https://soft-cactus.itch.io/lunokhod

I have been working on a small game for the last few months. It is ready for playtesting. I am trying to make one game every few months to improve my skills.

Unfortunately I think I have hit a bit of a wall with this one, the gameplay is a bit too linear and simple to be very fun. That’s a signal in itself and will inform the design of my next game. In the meantime, I need to finish polishing this one.

Please play with a critical eye and let me know what issues the game has.

EDIT: If you have the time, please consider DM’ing me with a screen recording of your gameplay. I think it would help a lot :)

  • BanMeFromPosting [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I looove Old RTS’s and this one has major RTS vibes! Reminds me of Command & Conquer with the rovers and the gathering of resources/spice/gold.

    Big fan of the starting interface. I love when menus are presented within the context of the game.
    Comrade Trump is funny, but it gives off big shitpost vibes. I think you could have fun by renting a few costumes and taking pictures of some friends in different poses in order to use them instead of Trump. But he is funny.
    The graphics are nice and cosy. Though a bit one-sided with colour. I like how the moon is gray and we are the ones that bring a pop of colour though. Very cool.
    The voice-over could do some work. Don’t be afraid to get extra with it either. “WE MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS” “VESSSSPENE GASSS” and so on are still voice stims to me from the first starcraft.

    The tutorial is nice. I wish the buttons had text when the cursor hovered over them (thinking here of the automine button, it is already present for the refinery button?). I would also enjoy hotkeys.

    If I have a building queued up and I click on another rover in order to select it, it instead plots the building down. I think it would be nicer if, when you click on something while you have selected a building to be constructed somewhere, you instead cancel the construction and select whatever you clicked. That might just be me though.

    When I can’t construct something, and I click anyway because I’m a dummy, it would be nice with a notification that informs me why I can’t build right now (resources, location, something else?)

    Regarding further progression… Copy that paradox game about terraforming maybe? Or that paradox game about intergalactic empires? You could make upgrades to the rover, but you might risk the rovers rising up or something. Would be nice to be able to upgrade turrets as well. Or some sort of expansive tech tree. You could also copy one of the Dune RTS’s - especially thinking of the first one. Handling worms and stuff.

    You could also look towards Warcraft and have more than one resource that needs to be mined by different workers. Right now everything is mined by the same workers and handled at the same place.

    You could also go in a more logistical way. Right now everything is just automatically connected to the power grid. There’s no refuse after refining. These are things you could also make the player manage. In that

    It’s fun, but it doesn’t really grab me. Played for about 30 minutes. So also take my feedback with that in mind - the game might not be for me, so following my feedback might just be you making a game that’s more to the liking of someone who won’t play it anyway and less to the liking of the people who would like it.

    It’s nice that there is no combat. If you want there to be though you could have an “enemy faction” that are space nazis. Them being on the moon was a big meme once.

    • bingus_bongus [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Don’t worry, Trump is just a placeholder. I need to do an art pass an audio pass before release. Trump is getting replaced with this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Chertok

      It’s fun, but it doesn’t really grab me. Played for about 30 minutes.

      That’s the conclusion I have come to as well. I think the fundamental design just isn’t very good. I plan to make some minor tweaks and bug fixes, but I think that there’s ultimately no use in trying to totally overhaul the game, I will just do some more refinement and leave it as is. I learned a lot though and will be applying the lessons I learned to future games.

      Though a bit one-sided with colour.

      EDIT:

      Though a bit one-sided with colour.

      This is my girlfriend’s biggest complain. I am literally colorblind so the color palette is a result of that. I will do some color balancing in the refinement pass but I think it will probably still look ugly to the non-colorblind hahaha.

      • BanMeFromPosting [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        I gotta be honest, I think the fundamental design is pretty good. It’s the basics of most RTS’s you’ve got going, and it’s pretty cool to see an old-school-rts that isn’t focused on producing soldiers, but instead on creating viable infrastructure and sending stuff back home. I think it has good growth potential, I could see it go in a lot of different directions

        • Steal from Tropico
        • Steal from Roller Coaster Tycoon
        • Steal from C&C
        • Steal from Paradox

        Then again, it is just a project, you shouldn’t work on it if you don’t enjoy it. But I think it’s a pretty solid base for something cool.

        • bingus_bongus [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          Thank you for the kind words. I wanted to keep the scope small, about the size of a flash game that you could beat in 30 mins during a work meeting-- but I guess that doesn’t lend itself to complexity in a game of this type. Idk I’m out of coffee and probably incoherent at this point in the day hahaha. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t plan for the scope of the game to grow any more at this point-- i.e. no new resource types or unit types or major new mechanics.

          an old-school-rts that isn’t focused on producing soldiers, but instead on creating viable infrastructure

          Yeah I wanted the focus to be on something positive. The guy from that image I sent, Boris Chertok, has a set of memoirs where he talks about the space race from the soviet POV. Basically they abandoned moon exploration to catch up with nuclear weapons production. The US had a 20:1 numbers advantage in the 50s and by the 80s they closed that gap to 1.6:1, but it was an enormous economic project. He compares it to the Great Patriotic War in scope. To that end I wanted to focus on heroic sacrifice without violence.

          The western view of the USSR is people enduring terrible conditions because of “authoritarianism”, when in reality people endured horrible conditions because it was literally an existential struggle for survival. I wanted to capture that, albeit in a very small and kind of detached way. In hindsight, from the 21st century, using Helium-3 to avoid climate disaster is a heroic industrial goal.