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 Endless Dark is a quirky little indie game, made by myself and fellow goon Soulmata, currently in Early Access on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2290890/Endless_Dark/. It therefore represents the elusive Successful Goon Project insofar as we've actually released a product. You play a sentient custodian robot entrusted with keeping a sleeper colony ship going. There are no other NPCs, no gribbly aliens, no jump scares, or anything else. It's just you, a job that will never be done, and the endless darkness both around the ship and inside your own head. It is, in essence, the song and story of every cubicle rat, construction drone, and retail slave in a period where everyone tells you to work, but nobody tells you why or for how long. It is generally no one thing that takes you to the cleaners in Endless Dark, but rather a piled up system of little insults that drives you to reeling, staggering, and finally exploding (see post icon for dramatization). Ew, Early Access! Yes, I get it. I can only hope to assure you that we are looking to do Early Access in the way it was originally meant to be done. We are a small team that has made this thing from the start as a community and we're hoping to keep that habit up. I'm serious about that. I put up a google form to my smaller community to solicit writing ideas for random events, and when I got good ideas for it, I signed actual contracts that adults use and paid these people for their creativity and effort. I even put their credit acknowledgements into their contracts. We ran multiple private betas to get reactions to what we were doing and tweak to fit. We aggressively went after people who had the most challenges and worked with them to resolve those challenges. The game possesses all of the mechanics it needs for a full release and then some (since we added more mechanics as part of the betas). The main thing separating it is finalized art and a lot more writing. I would humbly ask that you give us a shot. Considering the EA price is 8 bucks on Steam, it's not like you can go too wrong. We both know we've spent like 4x that much on one meal from DoorDash. OK, so what do you DO? The glib answer is, you fix the ship when stuff breaks. Obviously, it's a little more complicated than just that. The game uses a Left-4-Dead style Director to get a general idea of how much pressure you are under, and compares that to how much pressure you SHOULD be under. Every turn, it evaluates everything and does its best to true up the current pressure to the expected pressure. It only has a limited number of opportunities to do this, however, so if you are playing well, it can take many turns for the Director to catch up, or to recover from a particularly well-played turn. Some things it does to pressure you:
Good play will result from managing your risk, prioritizing your tasks, and managing the resources you have on hand - including your own fatigue, stress, and psychosis. There are 3 modes in the game: Story mode, Endless mode, Sandbox mode. Story mode follows hand-crafted narrative arcs that will, ultimately, form a cohesive story with an ending that you, as the player, will determine. There are currently 9 of the planned 9 narrative arcs in the game. All that is left is the finale arc, where you go from story reader to story decider! Story mode is generally designed to be pretty short and punchy. A game will be a couple hours long and the tension will ratchet up pretty fast. As part of the story mode, you will find a special Memory Core that will function as your savegame. If you destroy or lose your Memory Core, you will have to restart the narrative arcs - fortunately, you have to try pretty hard to do that. Endless mode is pretty much what it says on the tin. It will continue going until you lose the game, and your bragging right is how many turns you survived. Endless mode uses a specially tooled Crisis Cycle to keep the game interesting. During a Crisis Cycle, you will be shown 3 potential crisis arcs that all threaten irreparable harm to you or the ship. However, 2 of them are lies, and will go away on their own. Only one is the true crisis. You will need to use your intuition, paying attention to the pressure on the ship and the timing of the events, to noodle out which crisis is the real one. Go after it proactively, or you will definitely feel it next cycle. Sandbox mode is basically Endless mode without the crisis cycle. It's generally a much easier game that plays like a chill checklist simulator. Use it to mess with ideas you had in peace, or to just blow off some steam after working at the job that doesn't respect you with the game that understands how that feels. So it plays like (Insert Game Here)? I've fielded dozens of these questions while trying to explain this game to my family, friends, and acquaintances, and the plain truth is that even as someone who's been playing games for over 30 years, I find it difficult to compare to other games. It is part resource management ala Frostpunk or Against the Storm, part roleplaying thriller ala Cultist Sim (which Steam tagged us as similar to), and part immersive storytelling ala King of Dragon Pass. But it is none of those games entirely. The