Thanks for the feedback. I received some seeds, so I thought I was receiving them from killing the aliens. I started a new game and its going smoother now that I know what I'm doing. I love games like this so I'm sticking to it (and supporting it). I do QA for a living, so I'm always overly critical about the user experience. I look forward to seeing what you have in the update. In the meantime, I'll come back and post more positive/negative experiences as I progress further in the game. Kudos for participating in feedback from users. It gets noticed.
Really getting into using the crafting mechanism. My *** sniper is a beast. Only gripe after this weekend: the three non combat standard officers get clobbered in melee situations. Sure I have them buffed to the hilt but will someone tell the doctor to just pick up a rock and start swinging?
I like the new balance changes. Officer speed is much better now, they're fast but still vulnerable. Item drop rate is still high imo, but I bought the coin doubler and the credits aren't flowing as freely anymore, that's awesome. Question suggestions and musings about future content: 1. Fog of war on planets? I dig the randomization, but the exploration element really doesn't come through at all because the map is already visible. I realize that in the far reaches of the future, orbital sensors have eliminated the problem of cartography, but at this point it's a dash to the objectives. 2. Failing a mission seems kinda inconsequential. Not that it hasn't happened, but there's almost no penatly for it. If y'all are going for a more casual audience, this is probably a good thing. 3. I don't see the point to ever having more than 5 officers aside from not waiting for the morale to recharge. Y'all thought of adding traits, like "lazy" (slower build rate), "gifted" (active skills cost less energy), etc? The officers feel interchangeable, and don't really have individuality aside from being visually different. I totally get that this isn't mass effect here lol, but they're all just diff color sprites, wouldn't care if my game got erased cause I'm not really attached to any of them. 4. The game is overall easy, and I'm not sure if it's meant to appeal to a more casual audience, or not,mor somewhere in between. More severe mission loss penalties, maybe a permadeath mode (might not fit the overall mechanics though), attacks on your base. It's not an issue of numbers, the enemies take a few good hits to knock over, but right now, it' sues all offensive skills, heal, recharge, and by the time that's done, everyone's back to 100% everything. This one's more of an observation/criticism, which may or may not apply to your intended audience. Game's fun, don't get me wrong, just easy lol. A good one for shutting down the brain and watching stuff blow up. Keep up the good work y'all, it's really neat that this game came out of only two people.
Hi all! First of all, cudos to the developers for making such a wonderful game! I am putting way too much time into this tiny gem! Bought the coin doubler as support although I am not exactly in need of cash... I really like the different races in this game and how the game becomes really challenging from level 20 onwards... That said though, I wish more people could get into this game, right now I think the starting wall of text as tutorial is putting many off. Secondly, right at the beginning, me and another friend I observed while playing placed corridors 1 tile away from the center room and were wondering why the crew didn't build them. It was only through trial amd error that I found out the corridors were elevated and we need to build it 1 tile closer. Maybe a handheld tutorial can smoothen the learning curve and better the initial experience? I am currently stuck at the level 22 campaign mission. Everytime I start the campaign, my crew is stranded on a small island with no way to get to the main portion of the map. Not sure if this is intended (because I read on this thread there is going to be a teleport skill) or is it a bug, even restarting the campaign does not reset the map this time round. EDIT: Right after I posted this, I found the solution to the campaign mission! Should have always checked the side panel!
I have this engineer, got himself ganked by some pirates. No prob. My doc revived him. Now it seems he has a death wish. Wanders way far away from the away team daring mobs to walk toward his flamethrower. What's up with that? Anyway, I like the officer movement speed improvement. Laid waste to an old lower level planet to try things out. Drops didn't seem all that much reduced. The movement boost makes tactical fights much more dynamic. What is the point of trees? I plant them, they flower, and die. I'm supposed to collect bulbs from where? I guess my Specialist has a Specialist girl friend now since I thought I might be able to run two specialists on a mission. Silly me. (I'm sorry but the Scientist is a boat anchor.) So now my main Specialist has a Crustatian girlfriend. Getting all Mass Effect on that base. Good update.
