itch.io

What a beautiful game you've created. I tried it one afternoone and 10 hours just vanished. It reminds me a lot of playing Exile: Escape From The Pit back in the Windows 3.1 era.

I love how you've implemented so many things. This is a masterclass in game design.

This overall look is gorgeous. Your use of colour is creative but sparing. It makes the amber insanity really stand out. Little visual things like the "hop" when you walk and all the bumps and visual cues really make it attractive and easy to understand what's going on.

The worldbuilding is very thorough, The main plot isn't too obvious at first but you understand the main quests after some hours. Acually working towards them is a lot more difficult. There's so little player progression, just items and god-based still/stat boosts.

The random combat and random zoomed in tile system is a great balance of curated content and generated content. When you unlock the ship it's fun to go explore the whole map and see what's out there.

The poise system is very clever, it makes combat feel dynamic between action and rest, which is always fun in a turn-based game

My only complaint is that being stunned is very punishing, having basically zero control in combat is almost certainly a death, which gets a bit frustrating. Dungeons are also extremely difficult which can be a bit discouraging.

Fun little game.

Looks good, reminds me a lot of Burntime. I found that after a few minutes it stops responding to all keyboard input so I need to kill it. Playing in DOSBox Staging.

Just wanted to say thanks!

It's rare for me that a turn based game manages to capture a feel of action. It's fun moving your squad around together and mowing down bad guys. I usually die pretty quick but that's roguelikes haha.

I made a large comment on your Reddit thread.

In case the Linux version proves to be a pain, this works perfectly in Wine stable.

I said in my review, but this is easily one of my most memorable games of all time. I love replaying it every so often.

I played in RetroArch with the VICE emulator, and mapped a second face button to Up, so I had A and B buttons as Jump and Fire. It worked really well. I assume plain VICE could do the same thing.

What an excellent game. I'll definitely replay this many times over the years, like I do with other great metroidvanias from Super Metroid to Axiom Verge to Tiny Dangerous Dungeons. Your game is such high quality, it's better than most commercial NES games and even some SNES games. Thank you so much for all your work!

Thanks for the quick reply! Yes I am using the Gear interface, and repairing at garages when I have the funds. When I clear the early stages I go around and collect all the crates so I've got as much gear as possible. There's only so much you can do when there's like 9 cars to kill along the Arizona highway with almost no chance to repair in between.

I also don't understand the money mechanic. You collect Cash (₡) for kills, but it seems you can't spend the Cash on repairs, you need to collect Parts (screw icon) to do repairs. Cash is spent on Fuel, which you are supplied anyway so there's no need to buy it, and Ordnance, the purpose of which isn't clear to me. It seems it would be better to allow cash to pay for repairs? It would also be nice to sell extra weapons, I often end up with more Junkthrowers than I can use.

I don't mean for this to sound like complaining, it's a fun game with lots of potential, I'd love to see it get even better :)

The core turn-based driving with the two speeds and the various options for numpad movement is brilliant. It takes some practice to place the car exactly how and where you want for complex moves, but when you pull a move off it looks so cool and is very satisfying. Balancing that with the WASD directional shooting so you minimise movement input and maximise shooting is really well done. The advantage of two-squares-per-turn at high speed is subtle and I need to explore that more.

Hey, cool game! Turn-based driving is always hard to get right without being boring, but you've done it really well. It has that real sense of action like CDDA's driving. The graphics and sound are really well done too. What you've done so far is very polished and professional.

However, I'm not able to get very far. In the third mission (to Arizona) I always get swarmed by 4 to 7 cars and die. I've got weapons on every side and am constantly switching sides and skid-turning to balance the damage around my armor, but there's just too much damage to keep up with. There aren't enough repair gears to keep up with the damage I take. It doesn't seem possible to avoid damage once you're in range of an enemy. It seems losing is inevitable. Am I missing something?

