Really cool concept, but the stat boosts from xp don't feel very useful. They should either be linear or exponentially higher so the lower levels feel less impactful and higher levels feel way more impactful. Anything above x2 is almost completely useless atm. It cuts your time in half and then just feels like a grind for a 5s difference on the long tasks.
The dig in Laurion also feels too grindy. Would much prefer fewer, but more interesting layers. The last 2 are great with resource management. The others just felt like I had to redo the tedious start just to chip away at them for 3-4 loops. If I could skip the entirety intro of leaving the original station it would be much better. Or if there was more new things to do in the original station, such as longer tasks that I would need to grind up some levels to do. This once again goes back to the higher levels on skills not being useful. Once you hit loop level 25, it takes incredibly long to go beyond for basically no reward as you only need a couple of tasks to hit that important x2 multiplier.
Also a feature to set which resource will have priority on being consumed would be a nice addition.
These are all the things I think can be improved. Otherwise the game is great.
I wonder if Force Ground Floor Door can be completed within the 4m 20s time it takes for me to starve, but it's still a nice option for grinding destruction.
It is possible, but you need a very high level of destruction to do it. E.g. you need to grind I think literally for days to actually do it, and it doesn't really do anything. I recommend waiting a few weeks for the new content patch instead ;)
If I can have an ideal here, having an artifact there can be a thing: An artifact what is made out of shadows and generate shadows and dimensional disorder, so after you broke through the door you get an 10 minute long blue search to find the source of the darkness and at the end you find the artifact, what after you absorb (lore text) you didn't find any change for a few minute but when you reach in to your pocket for water you find the same darkness inside of your pocket and somehow is't feel bigger then before (+ 100% inventory side [if it's to op then only +20% (or +1)]).
It would be possible if it continued to be possible to repair only the food synthesizer instead of the entire floor. What’s the trigger for that change?
In current version, I believe the trigger is reaching a certain number of loops. Next version it all works different, and the action remains available after it's combined.
One critique: there are plenty of places I'd have loved a "Wait" option so I didn't need to do busywork like picking up and dropping items or exiting and entering places just to have cooldowns finish. You might also want to allow a way to use a partial charge of something to "top off" the resource; an easy way to do this is to allow you to right-click a resource to force the pc to consume it (if possible).
Thanks! A general wait button is already implemented for next version, and manual force-consumption will be added either next version (if there's time) or the one after.
Thank you for sharing your game! I enjoyed playing trough it.
I noticed the loop levels for skills have very little impact. They quickly reach level 15 but hardly level after level 20, I reached the end with 26 Tech and didn't feel its impact.
The tasks with permanent progress are the real meat of the game, choosing your route to reach supplies and objectives with the least wasted time possible.
I suggest removing experience and instead adding tasks with temporary or permanent skill boosts. You could get a 20% exploration boost from Marie's diary or get either a Destruction or Tech temporary bonus for repairing power tools or hacker tools. This would put the emphasis on routing and achieving instead of misleading veterans into thinking you can grind loop levels.
concept wise nice game, made it past the second rover discovery in the first try, died in the hour long part after that.
but honestly, seeing that my stats now are like 1.18x and such compared to before I REALLY dont feel like repeatedly do the whole starting part up till the rover over and over again, jsut to increase the stats a bit each time.
like, always the same sequence of hacking this, opening that, not acccidentally forgetting to drink, eat, piss, shit in between cause your focus wandered off.
dont feel like doing that again and again until my stats are "good enough" to make it to the travel part and further than that.
let me kind of "record" the choices I made in the last go through and just repeat them until a desired point.
cause , basically, I would have to record myself doing a go through so I can repeat the same steps in the same order next time. not feeling up for that.
let alone this game not really being idle at all, despite being in the idle category. the 0.5-1 minute wait isnt wht I would consider idle
Make it so you can queue up getting things you're already maxed on while paused. That way you can easily pause and queue up stuff including food, water, and air over and over and leave it running for a while.
