Alright, this is a pretty cool update! Some thoughts
-The new area was pretty cool to explore! I love how the Laurion-tier challenge of "Can you survive in the rover for X amount of time" is flipped to "Can you clear Santorini in X amount of time" which is pretty neat. I also liked how reading the logs in Santorini unlocked new stuff to do in Laurion- Excited to see more stuff like this in the future.
-I'm split on the new resource system. On one hand, it does a much better job at creating a sense of progression, with long timesinks like repairing the rover and long-distance travel able to be reduced much more substantially without making later parts too easy. On the other hand, it does get a bit weird in some circumstances- what's so different between exiting/entering the rover in various locations? It's the exact same action in principle.
-The new game balance in general is a bit harder than before. I appreciate that the changes make installing the generator a viable option, rather than useless like it was before.
-While the resource priority system is really cool in theory, in practice, having it reset everything to auto every loop is rather annoying, especially since this must be done at multiple points per loop as various resources are rediscovered.
-Combined tasks system was really cool for the most part, but it had an issue in some cases where you'd want to do the subtasks. For example, once you unlock the gather supplies option, there's no way to enter laurion directly without installing the generator or interrupting the gather supplies action.
Glad you enjoyed it overall! To address some of your issues:
- I've already planned a v2 of the familiarity system, which should smooth over most of the biggest problems with the current one (like the rover actions being different bonuses between locations) - Familiarity v2 on the Roadmap.
- I do plan to add a toggle option for saving the resource priorities between loops. Personally, since the preferred priorities wherever you end a loop are unlikely to match the ones at the start of a loop, I'd rather they reset to auto so I don't forget to change them and the character does something stupid. But I can see why people would want the option.
- Combined actions are also queued for an upgrade. The main thing will probably be making travel actions appear both inside and outside combined actions, so that you can still travel.
You can click on the chevron next to combined tasks to get the subtasks... with that it's fairly easy to just queue the 'exit rover, gather supplies' parts... or even just the 'gather water' part of the 'gather supplies' combined actions, etc.
Does look kinda funky with the four? tiered combined action for repairing the rover tho... so much ungrouping possible.
Nice update! I'm looking forward to seeing how you address the longer run times going forward. Even as it is, they feel a bit long for how many actual decisions you make.
I found a bug? In the Trello you posted this: "Allows the player to decide which items should be consumed first, and which should be not be consumed at all (unless you’re about to die)." I put my Small Water Bottle on DoNotUse thinking it will only use it when I about to die, but no, in my supplies I died from water running out with 5 bottle of water in my pocket.
I happened to return from Laurion to Talos once, but as far as I remember, I was not offered to charge the rover, and the base energy was not shown, although the food synthesizer continued to work.
As mentioned, currently the answer is no. Returning to Talos was added very late in the patch, so the possibility wasn't really considered. For the sake of balance, I probably won't make it possible to do (at least not initially). I'll try to work in some in-game explanation as to why.
Ugh, just more grind to suffer! But in all seriousness if it wasn't disassembled like the rest of the station it probably would be damaged like the rover.
whats the better option for the rover? generator or water? i feel like i dont have enough water without it but the power gets super close if im not extremely careful.
Great game! I was excited for the new update but a problem occurred
After getting in the rover I went for the 'Reflection', found the artifact but after touching it I didn't have any more 'Actions' while having a lot of 'Resources'. Before there was an option for a forced loop, but I can't find it right now, so I'm stuck
After touching the artifact, you should be able to "Get Back on Course", then continue driving until you die and loop.
The forced loop button only appears on your third loop (when your character is certain they are looping). Please can you send your exported save on discord so I can check it out?
Tried to time having the Mining Area door opened when I ran out of power while drilling the Obelisk, and was disappointed that it still automatically closed with no power. It makes no sense that the unpowered door is still closing on its own.
While playing, there's one feature I would have enjoyed : the ability to flag some tasks as "do it as soon as possible". This would make refilling water and food easier whenever we start a new loop an plan all actions we already know have to be done.
What I would love to see is a "prepare the Rover" option that gives you 5 Basic Food, 5 Protein Bars, 5 Small Water Bottles, 5 Water Pouches, the Emergency Suit and 5 air tanks, the Food Synthesizer Power Coupler, the generator, and a fully repaired Rover in one action. Maybe add it in after loop 10. Take the tedium completely out of restarting the loop once you've done it around a dozen times.
Definitely in March, currently aiming for within the next two weeks. Exactly when will largely depend on how many bugs/balance issues the testers find.
One thing I do wish was available was a way to set which water/food resource you automatically consume as there were several loops where I died because the wrong item was consumed which left me with only one stack of a resource rather than having two different stacks.
Very interesting game, however doing repeatitive things manually is not so fun. May be feature that allows to memory actions and repeat them could be useful. (However every run need to be slightly different and as result, it will be more thinking and waiting rather then thinking and repeating things.
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!
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Alright, this is a pretty cool update! Some thoughts
-The new area was pretty cool to explore! I love how the Laurion-tier challenge of "Can you survive in the rover for X amount of time" is flipped to "Can you clear Santorini in X amount of time" which is pretty neat. I also liked how reading the logs in Santorini unlocked new stuff to do in Laurion- Excited to see more stuff like this in the future.
-I'm split on the new resource system. On one hand, it does a much better job at creating a sense of progression, with long timesinks like repairing the rover and long-distance travel able to be reduced much more substantially without making later parts too easy. On the other hand, it does get a bit weird in some circumstances- what's so different between exiting/entering the rover in various locations? It's the exact same action in principle.