PS: An old report said Wine doesn't work, but it does now. Wine 7.22 on Ubuntu 22.04 with AMD graphics works well enough, fullscreen or Alt Tab hangs the game. It would be nice to have more resolutions like 1920x1200. I'm sure Unity must let you see the resolutions the system supports or support an arbitrary window size or something.

This is great, a joy to play. Controls are a little fiddly on keyboard but would be great on gamepad.

All good, better to release working software than on-time software :)

I looked into it with a Python developer friend. There is technically a way renpy could protect against this, but it's silly for them to do that to every method. I tried a linter/analyser called "flake8" to try and catch this sort of error but it didn't pick it up. What a strange thing about Python you have discovered :)

I'd report that bug to the renpy developers. I assume it's assigning your string literal to the notify method, so calling the method later crashes. Hopefully there's a way in Python to protect against that kind of thing.

Funny game, clever basic mechanics, well done

No worries about the large reply :)

Keeping the door back to the helmet unlocked would solve that problem.

I see the "smokey" air but it's pretty subtle, you could definitely make it more obvious that the air is harmful (and that the oxygen meter is ticking down, something we discussed a long time ago).

Yes, on the new demo.

I could shoot but couldn't get any further, evidently I'm missing something, I'll try again :)

That's what I mean about the helmet. You can't survive without the helmet, however if you miss it (because you're rushing to get away from the meltdown) then you can't go back and get it. The door locks behind you So you're locked in a situation which you can't survive.

It would be better to require the player to get the helmet before going outside. If not, then at least don't lock the door behind the player so they can go back and get the helmet.

Think of how Super Metroid handles the suits - sure, you can go into the lava without the Varia suit, but you can always go back and get it. You can enter Maridia without the Gravity suit, but you can't get very far, and you can always go back and get it.

I haven't played the demo in a while but gee it looks good!

If you get any Ubuntu 22.04 users complaining the game doesn't load, they can install libssl1.1 from Ubuntu 20.04.

I am not sure if the demo reflects the main game accurately, but it might be a good idea to gate suit progress so it can't be skipped. My first time I ran right past the helmet without picking it up, then you can't get back to it.

Not sure if the demo is broken as in un-completable, I could only get the red suit but didn't find anything further.

Looking forward to this being completed one day!

Looks great! I think about this game often and am looking forward to playing it :)

This was nice. Clever and short, but it still evoked that classic feeling of making a map on paper and playing a game multiple times to get it right. Thanks for providing the source too, it was interesting to see how you did it.

You implemented a similar system with the berries and fishing - they allow farming of food for the tradeoff of time and energy - so I was trying to think of a plausible way to make gathering water the same instead of relying on random chance :) Maybe a well could provide 1 water, and a bucket could increase the efficiency to 2 water, then allow the player to start hoarding water for the journey off the raft?

Pretty good. The random reliance on rain and water in trash makes the game frustratingly longer than it should be, I ended up with dozens of spare food and just collecting trash then sleeping for many days repeatedly. Maybe once you craft a hut you could drill a well or something?

I love the look of this!

I don't think there is anything wrong with fetch quests. You could reduce almost every adventure game puzzle down to a "fetch quest" if you wanted. It's the story around them which matters.

Asterion is a great example. I'm presumably going to find him dead at some point, then return to the starting location and get his items. The "fetch quest" isn't even an item, it's a piece of information which I'll "pick up" automatically.

However, the quest doesn't just send me over the other side of the map and back again with nothing in between. There's a whole storyline and mystery about it, the relationship between Asterion and other NPCs to explore, it's actually very exciting.

You actually do have a single-item fetch quest in the berries for the innkeeper, but if you talk to the guards then you'll learn this is a basic test to make sure you're trustworthy. The quest isn't about fetching berries, it's about proving that you're reliable and humble to another NPC. That's a lot of extra stuff added to a simple basket of fruit!

