Commander

kbzealous 2019-10-08 19:05

Wowee, best game I have played yet.

I really enjoyed a lot of it and I think that you should expand on this idea going into the future.

Some suggestions though, I would make the map that you have already travelled into stay discovered but slightly greyed out like a traditional RTS but I really liked the idea here and I think it has a lot of potential!

wekaj 2019-10-08 23:45

@kbzealous Thank you, I'm glad you liked it! I had an idea for a game where you control squads like this a while ago so it was fun to be able to try it out here, even if it's not as complete as I'd like it to be.

Greying out the parts of the map you have already seen is a great idea. If I do anything more with this game idea, that'll be one of the first additional features I implement.

dob 2019-10-15 05:33

Such a fun game, and so well executed. One of the best I've seen in this competition. I love the graphics and the concept. I died the first time I played, when I split my forces, and the second time I just built one mega-squad, because I thought with the stat upgrades, it would be better to have them apply all to one group. Eventually my megasquad was pretty well invulnerable to everything, and they pretty much four-hit the dragon to death. I love that the squads have random names, that the people have random races, and I thought the visual style and animation was really great. I had a little bit of trouble grokking the controls at first, but eventually it became very natural. Really clever game - thanks. I enjoyed it a lot.

dxk2294 2019-10-15 06:35

Loved it! This was one of the best games I've played so far. It was a really polished experience, and super satisfying to play. I agree with the megasquad point @dob brought up, but still stuck to a splitting it up because controlling the squads was so much fun.

chaosed0 2019-10-15 07:00

Quite compelling for how simple a concept it is! I had a lot of fun building up my squads to a point where they were unstoppable, and had a lot of fun trawling around the map for upgrades. You managed to fit in a lot of areas in not much time. That being said, I think there's a lot of polish that could be applied here:

- The introduction was very rough; I almost quit my first time after accidentally making a single squad which did only one damage. - The control scheme, while nice and simple, ended up getting in my way a lot of the time. Oftentimes when drawing lines, I'd accidentally move my squad backward into bombs because I have slightly shaky hands. - Along those lines, I also found myself wishing that I could move my squads together more often than not, as it seemed the dominant strategy to keep them together rather than splitting them. - I'm still not sure what some of the upgrades do. For instance, I'm guessing Accuracy adds critical chance, but I still have no idea about toughness vs. resistance.

However! Just know that, even with all the above, you really put together something wonderful. I ended up spending about 40 minutes, and enjoyed most of it. Great job with this entry!

cdunham 2019-10-15 08:52

Feels really polished for a compo game, great job! Very hard game but I like trying to control multiple squads at the same time, though I mostly just put them in the same spot to take on groups of enemies together. One thing that would've been helpful is seeing what stats the different squads have so I know which ones to send into battle. Having the weapon icon next to the squad name does help a lot but having the commanders health somewhere at all times would also help me not send them on a suicide mission lol And I feel the enemies health should be shown too so I know if I'm actually doing a significant amount of damage or not. Pretty fun to play this one though, so thanks!

wekaj 2019-10-16 00:15

Wow, thanks for all the feedback!

@dob @dxk2294 I'm glad you enjoyed it! The mega-squad tactic seems to be very effective, which is not quite what I wanted, but oh well! There definitely could have been better incentives to use multiple squads.

@chaosed0 Some good points, thank you. Being able to move squads around together is a great idea, I could imagine it being convenient for travelling large distances. The stats could have done with an in-game description (Resistance was for defense against magic damage, you are right about Accuracy.)

@cdunham I did have enemy health bars enabled at one point but I thought it made the battles look too cluttered. Maybe it could have worked, though! Displaying the individual stats for each squad is for sure something I would have liked to have implemented.

Thanks again!

notgreat 2019-10-17 01:40

Pretty fun, but it was annoying how making one super-squad was so overly powerful (if a bit slow). Having the Fog of War show revealed terrain would've made it much easier to know where I've been before, I got confused a couple times as to the overall structure of the map.

The healing wand weapon is kinda weird, it seems like the optimal way to use it is to pick it up, walk away for a few minutes, and the grab your old weapon and continue onward. This does not seem like a good idea, and it's made especially annoying by not having the health bars shown while healing. Does the healing affect other squads? I didn't actually test that.

I had a follower get stuck on a block sometimes and needed to loop back to get him to pathfind around it. One time I got a guy trapped inside some blocks (at the corner of 4 different blocks) but I'm not actually sure how he got there.

brokenmirrormedia 2019-10-19 07:41

This is a really cool game, I am not very good at strategy games, but I could see a lot of effort went into this, with how much depth there was.