Feedback wanted for Interplanetary Defense Alliance, the game I made for Ludum Dare

(TaylorAnderson) #1

Hello!

I made a game during Ludum Dare this past weekend that I think has potential (probably as a touch screen game, though I’ll be doing a downloadable version too). So I thought I’d post it here to get feedback on it-- what needs to be changed or tweaked, what could be added, stuff like that!

The game’s here: http://fourthfloorgames.itch.io/interplanetary-defense-alliance

If you guys could play it and offer some suggestions I’d really appreciate it!

(Bora Kasap) #2

if i have no any triangles in any planet, so, i think i can’t kill any triangle so, i dead because of i have no any triangles and a single triangle attacked to one of my planet for 20 - 30 secs and i’m dead now… :smiley: i like this game. that should be changed, if i have no any triangles, then any triangle attacker shouldnt be spawned.

  • enemies’ spawning speed increasing by time, so, i wish to my transfer speed to be faster between planets by time.
  • loading not required but i wait for 10-20 secs in the beginning screen because i think its the loading screen, so you can add a text something like “Press ‘space’ to start.”
(TaylorAnderson) #3

Not including ‘press space to start’ was definitely just a bad on my part, i forgot about it amidst getting all the other stuff done :P. But yeah, I’m not sure if I’m going to not spawn enemies based on lack of resources, or just adjust the contents of every passing ship based on resource need, cuz right now its just random.

(TaylorAnderson) #4

There’s a post-jam version of the game here: http://fourthfloorgames.itch.io/interplanetary-defense-alliance-post-jam which I will be updating regularly with suggestions and feedback and stuff. I’ve already improved the balance between ships and enemies, and put a ‘click to start’ message on the title screen.

(Bora Kasap) #5

Great, so, you want new suggestion? :smiley:

(Bora Kasap) #6

I have a question about stars, there are 2 layers of speed for stars. Back layer and front layer. But i wanna ask about a single star, each of them another instance or not(or each layer is single entity)?

(TaylorAnderson) #7

All separate instances :stuck_out_tongue: I didn’t really have time to do something fancy and they don’t seem to impact performance. Also, three layers actually :wink:

(Bora Kasap) #8

If them all seperate instances, you can make them move different speeds that looks cool.

Also, i have bad news.

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I think you just need to check for resources with also checking current triangle enemies (EDIT: BUT IF YOU DO THIS, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO LOSE THIS GAME? RIGHT? :smiley: LoL)

I mean you should use

if (triangle_resources - triangle_enemies > 0) sendTriangleAttacker();

instead of

if (triangle_resources > 0) sendTriangleAttacker();

AND another issue: Sometimes i can’t see shape of attacking enemy because of health bars of planets, you can make them transparent, or can change their layer to behind of enemy layer.

(TaylorAnderson) #9

Making health bars more transparent is smart. Also, enemy spawns aren’t balanced according to resources at all, I thought I could solve it by making ships give you more resources according to need and then aggressively rebalancing the ships to be more frequent, but perhaps I will also do a check in the EnemyManager.

(Bora Kasap) #10

Yeah, i added a little edit to my reply, read it :smiley:

(TaylorAnderson) #11

Yeah that came up when my friend and I were talking about it. I still like the idea of just having ships that restock, but I might make them even more frequent. Its a balancing act.

(TaylorAnderson) #12

Basically what I want is for you to have just enough resources to be able to kill all the enemies, but not enough for it to be easy.

(Zachary Lewis) #13

Don’t mind me, I’m just going to change the game pretty much completely.

  1. Bug It is possible to click an attacker multiple times and waste ammo.
  2. Improvement Remove health bar. Use health ring around the planet or other visual indicator that is part of the planet.
  3. Improvement Automatically fire at enemies if ammo is available. Then, add more ammo and more enemies to focus gameplay on the trading of assets between planets.
  4. Improvement As play continues, add shape combos (square with circle inside requires a square and a circle to destroy).
  5. Improvement Planets automatically generate shapes, and shapes can be spent to slightly upgrade regeneration speed for that shape on that planet. This would require some additional balancing. Keep spaceships as bonuses, but speed them up.
(TaylorAnderson) #14
  1. I will definitely work on getting a fix for that. I think I’ve noticed that before but I couldn’t think of a solution right away so I just ignored it, but now that I have time I can use it to fix the bug
  2. I’ll look into perhaps doing something like that. Now that I know how to make arcs its not too hard.
  3. I’m reeaallly not sure about this part. For one, adding more bullet types would necessitate planets be much bigger and given the other elements on screen (and making sure they remain readable) I can’t really afford to give them the extra space. Secondly, this was the first thing I tried when I first started making the game and it made it really dull. I don’t know how much adding new bullet types would change that. What I probably WILL do, though, is make stunning an enemy automatic if you shoot at one and you don’t have the proper resources.
  4. Might do this. I don’t wanna do toooo much more work on this game, just wanted to get it to a point where the existing mechanics work well. I was thinking of making a bigger version but I have another game I should probably get back to, so whether or not I do this will be entirely dependent on whether I decide to keep going on this game or not.
  5. Not sure what you mean on this one, but I was intending to make some form of long term investment in the early game to improve resource generation in the late game to try to offset late game resource deficiency. Again, like the previous one, I might not do this just because I want to move on pretty soon.

Thanks for the suggestions!

(Linck) #15

The mechanic is very original, and that’s a really good thing about this game. But I don’t have much fun playing it. Maybe because there is no evolution in the game, or maybe because there is too much to think about going on, and that makes me have a throttle sensation. But that’s just me, I don’t know how most of people will feel about this game.

(TaylorAnderson) #16

I’m gonna add some stuff to the early game to mix it up and add a little bit of strategy to that part. Other than that, don’t know what to tell you :stuck_out_tongue:

(Zachary Lewis) #17

For #3, I wasn’t suggesting you add more types of ammo. I was suggesting you have the planets auto attack, then instead of having 4 squares and 2 triangles and fighting 3 enemies at a time, you have 40 squares and 20 triangles and fight 30 enemies at a time. Since the player will focus on resource management and not actually clicking on stuff, you can make the game feel much more hectic and epic. Keep your three ammo types, just give the player a larger quantity of them.

(TaylorAnderson) #18

I’m still not sure. Given the limited space around each planet (not to mention the limited space inside the players’ head :P) wouldn’t that make each planets’ attacker numbers harder to parse? Thus making the whole system harder to parse? Also I would need a way to transfer more than one resource at a time to each planet…