Universal Interloper (by Anchorite)

Very cool hearing about the next update. Excited to try it out. I applaud your diligence and dedication to this awesome project.

The game functions beautifully the way you’ve intentioned. Despite having completed everything, I find myself delving back in to repeat the hardest levels multiple times a day. It’s already a perfect pick up and go game.

Invasion of Rayleigh, which I use to vehemently curse, I can almost always complete now, even though I still don’t know what’s going on with those infuriating black hole explosions. Who’s even shooting them at me? I’ve never had enough time to figure that out, gotta keep moving. It’s definitely chaotic, and fun, but I’d also love to see missions with less enemies that are more strategic and difficult to take down. In those particular transport missions, the pacing is a bit off as I’ll often clear out all the enemies, wait almost ten seconds, flying around doing nothing, until the transport shows up to one shot it anticlimactically.

The biggest ship is a fun battle, but it starts glitching around with sporadic movements while taking damage, and ruins the immersion of it being a huge ship.

Fighting right next to large enemies can be frustrating. It feels like having blinders on trying to get enemies who are close to you into your line of sight (maybe having a built in basic ability to boost to quickly get some distance despite your ship’s load out?)

The ability to cancel a boost at any given time would be helpful to improve strategic options as well.

I also had an idea of having your turning speed increase the slower you are. The fastest turning speed at full stop, to make close combat less frustrating, and dog fighting more engaging, to be able to slow down and turn on a dime and then boost again (maybe in future updates, with different ship types that potentially perform differently; more agile ship variants could utilize this function).

A more powerful, less agile gunship could be fun too.

This was said already but being able to see what those smaller fighters look like, perhaps by enhancing dog fighting would be cool.

I like the muffled sound effect when the hull is low. Can we get a sound option for it to always be like that? Jk kinda, not really, low key seriously. It’s quite immersive. Space ASMR.

I hear you about it’s just a mobile game, but I feel the looting aspect of it is still disconnected. During gameplay I don’t even recognize I’m picking up loot besides the little color indicators in the UI. For example: Sonic the Hedgehog has the iconic rings and sound fx. In this game, having some satisfying visual/audio feedback of collecting loot in game (you already have simple icons to differentiate the various items, so we could potentially see what we’re picking up during battle), might help connect the player to what we’ve collected when going through the load out after a battle. You mentioned that the load out menu will get revamped which is great. Atm it feels like a lot of extra managing for stuff I really can’t tell the difference between and didn’t know I collected. Like insurgent force vs strike force. I don’t really know the difference by the description. Even trying them out don’t really feel the difference. Obviously a lot of items feel very different and great to use, but in the details, some feel indistinguishable.

I guess I’m talking about the simple narrative of “oh wow! I took down this specific big powerful ship and got this specific amazing item, that now I definitely wanna take the time in this beautifully optimized menu to save and try it out. Nothing super complex in terms of adding to the game (says me who has never developed a game.) I refer again to EFT were that narrative helps in part to drive the gameplay. Maybe there’s a way to enhance that aspect with Interloper without complicating things too much?

At this point for me saving or deleting after battle is a bit of a burden, and hampers multiple runs, when I don’t wanna be bothered with organizing my load out. Maybe a discard all could be helpful to make the process a little smoother?

But also more incentive to try other combinations of equipment. At this point I go full shield boost (very op atm, it’s like having control of your own morphine drip), Belt feed reload mech (that increases rate of fire for some reason) to compliment that automatic railgun (which I have yet to be able to differentiate between the regular railgun because I can’t be bothered to navigate the different stats), heavy missile launcher, yes please! And Insurgent force, cuz the more allies the better. Very effective, and I have no real desire to change it up (besides the glorious nuke every now and again.) The gameplay doesn’t really encourage me to branch out, especially given my perspective of not really enjoying close combat, so experimenting with shorter ranged weapons doesn’t sound particularly fun atm.

Daily challenges, having to use specific items to take down specific enemies, to complete a check list of challenges could be dope.