writing, at least, is something that is a very unique proposal. It is functionally a locked-room narrative, but the lock only keeps you in, not stressful stuff out. The art and mechanics have been tuned to let that concept breathe and be paced out, so you don't have to read too much all at once. On reading, though, this is a hefty game for text. Even in our early access state, we have 100 random events, 6 crisis arcs, 9 self-improvement mini arcs, and 9 narrative arcs that all weigh in at right around 200,000 words. And we're selling it for 8 bucks, American. This sounds pretty cool. Can I stream/LP it? Unequivocally yes. We have been extremely careful to make sure we own 100% of everything in this game. Our musician is an old friend of Soulmata's and we have contracted him to make the music. Anything that doesn't come from him comes from Freesound. Every last pixel of every last graphic in the game is one hundred percent owned by us, and we would be honored if you would make content of our game. I only ask that you let us know when you do, so we can see the reactions.  So are we just gonna talk or do you have screenshots or something? And how! The game actually looks way better in motion, so have some gifs instead. Welcome to your home, such as it is: https://i.imgur.com/TEI1ptq.mp4 There is ample leisure for you: https://i.imgur.com/i9s2CYE.mp4 And fulfilling work to do: https://i.imgur.com/dkqv3wy.mp4 Stories of the stresses are FAR overstated: https://i.imgur.com/DTIjzYf.mp4 And we ask that you stay professional while on duty: https://i.imgur.com/iQty6AP.mp4 Coolguye fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Jan 11, 2024 |
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Feb 22, 2023 22:14
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Tag Lines and Stats for the game There are, at this very moment:
Social handles and stuff: Discord: https://discord.gg/GzNMeCtf8T Dying bird hellpit handle (Twitter): https://twitter.com/EndlessDarkGame Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/endlessdark/ Coolguye fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Feb 22, 2023 22:14
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coolguy sux
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Feb 22, 2023 22:21
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Please refrain from killing too many cryosleepers
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Feb 22, 2023 22:38
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Runa posted:Please refrain from killing too many cryosleepers i've gotta cure my persecution complex somehow
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Feb 22, 2023 22:46
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New patch today:code: DO NOT TRUST THIS ROBOT
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Feb 23, 2023 17:51
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Found this via the Fresh Releases thread and this sounds like very much my poo poo. I'm glad you included an endless mode as I always worry about the replayability of something like this if it's all story arcs. I'll probably grab this over the weekend when I'll have time to dig into it!
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Feb 23, 2023 20:29
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StarkRavingMad posted:Found this via the Fresh Releases thread and this sounds like very much my poo poo. I'm glad you included an endless mode as I always worry about the replayability of something like this if it's all story arcs. I'll probably grab this over the weekend when I'll have time to dig into it! Our ears are wide open for your feedback. This has been a labor of love, but it is a labor for the love of the people who play it.
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Feb 24, 2023 00:07
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Another patch today:code:
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Feb 24, 2023 00:51
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Today's patches are all about sound and ambience:code:code:Highwang took the new difficulty curve out for a ride on his stream and we could definitely see the game hitting a lot softer during the midgame while still being lethal during the late game. Really pleased with how our software design lets us make so many of these changes so quickly, it ought to keep us really agile as feedback comes in!
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Feb 24, 2023 18:54
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Although I will not get around to playing it for a while I am going to purchase this now on strength of the op and the apparent thought/effort you've put into making something unique. Good luck to you, goons, in your further video game efforts.
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Feb 24, 2023 19:27
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search engine posted:Although I will not get around to playing it for a while I am going to purchase this now on strength of the op and the apparent thought/effort you've put into making something unique. Good luck to you, goons, in your further video game efforts. I appreciate you! 🙇♂️ When you do get around to playing it, I promise my ears will be wide open.
