u/blaknite12

Spent the evening clearing eight data sites from a wormhole in an astero while being hunted by someone in a buzzard the whole time. Got out with the loot. Good fun.

Can I have your stuff?

Consider this wishlisted the moment your steam page is up!

Renaming things is one of the most annoying things to do in software development. In the code it can sometimes be pointless. For users it’s often hated.

This is pretty damn neat! Love it!

Oh and it's got even worse of late. For a lot of them it seems like they're very loosely related. It makes it quite hard to break through the noise and I often feel like I'm adding to it :/

For my game I really enjoyed diving far too deep into EVE's damage application mechanics. It's been a fun ride!

I used to use Illustrator for random icons back in the day and frankly hated it. I've used figma quite a bit for UI wireframing. This time around though I've been using affinity. I don't mind it but also I don't push it too hard so I don't really have a firm opinion either way. Does the job though.

For the record, they weren’t. I’ve come to terms with the similar vibe though. So all good.

If I was to go down that path the game likely wouldn’t have been vector art at all because of how easy it is to generate sprites these days.

This was something I could do with my limited artistic skills. In the end it stuck :D

I’m going to check that out! Love the idea of the hot spots at each of the vertices. I’m going to straight up try that now!

totally understandable. It's what I can do myself with basically no budget xD

Is it the vector style specifically?

> But then I added player levels.

Not the revelation your bot thinks it is lol

Yeah! As you play through each run you get to upgrade your ship. After each run you unlock different special abilities you can use for the next ones.

This made me laugh pretty hard because I feel it.

I'm making one but it's pretty hard to get past the "that looks like the others" blocker. The ship movement and combat is completely different to a bullet hell and typical arcade games but because there's 2D space combat and bullets it just seems like the flood.

Competing with the deluge is hard and makes me feel like I'm part of the problem, despite my efforts to make something unique.

People keep piling on my art saying it's AI when, in fact, I just suck at drawing icons for things xD

I'm in this camp too. 2D top-down is how I think the mechanics I've chosen work best and do be discounted purely on a graphics style doesn't seem to be in the spirit of this rule.

As another commenter said:

> If your 2D top down game has deep systems and isn't a carbon copy of the many other 2D "space sim" games clogging up this sub then great ... and that project doesn't have something substantially new or interesting about it then I don't mean to be rude but I just don't care. 

I think this is what we're really striving for here. If someone can articulate why what they're posting is something worth other's time and others agree through upvotes that's probably enough. I think this would largely guard against low effort posts.

I wish you all the best with it. It’s hard sharing stuff and even harder when people are critical of it.

Keep refining until your idea shines through :)

I didn't get this far. Thanks for sharing what's inside!

It does, unfortunately, look like this lacks the level of refinement it needs before the public can give an honest review of the game it's trying to be.

As a fellow developer creating something inspired by EVE, please take this as the friendly and honest feedback it is. I love EVE and space games and if you've got a unique take to share, make it happen!

This is obviously vibe coded. Opinions on the use of AI run from "any use is shit and so are you" to "I don't care". If I put that aside and judge the product as put before me, it lacks focus, polish and a clear selling point.

One of the things AI loves to do is embellish things with needless and meaningless accoutrements. Take, for example your "RIFTGUARD COMMAND NETWORK // ONLINE". At face value it seems kinda neat, but what is it? What purpose does it serve? Your landing page has numerous examples of this in action. So many that's where I stopped.

If you want to continue down the path of vibe-coding it, be aware that people can spot this stuff from a mile off and it will put them off. I would highly recommend you take a step back and design screens, interfaces, forms, icons etc yourself and prompt your LLM to wire in exactly what you design, rather than asking it to make all the judgements for itself and then shipping the mess.

There is a significant difference between the output of someone who uses an LLM to accelerate the production of a game with their hard earned skills and thoughtful designs and someone who delegates it all to the machine.

Quality works created with LLMs don't excuse you from hard work. Your job in this process is to bring direction, taste, clarity and above all FUN. Your game, after all, is something for humans to enjoy.

Harsh but fair I guess.

Gameplay keybindings are all defined in one place so no big deal at all to put action->key map in place.

Great point, really appreciate it. Maybe not that exact mechanic but a delay once broken would be pretty easy to communicate. I’ll see how it feels!

Just for the record, yes, I did make them. And yes, they kinda suck. I do what I can 🤷

Everything needs to be built at some point. I’m just one guy!

The low intensity, high-duration bit is a great point.

The current balance loosely supports that by having no cap-stable active fits and a lower overall regen in passive fits. You're right that this doesn't create a unique enough difference to make gameplay with either shield variants any different.

For enemies, they have a recent hit regen timer that means they don't regen while in sustained combat. What if the passive fit leaned on that mechanic for the player?

Perhaps it's no regen when recently hit but an increase to out of combat passive regen?

Thanks for checking it out!

At 8 USD it's a couple of lattes at best and you're welcome to wait for a sale ;)

As for the bindings, I could inherit the EVE bindings but it's not EVE. Noted on remapping. It's on the list. Consider this a +1 to priority. Great point, thanks!

As for shield regen, for eve players the regen curves are something unintuitive that you eventually learn and likely by being taught. After that it's intuitive. For a game of this style I don't think that's a complexity cost that can be afforded. Passive fits have undergone tweaks already, maybe they need another tweak to even it out some more. I did the maths and the average regen over 5 minutes is less for passive than for active.

Got any thoughts on where I could take it?

Yeah the limitations of my own artistic abilities are real 😂