Space Order Mine

Got a softlock on loop 10 :(

The difficulty of opponents correlates poorly with ship updates. Perhaps the balance needs to be corrected somehow?

It would also be nice if the infinite mode would have forks like the normal one.

Wish Hospital Ships either healed me too, or didn't say "all ships", because I thought it would heal me who took the legendary shield without Battery to support it and started a battle with like 15 HP.

Came from the Minesweeper tag. Fun! Not sure what Lava Tiles are since I never took the chance to get them and my enemies didn't hit me with them.

Hey fella, game is still very coolio!

Mesa noticing the game ends after the first world; "this is a demo"; but there is no full game in steam or anywhere :o Is this intended?

The elements combined in the game are all cool and even though it is in it's early stages, it's fun. It will certainly be a success!

Now for the negatives:

1) The minesweeper part of the game, while cool (and I love minesweeper and have always hoped more games used that mechanic), feels very detaching from the rest of the game. At first I felt like I'm playing a cool inventory management spaceship roguelite, but after a while, I'm feeling that all I'm doing is the minesweeper part, over and over and over and over again.

The minesweeper part needs to be more interesting and less tediously repetitious and luck-based. Currently most clicks I make into it are not made based on reading the minesweeper ques, but rather randomly choosing over the possible choices, because first you have to make clicks in areas where you have no knowledge of what's there, after that, it takes a few clicks to get to the phase where you can actually start reading the minesweeper ques and once you find the energy, the next energy is usually so far away that you have to continue somewhere else entirely and start this process from the beginning. This makes for a lot of random clicks and not so many calculated ones. This paired with the fact that enemies benefit from each of these moves makes it feel like I'm not really doing any strategic or tactical choises and a roll of the die will decide how the battle will end.

Some ideas to draw inspiration from:

a) The minesweeper part needs to be harder so that the player will actually have to think about it. Sweeper part difficulty can be based on the difficulty level of the enemies.

b) Smaller, individual minesweeper maps for each enemy (size, difficulty and what kind of things it contains differing based on enemy), with the enemy taking their turn after one map has been either completed or failed (this might require either setting a number of allowed moves or by including mines that you have to avoid).

c) More variety in the items inside the minesweeper part.

d) Be very careful on maps that are not 'free areas', such as currently in the game with the pre-defined rooms. They effectively block the minesweeper from playing like a minesweeper.

2) The ? events are bland. I assume they have not really been developed yet and are more like placeholder events for later developement? Take a look at games like cobalt core and lonestar to see how the 'random events' can be made impactful without them being a throw of the dice.

I have two "compact shields" that say "stacks with similar mods". But they do not stack and if I activate them both, the shield still remainds at 10.

There is some bug with the debris: In infinity level 3, a spaceship left "debris" with health 100. On my next shot, the debris disappeared but the bullets still got blocked by the now remaining void.

I keep getting this error when trying to play the game. Does anyone know how to solve this?

I watched the game on Retromation and it looks very promising.

Here are my tips to fix the current issues:

• add countdown timer to the next wave
  • this will promote to finish the wave as soon as possible instead of stalling
  • if you finish soon you can spend the next turns healing, shielding or stacking energy before next wave
• add different scanners
  • scanner for 1 energy to reveal a few random unrevealed tiles
  • 7x7 scanner to reveal 9 tiles (corners + middles)
  • 10x10 scanner to reveal 16 tiles (corners + 2 middles)
  • other shape scanners (line scanner, circle scanner)
  • some would reveal predictable symmetric patterns other random ones and it would be up to the player to mix them properly for maximum effect
• add cooldowns to some weapons/abilities to make them more precious and also to encourage having mutliples of the same type

gl

So, I just played through the game, and I loved it!  Here are my initial thoughts, and I'll probably add another comment at some point once I've tried it a few more times.  Also, I know this game is very early in development, all of this is meant as constructive criticism because I am already having a blast with this game.

-The podracers hitting on the second turn feels kind of unfair, since you are relying entirely on getting lucky and hitting energy on your first click to armor up in time.  Forced damage in and of itself is not the worst, but when it's forced damage that can be avoided based on luck it feels kind of bad.

-The scanner that shows all the 1s is waaaay too strong.  Once I got my hands on it I would almost never miss a click. I don't know that I have any good recommendations for how to rebalance it though, and I think that kind of mechanic does add a lot to the game. Also on the topic of the scanner, the 1s are extremelt hard to see on the ice maps because the blues are really similar in color.

-The energy economy is thrown way off because of the energy amplifier and the mining drill.  My first run I had three drills and an energy amplifier, so I could usually get my scanner up turn 2 or 3 and then get about 8 energy each turn.  At the same time, those items are some of the things that made the gameplay feel best.  I firmly believe that those should be some sort of upgrade rather than random item drops, either in an ftl-style ship upgrade screen or as post-boss upgrades like in monster train.  I also think you should probably start with two clicks, rather than just one, because it makes the game feel so much better.

-As mentioned by Retromation in his video, there is definitely an issue where stalling and healing to full every fight is the optimal play.  You also are heavily incentivised to stall to full energy before starting the next wave.  I don't know if the correct answer is having the enemies scale over time, or simply limiting the number of heals you can do per combat, but I do think that this should be addressed somehow.

This game is already great, and has so much potential.  I look forward to playing more of it and seeing where it goes from here.  Congrats on the amazing work!

Unfourtunately I can use only 5 components max, even if I have 6 or more components in the "backpack".

reminds me a bit of Backpack Hero

Very fun, wish it was longer/infinite

Hey, this is a cool prototype, are you still working on it?

Took me a while to realize I was supposed to find the bombs, not isolate them, but I got the hang of it.