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Feb 24, 2023 19:31
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Some thoughts after my first run: There's some UI stuff that's a little unintuitive to me. The main thing being right-click for some reason is bringing up the main menu. It feels more like right clicking on a thing in the world, like one of the panels, should open the context menu for it. Especially where you can move him around with left click, and access all other UI panels by clicking on them -- accessing with right click would feel more natural. Also return is kind of weird for the activate key. I tried like everything else I would expect to be activate -- E, F, it took me awhile to find return (or space) as the action key. (I didn't look at controls on the main menu before I started, and there's no option to access that from in-game unless you drop back to the main menu). Also, escape going into an "event hidden" thing rather than just backing out of a window. I'm not sure if there's a specific use case you envisioned for that, but I just found it frustrating. Also, why is there a specific end turn button on the UI when you have to return to the command pod to end turn anyway? That doesn't seem to have a point, unless ending turn from anywhere is something you unlock later. These are things that felt more natural as I played more but were a little annoying at first. Having an option to use right click as use, and E or F as use, would be good. It's kind of unclear where you need to be standing to clean hazards. Sometimes only one side works. Might be better if you just had it trigger if you are standing right on top of them. Bug, I think: I had crisis capacitors which say they are supposed to destroyed on use. I was able to just reinstall them endlessly, even after using them. (If this is not intentional, it may have contributed to this run going way better than it should have, since I was able to cheese some stress using them more than once.) The first time I gazed into the unknown from observation, I got a really bad result. This disincentivized me from using it on subsequent turns, even thought it was on my task log. I have the feeling it is supposed to be a "gamble on using it but most of the time it helps Robbie's stress, with occasional bad results" thing. If so, I would code it so that the first time a player uses it is a guaranteed good result, so that they are surprised if they get something that roughs them up a bit later. I had the reactor arc as a story arc which I thought was a good one. Got a bit stressful at times due to the lower power and I ended up taking a little psychosis but nothing unmanageable. I liked the random events but always having them occur at the start of your shift was a little jarring. Sometimes felt disjointed from what was happening on the ship. We've got a major reactor shutdown, Robbie, now is not the time to be pondering about making a cardboard box garden. I wonder if that could be reworked to a specific "event phase," maybe after all repairs are complete or if the player chooses to shut down before events are complete, rather than occurring at the start when it feels more like you should be scrambling to fix things. By the end of it, Robbie was having a rough time and I liked that one of his tasks was "UNINSTALL ARMS." I don't know if I would have made it if I hadn't been able to use crisis capacitor more than once, although we still had plenty of psychosis by the end. But after 32 cycles we ended with all 10 passengers still alive and I kept my memory core. Final scoring: 0 passengers killed: 0 89 Psychosis: -89 2 turns over par: -6 Final Score: -95 Is there a way to get a positive score? Small quibbles aside, I enjoyed my first round quite a bit, and intend to play it more. Let me know if you have any questions about the new player experience from my perspective. StarkRavingMad fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 04:28
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StarkRavingMad posted:Small quibbles aside, I enjoyed my first round quite a bit, and intend to play it more. Let me know if you have any questions about the new player experience from my perspective. Regarding the mouse, that is because the game is actually 100% playable with only the mouse, only the keyboard, only a gamepad, or mouse & keyboard. It's an accessibility thing, I had one particular friend with a maimed hand who we tested it out on, and he was able to play the game without any major impediments. Mouse controls, therefore, are LMB = confirm, RMB = cancel. ...and cancel brings up the main menu if you're not doing something else. You can move with the mouse by clicking and holding, and LMB clicking on an object will activate it. It makes a lot of sense if you're playing one-handed. That said, you can consider E = activate to be done already. Probably show up in a build in the next day or two. Ultimately we're gonna let folks rebind keys, of course, but that's no reason to not make it better RIGHT NOW. Regarding 'event hidden', we had multiple requests from folks during beta that when things got hot, they wanted to be able to check their task list without impediment, or their various health bars. So we made the event hideable for that reason. The quintessential example was "do i really care about an event that damages the engine, when the engine is already broken?" Your idea on having the tutorial accessible in game is a great one. Don't be surprised if you see that show up in a build sometime soon. I'm going to talk to Soulmata about that, see if it's possible since all of that junk is overlays. Regarding hazards, that is something we need to fix in general. The collision on them sucks. We've got a card for it on our team's trello. Observation is actually the subject of the patch notification I'm posting at the end of this post; it's ultimately going to be a much more important part of the game, to the point where using it will be required to get the Deep Lore of the ship, and the first chop at that particular tree has literally happened today. Getting insanities from the window is generally supposed to be part of the wheel you spin. Most insanities are not so bad, though, so I'm guessing you ended up getting one of the worse ones. Phrenetic Persection, perhaps? That one sucks, but especially with the tweaks we pushed out in the new patch, it should be a lot less crippling. Regarding the random events: Noted. We'll think about that. I don't have an immediate answer for you, I'll need to turn it over in my head. Patch notes! code:Coolguye fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 05:15
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Appreciate the thoughts on my feedback. I'll let you know if I have any more as I play through more.
