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Eowch. On the mission to retake the city from level 2, my mech was at 3 HP and I bailed out the pilot before it went out in flames. As soon as the mech was destroyed, I got a traceback.
The engine is functional, but the presentation of the battles still leave a lot to be desired. Mechas just vanish when they're destroyed, the missiles are invisible, and there's lack of sense of any carnage. The sound effects and music are underwhelming.

The story segments are brief, but the ethical issues raised by the plot is pretty interesting. Now, it would have been nicer if I knew what exactly I was doing to progress the story. Half the time, I made my choices accidentally on the battlefield, rather than based on the ethical alignment I wanted to pursue.

The technical aspects are all great, but this feels more like a demonstration of a battle engine than a game. The battles are functional and the coding is undoubtedly good, but the battles still end up being boring because of a general lack of visual and audio stimuli.

Alright, beat the game.

I'm kind of disappointed there wasn't more to the story. It was 90% game play and 10% story. I thought the plot was pretty interesting though. I liked the politics behind all of the characters and the moral ambiguity. I was struck by how abruptly the game ended. There wasn't even as much as an ending credit. I also did not know the main character was female until I looked her up in the encyclopedia. She looks a lot like a boy.

In regard to the game play, man, the machine gun by far the best weapon. The best strategy is to just arm everyone with machine guns, march up to all the enemies and rat-tatatata them to death at close range. Those lasers and rockets were pretty much useless. The lasers just don't have the same punch as machine guns and the rockets... well, they must be made by North Koreans, because it takes a small miracle to hit a target, even when you're aiming into a crowd. You might want to make the laser and the rockets more powerful.

Also, was the lack of shading on the characters intentional, or just a limitation because of lack of time? I think they'll probably look better once they're shaded.

I could never figure out how the attack of opportunity system worked. Sometimes, I walked right in front of an enemy and they didn't attack. Other times, I wandered near them from afar and I got pounded with bullets.

Overall, I thought the game was interesting, but the battles were still on the boring side. Very competent coding, but lacking in the audiovisual department.

Samu-kun wrote:Eowch. On the mission to retake the city from level 2, my mech was at 3 HP and I bailed out the pilot before it went out in flames. As soon as the mech was destroyed, I got a traceback.

Hmm - I'll have a look at this tonight... but it looks at first glance like a bug that's been fixed in one of the more-recent versions, but you loaded a save from an older version which still had objects with that bug stored in the save. That's a feature of Ren'Py's save/load, I'm afraid, so if that's the case there's only so much that can be done about it.

Samu-kun wrote: Mechas just vanish when they're destroyed, the missiles are invisible, and there's lack of sense of any carnage. The sound effects and music are underwhelming.

You'll be surprised to learn that this is pretty much all because there's only so much that one person can do in a month of time after work!
Seriously, most of this is already on the ToDo list for continued work, with the exception of the rockets - which I have no intention to change for the same reason that I have no intention of adding red glowy lines across the map for the lasers. ;-)

Samu-kun wrote: Now, it would have been nicer if I knew what exactly I was doing to progress the story. Half the time, I made my choices accidentally on the battlefield, rather than based on the ethical alignment I wanted to pursue.

Well, "knowing exactly what you were doing to progress the story" is something I absolutely do not want to make obvious to the player. I very much dislike the part of most VNs where you could more or less boil the majority of the decisions down to "pick which character you want to pursue", and the VNs I've enjoyed the most have had choices that didn't have an obvious direct effect on the plot but in retrospect you could tell more or less how the mindset with which you answered the questions led to the result that you got.

So is your problem with it that you don't see a relationship between the things you do and the different results you get, or that you don't know exactly which things you do are affecting the plot? (It's worth mentioning at this point that the first act doesn't have anywhere near such significant branching as the rest of the story will have, because the protagonist hasn't become prominent enough yet to affect events that significantly.)

I'm very curious if you have any examples of choices you believe you made accidentally, though - I can't see how any of the plot-driving decisions could possibly have been made accidentally, so I'd really like to know if there's anything I missed or any approaches to playing through the game I hadn't catered for..

Samu-kun wrote: I'm kind of disappointed there wasn't more to the story. ... I was struck by how abruptly the game ended. There wasn't even as much as an ending credit.