1. maybe have a wait option for the mines so you can weight on your items to recharge for the fourth and fifth layer
2. in the next chapter thing, maybe you can find another artifact or something that gives you a checkpoint so you don't have to start from the beggining every single life
You can't actually reach the third location, but unless you've seen a message saying "this is the end of current content" then you haven't seen everything that's currently possible.
I've not heard of anyone having that issue before. If you join the Discord server then it'll be easier to discuss, and you can send screenshots or exported saves to help find the problem.
this is such a delightful little game! i cant wait for the new chapter to come. one thing i think would greatly improve the gameplay is some sort of checkpointing/saving feature to prevent the long boring rover rides that happen every loop. keep going! its worth it ;-)
I dislike redoing the whole "do these 100 steps ahgain and again and be fcked if you mess up a single one due to inattention in the x hundreds loop" part before that.
A very clever premise! You've put together something that conjures the imagination. The starting scenario helps drive the mystery of where the story will lead.
Seems that the increase of initial skill boosts are based on reaching checkpoints rather than experience via retries.
After the second playthrough it becomes apparent that the monotony seems to penalise exploration if the story is to be railroaded by means of checkpoints.
For a number crunching game; the rule of thumb is generally to reward failure. Not quite so for here. Having to retry without any secondary benefit because of a 'mistake' feels like a waste of player's time.
But overall, there's a lot of potential to this! Thank you for sharing your creative project with us.
A nice option would be to top up a resource ... for example your PR water is currently 9/10 your water inventory water is full and you've got the leaving the first facility ready to trigger as well as grabbing another water pouch also ready to trigger if you could have a way to directly trigger that into making your PR water 10/10 while keeping your inventory full that'd be nice for maximizing your use of local resources before you lose access to them
I've not heard of anyone having this issue without having unlocked the ability to loop now. Please can you export your save and send it on the Discord server so I can take a look?
This was a pretty fun game so far! My only complaint was that it tended to drag out at points. In particular, driving the rover from Talos to Laurion gets pretty tiring, since it takes a good 3 minutes to go even with the tunnel unlocked. Incorporating some kind of Fast forward feature would improve the experience tremendously.
I'm enjoying the game but I'm getting bored of the long sections in my first few loops that don't change at all. Some sort of checkpointing would be nice if there's nothing new to discover
a delightful little early-access game so far and really looking forward to future updates. really enjoying the setting and story so far. highly recommend for people who have enjoyed similarly semi-idle resource management incremental games like Crank.
Fun! I enjoyed going through the different loops while trying to manage my my resources and then ohhhh yesss finally when getting new things to add to the rover that made life easier. I'm definitely looking forward to how this'll go in the future!
what really made me love this was the different death messages based on your progress. it never felt stale, the pacing was just right. love the story and gameplay, looking forward to more!
its a great game design in personal opinion that on your first loop if you prepare well and do what you need that you have just enough resources that your desparate when you encounter the abandoned rover and hope is has water leading you to intuitively open the case and start your loops. very clever and minimal rail roading. great game.
Despite the simplicity, I really loved this game! The idea is very engaging and the way you explored and developed it was cool. I'm looking forward to the future updates and content, because I can't wait to see where this story goes next.
It took me 14 loops to reach the current ending! I didn't see any bugs as far as I know.
from the (first?) rover travelling, the little sparkling object you encounter, is it still much content afterwards to explore? cause I died in like the 5th hour long travel segment, after doing the detour to the sparkling thing in the sand
I gotta be doing something wrong because i can't even get through the first rover section. Normally i fail because of water but the last time was because of air. I jsut can't seem to get the balance right and it always seems SO close it feels like i'm doing something wrong
If you're running out of water, you need to make sure you stock up as much as possible before leaving, which requires you to have NOT consumed all of the non-infinite water before you leave (from the Extract Water action). If you're running out of air then you just need to use the Fill Air Tank action more often/earlier.
If you need more advice, I recommend joining the Discord. There's a lot of people active on there, including several who are trying to optimise speed runs.
