Spacethumper

Yup, you’ll slowly get slower as you gain weight, but that’s another thing I’m planning on being able to be upgraded so walking around doesn’t get to be a slog (unless that’s what you want).

3 Likes

Alrighty, added a fair amount of things. Fair warning, a majority of the buildings still have placeholder sprites. I’ll be providing more in-depth explanations of everything I added at some point, but for now I’m going to wait and see how clear the systems I’ve put in place are. Basically tempting you guys into QA with the promise of fats!
Link to Download
V0.2.0
-added wide buildings
-added solar panel mk. 3
-added wind turbines
-added wind
-added miners
-added crystals
-added steam turbines
-added walls
-added turrets
-added research center
-added suit upgrade center
-added spaces for the steam turbines and miners to be placed on
-added more weight levels
-decreased energy drain from moving at lower weights
-increased speed reduction at higher weights
-made solar panels cheaper to build

3 Likes

it would be nice if the text was only red on the thing you don’t have enough of or made the crystal counter red like the energy counter is when you have to little

I feel like at higher speeds you move too fast to control properly. a walk button would be nice to have (especially if you plan on having more speed upgrades)

the suit stretchiness costs something other than a whole number for some reason, so when it is fully upgraded you are stuck with .90 Crystals you can’t spend

if a building (fusion in my case) is 2 blocks wide when upgraded then it won’t let you upgrade it if there is a building next to it. it does allow you to spend energy, it just stops at max

the turret doesn’t seem to upgrade correctly. after upgrading it once you can keep “upgrading” it even though it doesn’t do anything (you can do it even if you haven’t researched Mk.II turrets)

the game seems to crash when you have researched everything in the research station and enter it

here is the crash log

############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object obj_player:

DoDiv :2: undefined value
at gml_Object_obj_player_Draw_64
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_player_Draw_64 (line -1)

I didn’t find any of the systems to confusing. I was a bit confused with the buildings you have to put on a specific spot but that was mostly because the old version didn’t have any special tiles so I was thinking that there were none in this version as well
(and I didn’t read that there were special spots for them to be in in the patch notes)

after you have built fusion is there a reason not to build it? the solar panels are a reliable source of power, wind is faster but less reliable and steam is fast and reliable but you can’t place it anywhere. as I see it fusion does everything the others does and gives more energy so it makes the others obsolete (unless it explodes a lot when enemies attack it or something). as it is now the best strategy seems to be to make
one solar panel then build fusion as soon as possible.
solar could still be useful if you could place it on top of other buildings depending on how many non energy generating buildings will be in the game. I can’t really think of a reason for using the others except making fusion risky (and even then just build it in the middle of your base and you will be safe since there are loads of buildings the enemies need to get through first)

are you planning on having buildings that use energy and needs to be refueled? I think it might be something worth implementing (especially if having fusion power close to important things is risky) so there is more stuff to do than just build things (it might end up just being an annoyance though)

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I’ve also encountered that “bug” whenever all the upgrades were done. Anyway, will there be a save sistem? After crashing several times, rebuilding everything became kinda boring.
By the way, will there be new weight levels/ other weight related things?

1 Like

maybe have the speed upgrades mitigate the speed loss at higher weights.

1 Like

The only bug i’ve encounters was upgrading the reactor it gets stuck stuck at full bar instead of upgrading. I also wanted to to say this game is great can’t wait for the next update and i hope to see even higher weight levels.

1 Like

Yeah, that’s a good idea. Right now I have the color of all the text that changes color being controlled by one thing, but I think I have an idea of how to split it up without being too messy.

I’ll probably end up making a separate ultimate speed cap so you don’t end up zooming at lower weights, since I’m planning on the highest weights bringing you to a crawl when you don’t have any and it all works off the same multiplier.

That’s one of those things I didn’t think about making a UI element for. I think I’m going to add some flashing in the space where a building expands and a “no space” notification for 2 wide buildings.

I’m honestly at a bit of a loss on this one. I’ll keep looking into it but I can’t figure out why only the turrets are doing this.

Fixed that one up, as well as for the upgrade station when it’s possible to get enough energy to buy all the upgrades there.

I honestly had never considered the ramifications of just making an op building. The explosion idea is a good one, maybe I’ll make it so they also drain your crystals as well as energy so they’ll be for if you have a ton of crystals and not enough energy production.

