Project Landsword

Glad you like it! The railgun is a favorite of mine as well.

Спасибо

The C-RAM turrets can shoot down your grenades, but you can shoot down enemy missiles with all of the primary weapons (excluding the thermal projector)

Cheers for playing!

- Keybinds. Probably been said by other people.

They should've been added by now, but due to some unplanned delays I wasn't able to get them in this build. Next one should have the menus redone finally with rebinding functions implemented.

- Numbers in the menu as an option in settings?

Could you clarify what you mean by this?

- Turret direction vs reticle position indicator. Maybe a line?

Someone else requested an aim assist/laser line awhile ago. I'll see if I can have that as an option in the settings once they're redone.

- Maybe make it a bit clearer what environmentals will explode and damage you? Or give a list and images somewhere..

Noted.

It'd be nice to have something between Death By A Thousand Small Cuts Of 20mm, and Postal Code Killing Cannon. Maybe a nice 50mm stutter, or resurrect the HSTVL's cannon from the dead....and perhaps, a straight up 105mm Cannon? :P

I felt a basic tank gun might be boring but other people have asked for it too, so it's definitely going to make it in. Some intermediate burst fire weapons will probably be needed to space out the more heavy hitters too.

An unfortunately realistic plasma cannon? Exceptional against soft targets. Worthless against armor. The plasma superheats things with water in them to the point of exploding.

I like the idea of seeing the enemies burst into steam and smoke instead of just burning with the flamethrower. Sounds like it would have some pretty satisfying sound design.

Thanks again!

Thanks for playing!

I hope to turn up the vibes even further.

Thanks for playing!

Sorry about the readability issues on the first mission, I know the enemies can sometimes blend in. I'll see about changing the palette and colors slightly to be more readable.

This game is being made in Game Maker: Studio. I've come up with some methods of procedural animation and little tricks to make the game appear 3D, but in actuality it's entirely 2D.

Thanks so much for checking it out and your support!

- I find it really hard to track where you are. The reason why is the color palette of your mech seems to blend in with the rest of your surroundings. Same goes with the enemies. Would be nice to have your mech and the enemies pop out a little bit more so that they're easier to see.

There will be some more differently colored environment. I know right now the visibility can suffer a bit with the amount of desert and bright sepia tones, so I'm working to correct that as much as I can.

- The shooting and the destruction is a lot of fun. That being said, I also noticed that the end-of-mission stats keep track of how much property gets destroyed in the mayhem. Does this negatively effect your mission rank? If it does, then I think that's pretty silly, because it feels impossible not to completely destroy everything, especially since a lot of your weapons explode and cause massive damage and the enemies get stuck on the buildings, not to mention that they also explode when killed.

Right now the property damage is just a joke really. It has zero effect on your final rank, the only thing that matters is your time and direct hits taken. I realize it might be a bit unclear though, so I'll need to clarify at some point that the collateral damage does not matter.

- I know this is just a prototype demo, but I've also noticed that the missions are pretty same-y. Are there plans to vary the mission objectives beyond just killing all the enemies on the map? I think it would also be cool to have missions where you have to attack and destroy an enemy base, or kill an experimental weapon, which can act as a boss of sorts. Varying what you do from mission to mission would be nice.

Absolutely. Different missions, optional objectives,  and some other styles of gameplay are planned, but for now I have yet to get to them.  Bosses and 1v1 missions will come as well, perhaps after every five or so combat missions.

- On the topic of the missions, I felt like they were way too short. I was able to complete each mission in less than 5 minutes. Would be nice if they were longer and more dynamic.

This is a tough one since the gameplay can be very fast-paced, but I'll see what I can do. Maybe I'll make even larger maps and have some things you need to collect/rescue to finish it.

But this is a great base for a game for sure. I think it has a lot of potential and you've done a fantastic job so far. Hope to see updates on this one in the future!

Thank you! It's still very early and much more is planned.

Thanks for checking it out! I plan on having a VR training area which will act as a sort of tutorial section where you can practice using the different weapons.

Preach!

First time commenting on itch.io because damn, it's good ! Solid foundations for an already satisfying game ! The artstyle is beautiful (especially the choice of colors), the map navigation is great (but that's probably my love for maps speaking there) and overall, everything fits visually.

Thank you for playing and your kind words! I'm glad you like the map, I think it adds a lot too.

Gameplay-wise, each weapon alters the way you go towards enemies which is good. It's simple but it works. At this point, you could just add more missions, add more enemy types, perhaps bosses and voilà !

Bosses are planned and some other mission types as well. Hopefully in the next build I'll have one of each added in, should everything go right.

I don't know if you plan on adding perhaps a campaign but the universe is fitting for one.

I hope to double down on that part eventually and add a real campaign, but for now I'm still focusing on making sure the game is fun and all the systems are in working order when people start it up. Once I'm finished with that I'll most likely be focusing on the lore and story aspect a lot harder, I hope people will like it.

Anyway, thank you for the few hours of fun and good luck if you continue this project, you're definitely onto something !

Thank you again! I'm very happy to hear you had fun with it, as the dev that's my main mission, haha. Expect more updates in the future.

Thank you for the support!

Thank you for playing again!

Dude this is nuts, the quality of life changes do so much for immersion.

Really happy to hear that, that was exactly what I hoped it would add to the mission select!