We started a blog in our site! We are getting ready for the PC port and the 2.0 content/mechanics changes, and thinking about doing an Early Access system to get more eyeballs on our work in progress and our development funded at the same time. I've also put some info on 1.0.2 which I will send to iTunes in a few days, if nothing major surfaces. http://thespatials.com/new-versions-early-access.html Yeah some classes are more useful/used than others, for now we are OK with this. Tho the Diplomat debuffs are quite a life saver if you decide to go full on a group of enemies. I love Sedition. And the Scientist will suddenly become very useful in 1.0.2. You can even completely change his role by equipping him with dual Teleporters. You give up active energy regen in exchange for jumping in and out of groups of mobs every 20s if you time it well. We are thinking about it, and/or a fixed camera. The imminent PC port will give us more data on how this feels. Yeah we agree. 2.0 will remove the all-or-nothing nature of morale and their replacements will be affected by going into stasis too much, not being healed enough, etc. Avatar personalities is a very obvious thing and almost canon in sim games nowadays, but for 1.0 we wanted to avoid it. It's complicated to develop and balance properly. We are considering it for 2.0 for sure. I mean, it's called "The Spatials", it better generate some empathy towards your crew! We wanted to make 1.0.0 combat very approachable and, well, it was TOO approachable The next two versions are already tuning it in some areas, specially in the economy part (we want see how much we can fix the current IAP system before we do something else). What's missing is a much more involved station segment, which right now is not here, to make the short/easy missions feel better in the context of the entire game. "shutting down the brain and watching stuff blow up" is basically what we were aiming for in the combat segment, specially for side content (which doesn't really exists). Not shutting it down too much, but yeah. We think it's awesome how you progress from your puny pistol to making everything explode around you. That being said it's tuned too easy now, in part because it's too easy to come across really good items that make your dudes some kind of roaming robot exterminator team from hell with just the drops from a single mission. I hope the new drop rate of items in 1.0.2 will balance this a bit. We had an instrumented tutorial but we scrapped it for release. It's *really* hard to do a step-by-step, touch-exactly-like-this tutorial that doesn't break, unless you do some kind of super abstract, fully scriptable UI code (not the case...). We are thinking about more animations, like we did for the target system in the exploration help section. But yes. first player experience is not very good and we know we have lost players because of this. 1.0.2 has draw guides for the build mode. They will indicate where the limits of your draw rectangle extend to, so you can see if you are missing by one tile or not. It will also disable the wall layer while you are dragging your finger to make it even more clear. That Recall skill might be Lemurian tech... Being recalled out of stasis like that has to be hard on the dude, doesn't surprise me he got kinda disoriented. Spoiler (Bug fixed in 1.0.2 ) Starting from 1.0.1 fruit and bugs have become a product of your station. You now collect bulbs or eggs in the planets, and then build a tree or a terrarium to grow fruits or bugs. Thanks for the feedback!
One little visual bug I've noticed (which survived the 1.0.1 bug purge): patrolling enemies on bikes, when killed, leave invisible loot. Also just noticed it with flying robots on P20.
Nice game. Big surprise! Worth spreading the word! Fog of War on (some) maps would be awesome in order to have a much more thrilling exploration feel. Also its then fun, to go into every corner of a planet, opening the entire map, look for hidden items, whatever... New ad banner I generally understand, but find particularly annoying. It rotates extremely fast and I get to read about "gay journalists" all the time. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing at all against gays (more against journalists to be honest... LOL), but it is just awfully distracting to read this stuff, when playing a game like this... Anyway, so, if I want to go for (higher) amounts of premium cash, will it be removed?? Or only with the doubler?? That I would find bad, as I - believe it or not - tend to stretch a good game experience, not fasten it. Then again I am almost 40 and very oldschool... Seriously, can I skip the doubler and buy cash instead?? Thanks, all the best
Yep, that's fixed in 1.0.2. 1.0.1 was a released early in order to fix a progression blocker, and it missed a lot of small touches like this one. Yeah the sense of exploration is very diluted when you can see every tile of the map from the start. We are thinking of different systems to fix this, fog of war is one, the other is a fixed camera centered on your crew. We will see... Today I reduced the rotation to the minimum possible (2 minutes). That being said, the banner is here more to nudge/remind people into supporting us with IAP than to make money (and the credit doubler removes the ad too! Everybody wins.) We don't have much editorial control over the content of the ads, I can only enable/disable broad categories, or block specific advertisers URLs if I am provided with them. I am adjusting the categories today, that's not the first ad I see that I find weird. We will try making the next major version of the game ad-free, we don't like having the banner. The advantages of the doubler are that it is valid for all your new games, not just the current one. And that it will remove your ads forever. The cash packs only add to the current game credit counter. If you are worried about losing your game just manually save more often (1.0.2 will have a much more aggressive autosave). That being said having a nice bank account will be more important in 1.0.2, we rebalanced cash drops and prices so exploration it's not the infinite loot/cash piñata it was in 1.0.0 (less so in 1.0.1, but still). Soooo buy both! Hahahaha! Thanks everybody!
