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SynthOrange posted:Ascendency is currently free. http://appshopper.com/games/ascendancy I lost so many hours to this game back in MSDOS days. Thanks for the tip!
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Apr 20, 2014 18:08
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After five months of work the iPad game me and my brother have been developing has been published, The Spatials! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-spatials/id813212165?ls=1&mt=8    It's a mix of a (right now very basic) space station simulation (think Startopia) with planet exploration and real time action RPG-ish combat. You recruit and care for your dudes by building them a nice space station. Then you send them to explore randomly generated planets, to It's free + IAP. I would have preferred to do a paid download but after watching other projects it became clear that being an unknown team releasing their first game the income would be low no matter what we do, so we decided to make it free in the hopes of getting more traction and exposure. You can finish the game without spending a single cent, the IAP is more of a cheat code, really. We have plans for a PC/Mac port and to add more content and expand the game mechanics, specially in the space station part. Nothing like Dwarf Fortress in space but definitely something more involved than this first version.
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May 5, 2014 22:17
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Campbell posted:I've only done the first quest and don't really have a clue as to what I'm doing but I like your art design and applaud your lack of pixel art (not to dig at pixel art, it's just nice to see something different every once in a while). Thanks! We don't hate pixel art either, it's just that we felt more comfortable with this style. As for progress indicators we tried not to hold the users hand too hard and get them to figure some stuff out on their own, but we may have gone a bit too far with this for some mechanics. UI instrumentation for tutorials is loving hard to do too, we had it for the station segment but scrapped it in the end. Campbell posted:I've noticed some misspellings on the "What?" tab, and I think "Station" but am not sure. I hope you do well, but I wish you'd have charged 1.99 outright for this because I'd have paid it for sure, especially if the IAP is as unnecessary as you mention. The $2.99 credit doubler is a good non-consumable, but I've bought that enough in other games that I'm wary of that now without putting decent play time in. Basically we are giving up on money in exchange for exposure and feedback, at least initially. It's more of a marathon than a sprint for us. We will try a small banner ad for the next version. For the first levels credits are not an issue unless you go wild with the build tool. After combat becomes important you will be motivated to use the Collider often to get some phat loot and that starts to get expensive after awhile. But you can chill and just do side missions and get items no matter what. Campbell posted:If you don't mind my asking, tech/framework what did you use for development? Code is 100% C++, and the framework is cocos2d-x. The UI is all custom coded on top of the node system in cocos2d-x. Some parts of the game logic are a pain to write in C++, compared to say Lua, but I was way too far into the implementation to switch in the middle of the project. Out of this situation came out some weird stuff, like a unholy macro system that allows me to declare class attributes and generate automatic marshalling in a single line of code (no more "ops I forgot to update the save method", yay). WetSpink posted:Liking Spatial so far, up to level 9/10 planets and on the quest to unlock the last crew member - I've kinda "blasted" through and only done the quest planets so I'm not sure of the benefits of going to the other planets yet. Just had my first planet with hostile enemies and that was sorta fun. It was an exercise in kiting and dropping robots to zap stuff and throwing grenades and lasers. Once my captain The idea is that new campaign missions force you to face enemies 2 levels above your gear so in case you find that too difficult you can go and visit some planets with easier objectives for extra items and cash. That being said it's true we didn't do side content in order to release earlier, and the optional planets now don't feel very unique or challenging. We will put unique stuff in them in future versions, for example resource farming will become more important and it will have dedicated planet types for it. WetSpink posted:Is there an easier way to fire attacks? It feels a little wonky dragging from the icon on the bottom left corner to a mob and I didn't realize that I had to have my finger over the mob when I released til a little while in, I thought just the line overlapping the mob would be enough. The "drag to target" it's the gimmick of the combat system. It's more relaxed for the engineer skills because they are AoE, but the strategist is all about high single target damage so yeah as you have seen it's not as forgiving. You have to both point and keep in mind the delay for your dude to fire. It may sound cumbersome buuuut when you find a one or two stars sniper, it's worth it  (we will keep tweaking the hit boxes!).WetSpink posted:It's not always obvious what little ground objects will yield anything and things I think have yielded stuff on previous planets didn't work on new ones (that little slime mound thing, I think) also the heads of the colonists looked kinda like those silver panel things I'd got previous. Yes, the campaign missions sometimes will use decorative objects for objectives, sometimes lootable, sometimes not. In general everything without the big fat ! on top of it's optional and some free cash/loot the game is throwing at you. After level 8 or so most of your stuff will come from looting dead pirates/robots. WetSpink posted:It isn't immediately obvious how many of each base thing you need too, and at this point I'm not sure if I'm gonna get doubles of some crew members or not. Like I don't know how many food benches or hydroponic stations or cook areas I need. I messed up and bought more than one recycler and uh the other thing in that room that combines items which I think cost me a bunch. True, we need to explain more in depth what each item does a lot better. Right now count on something like 3 beds, 2 of anything to do with food, and 1 of everything else. And as many inventory pallets as you want of course. WetSpink posted:Is there any way to move or rotate items you've already put in? That'd be nice. That's already the number 1 requested feature! Campbell posted:Spacials: how do you equip passives? I have a ton in my inventory but can't seem to assign them. You can equip items (both active and passive) by going to the Staff screen (the third button from the left) and touching the item skill buttons below the portrait/stats area. xiw posted:I was enjoying The Spatials ... but it doesn't autosave. Was in bed, played until my device died, got up to plug it in, and I was back to zero. This is really surprising for an iOS game! That's a huge oversight on our part, sorry! I'm making it a top priority feature for the next version. For now save often (saves are in the order of 70KB-100KB, you can keep a bunch of them around). Thanks everybody for the feedback! unlurked fucked around with this message at 11:25 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 11:13
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gyger posted:Any idea if/when Spatial will be Universal? The game already compiles and runs on the iPhone, and supports arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. But the on-screen UI elements are sized way too tiny for phone screens, you need to peek at your screen with your pinky, and that's still too big for some buttons. It would require a redesign of every screen to make it usable. So the answer is that we would love to, but we can't, for now.
