MiniLD #69compo
Operation Mars
Operation Mars is the first game finished by my teammate David and I.
The game features 30 waves of 8 different enemies. You have to defend your newly settled colony on mars from inhabitants with laser guns.
The game is not very well balanced - Waves 20 onwards might be too easy and the RNG might sometimes surprise you but don't get discouraged, you can finish the game.
I focused more on art and GUI while David focused on the more technical programming.
We would love to see some feedback from you guys, good or bad.
*If the game doesn't start run oalinst.exe
The game features 30 waves of 8 different enemies. You have to defend your newly settled colony on mars from inhabitants with laser guns.
The game is not very well balanced - Waves 20 onwards might be too easy and the RNG might sometimes surprise you but don't get discouraged, you can finish the game.
I focused more on art and GUI while David focused on the more technical programming.
We would love to see some feedback from you guys, good or bad.
*If the game doesn't start run oalinst.exe
Comments13
Graphics and Sound are well made - and the difficulty is as I said a quite a bit on the hard side (but not impossible).
However, maybe I'm really bad at this game but I tried the game a several times and I always died on day 3, with a ~80% accuracy on every round, and i could never buy any upgrade before dying (except the restore health) which felt a bit frustrating :p
- Buttons for upgrades give no hint as to whether they are purchasable or not. Even graying out upgrades you can't purchase slightly would make it a bit easier to parse.
- It would be nice to be able to repair buildings partially, even if you don't have enough money to repair them all the way. Right now, even if a building is on 1% health, and you have 99% of the cash needed to repair it fully, you're kind of screwed.
- This may or may not be something you intended, but if you upgrade the health of a building, it will fully repair the building as well at no extra cost, meaning you can save money by upgrading your buildings when they're low on health.
- The upgrade tree has the potential to provide paths for different playstyles, but unfortunately, as far as I could tell, there was pretty much only one correct way to progress. If I didn't invest almost exclusively in DPS, and then in the force field once dps became too expensive, I invariably failed hard. The turrets were absolutely never worth it.
Still, the challenge/tradeoff presented by the accuracy bonuses is a really interesting design decision. Having good accuracy in the early game proves crucial to succeeding later, but after you get the level 2 scattershot, accuracy pretty much stops being a thing entirely, so it doesn't really play a role through the whole game.
Also, a quick tip, if you change the "?dl=0" to "?dl=1" on the end of your dropbox link, the file will download automatically.
@Stuntddude All your points have been considered by me and David already and we really wanted to implement them but we started kind of late and with no real roadmap of what we should do so we ran out of time :) The accuracy mechanic was David's idea and we implemented it like a few hours before submitting. I was surprised how much it added to the early game. Also, the dropbox tip is awesome, thanks!
Also, do you guys think it's worth investing some more time to polish the game or just move on to the next project?
But, maybe it's a little too hard ? I didn't manage to pass over Day 6. I try the turrets : didn't work, always quickly die. I think they should be stronger.
Moreover, a lot of time, I put my mouse out of the window and click so that it put the game in background. It's very frustating, maybe there is a way to avoid that.
Keep creating games ! (your game is my favourite until now)