Great game off the back but it does have a few flaws I don't know (i.e don't feel like looking for) if you have addressed.
-Planet directed upgrades. E.G: increase/decrease rotation speed, in battle healing, special powerups.
-The Upgrade/line move is a little unbalanced. I have one gun thats slightly upgraded and now I have to go against enemies with several weapons better then mine for free.
-ability to increase height as well as map length.
-nice to have visiual changes to upgrades maybe?
Thanks for playing and rating! I think your observations are all fresh and have not yet been brought up:
-Planet directed upgrades / special powerups are partially included in the game with the damage / defense / reload bonuses and some of the perks gained by the artifacts are planet-related as well. I could imagine making a separate shop for these bonuses in a possible sequel for the game.
-The upgrade line should directly be tied to your planet's worth in weapons and upgrades: If you fight a planet near the yellow "money incentive line", the enemy planet should have equipment comparable to your planet (besides guns you have not researched yet, of course).
If you haven't discovered it yet: You can increase the map length already when playing with a "custom" difficulty setting. It would be possible technically to increase the map height as well since the map is already dynamically created, but it might bring in a bit of a balancing problem: It gives you more / less green planets / artifacts / quests as you progress to the right. But since custom mode is "anything goes" already, I think I might add this in a future update.
-I'd really love to have visual changes for the guns (and maybe for gun health as well). It would not only be a nice visual detail, but it would also allow you to determine at first sight how "strong" the enemy gun is. I have not yet added them in because it would take a bit of effort to create different gun graphics for each and every upgrade, and if I would have that ready, the game file would most likely be too big to upload it on NewGrounds :-/ (I'm close to the limit already....) If you or anybody has an idea how to represent the upgrades in a "cheap" (effort & file size-wise) way, please let me know via PM!
Thanks again for playing and the feedback!
I'm impressed. This game is well designed, complicated, and success depends on a number of factors, including: experience in the game, a sense of timing, luck, judgement, ability to learn from mistakes, and, whether or not the player is distracted at the moment. The format is really interesting. The combination of limited slots on the planet, and lack of knowledge on the slots of other planets makes it really fun to try to design your arsenal. You get to feel accomplished when you recognize a counterproductive strategy. I will be playing this one for a while. The update that included the ability to change the game's variables made it more accessible to the general player base by enabling what we used to call "trainers", but also allows for more advanced players to still have fun. I'd honestly have dropped another half star on this, except for one feature I find missing. A "self destruct" button. I know, I could close the browser window, reload the page, select a new campaign. But seriously, that's a lot of clicking and waiting. When I make a bad call. I forget to take actions that will allow me to enter a fight at close to full health, or I just blatantly forget to do upgrades before intentionally picking a fight, please oh please, pretty please with sugar on top, can I have a button to press that says "Blow My Planet Up!"? That would save so much trouble! Again, good game!
Thanks for playing and rating! I'm very glad you liked the complexity of the game and you appreciate the custom difficulty settings! The self destruct button is a very good idea, I will add some kind of "safe" keyboard command for self destruction ( something like "press k 3 times in a row", a simple button on the guy might be annoying if you hit it by accident while clicking around with the mouse).
This game is great, I love it. Maybe the start is a bit too slow and the tutorial a bit too long (even then, you can skip it), but otherwise it's just perfect
Thanks for laying & the perfect score! The tutorial is indeed to long, I tried to combat this a bit by offering the short tutorial in V 1.09 and the option to skip the tutorial entirely, but i definitely have to think this more through for my next game. ;)
it's a great game. Also enjoyed the mobile version a lot. I got so obsessed I destroyed or searched every square before taking on the final battle.. you need a medal for that !!! Call it annihilation!
nice job
-z
Thanks for playing and rating! And thanks for trying ht mobile version as well. Unfortunately I was a little too eager when I created the medals for the game, I have already used up all 500 score points so I can't create any additional medals.
could get more stars if it wasn't so tediously slow...
severa seconds of wait time in the tutorial where you jsut need to wait for someone to finally say something... but that's forgivable...
The UI on the other hand always makes you wait...
planet upgrade system could easily show your whole planet and make the turrets clickable for example.
The intro and destruction sequences could be reduced to way less.
The wait time after the scan before anything happens could be reduced...
I'm just used to way more pace, you should be able to play at your own pace, not wait for the UI.
Thanks for playing and your thoughts on the game! I'm sorry the game felt to slow for you, it is hard to please everybody with the speed of the UI / sequences. For instance when the game was still in development and everything still was very rudimentary, the "Planet attacks" sequence was not present and people would not "get" who attacked them, and why they were thrown into a battle all of the sudden. So I added the rotating UI symbols, alarm and the camera movement to make it more clear. Another player noted before in a review that these sequences are too long now, so I made them skippable, to get the best of both worlds.
If this was a fully-fledged PC release instead of Flash / Android I would put some of the animation parameters in an .ini file for your tweaking convenience. =)