BitBase left me very bored for the entirety of my time playing it, but the time I did spend playing it was much longer than the time I spend on games I enjoy far more. If there’s any praise I can lay on this game, it’s that the constant and permanent progress made continuing easy and quitting hard, giving it a similar appeal to a clicker game, just with a few more customization options than the genre usually comes with. However, even this victory is made near pointless by the way the game pauses whenever you exit the game window, or move to another tab. This tendency forces the player to fully engage with a game that doesn’t feel like it was meant to be fully engaged with, a problem for obvious reasonsds.
I’m confused as to whether BitBase was created to be a more traditional base building/strategy game in the vein of age of empires and simply ended up being a semi-idle game by virtue of the monotony of its gameplay, or whether this was always the plan. This is an issue because my criticisms and suggestions differ depending on which of these goals the developer wants to pursue.
If this game wants to be a base building strategy game, it fails. The player technically does engage in the core loop of these kinds of strategy games, using what information they have to minimize risk in the creation and placement of buildings and units. Unfortunately, the way this game is designed deemphasizes the weight and prominence of these decisions.
BitBase has 1 failure state: suffering an attack when you don’t have the resources to defend it, in towers, in units, or in raw currency. Avoiding this failure state is very easy. By the time an enemy spawn location is discovered, you have ample time to prepare for it, and usually have the resources to defend against it. Because enemy attacks are directly tied to the rate at which the player collects resources, it is near impossible to not have these resources, even in the early game. Once you pass the early game, enemy nodes become a non-issue. I was able to assemble a defense force that was able to defend against any attack while sustaining minimal losses very quickly, and that was it. Progress became continuous and uninhibited, and the game took on the semi-idle state it never left from that point forward.
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to work towards fixing this issue would be to tie enemy attacks to time passed rather than to progress on mining out the area. This would make urgency in resource collection a factor, would allow you to have better control over the difficulty curve to reduce moments of complacency, and better tweak the amount of time the player has to react to an incoming enemy attack, so as to force the player to better prepare for them, as opposed to simply reacting to them.
I would also suggest making buildings require time and the use of gatherers or even specialized builder units to create (with the amount of time decreasing the more units you have working on the same building) as this once again decreases the amount of time the player has to react to an enemy invasion and requires them to pay more attention to resource management regarding buildings.
The rest of my suggestions would be far more nebulous and less helpful changes, such as tweaking the difficulty curve.
While these solutions would help keep the player more actively engaged with the game for longer, they still wouldn’t make this game stand out or even be average among other similar base building/resource collection strategy games. To do this, the resource management aspects of this game must become far more prevalent. The player must constantly be making decisions on what to spend where. While this does occur in this game, because there is only 1 threat, these questions become near pointless once that threat is dealt with. Adding more threats or avenues of noticeable efficiency, specifically ones that compete with the existing threats for resources, and ones that become issues at a different time than the existing threats so as to allow less downtime to the player, and give them more time where they are actively doing something, would go a long way to fix its issues as a strategy game.
Any more specific solution I could offer here would inevitably be either vague or overbearing, so I’ll leave to you exactly how these systems would play out.
If this game is trying to instead be an idle game, or something similar, it comes with its own set of issues. Perhaps the biggest is the aforementioned inability to leave the game running while outside the game window which is, for an idle game, a death sentence.
Getting past this issue, there are more fundamental problems with this games design that could affect its success as an idle game, and most of these find themselves in the strategy elements of the game. The problem is as such:
To ensure maximum efficiency when collecting resources, the player must make sure that as few gatherers die as possible in the event of an attack. While simply creating an army of defender units and defense nodes will stop the invasion easily, stopping the invasion with minimal casualties requires moving the units or nodes in question directly to the enemy spawn, so the enemies are killed before they can do any real damage. This requires the player to watch for enemy nodes and move/place their defenses accordingly. While not being particularly engaging gameplay, this still does require the player to pay attention to and engage with the game from time to time, or else their productivity will slowly be sapped.
While idle games do have optimal ways to play that require engagement with them, sometimes even at times that the game itself dictates, like this game, not engaging with these games only really loses the player potential future productivity. Losing existing productive forces is very rare, because the constant feeling of progress is THE selling point of these kinds of games. Any disruption in this feeling is an opening for the player to quit. With this game, in order to maintain this constant feeling of progress, the player must be constantly paying attention to the game, so as to deal with enemy attacks efficiently (This is made worse by the fact that the player must spend minutes at a time respawning fallen gatherers or spawning new gatherers to maintain/increase productivity because of the lack of a queue. I know you’re going to fix this, but it still felt worth mentioning.) This doesn’t work for idle games, for obvious reasons.
I don’t know how to fix this without just making this game a completely different experience to be honest. I can’t see a situation in which these strategy elements help the game rather than hurting it, so if this is the kind of game you want to make, you might just want to go full idle…?
The result is a game that requires enough attention to not become an idle experience, but too little attention to be anything more substantial, hurt by its lack of commitment to either side of the spectrum, and by this failure, rendered… pretty boring.
A few closing thoughts:
- The resource collection sound that plays when gatherers reach a resource/central node becomes very annoying very quickly, especially when dealing with large amounts of gatherers.
- I feel like having some final goal to work towards, or some permanent way of tracking your progress, such as a score meter at the top of the screen, would make playing this game feel a lot more worth it. Right now, most ways you have of tracking your progress are either pretty abstract (the size of your colony), dubious as a method of tracking progress (current amount of currency), or hard to calculate (currency generated per minute) and having one canonized number to record that kind of thing (for ex. the total resources collected in this colony) would probably help motivate the player a lot.
- The top UI elements are cut off by the top of the game window.
- Having to click on nodes that produce units becomes more frustrating as the portion of the map the player interacts with grows larger, and it can sometimes become a problem when a unit is standing on the node in question and the unit is selected instead of the node. Simply adding a window to the side where every node of a certain type can be accessed, similar to the build button, would fix this.
- When your build button is over a node, clicking the build button selects the node instead of the button, forcing you to move the button away. This seems unintuitive to me.
When your camera hits the edge of the play field, pressing the input to move it away takes a few seconds to have any effect, as if the camera were stuck to the edge of the field. It makes moving the camera slower than it should be.
- I wish you could place points where certain defender units would go when not engaged in combat, so they wouldn’t just stand there, forcing me to move them after every engagement.
This game’s music is nice, I like it.
- Because there’s only one building that can spawn gatherers, they’re really hard to produce in large amounts (especially annoying because of the lack of unit queuing). Simply adding the ability to spawn them out of supply nodes, as they serve a similar function to the central node and increase the population limit would work wonders here. Or a brand new node, it doesn’t matter.
- C doesn’t seem to work to center the camera.
- Building placement doesn’t seem to operate on a fully grid based system, the size and shape of neighboring buildings having an impact on whether you can place a building in a certain location. While this may make things look nicer in some cases, it has a rather minimal effect for something that makes building placement more fickle and less intuitive in my opinion, so I would rather operate on a strict grid-based system with one building per square.
- Not being able to place buildings on units is an odd choice that only serves to make things more frustrating when the units will inevitably move out of the way anyways and they can pass through buildings after the buildings have been placed.
Ok that's it, hope this helps.
