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 :)

  • 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.