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

    Thanks for all the feedback! There’s a lot of good ideas about QoL improvements in here and I will add all this to my TODO list.

    (though it is a substantial change to the game design), Introducing a space-race angle to the game, where perhaps there is also a nearby imperialist moon base can introduce PvP aspects to gameplay, as well as a race to claim valuable resources on the map or build offensive / defensive countermeasures.

    This was actually one of my initial ideas, but my goal with this project was to finish in 3 months. I really just want to ship something, and force myself to do all the polish, with menus, bugfixing, audio, QoL features, etc – so I limited myself to the complexity of a flash game. Unfortunately I think that the forced simplicity just makes the game too boring, the systems that exist are very linear and don’t interact in interesting ways.

    I do playtesting for indie devs sometimes and it’s always frustrating when you give someone feedback and then they’re like: “but I don’t want to change anything lol”. So I’m not trying to do that and be like “well actually it’s supposed to be bad!”. But I do want to just get this project polished and wrapped up. Which means unfortunately it will never be a “good” game, just the most polished version of what it is. However everything I learned about “how to make a boring game” I will keep in mind going forward so my next project is not boring.

    You should join the Hexbear gamedev discord if you haven’t already, the link is somewhere in this thread. You give very good feedback.