Overall I think it’s a nice presentation, with care put into things like hotkeys, tool tips and sound effects.
There’s definitely a decent cycle of game mechanics too, but it’s quite hard to progress more than a few minutes.
Thoughts while I played:
The gameplay is quite punishing, without a lot of freedom of choice, but maybe that changes after more things unlock. I played five games, and had a couple of other things unlock, but given that 3 energy “costs” 1 waste, and 1 waste costs around 3 energy to get rid of, there was never a point where it didn’t feel hopeless.
Maybe that’s the intention, but for me at least, I think it would have been more enjoyable with a longer run, with room for imperfect play that diminishes as the level goes on.
A good place to polish might be the tutorial, shaving it down to the most compact it can be. That’s likely to be something a new player sees, and their initial experience may depend on it.
The soundtrack is atmospheric and good, but I think the glitchy noises attract too much attention when they’re at their loudest. It is background music after all, and not everyone has a high noise tolerance.
Lovely interface, with the drifting moon etc.. I also like the pollution effects. It gives a feeling of weightless orbiting and the slowness we associate with things like the moon landing footage.
Dying in sat view mode seem to reset me without any usable UI elements.
I also got stuck in the tutorial, unable to launch a satellite after buying it. Didn’t happen the first time though.
Thank you for your time and detailed feedback! This is mostly coherent with what I have heard a lot. I will work on the difficulty level the next few days and update the web build on itch.io.
I really appreciate your time for this! I designed the game to be hard and require self motivated learning. But of course this comes from my brain, knowing everything about every design choice. For example regarding the resource distribution: the "trick” is to not shoot waste too far out in the beginning. This way 1 waste only costs 1 power. Gathering updates early to improve reactors further improves the ratio. But yeah, try to figure that out while also deciding if you want to play this game in the first place. Obviously not a good idea
Personally I would prefer the game to be a little less input-intensive (like being able to / upgrade to launch more waste at a time), but I think that’s because the setup reminds me of idle games, which are usually very chill and unlosable. I’m looking forward to seeing where you take it
I decided to give Steam’s Next Fest a try to get used to publishing there - Waste No Space is now online, can be played as a demo and I even managed to edit a little trailer with some home brewed music.
If you have a second, I would appreciate any support - you all know the struggle
I’ll be spending a few more weeks on the game, fixing reported bugs and adding more content and events. But as a body, this is it
Even having played it before, I still find the game quite stressful, input-intensive and confusing. My first run I didn’t see any new purchases beyond the first two, though I got plenty of satellite ‘surprises’, so I saw no way of progressing… and with no meta progression, it’s really hard to justify starting another run. I did though, and had a similar experience.
If there are any changes since I last tested, my impression hasn’t changed.
