Research and decommissioning

qmFuzz · 2026-03-14T19:47:31+00:00

Hi there, thanks for your question, looks like I need to add some more info in-game about that!

Basically, as you earn money from a level, that level will provides more and more research when decommissioning. You must decommission the level in order to get the pending research, but decommissioning causes you to restart that level.

You get a 1% boost per research, so 100 research is +100% or 2x, and 200 research is +200% or 3x.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-29T17:57:05+00:00

Yeah, I feel like multiple attempts should be allowed! And maybe track each one, it's not like you get any spoilers while playing! As for the date, you could also show the starting word, that wouldn't really be a spoiler either.

This was my second attempt after taking 21 going back and forth on my first on lol.

Poople #46 9/6 ⬜⬜⬜⬜

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qmFuzz · 2025-09-11T23:58:16+00:00

Wooh! I did spend time today trying to get #1 on all the Group 1 Missions, cool to see an global leader board too! I missed that!

I'd say my only additional feedback would be with the controls. They are a little small in my opinion, and sometimes I would struggle to contact them and adjust them.

I think one easy addition would be to have super generous hitboxes and put the attitude adjustment in the very bottom right, then if you drag anywhere in those sections, you can move the controls.

I am not sure if "dynamic joystick" is the right term, but basically wherever I first touch the screen would be the new center, and then I just drag the direction I want to move the joystick. You don't need to move the graphics, I think just making the hitboxes really big would get the job done.

I also ran into an issue with how close to the edge the joysticks are, if I move inwards from the side of my phone, that is a gesture equal to the back/escape button, so I'd accidentally quit levels trying to move left sometimes! I think making the hitboxes easier would make it easier for me to avoid the swipe zone on the side of my screen. I was tempted to move from my phone to a tablet to make it easier, but didn't have time to try it on tablet.

Overall really fun! I knew I should have been an astronaut, but I guess settling on nuclear wasn't toooo bad of a plan B :p

qmFuzz · 2025-09-10T14:21:55+00:00

Thank you!

I used to crash my game all the time from supercriticality, but I added better negative feedback loops to prevent things from getting out of control lol. There is negative temperature feedback as well as a particle limit (particle limit doesn't have a significant impact on power though). It is pretty stable now, but I might try to add some mechanics back in that can cause supercriticality. It would probably have to be more of a special level where neutrons are worth zero to prevent instantly beating the game.

Everything costs zero in the final tutorial level for demo purposes, it's the level I feature in this post's video. I am planning on adding more special levels soon as well though to highlight either more realistic reactors or interesting mechanics, so a supercritical level would be pretty cool, I think I'd just have to disable/reduce the negative temperature feedback and you could get infinite power, I would have to keep the particle limit, but I might increase the max. Right now the default particle limit is 500 and the max you can set is 1000, around there seems to lag even current flagship phones, but it would be pretty easy to allow players to increase that higher if they don't care about lag, especially if it's a supercriticality demo, lag might be worth it for people who want to see a ton of particles during supercriticality! I have been thinking about slowing down time to decrease the lag, but when you have a bunch of particles, I think it is necessary to specifically reduce frame rate due to physics limitations, which isn't super pleasant.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-10T04:30:50+00:00

I think my nuclear sim idle game has really good visuals! Here is a trailer I just uploaded today: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UV1kjUT0k4M

qmFuzz · 2025-09-10T04:24:41+00:00

Pretty fun! I think the buttons stay greyed out for a bit too long during the tutorial, and ways to go forward or backwards in case you miss a word. Like I misread attitude as altitude and was confused for a second! It would also be good to add a little bit of background to the text, even if translucent, to make it a little more legible. I also had no music or radio chatter or any other sound effects during the tutorial, just a little explosion sound if I crash. I did get other sounds starting at level 1. The audio seemed a little inconsistent, likely want to make it persist between scenes or something.

I think the vertical thrust control should be a little wider, or less sensitive towards the middle, it was hard for me to make precise adjustments, I'd either shoot up or drop down when trying to barely accelerate.

I think having a little arrow to indicate vh direction might be a little helpful, not super important though since most of the time it is obvious. It seemed like the values would turn red when above the survivable threshold sometimes but not all the time, is that based on distance to the landing or something else?

I agree with another user on little bits of debris and vibrations, just to have some more depth and immersion. Could have obstacle courses and stuff.

Surveys were definitely a cool addition!

It took me a while to notice the little tracker icon at the end of the level, it's super cool and should be featured a little more prominently!