Five seconds in and I already adore the concept. Definitely gives me some Fallen London vibes, mixing early aughts browser games with a compelling narrative. Excited to see where this goes!
just finished in 11 loops. I like it a lot. one thing that super bugged me though. the dam design is completely illogical! that is not how dams work! I know the mechanic you were going for. but the lore messes with me.
it is a good game though. that was the thing that bugged me the most. so thats good.
Yeaaaah, that's fair. I do know that's not how dams work, but I needed a timegate and that was the only thing I could think of which even vaguely made sense for a partially terraformed planet. Glad you enjoyed the rest of it though!
Could be coming up from the bottom of the dam first and you have to wait for the river to stop before you can progress. Same mechanic, same reason of the dam needing to stop letting the water flow, just not having the dam move. As for the lore for why the chosen path was going in front of it: The other bridge was not complete yet or was damaged by uncharacteristic corrosion.
For anyone who sees this and isn't on the discord - this issue was caused by the PC the save was exported from was set to one language, while the PC it was imported to was set to a different language. Temporarily setting the second PC to the same language as the first should solve the issue, and I plan to fix it in the next major update.
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Really cool concept, but the stat boosts from xp don't feel very useful. They should either be linear or exponentially higher so the lower levels feel less impactful and higher levels feel way more impactful. Anything above x2 is almost completely useless atm. It cuts your time in half and then just feels like a grind for a 5s difference on the long tasks.
The dig in Laurion also feels too grindy. Would much prefer fewer, but more interesting layers. The last 2 are great with resource management. The others just felt like I had to redo the tedious start just to chip away at them for 3-4 loops. If I could skip the entirety intro of leaving the original station it would be much better. Or if there was more new things to do in the original station, such as longer tasks that I would need to grind up some levels to do. This once again goes back to the higher levels on skills not being useful. Once you hit loop level 25, it takes incredibly long to go beyond for basically no reward as you only need a couple of tasks to hit that important x2 multiplier.
Also a feature to set which resource will have priority on being consumed would be a nice addition.
These are all the things I think can be improved. Otherwise the game is great.
I was so saddened to reach the end, this game is super fun lol
I wish you the best of luck with this game
I wonder if Force Ground Floor Door can be completed within the 4m 20s time it takes for me to starve, but it's still a nice option for grinding destruction.
It is possible, but you need a very high level of destruction to do it. E.g. you need to grind I think literally for days to actually do it, and it doesn't really do anything. I recommend waiting a few weeks for the new content patch instead ;)
If I can have an ideal here, having an artifact there can be a thing:
An artifact what is made out of shadows and generate shadows and dimensional disorder, so after you broke through the door you get an 10 minute long blue search to find the source of the darkness and at the end you find the artifact, what after you absorb (lore text) you didn't find any change for a few minute but when you reach in to your pocket for water you find the same darkness inside of your pocket and somehow is't feel bigger then before (+ 100% inventory side [if it's to op then only +20% (or +1)]).
No, it's impossible. I grinded for WEEKS, not days. My destruction loop level is 31 and I'm not nearly close.
It would be possible if it continued to be possible to repair only the food synthesizer instead of the entire floor. What’s the trigger for that change?
In current version, I believe the trigger is reaching a certain number of loops. Next version it all works different, and the action remains available after it's combined.
This is really good so far.
One critique: there are plenty of places I'd have loved a "Wait" option so I didn't need to do busywork like picking up and dropping items or exiting and entering places just to have cooldowns finish. You might also want to allow a way to use a partial charge of something to "top off" the resource; an easy way to do this is to allow you to right-click a resource to force the pc to consume it (if possible).
Thanks! A general wait button is already implemented for next version, and manual force-consumption will be added either next version (if there's time) or the one after.
Thank you for sharing your game! I enjoyed playing trough it.
I noticed the loop levels for skills have very little impact. They quickly reach level 15 but hardly level after level 20, I reached the end with 26 Tech and didn't feel its impact.
The tasks with permanent progress are the real meat of the game, choosing your route to reach supplies and objectives with the least wasted time possible.
