Feedback

[Macrodemon]

I really wanted to give you a positive review but there are a lot of annoyances and I feel that the game was rushed to hit an arbitrary self imposed timeline and with another month or two of polish it would have a lot more polish and a much better feel.

The way in which background music cuts in and out is extremely annoying as rather than fading between the two sound tracks it is a hard switch. This is really jarring and makes you feel like something crashed in the game. It would have been a nice touch to change the lighting to give the game a more night and day feel to it. When you defeat all the Zumbies and it is still night time there is no sound track and so it is silent until the clock switches over and you kinda need something to fill the void. But more polish around the day/night cycle would make the game feel a lot better.

Tool tips are missing, it seems that you had the house tool tip as the default as when I mouse over anything in the tech tree I get the same description for most of research items.

Slow scrolling research tree, it would be nice if you could use the mouse wheel to move along the research tree because as you get deeper into the game it is really annoying to have to wait while you scroll to the end of the tree. It would also be really nice if it remembered where you were when you last looked at the tree or if it just jumped to the first un-researched item in the tree.

AI is infuriating, I tried testing it to see the logic and I would see that by setting up 3 mines an auto-bot will give power to mine A then C and then A leaving mine B always out of power. What this means is that you can't really have a fully automated base as I found guns would often be left without power. You really need to have some way of creating priority to keep things flowing. It would also be nice if you could create logic so you could set an auto bot to give power to specific items. This could be all gun turrets or even a specific gun turret.

It would also be nice if there was a recharge station for auto-bots as watching dinkies and bots chase down an auto-bot to give it power is amusing but it means that everything else goes without power.

Starting a new game there is no way to skip the intro sequence. It would also be nice if you could click through what people are saying a lot sooner. Some people read extremely quickly while others are very slow at reading.

When new entries open up in the help/database the icon flashes but I have no idea what new entries display there. It would be nice if it marked what you have read an not read.

Purple crystal bug, you already know about this. But I was able to use the help tool to get around it. In this situation it was handy but I can imagine playing this game with my nephew and it would be nice to hide this away under a console command to enable/disable it it.

Transporting items with the rocket often causes items to fall in unreachable places and it would be nice if there were some dedicated crate slots that you could place items onto. This would also make it feel like you are loading/unloading the rocket which is more intuitive. Likewise it would be nice if turrets had a dedicated crate slot attached to it so you could use transport bots to keep them fully loaded rather than the turrets grabbing any nearby ammo. This could add some logistics to the game which seems lacking at the moment.

What does the entropy device do? There seems to be no way to build it. There isn't much in the way of adventure and discovery and so the game is pretty much over without the player feeling like they have achieved anything.

[Endless Loop Studios]

Hi there!

I definitely I do wish I had an extra month for polish and testing, but based on Steam's sales/festivals schedule it was really either now or have to delay until February.
The good news is I'm continuing to work on the game so if you try it again in a few months hopefully all your issues with the game will have been sorted!

The cut in the music is indeed exactly the lack of polish you mention, I do want to implement a music fade instead of a hard cut, just haven't had time to do it yet.
The lighting does change quite a bit, do you mean more of a slow change throughout the day? I tried that but it just made the game harder to understand when the zumbys were coming, so I ended up making the transition from day to night pretty quick in order to make it very noticeable.
The "no music after defeating zumbys at night" is actually an intentional choice, I like how it becomes super calm before the next day starts, although yes I agree that quietness lasts a bit too long in the early waves when there's very few zumbys and they are defeated very quickly. Maybe I'll just add some low ambience in that case.

There were indeed some missing tooltips/icons in the TechTree, I've added them in a recent update.

On the scrolling, yup remembering where it was is something I have on my to-do list, I've been focusing more on serious issues but everything looks pretty stable now so I should be able to get to that one this weekend.

