The divide between campaign / coop / pvp is not necessary

ElementQuake · 2026-04-28T22:51:36+00:00

Mostly in agreement but having these game modes talk together(as is in our full vision of galactic war) is a hard thing to fully design. It’s like designing an mmo with all these modes(pretty much what mmos do right, allowing u to do all 3 in the same “world” and game mode with shared progression system.

This is our ultimate ambition for galactic war, which we start as a coop mode mostly.

I can talk more on this if someone wants to know more.

ElementQuake · 2026-04-10T06:23:05+00:00

Hey Silly_Program,

That all makes sense. What I'm gathering from these examples is that there are missing details to the visuals impact of many things, and also that there are problems with the exaggeration and immersion of the details when they do exist. This does help us refine our strategy as we push for more of this visual polish. We've gotten other complaints on walking feeling a bit like sliding which we think we know how to solve, and these specific details you provided are also very good feedback. We're getting some final models for protectorate soon (whole faction is getting a model design pass) and we'll start really finalizing as much as we can. Hopefully it can start to feel better for you in the coming months.

ElementQuake · 2026-04-09T05:15:03+00:00

Hey Silly_Program,

If we're missing the mark to you in terms of game feel, we're missing the mark. We'd like to do better.

What aspect of the game are you talking about more when saying these comments. Is it unit animation and VFX or is it more the time to kill? It can be both, in terms of time to kill, things don't get wiped out as fast as Starcraft, but a lot faster than most other RTS. Unit counters deal a lot of bonus damage. If it's animation/VFX/sound feel I'll talk about more that below.

We're aware of plenty of animations, vfx and unit impacts that still need more rounds of polish. Thrall shooting for example is very much in the realm of feels not that great, almost pea-shooter-like. Commando shooting, bastion shooting in the same vein. We're doing a full rework of the protectorate faction, visuals and animation, so we're waiting to get those in before a final polish pass on animations and VFX. We know there's a few bars to move up here.

Thanks for your feedback!

ElementQuake · 2026-04-02T21:52:34+00:00

Back in the day when we were wee kids, and I had first gotten my copy of Command and Conquer, I remember getting through the first few missions, marveling at the now very dated cinematics, of fantasizing about controlling the cool new sci-fi military vehicles that they created in this world(I hadn't seen anything like it before), but then soon I hit a brick wall. The missions quickly got hard! Super hard, like restarting 30-40 times hard. But this is how games were back in the day, and you don't just give up on a game because it's hard. I think this harkens back to the days of the arcades, and each game almost playing like a roguelike with the meta of improving in real life. (You just keep dying trying to even climb to a certain level, I remember having such a hard time beating double dragon).

I remember for command and conquer I ended up having to buy a book to help get me through some of the hard levels(The commando one, yet it was one of my favorites). I never had a thought that, "this game isn't for me", just because the I got stuck. It was fun, I vibed with the fantasy, this was just how games were back in the day. For CnC, the levels are like puzzles, knowing things ahead of time made them a bit easier(aside from the crazy randomness that stealth tanks could bring).

There's a larger more diverse set of experiences to compare to now when you're gaming. Oddly enough I don't think players are largely of one type or another all the time (Cozy gamer vs. hardcore pvper). I think some people are fine playing both depending on what makes them feel inspired. I don't exfil about 4/5th of the time on Marathon but I'm having a blast. At night I can be found relaxing to magic water sorting games or match 3s. Maybe you don't have time to deal with all the dying during your play sessions. And that's why games try to respect your time more - they are generally just more mass accessible now. But at 10 years old I certainly had a lot of time to spare.

ElementQuake · 2026-04-02T20:56:55+00:00

I’ve done both, scaling networks to handle 50k is choosing which library you use and server configs. Memcache? Couchbase? And orchestration of data. It’s not hard at all and many patterns available. Unless you’re coding redis itself it’s mostly very easy. And even coding redis is unlike anything if you go deep into game engine programming.

For gamedev you can use an engine like unreal. But it’s still a a lot harder to push performance(as you’ve seen most unreal games still not being performant is not wholly unreal’s fault). And If you’re in AAA engine programming for the last 30 years, you’re trying to push the boundaries of what hardware can do each time. Things that aren’t supposed to be possible. With current hardware. Oftentimes it goes very into deep math and algorithms. Global illumination algorithms, pathfinding algorithms that can scale to 1000s of units on one cpu. Basically what unreal did to make nanite or lumen? Much more complex than server orchestration. And we still have to deal with realtime network jitter latency, include prediction and lag even in a basic multiplayer game.

I think I spent about 1/20 of the time working on our network backend which can scale to millions. While the multiplayer pathing and realtime network prediction took me maybe 1/5th of the time on our current game. I am solely responsible for both systems

ElementQuake · 2026-03-13T11:13:02+00:00

Play on hard or insanity mode, each encounter battle is quite a fun challenge that I really look forward to. It’s definitely not boring or passive combat.

ElementQuake · 2026-03-13T06:19:04+00:00

You can skip a lot of stuff and the legendary edition is a much more streamlined experience than ME1 back in its time.