I suggest removing experience and instead adding tasks with temporary or permanent skill boosts. You could get a 20% exploration boost from Marie's diary or get either a Destruction or Tech temporary bonus for repairing power tools or hacker tools. This would put the emphasis on routing and achieving instead of misleading veterans into thinking you can grind loop levels.
concept wise nice game, made it past the second rover discovery in the first try, died in the hour long part after that.
but honestly, seeing that my stats now are like 1.18x and such compared to before I REALLY dont feel like repeatedly do the whole starting part up till the rover over and over again, jsut to increase the stats a bit each time.
like, always the same sequence of hacking this, opening that, not acccidentally forgetting to drink, eat, piss, shit in between cause your focus wandered off.
dont feel like doing that again and again until my stats are "good enough" to make it to the travel part and further than that.
let me kind of "record" the choices I made in the last go through and just repeat them until a desired point.
cause , basically, I would have to record myself doing a go through so I can repeat the same steps in the same order next time.
not feeling up for that.
let alone this game not really being idle at all, despite being in the idle category.
the 0.5-1 minute wait isnt wht I would consider idle
Make it so you can queue up getting things you're already maxed on while paused. That way you can easily pause and queue up stuff including food, water, and air over and over and leave it running for a while.
I really like this, two suggestions though
1. maybe have a wait option for the mines so you can weight on your items to recharge for the fourth and fifth layer
2. in the next chapter thing, maybe you can find another artifact or something that gives you a checkpoint so you don't have to start from the beggining every single life
Really looking forward to playing the full game!
Is getting to the third location even possible yet?
You can't actually reach the third location, but unless you've seen a message saying "this is the end of current content" then you haven't seen everything that's currently possible.
Just hit that message right now...
OOFT!
15 loops?
Whenever I do to refill my oxygen, it just doesn’t refil
I've not heard of anyone having that issue before. If you join the Discord server then it'll be easier to discuss, and you can send screenshots or exported saves to help find the problem.
this guy must have to pee so much
this is such a delightful little game! i cant wait for the new chapter to come.
one thing i think would greatly improve the gameplay is some sort of checkpointing/saving feature to prevent the long boring rover rides that happen every loop.
keep going! its worth it ;-)
I dislike redoing the whole "do these 100 steps ahgain and again and be fcked if you mess up a single one due to inattention in the x hundreds loop" part before that.
A very clever premise! You've put together something that conjures the imagination. The starting scenario helps drive the mystery of where the story will lead.
Seems that the increase of initial skill boosts are based on reaching checkpoints rather than experience via retries.
After the second playthrough it becomes apparent that the monotony seems to penalise exploration if the story is to be railroaded by means of checkpoints.
For a number crunching game; the rule of thumb is generally to reward failure. Not quite so for here. Having to retry without any secondary benefit because of a 'mistake' feels like a waste of player's time.
But overall, there's a lot of potential to this! Thank you for sharing your creative project with us.
A nice option would be to top up a resource ... for example your PR water is currently 9/10 your water inventory water is full and you've got the leaving the first facility ready to trigger as well as grabbing another water pouch also ready to trigger if you could have a way to directly trigger that into making your PR water 10/10 while keeping your inventory full that'd be nice for maximizing your use of local resources before you lose access to them
That is on the roadmap for 'soon': https://trello.com/c/6VIeWvzv
My life got busy after I beat the early version of the game and I finally come back months later to find an already good game much improved
Stuck with no power in rover and no ability to "Loop Now" like the message says, have tried reloading as well.
I've not heard of anyone having this issue without having unlocked the ability to loop now. Please can you export your save and send it on the Discord server so I can take a look?
This was a pretty fun game so far! My only complaint was that it tended to drag out at points. In particular, driving the rover from Talos to Laurion gets pretty tiring, since it takes a good 3 minutes to go even with the tunnel unlocked. Incorporating some kind of Fast forward feature would improve the experience tremendously.
I'm enjoying the game but I'm getting bored of the long sections in my first few loops that don't change at all. Some sort of checkpointing would be nice if there's nothing new to discover
Loving the improvements!
