I don’t have too much time today so sorry if it isn’t thorough but I took a quick break from some other things to do the tutorial.

Thoughts (mostly general):

• I felt the claws of the city building loop sink into me like a great and horrible ghost. This is good. Any game can have technical issues or technical successes but something this simple this early having pull from a loop is a great place to start.

• The visual aesthetic is very very nicely matched with narrative and gamepkay. The 90’s graphics on the moon with the late Soviet Tech is a natural pairing and I can tell you put a lot of effort into the sfx. It really does remind me of that era of RTS and in a way it kind of seats me into the perspective of an alt-history Soviet city planner looking at a top-down view of what they have to do. Thas swag. 😎

-The tutorial is effective for how brief it is. Nice job with the contextual triggers for steps.

-You kept a lot of control conventions with RTS’s I was familiar with already. I could feel myself trying to do certain actions and was thinking “okay good” when I saw that they worked. Smooth.

-I’d love to see the energy something is going to take up before I build it too. That was something I wish I could plan for.

-Love the models and the shader that makes them look like sprites. Whatever you did for the LoD logic helps sell that too and it’s fun.

-This reminds me a lot of Per Aspera and that’s cool. That game also takes place at this level of management. I think if you do that but dedicated more to production-chains I think would differentiate this game enough for me to get something new out of the experience. (Per aspera isn’t really the most re-playable imo) Seems like you’re leaning into that more which is good 👍👍👍

-Can tell there’s lots of polish and other things to dial-in but some of the other comments talk about that already.

Might come back later to look at it more but I wanted to make sure you were properly complimented on finding a good vibe and creating a compelling gameplay loop. That’s literally the hardest part and you have it down.

Very nice work, comrade!

I dont have time to play it right now. But it looks cute. CUTE

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.

I got up to about 67 Lenins before I ran out of resources. The purpose of the game is to build Lenins, right?

Critical, you said?

• Input:

  • At the very least, Esc needs to bring up the menu and Space needs to toggle / cycle the game speed. I’m actually not familiar with RTS gameplay very much, but these are some of the most basic standard controls in genres like city builders and 4X. (I noticed later that the 1, 2, and 3 keys do this, but it took a while and I only discovered by accident. Only later, I noticed there were tool-tips on the time buttons).

  • Being able to pan the camera by right-clicking would be nice. This would allow full camera control with the mouse. (I understand right click also performs actions in the game, so this would require some thought about what the button does in context).

  • If you are committed to finishing the game, you should aim to support gamepad input too (though I wouldn’t dwell on this).

• User Interface:

  • The gray tab at the bottom of the screen is quite hard to notice above the gray moon background until you know it’s there. The game low-key has Vi syndrome (cannot figure out how to escape).

  • You need a settings menu in the title screen. Even with the in-game menu, there is no apparent way to switch from fullscreen to windowed mode

  • A user interface theme and fonts (to replace the default Godot UI theme. This is polish and I would worry about gameplay first)

  • “Toasts” (quick on-screen text popups) for voice announcements (“Power low,” “Power restored” etc.). I found the voice clips a little hard to understand, but toasts would also aid in internationalization and accessibility.

  • Get rid of the tool-tips on the bottom-right keypad. Put a stylistic green screen on that calculator and display the information there so that

    • It’s instant. You don’t need to wait for a pop-up or accidentally dismiss a pop-up because you failed to hold the mouse still enough.

    • It is in the same place for each button. You don’t have them popping up above / below / left / right of the cursor based on how close it is to the corner

    • You can include some pictographic information, like requirements, lack of resources, an image of the actual thing.

• Sound Design:

  • Needs music (I’m sure you’re aware). This would increase my desire to continue playing considerably.

  • More noises in general. Rovers should make noises when they’re moving around. I should get a sense that things are happening / are not happening from audio feedback. It’s very easy to over-do this though. The noises should be relatively quiet unless at a high zoom level.

• Graphics

  • The perspective seems a little weird when rotating the camera. Not sure if it is orthographic or something happening with the perspective at 3440x1440 resolution (21:9 aspect ratio). At this perspective, the ground almost looks slightly concave when it’s rotating. An orthographic perspective obviously was a requirement for classic sprite-based RTS games, but you have a rotating camera and 3D models here.

  • The resolution of the 3D scene appears to be down-scaled. I could understand doing this as a stylistic choice, but it is at odds with the higher resolution fonts, UI elements, and color depth. The lines on the mini-map are smoother than the actual scene, which seems a bit odd. The contrast between shaders on the player constructions and the completely flat shading of the ground is also distinct. Lunar regolith is highly reflective, but the surface doesn’t interact with light at all.

