IT'S PVZ IN SPACE!!!
Author Comments
Hello everyone! Today March 6 is my birthday and I wanted to celebrate it by sharing the game I've been working on lately.
Disclaimer (this game was developed by one person in 4 months)
Cosmodrome is a space-trade tower-defense game. You'll get to play different missions where you'll need to manage, design and upgrade your space station with whatever you can earn from trading with passing ships and negotiating with different factions.
PLAY THE DEMO HERE
BUY THE DESKTOP VERSION HERE:
Discord HERE
Game Schematics:
TOWER DEFENSE
-1 Level (more coming soon on desktop version)
-12 Asteorids waves
-10 towers to build
-12 Slots to instal towers in the station
-6 mercenarys ships to here
-constant space pirates atacks
-military inspections for narcotics and weapons
SPACE TRADE
-16 different factions to trade
-45 different special trades
-13 Resources
-5 Modules produce resources
ADMINISTRATOR
-Earn XP and Lv Up
-16 administrator skills to upgrade
-6 officers structore to fill
-7 randomizer officer creation every ingame 7 days
ART
- 22 inmersive songs made by 13 artist
-15 Different space backgrounds
-20 diferent ships and more to come
-75 sci-fi sounds
JamesChapp responds:
thanks for the good review.
I plan to develop a more complete version of this game very soon.
Graphics are full of detail and have that outer space vibe. Your tutorial should go much slower. Break things down into bite size pieces and give demonstrations of things you are trying to teach. Some people learn better by doing. I did enjoy all of the music and sound effects.
JamesChapp responds:
Thank you very much for giving my game a chance! Greetings and soon I will return to work on it.
This is one of the best games on NG, no exaggeration. The old-school vibe and independent attitude is a great thing to behold.
The tower activation was a bit tricky but I got the hang of it, reminds me of Elite, Serenity and other sci-fi stuff from the old days.
Keep it up and keep on improving!
Questions: Not sure how you buy or make computers, that option isn't there on the screen, maybe you haven't added it yet?
JamesChapp responds:
Thank you very much for playing cosmodrome =)
It makes me very happy to be part of the NG community and after so many years of seeing so many good things on the portal. Now I am the one with something to contribute.
Regarding how to buy or make computers.
There is a bug that makes the computer resources icon disappear. I will fix it in the next update.
space traders sell computers. through the factions / special trades window.
I plan to create a medical bay module where I can produce medicines. and automated factory modules where to produce machines and computers.
did you find the AUTO SELL button? with which the posters of the ships that want to buy fuel do not appear and accept them automatically?
Regarding the skills.
to produce credits I recommend financial / trade / megawelth that work.
to shoot with the towers and mercenaries the skills weponry or ordnance and pilot.
but station maintenance skills and resource consumption are also important.
complement your skills with those of your officers to explore different strategies.
there are skills that don't work and others that do. I will improve the popups to be more descriptive.
the game can be won in different ways with different strategies.
the game has many hotkeys.
with the "Q" key you select all the units.
with SPACE pause the game
if you press the "Delete" key or delete. gives you credits.
Did you press the "0" key?
You go one level inside the station which simultaneously passes the tower defense outside the station. I'm going to implement that too.
with the key "E" the doors are used and with the "Q" you use or not a weapon. you point and shoot with the mouse.
the idea is to do action scenes inside the station like boardings and things like that.
Thank you for your sympathy
I only have one question for this game that i still dont know how to fix
how are you suppose to make the towers fire?
they don't shoot at ships nor meteor, is there something im missing???
JamesChapp responds:
Thank you very much for playing the game.
Here I leave you a link in case you want to download the version of windows that is played fullscreen and works much more fluidly than in the browser.
https://drive.google.com/u/0/uc?id=1v1uxmRVOjkUqrNjiC209oWMMlBFDwy9E&export=download
At the bottom left of the screen there is a button called (TOWER CONTROL)
That button opens a display where you can control the status of the towers.
These can be in three modes
off, (OFF)
they may be firing automatically (AUTO)
they can be in manual mode (MANUAL) that point to where the mouse is and are triggered with the right click.
I am also going to leave you an important piece of information, so that you can try all the towers. with the "Delete / del" key you can increase your credits.
The game has a lot of hotkeys.