I also really appreciate your design sense for all the mecha/vehicles, they'd all feel right at home in a 90s sci-fi anime. Actually mentioning the dropship again, I don't know why but its design is just fucking awesome.

Glad you like them and the new dropship! I spent a lot of time working on every one of the designs even though in-game they're pretty tiny. I have something planned to show them in greater detail outside of the mission previews, I hope to start work on implementing it as well.

I don't really have any critique honestly, game feels and looks incredible. I'm super excited to see what you come up with :) also how did you do the map/what software did you use?

I used a variety of different height and terrain maps of Mars from NASA and mixed them together with some other speculative maps of what Mars's oceans could have looked like long ago. The map is still technically a work in progress, so expect a more refined version with landmarks to come. I use this as my art program.

Thanks again for your support!

1. When replaying missions, the level select menu tracks your most recent stats instead of your highest overall stats.

Sorry about that. I had hoped for it to function as you said and only replace the stats if your rank or time is faster, but I'll need to refactor how the saving works. It's technically possible for me to implement it now, but it would run through the entire save file checking every single data map which may cause some lag on older systems if you play a lot of missions. I think it would be neat to also have a place where you can view your overall playthrough stats such as total bullets fired and enemies killed — I'll see if in the next build I can add that as well when I rewrite the code.

2. This is a nit-pick, but for the user-interface, the thermal projector should say fuel instead of rounds.

Agreed. Will fix that too, thanks.

Thanks for playing!

1. From a purely visual standpoint, I think that when the mission description appears in the level select, the mission marker should centre itself in the remaining half of the screen. 

I had considered this, but I felt that the camera panning to the side every time you approach a map point might make it even more disorienting. I'll try it though and see how it feels. The speed will be lowered as well.

2.When moving out of the spin in the loading screen, the camera performs the motion of the spin backwards rather than simply flicking and snapping to the North Axis. This means that if you idle for too long, you get a very jarring camera movement when moving away from a mission point.

There's a system meant to handle that axis snapping which was turned off for debugging. It appears I never turned it back on, oops!

3. When the player dies while the game is out of focus, the game will not show the "Mission Failure" screen. Instead, the screen goes grey and fuzzy as per usual, but no text appears and the game makes a consistent buzzing noise.

Saw this happen a few times when people were playing. I'm still not quite sure how to fix it, honestly. Will see what I can do though.

4.Are there any plans for missions at different times of day? A night mission would really fit the vibe of the game, plus you could ramp up the stealth aspect a whole lot.

Definitely!

5. What kind of general environments are you planning? So far we have had cities and beach towns, but will there be more rural areas or water-based areas?

I don't want to give away too much (I like to surprise people), but I plan on having underground areas like tunnel complexes and maybe some abandoned/overgrown locations with more vegetation to contrast all the sand and desert.

Just realized there's already a new version out from a few days ago!! Will be playing as soon as possible. :33

Thanks for playing once again! I'm glad you like the new additions.

The font used to describe equipment in hangar can be hard to read. I personally can't make out some characters.

Apologies, it really should be the larger one. I'll see about changing it in the next build.

Map rotation that plays once the player arrow is situated on a mission point/location.somewhat irritates me at best and makes me kind of sick at worst (I would really like it to be slowed down or to be able to stop it on command).

Understood. I'll have a button to stop it from rotating at all and slow down the speed. Right now it might feel somewhat useless, but I hope it'll look interesting once there's 3D objects like little cities and icons on the map that rotate.

"X" is a weird place ona  keyboard to use to throw grenades with. I got used to it by the end but would like to be able to remap it if I wanted to (I would 100% put it on one of the side mouse buttons).

Adding key rebinding is also a high priority on my to-do list, a few other people asked to be able to rebind controls too. The settings menu in the options will be redone from scratch with separated tabs for different things, but I didn't get around to doing it for this build. Hopefully in the next one it will have it.

And last but certainly not least: It's very useful to see mechs in smoke (both the player's and the enemy ones) but I can't see terrain which made me get stuck between some buildings more than once. I know I should carefuly consider where I'm throwing smoke grenades and memorize the terrain before doing so but this is just something to keep in mind. I would suggest making taller buildings stick out of the smoke making their roofs visible (that would even make smoke look more realistic).

I agree that buildings should be visible in smoke too. This was a problem I attempted to solve, but unfortunately couldn't crack before release. The buildings are drawn in a completely different way than the enemies in order to be optimized with dozens on screen, so I need to figure out a way to keep both the FPS high and draw them in the smoke without the game chugging. I have a few ideas on how to do this, hopefully one will work...

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this update and the game never looked so sleek before. It's shaping up to be a really special arcady game and I love it.

Thanks for the feedback and playing again! Still much to be developed and added, but I'm glad this new update seems to have been worth the effort.

Awesome, thanks! It's not too big of an update, but hopefully there's some fun new stuff to play with.

Thanks for playing again!

Also the link to twitter seems to be broken (opens "https//x.com/sysmainframe) for two releases in a row already, so I wanted to mention this just in case :D

It's a strange bug. On my end it seems to open, and the code is all formatted and typed in correctly. But for other people it just refuses to print the colon and adds a quotation mark at the start for some reason. I think it might just be something to do with this old version of Game Maker, so next update I'll probably just turn off the link opening.

Thank you for playing. Controller support and an eventual Steam release are both planned. A few people have already managed to get the game working on the Steam Deck too, so dedicated support for that as well will hopefully come.

<3

<3