even +1% per level. You're already one of the world's foremost experts on a subject, so while you're always going to have room to grow, it's not going to be these huge leaps into excess. If you stop feeling like your expert doctor is struggling to treat a sprained ankle, you shouldn't feel like the girl with only 3 missions under her belt has jumped from coinflip-level medical skills to having a 95% chance of curing alien diseases nobody has ever encountered before.

The bigger problem is the layers on layers on layers of RNG though. And there are numerous examples where it becomes awkward for various reasons.

Sometimes, you'll just fly to a planet, and the RNG will throw "and one of your crew members geets bashed against the wall along the way" for no apparent reason. Then you check out the ring system around the planet "and the same crew member gets smashed against the wall again" because RNG, then you land to investigate the planet "congrats the universe decided that crew member in particular was hated and is now dead" because you dared to try and actually play the game. I've had this happen 4 separate times across only 3 runs in the game, with that exact pattern. I fly to a planet, a crew member gets injured, check out something in orbit, the same crew member gets injured again, land on the planet, and the crew member dies, just from one step along a small part of a journey in one system. My third "playthrough" ended in the first system - as we were reaching the gate to head back home with the ship at 1/3 condition because the last planet I visited arbitrarily damaged the ship twice with no choices I could have made to even try and influence the damage, then I got bad luck on a 55% roll to try not to blow the ship up on the way back through the gate.  The odds of random events feels too high, the odds of the event being negative feels too high, the odds of it being an event where you have no agency in what happens as a result of the event feels too high, the odds of the same event occuring 3+ times in a row on back-to-back checks where the event can happen repeatedly feels too high, and the odds of the same crew member being picked for the repeat injury feels too high. All of these layers of RNG within a single event that just tells the player "btw your crew member gets hurt for reasons you have no control over" then "and again to the same person" and "oh they died this time because screw that one crew member in particular" gets to be a bit much when I've seen it happen as often as I've seen "game over" screens.

Another area where the layered RNG becomes awkward is the location generation. You get a handful of systems to visit with each trip through the gate. The odds of getting a system with extinct life aren't super high. The odds of getting a system with current life are even lower. The odds of getting a system which has been visited by anotehr civilisation are pretty low as well. The odds of running into an existing intelligent species are super low. Finding sources for xenology research is fairly rare. Finding sources which give you meaningful amounts even moreso. You need xenology research for mission-critical things, but also for hiring multiple crew types, as well as for several critical research options which make it plausible (though still heavily RNG-reliant) for you to get more xenology research going forward. In my second run, I got to my 10th gate, and hadn't even gathered enough xenology research to complete a single R&R project with. It ws partly because I had to spend a bunch of that on new crew members along the way, but even without that, I'd have barely been able to afford the first research project after my 9th mission, which feels way too late to be a viable starting point for that process.  

There are multiple scenarios where a handful of bad RNG rolls (with odds skewed in favour of those bad rolls happening) can screw the player's run, and there's no way they could have prepared for it or compensated for it or played better to avoid it. I'm not against losing crew sometimes. I'm not against the game being hard, either. But I feel like it's built to be unfair in ways that feel frustration-inducing instead of tension-inducing in its current state, especially in the early game. Meanwhile, even midgame, if you don't get screwed by RNG early, it starts feeling like there's not enough tension any more, except in that you're sometimes just not being given a chance to make any progress because of the RNG not even giving you a chance at finding the resources you need to advance.

I know this was said 3 yeears ago, but it currently doesn't feel like you get reliable enough xenology research to manage this and to progress toward the major progress goals. That might be in part due to me being very new to the game, but at present, it's feeling quite RNG-dependent on getting a chance at making progress, then further RNG on whether you get that progress or not.

Accidentally clicked past it when trying to screenshot, but... playing on the latest Windows version (freshly downloaded today after being reminded that I hadn't played yet).

On the screen before hitting a "Game Over" (from running out of trips without finding a way to keep the gate open), there was a line which said something like "And But the mission is over." which you probably need to pick one of those first 2 words to keep.

Stumbled onto the KS page. Makes it sound like the full game is only coming to Steam at first. Shame to discard the platform you've used for testing like this. I hope you can make the full game available here too.

Or at least somewhere I can pick the game up. Since 2019, buying games on Steam has been a non-option due to Valve being abusive trash. I have a library worth around $3000 on Steam, I'm not banned, but they're (illegally) refusing me access to those games. If I buy something there, they won't allow me to access any new games either.

At this point, Steam is no longer a legitimate PC storefront. I'd be happy to buy here, Epic or GOG, or even on your own website if you put up a webstore for the game that way.