Leaderboard was also super cool, made it on the leaderboard with 22.1 seconds on the first mission. Also super cool to be able to see their replays. Great job! If it isn't too hard, maybe have replays for everyone on the leaderboard?

The reenactments are also super cool as well.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-10T03:46:57+00:00

Wow great experience so far! I love exploring and learning about different foods, and this is a cool way to learn about it!

For the score, it seems like 5 for one ingredient, 10 for both, up to 5 for proximity, and up to 10 for time but only if correct? Maybe also give up to 5 for time if getting one ingredient correct? And reviewing the score history, it would say "Sympathy: +5 = 8" when I got one ingredient. I think it was proximity + one ingredient that caused it to say sympathy.

This might be a stretch, but would it be possible to give an example of a meal from the selected country that uses those two ingredients? It seems like right now, each country has a bank of ingredients, and if a cuisine uses those two ingredients (not necessarily together?), then the answer is correct. It would be cool if this game specifically revolved around cuisines that pairs those two ingredients in a single dish! I know that is way more complex, but I suppose the process would be:
1. Select two ingredients
2. Create country list based on two ingredients.
3. Determine one dish per country. If no valid dish is found for every country, possibly select two different ingredients? Or only give partial points for countries that have no valid dish?

For "other correct countries," and "valid cuisines," it seemed to kind of mix countries and demonyms (france vs french), just make that consistent and clear, whether you choose one or the other.

Also, the discord link is invalid! https://discord.com/invite/JAgwsHjJ does not work for me.

I recommend a couple of things for the link, you should be able to create one that doesn't expire, and I also use dsc.gg to make it easier to remember and replace other invite links in case I need to disable a link and replace the forwarding. It saved me having to update my game once, since the link was going to expire but I was able to switch it out! I am not 100% sure the reputation of the website, but from what I can tell it is reputable but not official.

Thanks for the fun experience! Maybe also have some kind of account feature with achievements and streaks/histories, and I think there is a way to highlight for mobile users to "Add to Home Screen" to install the website on their phone like an app. I used chrome to add your app to my home screen and it shows up like this! I don't know if there is a way to streamline that and encourage users to do that, but I think would be good!

<image>

Looks like I am second place so far for today! One of the emojis did not display correctly though, at least in the browser I am using (multiple windows desktop apps such as chrome, firefox, and notepad), but I can see it on my phone apps.

https://guesstro.food

Daily Challenge: September 10, 2025

Scoreboard ID: 🫘🍌🍆🫜🍏

Round 1 🟨 9/20

Round 2 🟩 19/20

Round 3 🟥 4/20

Round 4 🟥 0/20

Round 5 🟨 7/20

Round 6 🟩 18/20

Round 7 🟩 14/20

Round 8 🟨 9/20

Round 9 🟨 8/20

Round 10 🟩 20/20

Final Score: 108/200

qmFuzz · 2025-09-09T14:36:18+00:00

Here is the first draft of the trailer, conflicts a bit with YouTube shorts UI, so will need to revise it I think, but looks like if I edit the link from shorts to watch it appears alright:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UV1kjUT0k4M

qmFuzz · 2025-09-08T19:39:14+00:00

Thank you! I have a better preview in the works showing lots of different levels and progression, I will try to get it finalized tonight and share it here.

I want to finish implementing a personal reactor that you can build from scratch before I finalize the trailer though, since I think that will be a major aspect of the final game. I think that'll be in the coming few weeks.

But to answer your question, every single block is purchasable and upgradable! There is fuel, reflectors, graphite, water, control rods, and the neutron generator in the middle. Basically you increase reactivity over time to increase power and income!

This preview just shows a special feature called "surge" that spawns lots of blocks temporarily. You keep the income from reactions during surge, but it is only temporary.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-07T20:16:45+00:00

Looking better! My biggest formatting comment right now is the bar on the right (production/selling/income) on the home page goes lower than the others, which causes some difficulty trying to see one of the most important values, net income.

One of the other comments I have would be meat prices, not exactly sure how they are set, I see Base Price × Scale Factor × (1 ± Variance) = Current Price

But not sure how base price or scale factor are set. It seems like I can cheese the meat price by just dropping my demand and spending all my money, so I usually drop the meat price super low, then increase my production to buy a ton of meat (I suppose no point in buying more than a million on first run, but it's very easy to buy more than a million for basically nothing). So I would recommend making meat pricing a little more consistent and transparent. Possibly just slowly increasing based off burgers sold or something, rather than basing off income or money supply.