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Feb 25, 2023 05:27
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StarkRavingMad posted:Appreciate the thoughts on my feedback. I'll let you know if I have any more as I play through more. Forgot to mention: Good catch on the Crisis Capacitors. That is indeed a bug, the unique stress break option they give you only forcibly uninstalls the module, and does not destroy it as intended. We're getting it fixed. Worth noting, you can always have the replicator make another module for you if it gets destroyed in this way. The same thing goes for Circuit Breaker, which will save you from a psychosis loss.
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Feb 25, 2023 05:43
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StarkRavingMad posted:Appreciate the thoughts on my feedback. I'll let you know if I have any more as I play through more. Be cautious when listening to the human beetle that is Coolguy. Thank you for your feedback. In response, with the version I just shipped to steam ( 0.3.6 ), the following changes are made: * Controls and Tutorials are available in-game through the esc menu * Right-click is now use/activate instead of esc menu (you can still click on the ... icon in the lower right to bring up the options menu) * E key now also works to use/activate * Crisis Capacitor bug is fixed
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Feb 25, 2023 06:00
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soulmata posted:Be cautious when listening to the human beetle that is Coolguy. Thank you for your feedback. In response, with the version I just shipped to steam ( 0.3.6 ), the following changes are made: That's some quick work! I'm going to give it another run or two tomorrow, I'll let you know if I have additional feedback after that.
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Feb 25, 2023 06:58
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My old lovely laptop didn't like the lighting effects so I had to turn those off, but I lost a lot of the atmosphere. Anything that can be done performance wise, or at least making it look better with the lighting off? Only fooled around for about an hour or so, but the game seems right up my alley.
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Feb 26, 2023 05:43
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SoggyBobcat posted:My old lovely laptop didn't like the lighting effects so I had to turn those off, but I lost a lot of the atmosphere. Anything that can be done performance wise, or at least making it look better with the lighting off? i'm fairly sure we had a static light radius thing at one point, i'll dig into the code and see what happened to it. i feel your pain on that, though, it's genuinely surprised us how lovely and nonperformant the lighting libraries are for LOVE, the engine we are using. most graphics cards handle it fine, but if you don't have dedicated hardware it's very possible to have a bad time. e: i asked soul, and yes, we did have a halo light effect at one point, but that code is not entirely compatible as we used to use it back when the ship was split up into multiple maps, rather than the single map we have now. i'm adding a card to the trello to look at it soon, though. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 08:45
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Well, I played it past the two hour mark without any show-stopping issues so yeah, I guess this counts as a mostly completed Goon Project. Some thoughts: +Nails the atmosphere, visually, aurally, and narratively. +The writing is good. Sometimes I think it goes too hard too fast with Robbie mostly already in a state of existential despair when the game starts, but it is intended to be a roguelite-esque game so starting from emotional square one every time wouldn't necessarily be a good idea. There's also sometimes interesting imagery. I really liked one the +Psychosis options during an event being "Cultivate a rust painting" which is just a neat little throwaway idea. -Maybe this is because I'm still learning all the tricks to squeeze everything I can out of the gameplay loop, but it does seem like there's a point during a run where the director just says "gently caress you" and puts me into a death spiral. It feels like it usually happens around 15 MU because I'm typically in the middle of a narrative arc (and thus taking brutal maluses) when it just starts dumping tons of repair jobs on me and not nearly enough machine parts. Inevitably I start losing critical systems, I end up way behind the tension wall, stress is through the roof and fatigue is getting constantly maxed out, and I abandon ship. This may be intentional and I just need to get used to min-maxing machine parts and better prioritizing ship systems but it still feels a little overwhelming for Normal difficulty. Suggestion: Include Robbie's personal buffs/debuffs somewhere on the main screen. I got the Clear all fatigue and stress for killing a cryosleeper Fortunately. Oh, also, consider actual numbers on the Fatigue/Stress/Psychosis bars. It'd be nice to accurately tell if I can chance doing one more task before my Fatigue maxes out or how much a Stress increase is going to actually hit me. At the same time, consider only including it on the lower difficulties, as not being able to perfectly predict the effects of an action would be a good way of adding to the oppression. 1stGear fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Feb 27, 2023 |