I don't know whether you missed it, but I did mention it in the first post - this is act 1 of a much longer story with more significant branching (and notably more plot) later on; I had the choice between a beginning-to-end run in one route or a fully-featured act1 to fit into a month, so I did the latter; this isn't a complete story, there's definitely more to it. Since it's a work-in-progress I haven't bothered doing things like ending credits or styling the load/save screen and so on.
(Actually, it's not even the end of act1, but since the next part of the story wouldn't get resolved before the end of the act1 demo, I left it out.)

Samu-kun wrote: In regard to the game play, man, the machine gun by far the best weapon. The best strategy is to just arm everyone with machine guns, march up to all the enemies and rat-tatatata them to death at close range.

For what it's worth: this works reasonably well in the easy-mode the enemies are set in right now, but when other difficulties are available (I was about half-way through the various AI improvements necessary by the end of March and figured it was better to wait until they were complete) you'll probably find that this kind of strategy results in you being taken apart pretty quickly. ;-)

MGuns are fairly 'safe' weapons in that you're pretty likely to at least score some damage with them, but they're less accurate than all the other direct-fire weapons and don't cause so much damage, so a lot more of their effectiveness is soaked up by armour... meaning you really do have to get right up in short range to use them effectively, meaning you're exposed.

The only lasers in the game so far are lvl 1 lasers, and compared to lvl 1 rifles they're more accurate by far and do more damage. The problem is that there are lvl 2 rifles in the game as well, which do more damage in turn than a lvl 1 laser, so they look worse by comparison. Right now my own view is that the thing lasers need is simply to make them cheaper, but I'm certainly open to any kind of weapon-balancing feedback.

Rockets... well, they need more attention one way or another, certainly. They can't be too accurate, or "sitting behind a rock and using indirect fire all day until the enemy are all dead" would be a degenerate strategy, which would be boring. Lvl1 rockets, like all the other lvl1 weapons, aren't very good; my experience has been that lvl2 rockets are still worth using - they're definitely something to be worried about in the hands of the enemy.

Samu-kun wrote: I could never figure out how the attack of opportunity system worked. Sometimes, I walked right in front of an enemy and they didn't attack. Other times, I wandered near them from afar and I got pounded with bullets.

If you - or the enemy - use the 'Sentry' skill to pick a spot on the ground, then you get a little blue exclamation mark over your unit and you enter sentry mode. In sentry mode, the first enemy unit to move within a few squares (off the top of my head I think it's three) of your sentry point and in line-of-sight gets shot at immediately, and you lose sentry mode (and the exclamation mark) after that shot.

Another update - a couple of fixes and a couple of new features. There's a new popup that appears when you choose a target which tells you the damage of your present weapon and the odds of a hit, and the timing has been adjusted on the shooting animations to make it more clear who's shooting whom.

Updated 20130422 23:13BST - v0.25

Windows Download (35.5MB)

All Platforms Download (47.3MB)

Me again, took me awhile to get around to downloading the latest posted version. I even started from the very beginning to avoid an potential error caused by loading from an old file. Just the same I ended up with the following after firing some rockets at a government unit located at the edge of the map. I had fired some earlier that battle so I'm guessing one of the missed missiles landed off map and caused the error. could be wrong. anyway here's the error message I got:
quick edit: after posting I clicked ignore just to see what would happen, and the game seems to think the battle's over, though the unit status windows are not going away (they're currently behind the text window that popped up in front of them) not sure if that will help any but figured I'd mention it

OneHitPoint wrote:error message

Sorry - I tested the changes I'd made in that release thoroughly; everything was working absolutely fine. I went and looked at the line of code mentioned in that stack trace today, and there's no way it could ever have worked, it had two stupid typos in (that came from my modelling various armour-loss curves in Wolfram Alpha, which understands a more mathematical notation than Python does). Annoyingly, this was a case of Ren'Py's occasional inability to notice that a source file has changed and recompile it. :/

I've uploaded a fixed version which definitely has a working armour resist function!

Updated 20130425 23:17BST - v0.26

Windows Download (35.5MB)

All Platforms Download (47.3MB)

quick edit: after posting I clicked ignore just to see what would happen, and the game seems to think the battle's over, though the unit status windows are not going away (they're currently behind the text window that popped up in front of them) not sure if that will help any but figured I'd mention it

[/quote]

As it goes, this is because the battle all starts and is run from from a single Python call, and if there's an error Ren'Py doesn't know how to resume part-way through that call, so the best it can do is continue on from immediately after that call is made... effectively meaning the rest of the battle is skipped. There's unfortunately no way around this, ignoring errors inside battles (or any other Python function) just isn't going to work properly.