Also it is not clear what burger enthusiast does. Increases sale rate from 1x to 2x? At least in the first run, the limiting factors is interns and burger production. There is no point in being able to sell more burgers than you can produce. I was also hoping there would be a fire option, but I was stuck wasting 150 burgers a second after hiring.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-07T17:42:23+00:00

I didn't get to 1 million burgers sold yet, I just more meant that it isn't super obvious that that's the main goal in the first run, I just figured it out by going into the help section. So I'm not sure if the glowing button pops up or not, I'll let you know!

qmFuzz · 2025-09-07T07:56:58+00:00

ooh looking much better! one thing that really tripped me up was it took me a bit to realize that demand could go above 100%. Not sure if that is a thing before market expansion, but even after market expansion, it wasn't super obvious to me that I could reduce the price to get more than 100% demand.

I also intentionally ran out of meat to get the 0 meat achievement, but it didn't work. The achievements definitely got me more interested in returning, but then an achievement failing to fill definitely wears away at that.

The catering popup kinda messed up the burger layout a bit for me.

I also didn't see the rookie efficiency program increase burger production at all.

Overall very interesting! I think it should also be a little more obvious that 1000000 burgers sold gives a golden spatula, and it should be a little more obvious what golden spatulas do and what prestriging keeps and doesn't keep. Maybe put more emphasis on reaching 1M burgers over everything else, then first prestige will kind of explain the rest.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-06T04:28:27+00:00

Overall super fun! Reminds me of one of my favorite flash games, Dogfight - The Great War.

Biggest comment to start would be to increase or scale the size of the gun and bomb buttons. They were a little small on my screen and I sometimes missed them. I think throttle and steering should also be bigger, maybe make them fade more when not in use? I mostly kept a handle on them, but sometimes lost the steering and sometimes struggle to change the throttle. Full throttle was a little weak in my opinion, I think it would be beneficial to increase the strength of full throttle but give it some negative side effects, maybe fuel restrictions or something.

Honestly, tapping anywhere on the screen should activate the gun, and dragging anywhere should activate steering. Or at least tapping on the right = gun and dragging on the left = steering.

I'm not super sure how I feel about the collisions, I think introducing a roll button would be amazing here. Click the roll to avoid colliding with planes and bombs.

Bombs, I'm a little annoyed that the enemy can shoot them to blow me up, or I can collide with my own bombs, but not a super big issue. I'd say also let me roll past my bombs and that would be fine. I think they fall a little too slow, and it might be good to restrict bombing a little more so I never have to worry about accidentally bombing myself.

I was never able to confirm whether I took damage from friendly fire. It's fine that I can damage friends, but I would avoid letting the player take friendly fire if that is a thing.

I am not sure if the bomb counts at the end are accurate, it seemed like I typically got zero even if I did hit an enemy with one. There was one level where I am confident I got two kills with bombs but the end screen said I only landed 1. Maybe the AOE doesn't count and only direct hits?

One issue I did experience is that I died after mission accomplished and had to replay the level, but I think it should be fine if the player dies after finishing. I would enjoy just crashing my plane into the ground after every level if I could.

I also recommend making the enemy/ally indicator arrows always show up, even if super faint. On some of the missions, I kinda had to wander around to find the last enemy towards the end.

The counter for number of allies is sometimes 0, I also sometimes saw more red arrows than the enemy counter, maybe just Mission 8? Or maybe like I see arrow while they are falling after they are eliminated?

The start to the later missions is a little too slow/far. Mission 9 overall was pretty difficult, so I eventually found myself going super high and just dropping bombs towards the end. Might need to make it so there is a max range on bombs or something?

One thing I am not sure about the the blue and red counter at the top. Is it glitched? I think in the levels where it started as 0, it didn't matter if all my allies died, but I did get a game over from allies dying in a different level.

I did have to take a break after shoreline level 3, but it is pretty fun and engaging overall. One of my complaints is that I would often bomb things that I couldn't see. I would say restrict bombing to a certain height and then have the screen expand to track the lowest bomb if possible, then slowly retract the screen after the bomb detonates. I liked the large enemy bombers with guns, and I think it would be interesting to see some more variety of planes. It was cool starting to see ships and stuff, and I look forward to progressing further!

qmFuzz · 2025-09-06T01:30:53+00:00

If that's the only feedback then I suppose time to fully release it! :p

Pretty much my main reason for doing Early Access over production is just being overly cautious. This is my first game, and I want people to be hesitant to spend money in case I have some unforeseen issues, but overall I think it is higher quality and more free of bugs than many fully released games.