Thank YOU Carlos. It is really amazing how much time you take to answer questions etc. Really nice. Best of luck! I will definitely support this game and your team. Cheers!! P.S. ...and yes, I will buy BOTH, be sure of that!
I just bought the coin doubler, and since I hadn't advanced too much, I'll begin a new game to make 100% use of it, and to replay tutorials to understand better what I'm supposed to do. Game looks gorgeous, at least what I've seen so far
Bought the coin doubler as well. Took a little figuring on what to do but sounds like you are on the right track!
This game is so much fun. Bought the coin doubler too. My small group is so strong now... Got a sniper rifle and took out a whole bandit camp. It's like Mass Effect but easier to play in short bits.
How did I miss this? Wow, I gotta pay more attention. This looks awesome and I read the developer's description of IAP and to me, it's IAP done right, which I am more than happy to support if I like the game. Two quick questions: 1 - I use an ipad mini, the video I saw looks like the UI might be a bit cramped on it - anyone here playing this on a mini that can comment? I'm at work now so I can't try it myself. 2 - Can I play it offline? I'm often in areas where I have no internet and this is always a must for me Otherwise this looks amazing, can't wait to try it out.
We test every build with a 3rd gen iPad and a 1st gen iPad mini, and make sure it's fully playable on both. But I may be biased
Yeah I played it for an hour last night and it's fine. Some windows are difficult to close but that's not a big deal. Nice game, very impressive UI and the whole experience feels very fluid and polished.
Game Impressions Wanted to post some extended impressions now that I've had a chance to play more: I really like the whole UI feel and look. It seems very polished and everything works as I think it should. Building the base is fun, there's a lot of different structures that do different things. Happy to know that this will get expanded in a future patch. Overall, so far, keeping my staff happy is pretty easy to do. When I run out of money, I go exploring on planets. Planet exploration involves surface maps with different objectives. Most of them are "go here, get this" but the last map was fairly challenging. There was an enemy base I had to check out, but it was surrounded with enemies and turrets, so I had to slowly go about it. I pulled most of the enemies out by using the snipe skill I had previously found (long range attack) and then cleaned them up that way. I lost a crew member the first time and had to come back, so it wasn't super easy. Loot is interesting as well. I'm constantly hunting for better random effects on my passives and actives. Each of these can have up to 3 (or more?) random special effects added on to the base effect. Just a tip: Build a lot of the storage containers for extra inventory slots, and remember, you can use your recycler even when you're on the planet (without having to come back) to turn inventory items into credits if you're full. I figured this out a little too late but it's quite handy. If you enjoy base-building and planet exploring missions, , there seems to be a lot of content here, most notably on the planet exploration and combat. I've now spent over 5 hours playing the game, so I have a full crew and their gear is all tweaked. The planet missions keep getting more challenging which keeps things tense. I'm quite addicted, having to charge my tablet in the middle of the day due to extended playtime, which is something I never do for any other game. (note, it may be hard on the battery for some reason, dev might want to investigate this). Crew members have classes too, from your typical infantry style guy to medics, engineers, AOE specialists, slowers and so forth. I'm pretty sure you can also hire crews if you want more than one type, so you can mix and match as you see fit. It didn't take long for me to get the currency doubler to both support the devs and remove the ads. Since the game is free, I highly recommend trying it out, but keep in mind the game starts off a bit slow, so remember things will get way more interesting as you progress and build your crew up and skill them up. One suggestion: When putting down floors or structures, it would be nice if when you tap the block again (or tap and hold for a sec), it would remove it, instead of having to stop, switch to the remove tool and then tap it. It's easy to put down stuff by accident in areas you don't want, even with wall toggle button switched off.
1.0.2 switches the walls off while you draw the floors and adds drawing guides, this should help! For the next major version I am redoing the station menu. We want to put more content for building and it won't fit in the current design. I know the eraser tool has to be more accesible while laying out blueprints and will try to make a design that makes it fast to switch between the build/erase modes.