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Feb 27, 2023 00:53
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1stGear posted:Well, I played it past the two hour mark without any show-stopping issues so yeah, I guess this counts as a mostly completed Goon Project. Some thoughts: quote:-Maybe this is because I'm still learning all the tricks to squeeze everything I can out of the gameplay loop, but it does seem like there's a point during a run where the director just says "gently caress you" and puts me into a death spiral. It feels like it usually happens around 15 MU because I'm typically in the middle of a narrative arc (and thus taking brutal maluses) when it just starts dumping tons of repair jobs on me and not nearly enough machine parts. Inevitably I start losing critical systems, I end up way behind the tension wall, stress is through the roof and fatigue is getting constantly maxed out, and I abandon ship. This may be intentional and I just need to get used to min-maxing machine parts and better prioritizing ship systems but it still feels a little overwhelming for Normal difficulty. 1) when you fail a repair, you may choose to activate an inspiration that will guarantee you 100% repair rate for 3 turns. 2) when you start a turn with 0 machine parts, you may choose to activate an inspiration that will give you +2 machine parts per turn for 3 turns. 3) if you start a turn with 7 or more tasks, you may choose to activate an inspiration that will give you -25% fatigue accrual for 2 turns. 4) when you have a stress break, you may choose to use an inspiration to avert it, restore a small amount of fatigue and stress, and give you -15 stress for 2 turns (to help you back away from the brink). all of these are 1x/game but i think should go a long way toward helping people get through That One Clutch Rough Spot. due to our design consideration where it should never be just one thing that kills you, i'm not super worried about these get-out-of-jail free cards making the game too easy. beyond that: one thing that we definitely need to make more clear is that you are going to need to overclock SOMETHING to stay ahead of the tension wall. the engine will work, nav will work, the subroutine afterburner commands will work (that's only really available in endless mode, though). but dust storms make you go 0.8 and they show up like 20% of the time, so if you just cruise control, you ARE going to end up behind. the big insight that we tried to make clear by giving the reactor one spare power was in the tooltip; if you have spare power, it's easier to overclock systems. you can, therefore, overclock the reactor to get more power, or simply shut off systems in preparation for slotting in overclocks. overclocked systems don't actually use more power, so you'll always be able to turn those temporarily shuttered systems back on afterward. all of that said, you ARE supposed to get stressed out and pressured by the third act of the game. if you end with less than 50 psychosis and nobody dead you either played extremely, extremely well or we didn't do our jobs. quote:Suggestion: Include Robbie's personal buffs/debuffs somewhere on the main screen. I got the Clear all fatigue and stress for killing a cryosleeper quote:Oh, also, consider actual numbers on the Fatigue/Stress/Psychosis bars. It'd be nice to accurately tell if I can chance doing one more task before my Fatigue maxes out or how much a Stress increase is going to actually hit me. At the same time, consider only including it on the lower difficulties, as not being able to perfectly predict the effects of an action would be a good way of adding to the oppression. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Feb 27, 2023 |
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Feb 27, 2023 02:46
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1stGear posted:-Maybe this is because I'm still learning all the tricks to squeeze everything I can out of the gameplay loop, but it does seem like there's a point during a run where the director just says "gently caress you" and puts me into a death spiral. It feels like it usually happens around 15 MU because I'm typically in the middle of a narrative arc (and thus taking brutal maluses) when it just starts dumping tons of repair jobs on me and not nearly enough machine parts. Inevitably I start losing critical systems, I end up way behind the tension wall, stress is through the roof and fatigue is getting constantly maxed out, and I abandon ship. This may be intentional and I just need to get used to min-maxing machine parts and better prioritizing ship systems but it still feels a little overwhelming for Normal difficulty. Yeah, I played a couple today that felt unwinnable. I was even trying to think ahead and do stuff like conserve repair parts, use high percentage emergency repairs instead of parts when I had a surplus of stress/fatigue, making extra parts when I had an excess of stress/fatigue, etc. Midgame, it just started pummeling me with repairs. There doesn't seem to be a good way to counteract this -- making more parts causes stress/fatigue, emergency repairs cause stress/fatigue (and is a gamble anyway), leaving stuff unrepaired causes stress and most things need to be repaired -- you can't leave cryo or engines or nav unrepaired, really. It feels like either there needs to be some way to generate parts or repairs that causes less stress comparatively, or