- enjoyed the game, especially the hard sci-fi feel and the thought put into the geopolitics and conflicts of interest. nice to read a story populated with people driven by realistic motivations and ambitions.
- my computer sux, so the battles were a bit slow. i wonder if ship-to-ship space opera battles, rather than mech squads, might fit well with a slower, deliberate pace. but then again, it might be that my computer just sux.
- because of my slow comp, i really wanted to get through the battles quickly to read more of the story to see where it was going.
- didn't encounter any bugs, but i just played 'kill 'em all'. muahahah. damn runners...
- interesting that the demo presented left-wing/right-wing ideologies in a fairly neutral way. usually, most people tend to portray one side as ignorant, misguided, irrational, or really super evil because it's hard to step outside of one's personal political beliefs.
- i dunno military history. QQ what historical scenario is the demo based on?

unknown5 wrote: - enjoyed the game

Glad to hear it!

unknown5 wrote: - interesting that the demo presented left-wing/right-wing ideologies in a fairly neutral way. usually, most people tend to portray one side as ignorant, misguided, irrational, or really super evil because it's hard to step outside of one's personal political beliefs.

Well, maybe I'm not stepping so much outside of my personal political beliefs; I think they're all ignorant, misguided and irrational. ;-)

But yes, the intent is to portray both the upsides and the downsides of each faction's beliefs, since neither capitalism nor socialism are inherently evil. There's a third group in the finished story who (to my mind) are generally 'better' people and also far worse in some other ways...

unknown5 wrote: - i dunno military history. QQ what historical scenario is the demo based on?

Broadly, it's based on the Roman Social Wars, which took place about a generation before the Republic turned into the Empire of Rome. It's not especially clear from just the first act, though, so unless you recognise the characters (several of them are based on busts of prominent Romans) I doubt anyone would particularly work it out! The second and third acts, which move on through the Sullan civil wars, probably make it much clearer - but they're (still!) not finished for various reasons. I still have every intention of working on it more, though.

unknown5 wrote:

- just curious, why did you start the story with a boardroom discussion? it kinda felt like you wanted to show the reader that your intent was to create an intelligent, rational story without the usual cartoon caricatures and grotesques.

unknown5 wrote: - can you do cutaway scenes during a battle? that way you have the overhead positioning/tactical map from the battle engine, then when you attack, it cuts to animation of explosions, weapons firing, maybe first person PoV, or something to break up the battle here and there perhaps. then again, it might be a dumb idea, and just disruptive/annoying. dunno.

It's certainly possible from a technical point of view. I've been trying various things with the battles, but anything which comes up all the time is generally just distracting and tedious after the first few times. You could have the most awesome Production IG animation of a mecha dynamically firing a machine-gun, the bullets streaking across the Martian desert and impacting viscerally with the target... but the sixth or seventh time you see it, it's just "yeah, yeah, machine-gun attack, get on with it, I have other guys to shoot at"!

I've made some improvements to the timings and camera-work around attacks, which help a bit with overall feel, and I'm playing around with the idea of having cut-in graphics for critical hits and so on... but it still kind of annoys me some of the time, and also adds dramatically to the art resource needed, between the different terrain, units, and weapons involved!

unknown5 wrote:

- hmm, space debris trapping earthlings? stirs up a lot of interesting ideas. do they break out?

unknown5 wrote: - amazing that you did this in just one month. never tried a nanoreno, so don't know much about it.

Well, to be fair, I'd coded the battle engine part prior to the start of NaNo, so the only parts I had to do inside the month of March were the cutscene code, the graphics and animations specific to this game (my partner did all the character illustrations while I was working on other stuff) and writing all the scenes and scripting the battles. And I didn't finish - the release in this thread is the first act of three, probably about one quarter of the length of a single playthrough of the whole game and maybe a tenth of the actual content! It's coming, just slowly.

If you're interested in making games, I would thoroughly recommend taking part in NaNoRenO, though - or some other similar challenge. Take a really simple project for your first go, though - because they main thing it's useful for is getting you used to the idea that making a whole game is actually a lot more work than you expect! ;-)