Quite fun so far! I really like the incremental looping and am looking forward to more chapters.
my only real complaint about this game that i can even find is that i found it before it was completed and now i have to wait for more content T-T
a delightful little early-access game so far and really looking forward to future updates. really enjoying the setting and story so far. highly recommend for people who have enjoyed similarly semi-idle resource management incremental games like Crank.
i really enjoyed the story telling here. looking forward to updates
Fun! I enjoyed going through the different loops while trying to manage my my resources and then ohhhh yesss finally when getting new things to add to the rover that made life easier. I'm definitely looking forward to how this'll go in the future!
what really made me love this was the different death messages based on your progress. it never felt stale, the pacing was just right. love the story and gameplay, looking forward to more!
its a great game design in personal opinion that on your first loop if you prepare well and do what you need that you have just enough resources that your desparate when you encounter the abandoned rover and hope is has water leading you to intuitively open the case and start your loops. very clever and minimal rail roading. great game.
you should allow us to break down the office door for exp
even after we get the password
Skills are being replaced with a familiarity system next patch: https://trello.com/c/9tONHcuv
I forget to save before I restarted, is there a way to go back to where I was?
sounds good
IT's a great game!
...but I want a way to break that first floor door. Please!
Eventually, yes, when there's a benefit to doing so. That probably won't be soon though.
Very interesting gameplay loop, follow earned
Despite the simplicity, I really loved this game! The idea is very engaging and the way you explored and developed it was cool. I'm looking forward to the future updates and content, because I can't wait to see where this story goes next.
It took me 14 loops to reach the current ending! I didn't see any bugs as far as I know.
from the (first?) rover travelling, the little sparkling object you encounter, is it still much content afterwards to explore?
cause I died in like the 5th hour long travel segment, after doing the detour to the sparkling thing in the sand
I want to break that damn door!!!
"Repair rover power system" and "repair rover hull" should eventually be combined into "repair rover".
"Shut off emergency systems" should probably be Tech, not Exploration.
I gotta be doing something wrong because i can't even get through the first rover section. Normally i fail because of water but the last time was because of air. I jsut can't seem to get the balance right and it always seems SO close it feels like i'm doing something wrong
If you're running out of water, you need to make sure you stock up as much as possible before leaving, which requires you to have NOT consumed all of the non-infinite water before you leave (from the Extract Water action). If you're running out of air then you just need to use the Fill Air Tank action more often/earlier.
If you need more advice, I recommend joining the Discord. There's a lot of people active on there, including several who are trying to optimise speed runs.
Five seconds in and I already adore the concept. Definitely gives me some Fallen London vibes, mixing early aughts browser games with a compelling narrative. Excited to see where this goes!
Very nice game but you should allow the player to Force that ground floor door.
just finished in 11 loops. I like it a lot. one thing that super bugged me though. the dam design is completely illogical! that is not how dams work! I know the mechanic you were going for. but the lore messes with me.
it is a good game though. that was the thing that bugged me the most. so thats good.
Yeaaaah, that's fair. I do know that's not how dams work, but I needed a timegate and that was the only thing I could think of which even vaguely made sense for a partially terraformed planet. Glad you enjoyed the rest of it though!
Could be coming up from the bottom of the dam first and you have to wait for the river to stop before you can progress. Same mechanic, same reason of the dam needing to stop letting the water flow, just not having the dam move. As for the lore for why the chosen path was going in front of it: The other bridge was not complete yet or was damaged by uncharacteristic corrosion.
Ooh, that works. All the same effects without any of the issues. Thanks!
somwhow i have 0 air hut dont die, also character wont use the air tanks
I've not encountered that before. Please can you export your save and send it on the Discord server so I can investigate?
Import doesn't work, console says
`KeyNotFoundException: The given key '169.13444519043' was not present in the dictionary.`
For anyone who sees this and isn't on the discord - this issue was caused by the PC the save was exported from was set to one language, while the PC it was imported to was set to a different language. Temporarily setting the second PC to the same language as the first should solve the issue, and I plan to fix it in the next major update.