the director needs to try some different tricks than just piling on breakages. Maybe more hazard spills. When it gives you four things broken, each of which needs multiple parts, and you have like three parts total, you're just hosed. It doesn't feel like there's a real choice that you can make as the player to avert it. Coolguye posted:the game IS a little too punishing right now. we had our first victory on stream yesterday by pankraru on twitch, but they were loving brawling for it up to the final turn. I actually spent today doing nothing but coding in a dozen different 'cooloff' events that the Director will throw your way to help reduce tension, rather than only pile more on. this is stuff like just a free -25 stress, a free repair and overclock to a system, that sort of thing. soul also spent a fair bit of time coding a fistful of 'inspirations' that are meant to save you from bad edge cases once per run. examples: This might help, although I'm not sure if it'll quite remedy how brutal it can be. But this is all balancing stuff, so best just tested to see. Coolguye posted:beyond that: one thing that we definitely need to make more clear is that you are going to need to overclock SOMETHING to stay ahead of the tension wall. the engine will work, nav will work, the subroutine afterburner commands will work (that's only really available in endless mode, though). but dust storms make you go 0.8 and they show up like 20% of the time, so if you just cruise control, you ARE going to end up behind. I imagine you can tutorialize this pretty easily this as well. Whether in an interactive tutorial or just an event that generates the first time a player plays that is like "oh, ship got hit by a dust storm, I'd better overclock the engine, and by the way the dust storm detector broke so I'll have to keep an eye on our progress for the need to overclock in the future." But even so, in the second game I played today, I was trying to keep the engines overclocked and overclocking the replicator as much as I could, and I still just got crushed by the end. The only game I won so far (or even got close to winning, really) was the one where I abused the bugged crisis capacitors haha
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Feb 27, 2023 04:10
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ideally what we want for the interactive tutorial is to have a "game 0" wherein you go through a shortened like 15 turn game or so where everything is on rails and everything is driven by events. go here, do this thing, see what happened there, oh no you're out of parts, this is how you can work with that...etc. basically running a shakedown of core ideas so when you hit the first 'real' game, you feel like The Custodian. one thing that i'm fairly positive both you guys have missed is: those blank screens around the ship, like in nav? you can dismantle those for parts, or repair them to functionally 'bank' parts for a rainy day. no stress involved, it's just a fatigue toll to dismantle it. the still-unreleased narrative arc 4 makes this a requirement to progress at one point but it's honestly been such a critical piece of tech that i don't think it can wait that long, so we'll probably point it out in the tutorial right before we show you how to sabotage. in the meantime, if you just want to get going a bit, don't feel bad about clicking the difficulty down to Easy. i write this loving game and i'm in here telling you normal needs some work, there's no shame.
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Feb 27, 2023 04:42
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Coolguye posted:ideally what we want for the interactive tutorial is to have a "game 0" wherein you go through a shortened like 15 turn game or so where everything is on rails and everything is driven by events. go here, do this thing, see what happened there, oh no you're out of parts, this is how you can work with that...etc. basically running a shakedown of core ideas so when you hit the first 'real' game, you feel like The Custodian. That I did not think of. I repaired a couple of them in my first game but then figured out that they did nothing, so I just assumed they were there for decoration/to make the ship look more aged and lived in, etc.
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Feb 27, 2023 05:14
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Ya'll are gonna want to get the new patch from Steam.code:e: to be clear, the 'numerous fixes for breakers' thing is bigger than it might seem. due to an oversight, the Basic door breaker would always get hit when the director went to hit a breaker. since Basic doors are one of the more common ones that the game seeds around during generation, this was a big deal; you actively could not ignore a damaged breaker, because it was almost certain to simply break later on, which is a very expensive and tiring repair. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Feb 27, 2023 |
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Feb 27, 2023 05:22
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quote:* Sync issue insanity will no longer teleport you while performing an action Ooh, this is a good one too. I got that insanity in my last run and was spending some time scrolling through the replicator commands trying to decide if I wanted to load a schematic...until I eventually realized that I had been teleported back a while ago. Which was kind of funny and thematic to be fair.