On the Add Power, it sounds like you experienced a bug that has since been fixed. There was an issue where if you manually added power to a building before the AutoBot got there it would get stuck in the queue and never receive power. Now that should be fixed.
In terms of priority they prioritize things that have the least power, adding customizable priority is an interesting option, I don't want to overcomplicate the game but a simple Low-Med-High priority could be simple enough.

I also added high self priority in a recent update, so the issue with AutoBots chasing other AutoBots shouldn't be a big issue. Now it's really just a optimization problem for the player to solve.

Skipping the tutorial is something I've always had in my own developer tools but never considered making it for the players, but several people have suggested it so I have it on my to-do list.

On the new Knowledge entries, yup that's another one of those tiny polish things that I didn't get to on time, I do want to add a flashing icon on each new entry instead of just the main button.

Yup the cheats menu is something I intentionally want to keep in the game but I want to disable it by default and make it a toggle in the Options menu.

On the Rocket, I did actually initially have it working exactly like that, it required placing Crate Containers and linking them to the Rocket
But that system was extremely limited and did not support transporting machines, so I swapped it for a simpler "nearby" system. Although it should never cause items to fall into unreachable places, maybe there was some strange physics bug and 2 objects spawned on the exact same position which caused them to be thrown?
On the Tower, yup that's also how it used to work and again I removed the manual link to simplify it. Not sure what you mean by the Transport Bots, you can definitely do that, place a Crate container near the tower and have a Transport Bot move ammo on there, that's how I fully automate defense, the Tower will automatically grab the closest Ammo whether it's on a Crate Container or on the floor.


Many thanks for such detailed feedback!

[jajo]

>I also added high self priority in a recent update, so the issue with AutoBots chasing other AutoBots shouldn't be a big issue. Now it's really just a optimization problem for the player to solve.

Bots that have task to add power should never runout of power. Even when power is gone it should continue moving until reaches source crate.

Bots that generate power should also neven runout of power. That's super annoying to come back to planet, see all dinkies were killed and find out that this happens because energy production bot run out of energy.

Dinkies that harvesting food should never runout of energy. As well as dinky feeders.

[jajo]

Another issue that stops me from finishing the game.
In the late stage I have a lot of production. Also, there is a game mechanic that blocks crafting or mining when there are too many objects nearby. I have several problems with that:

1. When I return from other planet back to "main production" planet I have all resources messed up. All these fricking rocks, power balls and other resources are scattered across all the map. You know what that means? My production is blocked by this trash. And it doesn't matter how many times I cleaned this mess, it returns after some time. Seriously, I don't know how you played your game and were able to automate colony not experiencing this issue.

2. I built several crafting buildings nearby each other. Then one of them reaches 99 resources in gathering crate but it continues producing trash all over the place. Up until this blocks production of ALL crafting buildings in that block. Not to mention that exactly these waste resource ending up scattered all over the place. It really needs some way to limit production, or some kind of unique building from research tree that acts like storage and can store an unlimited amount of resources. I understand that this could break the whole game balance. So...
What about another job for dinkies or bots? Clean up(destroy) trash resources from the area, that lying on the ground for long enough.
And as player I also would like to have an ability to destroy resources I'm currently holding. Separate button, for example X on keyboard, with hold action. Though, this doesn't fix the problem of overproducing, but somewhat helps with random trash(like rocks blocking mining of green crystal while their mining spots on different sides of the map)

[jajo]

Ok, I'm pretty sure that resources are messed up all over the place because when planet is activated (through rocket travel or when game is loaded) all resources that were carryied by dinkies, auto-bots and transport-bots at the moment of save are dropped on the ground. This is a game braking bug

[Joelle]

Can agree for the average user of a factory/automation style game, a clean factory is preferred. The mess on the floor in areas where you don't have things normally running is annoying at times to clean-up.

[Macrodemon]

@Hugo, thank you for the insight. It is has been really good to see how you tackle the various different challenges. Coordinating the release of a game with Steam events isn't something I had thought about too much and following other indie developers it something that can have a big effect on how many people will see your game.

I am certainly looking forward to running through the game again and seeing what improvements have been made.