-The new game balance in general is a bit harder than before. I appreciate that the changes make installing the generator a viable option, rather than useless like it was before.
-While the resource priority system is really cool in theory, in practice, having it reset everything to auto every loop is rather annoying, especially since this must be done at multiple points per loop as various resources are rediscovered.
-Combined tasks system was really cool for the most part, but it had an issue in some cases where you'd want to do the subtasks. For example, once you unlock the gather supplies option, there's no way to enter laurion directly without installing the generator or interrupting the gather supplies action.
Glad you enjoyed it overall! To address some of your issues:
- I've already planned a v2 of the familiarity system, which should smooth over most of the biggest problems with the current one (like the rover actions being different bonuses between locations) - Familiarity v2 on the Roadmap.
- I do plan to add a toggle option for saving the resource priorities between loops. Personally, since the preferred priorities wherever you end a loop are unlikely to match the ones at the start of a loop, I'd rather they reset to auto so I don't forget to change them and the character does something stupid. But I can see why people would want the option.
- Combined actions are also queued for an upgrade. The main thing will probably be making travel actions appear both inside and outside combined actions, so that you can still travel.
You can click on the chevron next to combined tasks to get the subtasks... with that it's fairly easy to just queue the 'exit rover, gather supplies' parts... or even just the 'gather water' part of the 'gather supplies' combined actions, etc.
Does look kinda funky with the four? tiered combined action for repairing the rover tho... so much ungrouping possible.
Ah, so you can. Not sure why I didn't think of clicking on the subtasks, thanks for pointing that out.
Doublechecked, it's three tiers on that one...
Fully Repair Rover > Repair Rover Power System > Take Non-Essential Couplers
Nice update! I'm looking forward to seeing how you address the longer run times going forward. Even as it is, they feel a bit long for how many actual decisions you make.
I found a bug?
In the Trello you posted this:
"Allows the player to decide which items should be consumed first, and which should be not be consumed at all (unless you’re about to die)."
I put my Small Water Bottle on DoNotUse thinking it will only use it when I about to die, but no, in my supplies I died from water running out with 5 bottle of water in my pocket.
Can you recharge your rover in Talos?
I happened to return from Laurion to Talos once, but as far as I remember, I was not offered to charge the rover, and the base energy was not shown, although the food synthesizer continued to work.
As mentioned, currently the answer is no. Returning to Talos was added very late in the patch, so the possibility wasn't really considered. For the sake of balance, I probably won't make it possible to do (at least not initially). I'll try to work in some in-game explanation as to why.
Ugh, just more grind to suffer! But in all seriousness if it wasn't disassembled like the rest of the station it probably would be damaged like the rover.
whats the better option for the rover? generator or water? i feel like i dont have enough water without it but the power gets super close if im not extremely careful.
You can park the rover in Laurion to charge it. So put the water recycler in the rover, and the generator inside Laurion.
generator for when you go to the third base
Depends which part you're doing. For the new content I've only used generator. For earlier, water was really good.
Great game! I was excited for the new update but a problem occurred
After getting in the rover I went for the 'Reflection', found the artifact but after touching it I didn't have any more 'Actions' while having a lot of 'Resources'. Before there was an option for a forced loop, but I can't find it right now, so I'm stuck
After touching the artifact, you should be able to "Get Back on Course", then continue driving until you die and loop.
The forced loop button only appears on your third loop (when your character is certain they are looping). Please can you send your exported save on discord so I can check it out?
Sure, where exactly on the server should I send it - the 'bug report' section, 'help & support' ?
Bug reports please, thanks!
ITS FINALLY HAPPENED!!!! and i have the next two days off work, this is gonna be amazing.
discord link has expired :(
literally any day now. ive been checking daily, i cant wait for the next content drop.
Tried to time having the Mining Area door opened when I ran out of power while drilling the Obelisk, and was disappointed that it still automatically closed with no power. It makes no sense that the unpowered door is still closing on its own.
the door closes by slamming down, and losing power makes it drop maybe?
It does tho? It's natural state is closed, and wheen not actively resisted, it returns to that state.
Great work ! I love what you have done so far.
While playing, there's one feature I would have enjoyed : the ability to flag some tasks as "do it as soon as possible". This would make refilling water and food easier whenever we start a new loop an plan all actions we already know have to be done.
What I would love to see is a "prepare the Rover" option that gives you 5 Basic Food, 5 Protein Bars, 5 Small Water Bottles, 5 Water Pouches, the Emergency Suit and 5 air tanks, the Food Synthesizer Power Coupler, the generator, and a fully repaired Rover in one action. Maybe add it in after loop 10. Take the tedium completely out of restarting the loop once you've done it around a dozen times.
Yeah, I feel like after a certain point you would just grab all the first four water bottles the moment you open the pod
This was super fun! I got super into it and lost track of time haha.
i really enjoyed whats available right now and ive been checking daily for new content. is there any estimated date for the next major update?
Definitely in March, currently aiming for within the next two weeks. Exactly when will largely depend on how many bugs/balance issues the testers find.
Glad you're enjoying it so far!
i appreciate the timely response and am very excited for what awaits us in and after the dam.
This is a very fun game! I'm really excited to see where it goes from here.
One thing I do wish was available was a way to set which water/food resource you automatically consume as there were several loops where I died because the wrong item was consumed which left me with only one stack of a resource rather than having two different stacks.
Very interesting game, however doing repeatitive things manually is not so fun. May be feature that allows to memory actions and repeat them could be useful. (However every run need to be slightly different and as result, it will be more thinking and waiting rather then thinking and repeating things.
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!