Hadn’t considered that one either, but it’s an interesting idea. Technically I was planning something similar with energy being used to heal buildings (walls in particular would be “recharged” a lot this way). I would mostly be worried about energy use priority since I want to keep all energy related functions working on the up key, and maybe not being able to upgrade something until it’s stores are full would be annoying. Definitely something to consider though…

Eventually, yeah. I want to get enemies/building health if not implemented, at least with their values in the game so I have everything that needs to be saved/loaded and don’t have versioning issues.

Are the speed upgrades not increasing your speed at higher weights? They should be increasing your speed by a percentage of your base speed that goes down at higher weights.

That’s the two wide buildings not being clear what their requirements are, fixing that up as above.

1 Like

Link to Download
V0.2.1
-menus now have left/right arrows on options
-game no longer crashes when opening research menu with all buildings unlocked
-energy bar overlay for upgrade costs no longer extends off the side of the screen when exceeding max energy
-crystal amount no longer displays decimal amounts (they still exist in decimal amounts, but all displayed costs are rounded up, and the displayed amount you have is rounded down, so your actual crystal amount will always be equal to or higher than the actual crystal cost)
-when upgrading buildings that become wider, blocked spaces are now indicated

6 Likes

This about covers all of the problems I had with the previous version. Outside of the unimplemented features of course.

1 Like

you could make the buildings use energy in chunks, so after say 30 seconds it loses 1 “block” of energy.
you could also make it so that buildings pause their energy use while upgrading them and a way to turn them off so they stay at full power while you go and get more energy.

2 Likes

Update: had to redo how the player is animated because the higher weight sprite sheets were too big, so that’s a good sign.

5 Likes

Fusion reactors wouldn’t explode- a failure in containment would cause a loss of fusion, i.e. it dies out. A steam explosion is possible, depending on the energy capture setup, but the same is true of the steam turbines in-game too.

My suggestions to balance them are to either implement a resource tax, as you said, or maybe make it so they don’t function if at less than full health (reflecting fusion’s propensity to be annoying to maintain artificially). The latter option would make other energy sources more desirable for frontier outposts, and making Fusion reactors better suited for your well-defended home base.

3 Likes

So, as it stands, it appears the last upgrade to energy transfer range, movement efficiency, energy transfer speed, and suit repulsor can’t be obtained. Their energy costs appear too large for the max available energy, even when capacity is fully upgraded.

2 Likes

Yeah, I’ve been thinking over the fusion reactor a lot, my latest idea was to make it so enemy attacks are more frequent with them for a big risk/reward.

That’s probably going to be true up to the full release, since I don’t want to allow weight levels that I haven’t finished spriting yet (or started spriting for the latest version, a lot of them are just boxes).

2 Likes

Gosh im really liking how this game is coming along so far. ^^ I wonder though just how big is the biggest size going to be, and will you still be able to move even if you dont get any movement speed increase upgrades?

2 Likes

I’d assume “yes, barely” if only to avoid a softlock of a lategame non-speed-invested blob getting stuck on top of an energy stack where they literally can’t burn energy faster than they take it in.

2 Likes

Yeah that makes sense, and honestly what i was hoping for. ^^ I dont like the idea of immobility at all even at super huge sizes, so im excited to see how big you can get in this game while still being able to move about.

2 Likes

100% correct! Your base max speed at the higher weights is pretty dang slow, but you will never be immobile due to that exact situation.

2 Likes

V0.3.0

Man, implementing the turrets properly was a lot harder than I thought it would be. They’re pretty rough around the edges and there’s plenty of graphical stuff to fix, but the groundwork is there! Right now enemies will spawn every minute, with more spawning each time until they hit 10. I might do a quick fix to make that a little less intense if people can’t make much progress though.

-adjusted all research and upgrade costs (mostly to be more expensive, 100 energy is super cheap and was mostly for debugging)
-moved player in front of buildings
-added some event dialogue (disabled for this version since there’s no saving and getting the same text over and over is annoying)
-updated miner sprites
-updated some wall sprites
-added enemies
-added ability to damage enemies
-adjusted health amounts of buildings (not that they did anything before)
-added ability to heal buildings
-speed is now capped

3 Likes

Heyo, so I was playing the newest build and I did a dumb and the enemies destroyed like all my buildings and I got an error that crashed the game. Was it trying to detect a building to attack that wasn’t there or something?? Anyways, I hope this helps :3


############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event0
for object obj_enemy:

DoAdd :2: undefined value
at gml_Object_obj_enemy_Step_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_enemy_Step_0 (line -1)

1 Like