Welp, guess I jinxed it by saying it shouldn't be possible in my last reply. Thanks for the report, I'll investigate! Hopefully it didn't set you back too far when you refreshed.
Yeah, it shouldn't let you make any infinite loops, and I'm not sure what I'd expect the results to be if you could. Best you can pull off is switching back and forth between two accumulators manually while one of them is disconnected. Out of curiosity, what loop were you trying to make and what did you want it to do?
I wanted it to loop between double and itself, so it output double, doubled, doubled, doubled, until it maxed out at 500, from a single block (currently)
This is a good and original game, congrats on making it in only 9 days!
A few recommendations if you want to improve on it.
1. Gameplay
I got stuck early on, because I had no idea that it was possible to scroll. The documentation starts with "the game can be played entirely with the mouse" so I stopped reading there but that was a mistake.
It would help a lot if you had some onscreen buttons for zoom in/out. Ideally with tooltip that share the Q/E keyboard shortcut.
The "add" block came up early, but at the beginning this block is not needed since final outputs are added as needed and the bank block wasn't there yet. Consider making sure the "add" block only shows up after the bank block.
2. User interface
- the shop would be a lot more readable if buttons and machines looked different.
- I was expecting the shop UI to go away if I click outside of the shop "window".
- when moving with the arrow keys, players expect the shift key to speed up the movement (this is especially important in this game since you quickly get a large map)
- scrolling with the mouse was unsatisfying (this was on Firefox) it proceeds by big steps that somehow aren't the size I want. It would be much nicer to have faster, finer-grained scrolling, plus on-screen buttons to zoom to exact useful sizes (one map square, 3x3 map squares, etc.)
- we quickly end up having to spend some time zoomed out, and then it's impossible to read the squares. It would be nice to have easily parseable visual effects to indicate "bank full" or "no square in range of square harvester"
- for a game with spread-out units like this, consider starcraft-style keybindings: press control-1 to control-9 while a unit (or more) is selected to save the selection. Press 1-9 to select that unit again. Press it a second time quickly after to move to that unit. This would make navigation much more pleasant.
Thanks for playing! I originally wrote the description & controls while I was pretty tired from pulling an all-nighter, sorry for making it so confusing! Way too much specificity on things that weren't important. It should be updated with a much more concise version now.
I'd definitely add a controls tutorial and proper tooltips in a full version. The description is a little bit of a band-aid, I just always run out of time for onboarding besides trying to lead the player in the right direction best I can without text instructions. Part of that wordless onboarding is the purchase options - they are gated based on which currencies you have unlocked, but there's no special case for the add node since an alternative start is 2 harvesters -> add -> circle converter.
Completely forgot about clicking outside of the shop, zoom buttons, and shift for speed! They were on my list, just slipped my mind. Oops.
Scroll wheel zoom speed is kinda strange, in order to support "smooth scrolling" it uses a multiplier supplied by the OS, but evidently that gives a weird experience on some mice. I'll keep an extra "zoom speed multiplier" option in mind for the future.
I wasn't incredibly happy with the UI for purchases in the shop, it was suggested during playtesting to rework things so you could click on an item to purchase it and the cost would just be text below, but it was a little late to spend so much time redoing it.
I've never played starcraft before, but that's definitely interesting if the game continues to lean into moving a group of nodes around the map. The other possible direction was leaning more into "subgraphs", a feature of other node-base programs that let you pack multiple nodes into a single powerful block. Much to consider!
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why is it not loding the squrer now I'm stuck
ver cool
Cool game, but establishing this link make game hangs...
I tried to make multiplication loop.
Welp, guess I jinxed it by saying it shouldn't be possible in my last reply. Thanks for the report, I'll investigate! Hopefully it didn't set you back too far when you refreshed.
I wanted to make a recursive loop, but it doesnt seem to work?
Is that intentional?
Yeah, it shouldn't let you make any infinite loops, and I'm not sure what I'd expect the results to be if you could. Best you can pull off is switching back and forth between two accumulators manually while one of them is disconnected. Out of curiosity, what loop were you trying to make and what did you want it to do?
I wanted it to loop between double and itself, so it output double, doubled, doubled, doubled, until it maxed out at 500, from a single block (currently)
What's the end goal?
After I unlocked the ability to harvest green figures, what should I do next?
You should be able to find a "Victory" node in the shop after getting your first astroid, it'll tell you its requirements after you purchase it :)
This is a good and original game, congrats on making it in only 9 days!
A few recommendations if you want to improve on it.
1. Gameplay
I got stuck early on, because I had no idea that it was possible to scroll. The documentation starts with "the game can be played entirely with the mouse" so I stopped reading there but that was a mistake.
It would help a lot if you had some onscreen buttons for zoom in/out. Ideally with tooltip that share the Q/E keyboard shortcut.
The "add" block came up early, but at the beginning this block is not needed since final outputs are added as needed and the bank block wasn't there yet. Consider making sure the "add" block only shows up after the bank block.
2. User interface
- the shop would be a lot more readable if buttons and machines looked different.
- I was expecting the shop UI to go away if I click outside of the shop "window".
- when moving with the arrow keys, players expect the shift key to speed up the movement (this is especially important in this game since you quickly get a large map)
- scrolling with the mouse was unsatisfying (this was on Firefox) it proceeds by big steps that somehow aren't the size I want. It would be much nicer to have faster, finer-grained scrolling, plus on-screen buttons to zoom to exact useful sizes (one map square, 3x3 map squares, etc.)
- we quickly end up having to spend some time zoomed out, and then it's impossible to read the squares. It would be nice to have easily parseable visual effects to indicate "bank full" or "no square in range of square harvester"
- for a game with spread-out units like this, consider starcraft-style keybindings: press control-1 to control-9 while a unit (or more) is selected to save the selection. Press 1-9 to select that unit again. Press it a second time quickly after to move to that unit. This would make navigation much more pleasant.
Thanks for playing! I originally wrote the description & controls while I was pretty tired from pulling an all-nighter, sorry for making it so confusing! Way too much specificity on things that weren't important. It should be updated with a much more concise version now.
I'd definitely add a controls tutorial and proper tooltips in a full version. The description is a little bit of a band-aid, I just always run out of time for onboarding besides trying to lead the player in the right direction best I can without text instructions. Part of that wordless onboarding is the purchase options - they are gated based on which currencies you have unlocked, but there's no special case for the add node since an alternative start is 2 harvesters -> add -> circle converter.
Completely forgot about clicking outside of the shop, zoom buttons, and shift for speed! They were on my list, just slipped my mind. Oops.
Scroll wheel zoom speed is kinda strange, in order to support "smooth scrolling" it uses a multiplier supplied by the OS, but evidently that gives a weird experience on some mice. I'll keep an extra "zoom speed multiplier" option in mind for the future.
I wasn't incredibly happy with the UI for purchases in the shop, it was suggested during playtesting to rework things so you could click on an item to purchase it and the cost would just be text below, but it was a little late to spend so much time redoing it.
I've never played starcraft before, but that's definitely interesting if the game continues to lean into moving a group of nodes around the map. The other possible direction was leaning more into "subgraphs", a feature of other node-base programs that let you pack multiple nodes into a single powerful block. Much to consider!