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Feb 27, 2023 05:52
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1stGear posted:Ooh, this is a good one too. I got that insanity in my last run and was spending some time scrolling through the replicator commands trying to decide if I wanted to load a schematic...until I eventually realized that I had been teleported back a while ago. yeah i almost argued to leave it as a won't fix until it happened while a player was trying to overclock the engine. when the proc failed it blew up Command. on one hand, yeah, okay, i'd rather Command blow up than the engine, but on the other, feels bad man.
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Feb 27, 2023 05:58
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You can also ping me on the Discord to get the real facts, FYI. Thanks for feedback on the atmosphere. I worked a lot on it, and the intent is to give a specific feel: claustrophobic, alone, abandoned, but never threatened. So on. My hope is to have an interactive tutorial that is toggled on/off on game start that will blend in with the first game you play. It'll take the form of railroaded events that prompt you to do all of the major actions, but no harm if you just ignore it. There are not so many mechanics that they couldn't be quickly encapsulated like this; it's really the weird ways they interact that makes things get complex fast. And, since this is early access, mechanics do change and get refined as we see people actually play it and see how they react.
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Feb 27, 2023 07:39
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Another pretty meaty update today, friends. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2290890/view/3639508923216958395 code:Coolguye fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Feb 28, 2023 |
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Feb 28, 2023 06:28
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Hey this looks cool! The robot reminds me of the one from those CYOAs on GBS, Bim or something?
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Feb 28, 2023 09:38
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i unfortunately am very far behind on that tradition so i couldn't tell you. it does have a fair bit of CYOA DNA though.
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Feb 28, 2023 16:26
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StarkRavingMad posted:Yeah, I played a couple today that felt unwinnable. I was even trying to think ahead and do stuff like conserve repair parts, use high percentage emergency repairs instead of parts when I had a surplus of stress/fatigue, making extra parts when I had an excess of stress/fatigue, etc. Midgame, it just started pummeling me with repairs. There doesn't seem to be a good way to counteract this -- making more parts causes stress/fatigue, emergency repairs cause stress/fatigue (and is a gamble anyway), leaving stuff unrepaired causes stress and most things need to be repaired -- you can't leave cryo or engines or nav unrepaired, really. It feels like either there needs to be some way to generate parts or repairs that causes less stress comparatively, or the director needs to try some different tricks than just piling on breakages. Maybe more hazard spills. When it gives you four things broken, each of which needs multiple parts, and you have like three parts total, you're just hosed. It doesn't feel like there's a real choice that you can make as the player to avert it.
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Mar 1, 2023 04:55
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So I grabbed this, had some minor issue with gamepad but its working now. Ended up making it about 9 days until the madness effects made my dude scared of doors and unable to read, oh and he also randomly does the opposite of what I try to order him to do. Game good, worth the money.
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Mar 1, 2023 22:25
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DreadUnknown posted:So I grabbed this, had some minor issue with gamepad but its working now. Ended up making it about 9 days until the madness effects made my dude scared of doors and unable to read, oh and he also randomly does the opposite of what I try to order him to do. Game good, worth the money. if i can get you to put pretty much exactly this in a steam review i'd appreciate it, bahahha
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Mar 1, 2023 23:05
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SoggyBobcat posted:My old lovely laptop didn't like the lighting effects so I had to turn those off, but I lost a lot of the atmosphere. Anything that can be done performance wise, or at least making it look better with the lighting off? I'll include a toggle in the next major update that will allow you to turn off Shadows but not the other lighting - that increases performance by about 50%, and loses some of the atmosphere, but not all of it. Give that a try when you can. That update won't be out for a few weeks though.
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Mar 2, 2023 08:49
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I went incredibly insane while trying to deal with the Reactor being an rear end in a top hat and pulling rank on me because I'm just a robot. Also Unlimited Door Works is one hell of a hallucination
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Mar 2, 2023 10:17
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fake doors is my favorite insanity right now. it's so hilarious to watch, and even when i'm playing i occasionally get got by one in a narrow corridor.
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Mar 2, 2023 17:21
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soulmata posted:I'll include a toggle in the next major update that will allow you to turn off Shadows but not the other lighting - that increases performance by about 50%, and loses some of the atmosphere, but not all of it. Give that a try when you can. That update won't be out for a few weeks though.
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Mar 2, 2023 17:51
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Coolguye posted:if i can get you to put pretty much exactly this in a steam review i'd appreciate it, bahahha I can totally do that after work.
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Mar 2, 2023 22:21
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