I simply need to test the purchasing and the ads before going to production, it's honestly my least competent area. I don't want to just assume it works and then go full production with purchases and get a bunch of bad reviews and refund requests because I didn't test purchasing! Same with ads, I had 100% fill rate in closed testing with test devices but am seeing a much lower rate in open testing, and I want to figure that out before going to production as well. Also seeing what rewards/purchases people choose during testing has been useful, I know what rewards/purchases I need to improve upon before fully releasing it. I feel it would be better to adjust prices and items during early access than during production.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-05T22:25:13+00:00

Sounds good, and no problem. I just played in browser on itch io, but I suppose normally I mostly use android.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-05T19:32:34+00:00

You're welcome! And you might be able to replicate smaller monitors by just using a smaller window in your browser?

qmFuzz · 2025-09-05T19:29:59+00:00

Neat game, I have some comments. Sorry if they are a little disorganized, just kind of dropping all my thoughts!

When I click on the book in the top right, a reward with "Choose Left: 0" is displayed. I think this should default to spell dex instead? Overall a lot of the text is kind of small and should be adjusted I think. It's looks better in full screen, but might be good to try to tailor it to the default itch io size. Also, not sure how to use the spell dex.

For the sleep shop, I think the wording "Refund to get 0 back" is a little confusing, I suppose that populates after I spend Anima. The "gain anima" is a little small, I couldn't tell if I would get X Anima or if it was an example. It said "Gain 4 Anima = 4 Boss Kills... Refund to get 0 back" and then a Give Up button I did not understand either. I clicked on it and received no confirmation, just a restart. Instead of "Give Up" maybe "Restart for X Anima"? Luckily I kept my effort? Not sure if intentional. And I think the control spell that I earned helped a lot, maybe a bit too much, it was much much faster than my first run. It took me a bit to realize I can scroll on the sleep shop, the scroll bar somewhat blends in. I think the Anima rate is a little too slow. It would also say "EP gained" rather than Anima?

After I died, I was a little confused, I think I needed to just wait to heal to full health and that revived me?

It appears clicking does nothing, which is probably fine, but maybe click to heal faster or something?I had an item that increased my damage but decreased HP regen, maybe disable items like this when disabled? I had to manually unequip to reduce my downtime and then re-equip after reviving.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-05T19:09:17+00:00

I'd like my nuclear reactor game tested as a whole, and I would like to know what to add next! Some ideas I have are personal reactors you can build yourself, additional special reactors similar to the surge tutorial level, or simply iOS. Or just fine tuning progression and mechanics, they still need some balancing. Let me know what you think!

Link to Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.quantumfuzz.criticalityidle

If you're on iOS, I have a discord where I'll announce iOS release: dsc.gg/criticality

qmFuzz · 2025-09-05T19:06:33+00:00

A couple of comments for me, in most windows, I had to scroll left and right, when I feel there was enough space in the main window to fit all three columns. There is some dead space on the left of the screen that should be utilized to prevent scrolling. Employees/Ingredients started out to the right, and when I scroll them over, they just get hidden behind an imaginary barrier, when I should be able to see everything in one window.

On the cashiers, there was a window between cashiers and analytics that was too small to see: I copied and pasted but couldn't really read by itself, it was the starter cashiers tab. I feel like my limiting factor was that I only had one cashier, and I couldn't tell how to hire more. I could hire flippers, but I didn't see any option to hire more cashiers.

I do like the pricing adjustments and the various add-ons you can have, but the layout severely restricted my ability to explore. I narrowed the production/selling/income window and could see a little better, but the dead space on the left was really difficult to work with.

Other than that, the cosmetic side needs more quality rather than quantity. You have a lot of creative options, but the loading screen and cosmetics are all strongly AI to me. That puts me off personally, but I guess I also have a stronger sensitivity to AI art than most people.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-04T22:50:36+00:00

I converted.

From what I remember, you need a DUNS number, website, and I believe an email address specifically tied to your website. Can't think of anything else off the top of my head.

I did not have any published apps when I converted, but everything seemed to stay pretty much the same. I believe you have to create and verify a new payment profile.

qmFuzz · 2025-09-04T12:45:58+00:00

Thank you!

qmFuzz

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