I just got hit with that disappearing inventory bug. I play in an IPad 5 on 13.6.1 and an iPhone 11 on 14 beta. I’ve been swapping back and forth between both devices the whole time the game has been out, and today was the first time it’s happened. It’s totally possible it has something to do with the 14 beta, but I figured I’d bring it up.
Can you remember the sequence of events that led to it happening? It definitely sounds like an iCloud sync implementation issue, just not sure what causes it.
I played it last night and died on a survive run on my phone. I played on my iPad this morning and all I had was the starter inventory (basically I lost everything, not just my loadout.) I checked on my phone and it was the starter inventory as well. The only other game I’m playing between both devices that uses cloud saves is Shieldwall Chronicles (totally off subject, but it’s an awesome game), and I haven’t had any problems with it before or after switching to the beta.
yeah no it's definitely the way I'm implementing icloud that's borking it, not icloud itself. I think it might be a timeout issue, i.e. if the device doesn't get a response in a certain amount of time it should use the last known saved config.. maybe something is going wrong there? Frustrating because no matter what I try it doesn't fall over on my side.
If it makes you feel better, I give zero shits about losing the stuff because the game is still really fun with the starting gear... and I die so much I often end up back at ground 0 eventually anyway.
Glad it doesn't affect you too much, but yeah it's something that really needs to be sorted before I work on the tvOS / macOS ports. (work on == finish)
I know nothing about game development or programming... but it seems like iCloud saves are often the bane of many indie developers. I was in a discord chat with a pretty popular indie developer for iOS and and someone asked him why his games don’t use iCloud, and his response was a very detailed account of the months of time it set him back which ended up with him saying “TLDR: Not f’ing worth it.”
There's a couple hoops to jump when integrating it with Unity, even more with Unreal. I tend to think the end result is very worth the time spent on it though as the player should never have to worry about logging into any accounts or anything, the saves are just there. Unless you're playing Interloper when sometimes... they're not.
Tried out the new patch: I’m not getting the low health sound, either I’m dying too fast, but I have died and I haven’t heard anything. Also, I feel like evading/dodging should decrease the speed of your ship, not increase The new border skirmish run seems pretty hard honestly. I keep dying because an onslaught of ships come in and a volley of bullets i can’t really dodge them. Also the descriptions of the runs is confusing, there are years, but sometimes each run has a different year, so your time traveling? I really like the nemesis fighter, nothing wrong with that During play, might just be because of beta, but there’s always this weird low scratchy sound. I don’t know if it’s the ship, or on purpose, but it kind of takes away from the game. Also when I’m fighting, pause the game, turn up all the music and game volume, then resume, then pause again and check the audio, the game and music audio are reset to zero, or all the way left. But if I leave and go to menu, it’s fixed again to the setting I originally put. Kind of confused about how shields work. How much time do they take to recharge? And the difference of higher level shields, what does that mean? It refills more of the shield bar? Cause even the low levels fill up the same as the high levels. Maybe more confirmation on that. When fighting, I really like how you are able to see the rarity of the loot that you’ve collected each wave, but I feel like if you added more detail, maybe “loot rarity”, it could make it less confusing. One very extravagant game idea: Credits/coins. Collect em every round, maybe depending on how many ships you kill, then a randomized run you would do would have a Trading ship where you could buy items. Doesn’t have to be in game, maybe a trading thing in the menu, but I don’t know. For nemesis strike, for some reason only that level i was experiencing lots of lag. I don’t know why. For this level i was fully kidded out with legendary(orange?) items, like repair and shields, gunship force, and other guns, yet i died. Maybe it’s cause I’m bad, but I don’t know. sorry this is so long, and no offense if I offend you
Please don’t feel sorry for providing feedback, and thanks so much for all the detail. I’ll try to answer as much as I can! The low health immersive sound effect is the one that mutes most of the gameplay when your health is low. @Jstorm asked for a toggle for it a while back, so I added it. It’s not something that should be suuper noticeable, more just an immersive feedback mechanism. IF the toggle is on and the game still sounds the same when you’re below 50% health, then there’s a bug. I tend to agree, but I’m also reticent to let *anything* outside of rotational drag slow the player down (the rotational drag bit is to make it feel more like a “fighter sim” and less of a “space sim” if that makes sense? I don’t really want the player to have to deal with newtonian physics haha) The new highlighted runs are meant to be a challenge. That said if you feel like it’s too hard for the difficulty of the run, then I can dial it back a bit. Not quite, the tense I’ve been trying to use is past tense, making these runs more “historical recaps” and less “current events”. It’s meant to be subtle... but if it’s confusing I can think of ways to improve that. it’s the star of this patch! Definitely a response to the early criticisms of the game not feeling like it has enough dogfighting. Hopefully it fulfils that.. even a little bit. Definitely shouldn’t be a constant low scratchy sound... It might be part of the reorg of sound effects that I did to fix some sound performance issues.. If you could DM me a gameplay video demonstrating that, that’d help a lot! without utilities your shields regenerate quite quickly on their own. If they go down they’ll take a second or two longer to regen back up. Shield boosts all *immediately* fill all your shields, but have shorter cooldowns with rarer boosts. Capacitors increase your maximum shield amount and regeneration speed. Ahh yeah, that could totally use a heading. Hmm I’ll look into this. Thanks again for the detailed feedback!!
Oh sorry, forgot one. This is a fun one. So Interloper is very much a “mobile” game, most of the design choices cater for that, but at every point of development I wanted to make it feel like a premium “desktop” or “console” game. One of my earliest decisions when it came to player progression was to not include any kind of currency in the game as its kinda the first bit of criticism you see of most f2p mobile games. That said, yeah there’s definitely a hole where player progression should be in the game, and my plan is to sort that with “Pilot” systems in a future release. Not gonna go into toooooo much detail now, but I think it’ll achieve the same kind of feeling of progression that a currency system might give.
On that point. Who would like to hear a more detailed version of my plans for the game vs keeping new systems a bit of a surprise?
Games can have an in game currency, it’s when you ask me for real money for said currency it becomes free to play, pay to win bullshit. I think your overthinking this point.
Quite possibly, either way I still feel like currecny-as-a-feature is at saturation point in games, and won't be adding it to Interloper.
Did you make the medium level difficulty easier or an I actually getting better... I just completed my first run on medium! Another adjustment I think you can make is dropping less loot at the end of a run. It felt like it took no time at all to fill up all 60 slots. Regarding your question, I like to know about the small changes and fixes you have in the works. I prefer the big news to be a secret.
Haven't changed the difficulty, though the missions do cycle, so some "medium" missions are harder than others? As for loot, I've had some feedback saying there's not enough... but yeah also that the inventory size was too small. Hrm.
