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Thank you!

We just used some assets through an asset store for music that I use for other things, but it was appropriate to this jam we thought, and I'm glad you liked it!

Thanks for the comments!

Yeah there was a problem we realized late in development that we called a 'soft-lock'. Because the game is flow dependent it's very easy to end up in a situation where you can't advance. That really comes down to really precise tuning, which for a game like this would honestly take like weeks to sort out because everything is time dependent and related to each other.

In a proper game ( not a jam ) you should do balance analysis before hand, sort of mathematically describing the relationships, like a game model in a spread sheet that lets you play with relative strengths and weaknesses of all the buildings.

We also capped the game at 24 buildings ( and there was a bug that was capping it at 22, we found after release ) , again because of time limits we didn't want to hafta deal with users placing buildings cuz getting the UI for that right would have taken the UI dev a day or two once you factor in polish and good feedback.

Our objective was to trail the concept with bare minimum of scaffolding and see if it worked at all. We think it did, but a future iteration, if we take this farther, will likely be much more involved. 

Thank you!

Yeah that was something we wanted to do. Just didn't have the time to wire it up.

Hey thanks for the comments.

Yeah it's a Jam so didn't have the time to do all the polish we wanted and it was a fairly ambitious concept. Thanks for the feedback , it's really helpful.

For anti-matter, there is a structure that actually takes lots of hydrogen to make it. So you need to increase your output as you go. But your right, a tutorial or some kind of pop up to make that clearer is something we would need to do if we wanted to take this project further.

Thanks again! All of this is very helpful. Help us contrast what works with what doesn't work.

Hey thanks for the feedback!

Yeah we are aware of the issues. Maybe this particular game concept was a bit ambitious for a jam and it shows, but we wanted to experiment with a concept that could be turned into something fully featured down the road potentially.

The soft-locks in particular were a problem we didn't anticipate and started popping up a day or two before the Jams end. That's a bit of a hard problem, because it's actually a problem of interface and human psychology, how do you communicate something to a player and give them enough time to respond, and give them enough visual indicators that they are far less likely to soft-lock , while still leaving room for players to make painful mistakes.

Appreciate the feedback! Most people are too nice haha.

Yes, and actually agreed with the critiques above.  It's two of the developers first Jam, and one of the developers second Jam. 

Over scope is def true, and we ran out of time to do the tuning that we really wanted in order to give it more depth, so both those problems are actually related. But it was a fun experiment, and now we know better for next time how to approach these things.

Thanks Again!

Yeah I think the interface needs a bit more clarity. The intuition is missing, though that didn't occur us till it was too late in the project to add features.

Maybe we need to show the threshold to hit the 'tier' which unlocks new buildings and new planets. It's meant to scale exponentially, with bigger more valuable worlds farther away, and more expensive buildings becoming available as you advance. There are 3 tiers, and the game doesn't complete until build the last tier and the final building , though that isn't stated explicitly anywhere. Just ran out of time. We were pushing updates at like 3:30, with delivery due at 4 haha.

Thanks for playing, and the feedback! It's super valuable.

Understood. 

I've actually opted to not use Gridless for this project sadly. I did have a DB oriented solution already that was I was going to replace, but the issues with collection reference made it more difficult than it was worth at the moment. 

I REALLY like the tool. The interface is clean and simple, and it's easy to mock out really complicated data in an intuitive way.  I think it needs a little more polish for what I need though, so I'll revisit it in the future. Especially if I can keep Gridless in mind as I'm building the schema for my next project. It's not hard to match a new project up to it, but an old project that isn't going to cache everything from a single Json file would require some changes that don't add enough value for the time I'd need to spend.

Addendum -

There are 2 separate issues here after further exploring it.

1 ) When adding a new reference collection at the root level of a category, it will add a default entry. If you remove that default entry, you can no longer edit the reference category in the collection edit interface, and your only able to add blank references on items inside a category. IF you add the default reference back you can then edit the reference category.

This is a minor issue, though as a quality of life improvement I'd like to be able to have a default reference type set for a collection without requiring it to actually have an entry, since an empty collection is still valid.  I'm able to work around this by removing the default reference inside each individual item.

2 ) I do think this falls down when references are nested. So if I have a reference category pointing to a thing that also has a reference collection inside of it, it will never correctly assign itself to the proper category. So I definitely would like the developer to look into this if he can. 

It's also possible it's failing silently somewhere ( Like a broken record somewhere ), but in either case I'm not getting expected behavior. 

 For the moment I won't be using nested references and I'll just build the intervening layer in code on game boot up and store the raw data flat, but it's a bit of a hacky approach I'd like to avoid.

I'm loving the tool. I been using an SQL database to build my records but I find this interface to be much easier to work with.

But I'm having some difficulty getting collections of references to work, which is unfortunate because I'm using references heavily to make abilities and bonuses modular.

I'm not confident of the Repro steps, because it seems to fail intermittently but it fails quite a bit. Essentially new references added to the collection will often fail to point to the assigned reference. The Drop down just comes up empty.  I've had to add reference collections multiple times in order to get them to take, and it seems like if you try to edit them it just farts. I've also had cases where I assign to a refrence collection a particular category, but the collection refuses to point to it, instead selecting another category despite repeated attempts to get it point to the right category
I am using nested references, but not circular refrences.

IE AbilityResource  contains many  AbilityEffectGroups each of which contains one or more EffectResources.

This is important because it's a tactical RPG I'm making where I need to have the ability to set up various targeting groups for spells that have multiple targets, but have fine control of the status effects / damage inflicted on each target.

anyone else run into this and any insight into how to troubleshoot or work around it?

Hey Deep - Just wanted to update you on my progress. I took your shader code and mutated it horrifically and made my own thing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/nuf5um/shader_based_planets/

Later in the week I'll be releasing a video and some code.

Honestly the Pixel Planet Generator was a gigantic inspiration. These shaders are going to go into a game I been writing for the last 3 months.

This is a fantastic tool.

Any plans for supporting any other in-engine development other than Unity? I'm a godot developer ( as many of the people on Itch.io ) are. Not sure if there is huge demand for that, but if this was a godot tool, it would be a very easy buy for me.

https://www.screencast.com/t/PyoSNBvDvWf

Here is my first attempt at a planet using your shaders. I'm making a kind of avengers in space game, so I wanted something with a more pen & ink style than pixel art. It looks like the shader scaled. I had to change it pretty dramatically, but I learned alot reverse engineering it. 

I added those polar ice caps, modeled on your shaders, but using textures rathe than in shader noise generation.

I may take you up on that. Still a bit early in my process. I'm writing a procedural planet data generator ( so mass, gravity, atmosphere, biosphere, etc ) and I think it will fit like a glove into this shader system.

For example , I can make the clouds yellow when the atmosphere generator returns Hydrogen Sulfide. I'll be sure to link you to the project when it's more complete.

This is awesome. Honesty the best and most complete Procedural Planet Generator I've come across in terms of it's ability to easily slot it into an already existing project and make use of it.

I made a donation, but frankly you should think about selling this. It actually scales pretty well without pixels. I'm tweaking it a bit for my own liking, creating more high def planets and adding shader params and combining layers. I need to actually wire up specific parameters to specific kinds of atmospheres and that kind of thing to give the player visual cues.

I'm a developer, but not much of an artist and I'm pretty weak in the shaders department so this is saving me an enormous amount of time, and I'm learning quite a bit too fussing with the code.

Thanks!