• Game design

  • The game needs to tell you why you cannot perform certain actions, or indicate why things aren’t happening. I got stuck in the tutorial twice. Once, I managed to designate the solar panels but the rovers didn’t start building them. Took me a couple minutes to figure out I needed to assign them to do it - I thought this is what I had done by having the rover selected in the first place to make the “SOL” button available. The second time I got stuck was when the tutorial asked me to build the habitat. It would show a red square no matter where I tried to place it. Took a moment to figure out the reason is because I did not have enough metal.

  • I haven’t gotten very far yet, but I get the impression that the player’s capacity to accumulate resources will simply snowball until they win. In this regard, the game is not very challenging.

  • On the other hand, recognize a game-over condition. I let the game run in the background for about 15 minutes and all of my constructions have been destroyed. AFAIK there is no way to recover from this state. It’s Game Over. At this point, the game should enter a game-over state, display some sad imagery, play a dirge, maybe show statistics for the run - something.

    • noticed a bug too: If a construction is destroyed, I think its controls remain visible on the keypad. I still see all the buttons for actions a rover can do, even though the rover is long gone.

  • The singular threat of meteor strikes lacks variety. The way solar flares have the potential to make meteors more dangerous is a nod towards complexity, but there needs to be more interlocking gameplay mechanics to produce a wide variety of situations the player might find themselves in. Consider (and I am only spitballing here - this is not a list of demands or anything):

    • The moon has a long day / night cycle (long enough even that you can do much of the tutorial during the day and then pull the rug out 2 weeks into the game). This can introduce gameplay mechanics involving long periods without solar power, and different properties caused by extremely high and extremely low temperatures. There can be trade-offs between different types of power generation, (solar, fuel cells, RTGs, etc).

    • Having unique sources of power begs for unique on-map resources and unique constructions to harvest them. The rovers might be doing too much. The player should need to build a larger variety of machines.

    • If the power-denial mechanic is shifted to the day/night cycle, solar flares could be re-purposed to interfere with radio / remote control mechanics in some way. They shouldn’t be made completely redundant.

    • Giving each individual construction its own power capacity instead of a binary “the whole moon has power” vs. “the whole moon doesn’t have power.” This gives the player an incentive to build logistical infrastructure to support mining / exploration farther from base, as well as the risk/reward of trying to stretch these limits.

    • A repair mechanic. Increase the costs of building new constructions such that it is more economical to repair damaged constructions. Maybe give meteors a splash-damage range (i.e. direct hit obliterates, but close hit takes something offline). Then the player has “fires” to put out - literally or metaphorically. Damage can also be caused by other mechanics like temperature (ambient, or over-heating), running power systems beyond their capacity, etc. etc. etc.

    • A larger variety of resources may give the player reasons to explore, or engineer work-arounds for un-buildable contraptions, or approach environmental hazards they would have no reason to otherwise, or convert one resource (or a combination of resources) into other resources. This can introduce some aspects of factory-builder style gameplay.

  • (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.

All that said, you have a really solid foundation here, both thematically and technically. The idea is good. The core systems are there. You need to introduce a few more mechanics to add variety and complexity to the game loop, but don’t do what I always do and quit working on a project way too early.

Played like 25-30 minutes of it and liked it.

Yes sir I will build that habitat

I will say, the meteor showers really fucked me over. I had my turret smack dab in the middle of my solar panels/batteries and habitat/refineries, expecting it to at least prevent the critical stuff from going boom. But…no? Two meteors landed right on top of my solar panels & batteries, blowing them to hell and basically soft-locking me because my power draw is now too high for any of the rovers to move

…At least the Lenin statue survived

I’ll give it a go tomorrow.

Hey, why aren’t you on the hexbear gamedev discord?

I can DM you the link if you want.

because of the comments here I built 2 turrets before building the habitat. Shooting down all but one of the meteors meant i only got a small patch of new resources.

The optimal play seems to be to get a ton of rovers and build a few extra refineries and just let all the meteors hit you

I have started playing it, and I will say GET AWAY FROM THE LATHE

Also an options in menu selection even if only for sound volume would be good

also terrain blacked out for some reason

I lost my… uh what was it called? The base that allowed me to build rovers.

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Oh it’s an RTS?

I’ll give it a go

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.

So how does the resource system actually work? the numbers on my little tv suggest there is a minimum amount of ore to produce a metal but i notice that my ore will deplete to 0 and I won’t gain any metal when the amount of ore remaining is under 100 or so.

I suppose the refinery is filling with ore and needs a certain amount to start producing metal?

I actually don’t think I can complete the game on this save. I built a ton of stuff before finishing the tutorial and only have the resources on the very edges of the map left. Is there a way to sell buildings? I could sell off my useless refineries and get the nuke and sell all my panels.