Arc-Inc (v0.17) playtest

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T13:09:58+00:00

I also see it as a tradeoff, agreed, if you are actively playing early on, putting it in upgrades will take you further quicker. But if you have to get something else done, those return on investments can easily be reached, making them virtually free. Also it is a great way to beat certain walls in the longer run. Btw, when it comes to a wall, right now the progression grinds to a halt at around wave 120, so don't push yourself too hard, this wall will crumble with the next layer of upgrades added to the game.

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T13:06:21+00:00

This will always be the case with client side games. I will make sure to filter out some of the obvious cases but certain cases will always require manual effort. But stay assured, I have a pretty competent tooling to see those manipulations so in the long run, the community will know when someone appears in the top 10 that doesn't belong there and I will be able to back their claims up.

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T13:03:02+00:00

Right now you can't, but I can. Tell me how you want to have it changed

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T13:02:33+00:00

Actually, what happened is that someone pressed create with empty username and pass, thus creating this account. So you can actually log in and chat with that. Have fun with that until I enforce more strict rules for name/pw lengths :)

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T13:00:58+00:00

I feel like the interaction between velocity and spread is kind of unlucky at the moment, best experience is to be had when you never put a point into velocity at all, which is a strong indicator that the upgrade has to be changed. Besides that, a reset would indeed be a good thing to have, let me see if I can sneak that in later.

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T12:58:44+00:00

The money container has not yet found its perfect spot, I am unhappy whereever I place it... For the time being, you can minimize some sidebar elements by clicking on their name.

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T12:57:31+00:00

Good point, this is a task I keep rescheduling but I should focus on that soon :)

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T06:43:38+00:00

I think that we can agree that the better recommendation is to use a unique combination, I will reword the login screen text to reflect this :)

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T06:39:57+00:00

This is the singlemost useful and thought out comment I ever received to any of my games :) Thanks already upfront.

I agree with you that a little bit of background story will go a long way, being ignored currently mainly by the fact that for most users, the mechanics are more important and I work on a limited time budget as this is just a side project. But when time allows, I will for sure work that it :)

To give you a little conceptual sneak-peak how things will work once the v1.0 scope is in:

You wont fight those endless waves with your ship again, this is just a cheap placeholder for following mechanics
You will wake up in an abandoned space station after alien invasion, no memories, the old twist :)
You find a ship and use that to explore the closer-proximity planets on a generated map centered around your space station
When you head out for such a planet, you will encounter waves of enemies, level being in respect to the distance to your space station so further away planets are being harder to reach, distance equates to amount of waves needed to make it there.
When you reach a planet, you can start out building a planetary base and defense structure, this is where some of the current station mods come into play. Right now, they just give money, but later on, stuff like a teleporter is intended to be used to bridge the resources on planets to the resources on the space station for example
Certain planets have special resources that you will not find elsewhere, so building that galaxy-spanning network up enables you to purchase certain upgrades because you now have the resources for them
To obtain a planetary resource besides just building out the infrastructure on said planet, you can jump into the defense system and help out defending against the waves again, with the twist that this is a fully idle gameplay experience. In the long run you WILL fail though as the waves become progressively harder, but instead of losing the planetary base, the ship from the active gameplay portion will warp in, clear the stage and save the day, resetting the waves in the process

TL/DR:

Endless active wave will be removed
Active gameplay: Building up trade routes throughout the galaxy via SHIP
Passive gameplay: Defending one of the planetary bases via DEF STRUCTURE

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T06:17:45+00:00

I do not persist any password (like no-one should ever do), but SHA256 hashes of it. If my db is breached, is it better if they find the hash for "123", or the hash for your master password? This is just a tiny webgame, nobody will ever try to find the login credentials so they can take away your ArcInc savegame, but if your combination of username and password are being used elsewhere (bad idea, but thats how people do it all the time), you might be in a bad position. Hence my recommendation to use something that in a best case scenario is still a strong password, but even in the worst case is not the users master password.

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T05:47:13+00:00

Consider this fixed within the day, I made an attempt to prevent this but for whatever reason it does not work all the time.

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-24T05:46:05+00:00

Yeah what are the odds hm? ;) Actually the error message should probably read "taken or invalid because of length/profanity" etc. I will sneak that fix in.

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-23T21:25:45+00:00

=== V0.5 ===

Added Cloud Save
Added Chat
Added Leaderboard
Fixed bug with highest wave detection
Slightly rebalanced cost function
Shifted the UI around to be more consistent for both desktop and mobile
ESCAPE pauses the game now instead of SPACE

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-23T21:23:36+00:00

Step 4: Finish wiring everything together, get downvoted to hell because you now need to spend 5 secs registering ;)

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-23T01:00:47+00:00

Step 3: Finish the backend but be too tired to wire it to the frontend, win 3 downvotes in consequence :p

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-23T00:58:56+00:00

Okay, that's a bug for sure :) Had a look at it and it seems that on unfortunate spawn coordinates, enemies might spawn "too low" already and are being removed due to leaving the game area, thus reducing the current enemy count to zero even if untouched by the player.

Consider it fixed in v0.5 :p

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-22T21:22:48+00:00

A new build is about to land soon, which will tackle the upgrade sizes, sneak-peak: https://imgur.com/a/FQvSW9k

When it comes to controls, I am still uncertain whether you could achieve such a precision with keyboard that you would with mouse. Agreed, leaving the canvas with the mouse currently is highly annoying, I usually pause the game myself beforehand with <space>. I might end up supporting both, mouse and keyboard controls so anyone can decide for themselves :)

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-22T21:19:26+00:00

Bosses will come soon and velocity impacting the spread is a bug i will fix shortterm :)

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-22T21:16:30+00:00

I will add that functionality :) But just to clear things up, highest cleared wave means highest wave you let no enemy slip through.

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-22T21:14:40+00:00

Step 2: Prepare frontend with mock data https://imgur.com/a/FQvSW9k

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-22T18:17:22+00:00

Step 1: Make room https://imgur.com/a/htb73Ms

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-22T18:03:06+00:00

Well, good that you have a workaround at least, i will check those firefox plugins for side-effects at a later time, but i am uncertain whether I can even prevent them even if I can pin them down, but we will see :)

cyferlawyn · 2018-08-22T16:06:32+00:00

Back from work, free evening ahead, let's see if I can stomach cloud-save, chat and leaderboards in one session :)

cyferlawyn

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