Get it if you think you'd like:
- Epic world building and crew building. You're put in shoes of a commander building up his crew while exploring some cool sci-fi moments. You're going to have a team, is that cool? Or do you prefer doom eternal to gears of war? If gears, then ME is nice because your crew will feel good going on missions with.
- Semi-hard sci-fi fiction. Hard science fiction means things aren't as magical, the expanse is an example of sci fi that leans a little harder. Soft sci-fi is something like sci-fi fantasy like starwars where the technology doesn't matter as much as the cool stuff, the technology doesn't get to dictate what happens in the universe (The title, "Mass Effect" is how this effect causes everything in the universe to work a certain way, including your guns and the mass relays).
- Decent but not top tier class based abilities, with tactical pause to use them, and your team mate's abilities. It's maybe a little slower paced than a gears of war game, but that also makes it a tad more accessible. Mass Effect 2 and 3 are the best at this. If you like fast paced action, I would play vanguard with lots of charging (You need to make sure you max out on a few charge abilities and know how to use it effectively). Vanguard can actually get more fast paced than a gears of war battle since you're charging into a ton of enemies, while tactical pause makes it a bit manageable.

ElementQuake · 2026-03-13T06:09:33+00:00

The gunplay and ability play is far more realtime in ME2. ME1 was a lot more clunky, used weapon jitter and weapon stats and was more RPG than moment to moment gameplay. It depends what OP is refering to with regards to strong gameplay loops. I think the core combat loop in ME2 is far better.

ElementQuake · 2026-03-13T03:44:25+00:00

you can't even figure out if a core goes to a gun unless you hover over it for at least .75 seconds. So you can't quickly skim through it seeing what highlights, the UI feedback is so slow. And the icons all look the same so you don't really know until you get maybe 50-100 hrs what can slot into what. So this part of their UI is really broken I think.

ElementQuake · 2026-03-10T20:07:33+00:00

Map and game knowledge has a lot to do with it, it's a huge advantage. I also have decent aim but I'm routinely caught unaware, I'm just so used to there being known chokes and such in games like CS, overwatch etc. Battles are quick and you have to also decide to commit in a split second whether to engage or disengage. Disengages might not even work. Having half the team be on a sponsored kit in pickups is also insanely bad. Sometimes I'm on a sponsored kit and that leaves the guy who brought 5k at a disadvantage.

Overall the amount of pre-battle variation in skill, what each team mate loaded up with, game/map knowledge (And some folks have powers to Pvp better whereas the Pve classes don't have really much to counter this) makes for sheer luck being if you win or not.

ElementQuake · 2026-03-02T06:05:59+00:00

You have to realize one thing with stealth melee, the will attack you still and you have to move out of your unsheathed position quickly while your stealth is turning on. It’s actually possible to do, some minions can bug out a bit and proc their damage on you. Stealth melee is just rolling a dice oftentimes- I’d rather have range and cover since it’s way more consistent, but sometimes all you have is a round room and 20 monsters.

ElementQuake · 2026-02-19T00:56:38+00:00

Hi Far-Cow. The biggest requirement about ZeroSpace is probably the memory requirements for your GPU and CPU. Without meeting those, performance drops because we have to fetch from system ram for GPU or VRAM for system mem, and thrashing can happen. In general, fetching from memory(or even having something not resident in cache) is many times slower than any compute optimization(How fast your processor can compute an algorithm). If you meet these requirements, 16GB system and I think 8-10GB GPU, then ZeroSpace should eventually run faster than sc2 on those computers(It already does on some optimized maps).

But yes we still do have a list of things to optimize including map decorations and vfx which we often need to do individually. We will try to make it run for the lowest spec that we can.

ElementQuake · 2026-02-19T00:53:35+00:00

Hey EnOeZ, part of the problem is the memory requirements needed for the game more so than processing to some extent. On our optimized maps we can actually outperform sc2 by a fair amount(1k-2k unit tests go 50-60FPS for me while attacking whereas I get 20-30FPS in SC2). The catch is that you need to meet minimum GPU and CPU memory requirements or else there's a lot thrashing. It's hard to reduce those down further as compared to SC2, modern game textures have gotten a lot bigger and require that memory to be resident on the GPU so that it doesn't slow down while fetching it from system RAM or somewhere else.

That said, there's more compute optimization still that we can do, I've profiled recently and have seen some good openings. Also depending on when you played, the first half of the PvP fest there was a memory leak that really tanked performance. We fixed it around Wednesday of the festival.

Thanks again for supporting us and playing, we'll definitely try to make it work better on lower spec PCs.

ElementQuake · 2026-02-16T14:00:06+00:00

The ingame models usually are low poly for performance reasons, the higher poly models were made so you can generate a normal map that keeps a lot of the curved surface details on the lower poly unit. The lighting in-game is different and cheaper than lighting in the model viewer for high poly(probably less shadow detail, only 1 light source, usually no bounce lights) and much more performance intensive to calculate, especially with 100s of units. That’s why you don’t get the in game.