Thanks for the callout! O_o

So uhhh... about that new update, devs? Any word on how long it's going to take to show up here?

Steam is very bad about verifying game updates, which allows them to publish faster than other platforms sometimes. By which I mean that 90% of updates to games never get checked, just pushed live without any steps to ensure they meet the standards Valve require when you're uploading a game. Inserting malware is hard on a game's launch, but stupidly easy once the game is live. So seeing a game getting updated on Steam first is pretty normal. It's also a bigger platform, so a lot of devs prioritise it over other storefronts.

Hopefully, this doesn't take too long to get updated, though.

Poking my head in to say I came back to the demo about a week ago for a few runs, still enjoying it, and got an email today about endless mode being in beta. Sounds really great, and still looking forward to the game showing up in a place I can play a more up-to-date version again.

Keep being awesome and congrats on another cool milestone!

This would be cooler if:
-the download worked (currently broken)
-the full game wasn't locked behind the abusive trash heap that Valve has spent the past decade turning their platform into.

I'd love to try the demo out, and/or to buy the full game, but you're not providing either option rn.

Not my favourite of your games, but this seems fun. I second the "there's no score" report though!

Just coming back here to say thank you for a really fun game! Keep coming back to it and it's always a great time xD I hope it sees more development because... well, it's really cool and deserves more attention!

Sorry to keep breaking stuff but it's so fun to play lol. Thanks for making a really cool game!

Found some weird bugs with the warden of moonshield. I've had it count as high as 12 on the mystic, and miscount in various ways (3 or 4 when I cast 5+ spells which fit its conditions). Then in the boss fight, had this happen:

Still won though xD

New bug from 1.1.4 (just downloaded 1.1.5 and haven't tested but it's not in the patch notes)...
My best win so far was God 1, so I have God 2 unlocked.
I just won a run on Normal with the berserker and got told I had unlocked God 3, as if I was playing on God 2. It didn't unlock, just told me it had, but... yeah.
Also, across a couple of the recent builds, finishing a run has had the game popping up messages when i return to the menu, telling me I just unlocked the berserker and mystic, even though they're (obviously) already unlocked for me.

I've finished a couple of runs with the defensive deck on the mystic, and it feels really solid. I'm still getting used to drawing the extra patterns and making effective use of them, but it felt easier to win using the defensive deck on normal than to beat the first boss (and I tried 3 different options) on easy with the low nodes deck.

I'm not certain how much of this is an actual balance issue, and how much is just that this game is harder on a touchpad, though xD

Quite a lot of things over the years. A noteworthy example being that it used to support larger fonts for people with vision issues, because GabeN had bad vision, but almost immediately after he got laser surgery he was like "k don't need that any more" and since then, they didn't just remove the in-built options for larger fonts, but made changes to how skins work to make it harder to add them back.

For me though, in 2019, the Steam client got an update which has turned it into a literal health hazard. It's an active trigger for a variety of photosensitive medical conditions. I get migraines and it's affected me really badly - spent about a month bordering on hospitalisation almost daily because of it, before finding out that the Steam update was the cause.

Numerous people have identified a variety of (mostly easily-fixed) causes for this behaviour in the app, and Valve's responses so far have included:
-admitting they knew within days of the problem starting, but promising not to take appropriate action to fix it.
-repeatedly gaslighting people affected by the issue.
-intentionally violating privacy laws in multiple ways while trying to dodge liability.
-on multiple occasions, directly abusing customers asking for help, including at least 2 instances I know of where they tried to coerce customers into self-harm.

At this point, that's more than sufficient levels of horrific behaviour for me to say that even Epic would be a better choice at this stage.

Couldn't get a screenshot of it, but... there's a bug with the mystic's ability when fighting enemies with the "chain" special effect. Using a chained card doesn't highlight the card properly, and doesn't reveal the new pattern to trigger the upgraded effect. They highlight like they're mid-cast, but don't activate properly. It's weird.

After a couple more runs with the low nodes deck on the mystic... it might need some uptuning on some of the numbers. Not 100% certain yet but it feels kind of rough at present. The mystic's unique mechanic is really fun though!

So jsut died in the second area on easy, on my first attempt with the mystic. *WOW* that's a fun mechanic but... going to take some getting used to! O_o

After the 1.1.3 update, i was able to finish my previous run, which had already been a lot of fun. Thanks for the fast response!

And this one is apparently reproducible. Had it happen twice in a row...

And another "can't progress" bug, this time after beating the final boss...

And further information... Cast 1 heal then 1 damage then the buff card, and it didn't break. So now I have no idea what triggered the glitch...