I am having problems because browsers do not always recognize the keys. but they are there
if they don't recognize them I recommend refreshing the screen.
Thanks a lot!
I got incredibly lost in my playthrough, unfortunately, so I can't say anything definite on the game in a deeper sense. I think it has potential and a lot going for it, and could just be a game not for people like me, but nevertheless, I think it absolutely needs a bit better of a tutorial experience, more intuitive design and a more uncluttered HUD.
The tutorial was way too overbearing and impossible to process. It just vomits pages and pages of textboxes at you, giving you no time to breathe or see the full results of certain mechanics before it speeds off to teaching you the next set of mechanics, so you just forget everything and stop listening. It doesn't help that the textboxes are overlapping constantly as well which makes it impossible to read or interact with anything.
Regarding the tutorial: For one, I'd say you can cut down on the amount of instructions you give: the game is already laid out pretty intuitively and provides a ton of info pop-ups to learn, so you don't need to explain every single thing. And secondly, I'd say you should have the tutorial be a bit more of a story where they introduce mechanics bit-by-bit: leave the complicated mechanics for later, let the player just learn about basic trading first for a few days or whatever, then slowly introduce more complex stuff like crew and factions wayyyy later on.
The game was absolutely chockful of typos. Luckily, they were never major enough that it hurt my understanding of the game, but I seriously don't think I went by a single textbox without something being misspelled. Bizarrely enough, there would be times where the same word would be spelled correctly and wrongly, all practically in the same sentence!
I didn't like how I was being rushed all the time (the game gives you so much text to read and so little time to make a decision, alarms going off with unclear meaning as to why they were going off since hovering over the alarm doesn't tell you with a pop-up, you can never pause full-stop, the game doesn't pause automatically when you go into menus, etc) and yet simultaneously I was also just waiting around all the time (felt like all I could do was just sit and wait for events to happen, hoping for something in my favor to randomly happen, ordering oxygen/food/water is so delayed and unintuitive, etc).
I can definitely understand the difficulty in teaching a game as complex as this to a player, so you have my sympathy, haha. Looking forward to seeing how this develops!
JamesChapp responds:
Thank you very much for taking the time to play cosmodrome!
I developed the game alone for 4 months and it's not finished yet.
It seemed important to me to share the game in the state it is in before leaving it archived on my hard drive.
Luckily it had a very good reception from the public and now I'm putting together a team to finish it.
To begin to understand cosmodrome you have to keep in mind that it is an experimental game. where I implement a lot of different mechanics in a playable experience.
One of the last parts of the game I developed was the tutorial and I had a lot of trouble explaining each of those mechanics.
Regarding the alarms. yellow alarm is when you are running low on oxygen, food and water. (Less than 30 units.) If that happens automatically the station will contact a ship of those primary resources and will buy that resource.
The red alert is when the station is attacked by pirates or there is a threat like asteroids.
There is a button with which you can mute the alarm.
There is also a button with which you can automatically sell fuel to the ships that come to the station. that makes not so many windows with text appear, interrupting the game.
Regarding the design of the UI... sorry... but each system has a different system... it's all part of the experimentation... but I am aware that the UI is a disaster. hahaha.
All that is going to be fixed with the team... yesterday I was meeting with the new ui designer (Naty) who is going to clean up the mess I made.
Regarding the spelling errors... the game was made at super speed without corrections. Missing the editing and correction part.
The game is a kind of multi task...
You have to survive first and take care that you don't run out of resources for life support. (oxygen, water, food)
Then it's a space trade. where you have to trade with different resources to earn credits.
Then you have a Tower Defense where you have threats that attack the station and you can buy and improve your defense system.
on top of that there is an experience system with skills.
and on top of that a system of factions where depending on the relationship you have with the factions, different events are enabled...
and on top of all those systems... like a cherry on a cake... there is a system of random events that happen all the time...
all those systems make each experience playing the game different... or at least that's what the game's design points to.
Thank you again for taking the time to play the game and record a video.
I think all the feedback you give me is consistent and I appreciate it a lot... it really helps a lot in the development of the game.
Greetings
Credits & Info
- Views
- 12,263
- Faves:
- 70
- Votes
- 143
- Score
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3.69 / 5.00
- Uploaded
- Mar 6, 2022
- 12:37 PM EST
- Genre
- Strategy - Tower Defense
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Frontpaged March 13, 2022