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May 6, 2014 16:18
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Campbell posted:A few things. When I first started the game, I tried dragging rations over from slot 2 to slot 10 and have a graphical issue. It seems repeatable after 3 or 4 attempts to drop an item just outside of a drop zone. Total bug, thanks for the report! Campbell posted:Next, on Passives, I figured it out. I didn't realize the icon in the background of a passive button denoted a category, so when I wasn't seeing anything it was because I didn't have any for that category. Pic below shows the Rations/inventory drag/drop issue overlaying this view as well. Yes, those buttons may not make it clear you are supposed to fill them up. We will redesign them. xiw posted:In Spatials the drop rate of stuff once you start fighting pirates seems ridiculous - I keep losing dudes because i'm off in the base screen frantically recycling stuff. YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL Did you find it game breaking? We were worried about first time players finding it hard to gear up, specially when you have to start killing stuff for real, so we made the drop rates quite generous. We will tone it down for the next version and instead spawn your initial officers with some random passives pre-equipped.
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May 7, 2014 08:55
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ZarathustraFollower posted:1. The stupid floating enemy (reminds me of a beholder) is a massive pain to kill. I basically rely on the engineer's robot to do it because I can't find the things hit box (I feel like it is just below the tentacles, but miss more often than not) Campbell posted:The main frustration I had was having a crew w/ non-aoe weapons. You had to be super quick on the draw to hit the button and then move over and drag to the target. Now that my engineer had Missile and Fusion Missile I don't notice it as much anymore because I AOE everything from a mile away and kind of feel like I broke the game Some hitboxes (actually hitcircles) are wrong, we will fix them for the next release. We will also add some kind of visualization to the target circle to make it clearer if you may to hit or not (but we will stop short of a 100% true indicator, it will be more of a graphical hitbox as you mention later). Also some player AoEs are getting the nerfbat  ZarathustraFollower posted:2. Going to a planet and having a mission be impossible is really frustrating. I had to clear out 2 pirate bases on an astroid, and one base was on a little island by itself. I still killed everyone with missiles, but couldn't get the reward. Island/asteroid worlds have these quirks sometimes. To reach islands you can build corridors in exploration mode, it's the second button in the left toolbar. We are also thinking about adding a teleport skill. Campbell posted:* I wish that I could touch & hold a character to bring up the firing ring for the first weapon that's not on cooldown, opposed to solely using the UI button for the weapon. xiw posted:Yeah this game is triggering my RSI something wicked when using the pistol - drag from bottom left of screen to near the middle, over and over and over. We toyed with alternative ideas for skill triggering. For example a deck-like system where before the mission you order your officer skills in a queue. Then on the planet you tap directly on enemies and the first item on the queue gets used and then goes back to the end of the queue. Also direct avatar interaction like dragging from your characters, as you mentioned. We went with the current system because it looked the most familiar to action RPC fans. To address your issue with repeating the same action, we are thinking about adding "memory" to what was the last position you fired at, and then making the weapon skills be usable both as drag-to-target (current system) and as a button (it will just fire at the last position). But doing a good UI for this and explaining it to new users is a daunting task. We got a Greenlight for the PC port we are preparing with a trailer, check it out! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=257083077 (the final version will have keyboard bindings for the skills, of course!) Thanks everybody for the feedback! Altought we basically stealth launched it's amazing to see people picking up the game so fast and liking it.
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May 8, 2014 10:40
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Cocoa Crispies posted:I'm stuck on a level 24 Arid planet mission. I'm supposed to destroy five robot factories, only four ever spawn We are very sorry! I've submitted version 1.0.1 which fixes this and adds other small improvements and fixes, it should be out within five days.
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May 9, 2014 11:12
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