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.

You know what, I bet what is happening is that refineries or rovers are being destroyed, and the code that tracks resources is just never taking into account that dust was destroyed.

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.

From your video it looks like that might actually just be glare from the sun due to your camera angle. Could you try rotating it and see if it goes away?

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.

Youtube or TankieTube will work. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

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.

Demolishing buildings refunds 50% of the cost by dropping a bunch of regolith on the ground. Meteors should provide more resources. I was hoping that there would be enough starting resources on the map to let each player finish without needing to wait for meteors, but it’s randomly generated so I guess it’s more variable than I thought.

Good ideas, I will implement some of these in the next build. Thanks for giving it a try I really appreciate it.

No that sounds like a bug. Although that’s a new bug so congrats on being the first to find it! I know it’s a lot to ask but do you think you could send me a screen recording? I didn’t think about how many of these bugs would be difficult to capture with just a screenshot.

It’s implicit but basically rovers gather the moon dust. They take it to a refinery. It is converted to metal at a ratio of 0.1 I believe, so 100kg dust -> 10kg metal. I tried to keep it simple but the rules are never explained. I’ll need to think about how to make it more explicit.

Yeah solar flares cause the VCR static. I’m glad you liked the explosions, my intention was that if your base gets destroyed it should at least be fun to watch the explosions chain and destroy everything. It sounds like some of the visual queues aren’t obvious, people aren’t picking up on the solar flare, so I will add an audio queue and maybe text that literally says “SOLAR FLARE” when one happens lol.

The Lenin radius is something other people have mentioned, so I will go ahead and increase it.

That’s a new one. Mind dm’ing me your operating system and any logs if there are any?

Yes that is a bug that I just became blind too. Need to fix it.

Do you know if your solar panels were inside of the radius of your turret? Did they get blown up during a solar flare + meteor shower, or just during a normal meteor shower?

Thank you for the feedback. I have been struggling to make the meteor showers a challenge, without making them too frustrating. I think I need to see how player’s play, I will be doing some IRL playtests in a couple of weeks so hopefully I can get a better idea what is causing people to die in the early game. If you have the time to spare, it would help to see a video of your playthrough. Sorry it was frustrating :(

Do you remember the sequence of events? The meteor shower triggered at the end of the tutorial should be weak enough not to blow your stuff up.

I didn’t know there was one. I don’t really post online much, but I figured I needed to start doing some advertising if I wanted anyone to find out about my game. Please DM me that sounds fun.