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 :)

  • BeanisBrain [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    14 hours ago

    Comments I’m making as I play:

    • I like the startup menu, gives me The House Abandon vibes.
    • The game looks like a late 90s/early 00s RTS which is quite different from what I would’ve expected based on the startup screen. You nailed that aesthetic though.
    • Why is the tutorial guy Trump lol
    • Are those different sprites for each scale of zoom? Very impressive if so.
    • The turning animation and the dust clouds when the rover moves are nice details.
    • The tooltips on the build buttons are nice to have, though I would have appreciated them on the action (e.g. automine) buttons too.
    • Typo, “Anti-Metor”
    • A lot of Paradox games have pause/resume bound to spacebar, and I think this would’ve been a nice feature to have here
    • Tooltips don’t work when time is paused
    • Speeding up time being disabled during solar flares or meteor showers gets annoying and makes them feel like an interruption of the gameplay. I appreciate that you probably meant to give the player time to react, and it makes sense to set speed to 1x at the moment they occur, but I repeatedly found myself wishing I could speed up time while they were happening.
    • I wish I could see an itemized breakdown of my power consumption. It kept going up and down and I didn’t know why.
    • I wish I could’ve seen the radius of effect on the Lenin statue before I placed it.
    • Target indicators to see where my rovers are going when I select them would be useful.
    • Felt like the resource requirements for the late-game buildings were a bit much. I spent a lot of time waiting.

    Overall impression: Simple, but quite impressive for something made in only a few months. I feel like if you expanded on this you could end up with something really good.

    • bingus_bongus [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      3·
      14 hours ago

      Are those different sprites for each scale of zoom? Very impressive if so.

      They are actually just low-poly 3D models with shaders applied, but I was hoping they looked like sprites.

      Why is the tutorial guy Trump lol

      I needed a placeholder and I had that meme of Trump on my computer:

      The game looks like a late 90s/early 00s RTS which is quite different from what I would’ve expected based on the startup screen.

      This was a concern of mine, the graphics being so different from the menu and the gameplay. The idea I had was that the actual main game exists diagetically in the world, it is the software you use on the computer to manage the moon colony. Or at least an abstract representation of it. Idk maybe that doesn’t come across very well.

      Thank you for the feedback, amazing input. Some of this stuff is out of scope for a project of this size, but a lot of this is going in my immediate TODO.