I trust you'll add a compelling story around most long puzzles. You seem very good at writing these intertwining storylines that make solving puzzles very rewarding to the reader.

Relax! Demos and playtesting are (at least partly) for catching bugs, the system is working perfectly :)

The demo is pretty good. Like you said, you've focused on polishing existing content rather than adding new content, so the changes are a bit subtle compared to the previous demo. I like the changes you made to the health/armor/conversation systems.

The world still feels alive, like there are other things going on around you and you're just a minor participant, there are mysteries to solve, and maybe there are things you won't even see in a single playthrough because of the different paths you can choose.

I have no idea what the Elder's real name is (probably not in the demo I guess), and I don't have enough money to buy Dajit's monster advice (again probably not enough money in the demo), so there's exciting things to look forward to in the future. I wonder what happens if I choose all the agressive conversation, or if I choose to joke around with the innkeeper despite being told not to. I want to play a few different games choosing all the different options. I expect if I choose to fight the the goblins then I might die. I'm actually scared to discover what's hiding in the ruined town, the writing is so good.

I guess from here, you have that mid-development part of adding new content. People often say this is the slow boring part of game development :P but also it adds the bulk of content which players enjoy.

The new areas in the demo were nice. I imagine the Elder sounds Scottish.

I did notice one problem. At the Ruins I explored the shack, the river, and the west ruins. I then got "In the north, you see a path leading around the palisade" then "The path leading west from here..." but then "In the north..." was unexpectedly repeated again. Here's a screenshot:

Only now you drop the bombshell that English isn't your first language and you were not very confident in it. You certainly could have fooled me! Very keen to play the new demo.

This is great. It's like 2048 except your game is actually fun :P Thanks for the Android touch version

Oh, please don't take anything I said as a complaint, it was all praise! :)

I like exploration games where the player is actually able to explore! I'm sure you've played games where the player is given things to look at, yet resource management is so tight that it's impossible to get anything done. The player is actually punished for exploring which defeats the whole purpose of the game. This really ruined Out There: Ω Edition if you've seen that.

I also don't mind an easy game. Not everything needs to be an ultra-hard nightmare roguelike.

Don't worry about time. It took Tom Happ 5 years to make Axiom Verge. The guy doing Pixel Art Academy has been going for 5 years with no end in sight! Take your time and enjoy creating.

I'll follow your devlogs and have wishlisted on Steam. The game is ready when it's ready :)

This is great! I've often wanted a good modern "text RPG" sort of game and you've got the idea perfect. The writing is very engaging, each of the places and characters have a unique feel, yet there's also a lot which appears hidden and makes you want to explore more. The idea of different "moods" and different conversation paths lets a player actually "play a role" which is something a lot of RPGs surprisingly lack! The timer is generous so you can get quite a lot done in one day. The danger level seems forgiving, especially with the idea of quicksaves and autosaves. I couldn't put this down once I started. Really hoping that you continue to make this. I'd gladly pay for the full version.

It's incredible dedication to stick at it like you have. Breaks are only natural and arguably required! Be happy with the well-playing and beautiful game engine you have made, and enjoy creating room-based puzzles in it :)

More difficult than a normal game of Columns. Really good job!

Considering that rotation works on the login screen, it's possible something has gone bad in your user profile.

If you create a new username, then login as that new user, does resize and rotate work okay as the new user?

What an interesting idea. Well done.

Even though it's just a two-room demo, this plays pretty well. Good stuff.

It ends up as W and C on QWERTY.

Good concept, interesting way to take the typical snake mechanic of tail getting longer putting you in more danger and applying it to a platformer with gravity.

This is really cool. It's like System Shock meets Tomb Raider. It's pretty unbelievable that this is done in DOS.

DOSBox needed `cycles=auto` for me, which ends up using `max`.

This was quite good. It has a few challenging parts and tells a good story with a twist at the end. Amazing that you made this in 3 days, I couldn't make something as good in 3 months! Thanks for sharing this little gem.