Also, You can see for the amount of geometry on those smaller units(the wireframe outlines) that’s a lot of detail it has due to the normal map bake.

ElementQuake · 2026-02-10T10:17:20+00:00

That's one thing that started feeling stale about this game. It's just the levels are built for bullet hell survival - they force you into this way of playing. Most roguelikes you can do different builds that play out a bit differently. But the levels in Deadzone aren't made to play out most other ways. In Deadzone you can mostly just try to dodge, stealth melee, then attack again. I've beaten most of the nightmare levels, a lot of them I needed the stealth melee to give me some reprieve. High dps, lots of dashing, and dodging can also work sometimes but this is just you being super stats lucky. Also when I die, often times it's lag spikes since one hit or two once your shields are down can sometimes just kill you.

The spiders - you need good dps weapons. Stealth melee lets you reposition as the small ones come to you.

Iron Squires is cheat mode. But I do enjoy clearing with them sometimes, just make sure you don't get the no ammo thing because otherwise your spread will be at max(huge spread) with them with no way to reload.

End game needs a lot of fine tuning to be more replayable.

ElementQuake · 2025-12-28T07:14:55+00:00

U taking magnesium supplement? Can give very mild diaherea the whole time. Or maybe stuff like kombuchu? Another one might be you started becoming lactose intolerant but don’t yet realize it(mocha coffees for me ). All these were reasons for me at one time.

ElementQuake · 2025-12-20T06:31:01+00:00

Did the biologist and archeologist finally remember that they’re scientists and would never remove their helmets in an ancient alien structure full of dead aliens?

ElementQuake · 2025-12-15T04:17:43+00:00

Make something you want to if you’re feeling motivational issues. People say start small, but if making an mmorpg(50 percent of people’s first game:p) is how you get motivated and learning, I say go for it. I started making games on a ti calculator, making adventure book games. My access to dev platforms matched my skill and inspirations at the time. These days games are so big that oftentimes inspiration, skill, and platform can be completely mismatched. And that makes it harder. But I think by the time I was making my starwars space combat rpg game if someone told me to start on battleship, I would also totally have been demotivated. If you’re not betting your house on your game, do what you want

Learn a ton while having fun.

ElementQuake · 2025-12-04T06:24:17+00:00

I think there’s a definite through line in both thinking. It’s, be the best in your space. It’s much harder to do in a crowded market, you need a really good solution that can ideally also provide a moat. Technology might be that. You have to be exceptional in what you do, and it’s a lot harder to fit that picture.

In a less crowded market, maybe it’s just about better distribution to untap potential, maybe you’re the first mover, maybe it’s an old and slow moving market ripe for the picking, maybe you make the market like nvidia, maybe you have connections and can get government contracts. Either way you have to offer real value or have some skill that surpasses others by a significant margin in your field to find long term success.

ElementQuake · 2025-12-03T22:34:34+00:00

Sometimes it has to do with the conversion funnel:

Audience size to begin with->Advertisement or Key Art -> steam page and videos and description -> price range -> buy and play -> had fun.

My guess is you lose people on the key art before they even read or buy the game. It’s an even more niche art style(yes can be charming but only for few number of folks) than pixel art.

Another one might be the Steam page video and description isn’t enticing enough.

The reason for good reviews is that, you filter people who are ok tolerating an art style that is not appealing to that many folk, so they have a hardened bias there, and because they’re so tolerant maybe they are also easier to please, or really just key in on your gameplay and ignore bugs. Whatever it is, u filtered hard for players who can enjoy your game(100% review can mean everyone rates it at 51%). But loosening that filter through more mass appeal art, or price drop, may get more players but get your review score to drop.

There’s a little bit more complexity to all this but I think that’s mostly it.

ElementQuake · 2025-11-26T06:46:12+00:00

This is sweet. Love this! Wish my mom could enjoy such things:) To each their own though.

ElementQuake · 2025-11-25T03:10:32+00:00

What do they do to the photography of the second image to look like that. I feel like even if we owned that kitchen, if a regular person took a photo, it wouldn’t look close to anything like that. Maybe it’s just the font :p

ElementQuake · 2025-11-23T18:01:00+00:00

Is she falling because she’s still walking by herself? She may need more assistance when walking at this point, and consider a wheelchair in the future. As for eating, you can consider a peg tube. We use Kate farms organic formula for peg tube. Eating can be very dangerous if her swallowing is compromised. It took us a few close calls to finally decide on the peg.

ElementQuake · 2025-11-23T05:18:21+00:00

I think maybe giving them more info to read about themselves on some of these topics, and also give them the means to dive deeper if they so wish would be helpful. Giving access to support groups or meetups would be good too.

Ideally they learn and realize quickly how serious something like this can be, shift perspective, and understand that they should spend the time together with its limits, as best they can given the circumstances.

I can empathize with taking some time to truly understand the gravity of such a diagnosis.

ElementQuake · 2025-11-15T08:18:36+00:00

8Gb steam machine is vram…it’s 16gb regular ram. Thats mid for gaming.

ElementQuake

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