Lastly, there’s a small bug when pressing on the roadmap button and switching over to a browser, upon switching back to the game it automatically pushes you back to the browser. You have to restart the game to get out of the loop. Happened once, haven’t yet tried to replicate it. Not a big deal.

Sorry for the rant. Love the game a lot.

 

BTW, for you folks too young to remember it, I believe the term for those “green wire” graphics is vector.

 

TIL.

Damn, I’ve been calling it the wrong thing all this time. And am I old enough to know better. I used to play the old Star Wars game as a kid that was in a bar my dad worked at while I waited for him to get off work, and the game was located directly next to a shuffleboard table and a cigarette vending machine.

There was also a pinball machine based on Jaws (if my memory is correct).

The customers would send me to fetch cigs for them, and let me keep the change to play games.

And totally off topic, Charles Barkley was a regular and taught me how to play shuffleboard.



Those were the days.

 

I grew up playing Spectre on my mom’s Macintosh LCII. Guess it was technically next gen vector.

 

Glad to report that in the latest beta, as mentioned above, the enemy fighters are no longer sitting ducks and are giving you a real hard time, which means greater fun and more engaging dogfights!

 

Hey man, thanks. This is part of the responsibility of a beta tester. I may be late to the party but playing this using a controller is a blast. With all the button hints on screen is a big bonus, which is customised with controller used (I am using PS4 Dual Shock II), showing how thoughtful the developer is.

 

I’m still really enjoying Interloper! On my iPad Pro 11” and iPhone 11 Pro Max (both on latest iOS 13 release) I’m also happy to report I haven’t had any performance issues nor bugs.

The variety of ships on the enemy team is fascinating to me. They feel fresh even after many repeat runs as each ship fills a specific role in the Commonwealth fleet. I always try to get close enough for a good view.

I think it’d be really cool to have an almanac of sorts. Kind of like the one found in the original Plants vs. Zombies and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II. It may allow players to view each ships’ model and get a bit of lore backstory for each ship plus some general tips for engagement.

The Commonwealth faction is most important but I’d also love to learn more about the various allied frigate and fighter types that you can call in for support.

As a tangent the varying allied-ship models may serve as inspiration, or straight-copy/paste, for models of potential new playable ship types. I imagine balancing would still be tricky there through.

No idea how feasible any of this—just something I thought would be neat.

Thanks for putting Interloper out there! It feels much less like a “games-as-a-service-obligatory-product,” and much more like a carefully crafted, and thoroughly engaging experience with clear care shown all around more than near any other mobile game. Cheers!

 

Wow nice!

 

Yaaasss! Updating now.

 

I noticed the wingman name and the engage warp texts overlapping after the update.

And yes the game is quite shiny now.

 

So I bit the bullet and bought this....and I do not regret it. Holy shit. This is awesome. Like, a run based, loot based, space rogue lite, with some seriously bad ass graphics. I absolutely LOVE the layout of the cockpit and the way weapons look when fired. The whole game is just oozing with style. Im really looking forward to some of the road mapped features (more ship selection/customization, pilot progression, deeper map based campaign). I expect this will be a much more fleshed out title when all is said and done, but what is here, is incredibly solid. And fun. Did I mention fun? brb, gotta barrel roll my way through an asteroid field and blow up some more commonwealth scum.

 

ya man I think it needs more fun.....

I took this break from having fun with interloper which is fun so I could come here and tell you this fun game needs more fun because it’s fun but you can always have more fun with stuff that’s already fun cuz when it’s fun it could be real fun which is better than regular fun....

 

couple of things, I feel like the tutorial and the easy practice levels are pretty hard. Or maybe i'm just bad

game mechanic: I noticed that resource bunkers have three lines by their name, some Commonwealth ships has a vertical triangle, and lightships have two swords clashing. I like that and I would like to deepen that. drawing off of Star Wars kind of, I feel like their are bomber ships that do more damage(and in interloper), and maybe you could tell what they are by a small icon by their name and you could know how to defeat them, something like that