Comments for Planets Gone Rogue!

Thanks for playing so far into the campaign & commenting! The final battle definitively is extra tough compared to a regular battle that would take place on the same field the final boss is being found on. But just as the other planets the enemy in the final battle is randomly generated, so I hope you will get a more forgiving enemy if you decide to try it once more.

Thanks for playing and commenting! There is a small regain at the moment, you get the same amount of health between two battles as you would from a regular scan. It is intentional that it is very dangerous to fight multiple planets in one turn, so the player still has to consider which fields to uncover with the next scan even if it is in seemingly non-dangerous territory. Your suggestion could indeed be interesting: sacrificing one weapon slot against the ability to rotate the planet faster could sounds like a cool trade off. Noted for potential sequel! ;-)

Thanks for playing and commenting! Can you tell me why you want the buttons at the bottom? Is it an usability / accessibility issue? I placed them on the right side with the mobile version in mind, so the players can scroll with the left thumb / finger while pressing the buttons with the right thumb.

Thanks for playing and sharing your experiences! The level system was more intended to be a consolation so that you get rewarded a little even if you die during a campaign. Furthermore it should allow you to move faster to the right in the beginning of a new campaign so you can get to the more challenging battles faster with each new attempt. So it was not my intention to make a game where you have to grind up to have a chance at beating the game. Hard mode might be extra tough without leveling up before, but I assume that most players should have earned some levels before on medium before trying hard mode so they should be on a higher level by then already.

Thanks for playing & commenting! It seems that every player has his own favorites among the weapons. I think it is the right mix between offensive and defensive weapons that makes a loadout more or less successful.

As far as I know it is. I did not copy this from another game and I'm currently not aware of a game that does this in a similar fashion. There are however some games that have the same theme / topic of "planets fighting each other with giant cannons". I would love to add badges on kongregate like I did with the achievements for the Android & Newgrounds version, but as far as I have understood it there is a Kongregate badge team which creates the badges for select games, I cannot add them by myself. The game does however send some statistic values in the background already that would allow the integration of badges on Kongregate. Sooo, badges team, if you read this, I'm ready! =)

Thanks for playing and commenting! I know that there are certain situations in battles where it does not make much difference where you are placing your shots, but there are also situations where this can decide the outcome of the battle. Same goes for the shields, if there is a single projectile approaching it is pretty clear where you need to place your shield, but if there are multiple projectiles around it becomes more interesting. Also keeping track of which weapon / shield is reloaded at the time while handling other weapons makes part of the challenge of the game, if I would introduce a auto-fire feature I fear it would become boring quick.

Thanks for playing and commenting! Yes, the laser sound is a bit unusual, but believe me when I say I tried several variations and the current one was the least annoying of them all. =) It is also extra-hard to find matching sound effects when the game is available on mobile as well, some soundFX sound entirely different when played back by mobile phone speakers. But this is no excuse, I will try to improve the sound effects for my future games.

Thanks for playing and commenting! There are still too many people recommending rockets in the comments here, makes me wonder if I should nerf them further =)

Thanks for playing and reporting these bugs! I'm sorry you had to experience two bugs at once. The strange thing is that I can't reproduce these issues on my pc, no matter how hard I try. Do you have the feeling the game is lagging / running slow? I know of one player who reported he could not select any weapons in battle and that problem went away when he turned down the render quality settings in the options, maybe this is worth a try.

Thanks for completing the campaign & sharing your strategy!

Thanks for playing and putting so much time into the game! Much appreciated! =)

Thanks for playing and reporting the crashes! If you find the time could you send me a PM with the details of the crash? Where does the crash happen, and what are you doing in this moment? If I can't "see" the crash for myself, it is near impossible for me to fix it.

Thanks for playing and the praise! I'm excited to hear you put 6 hours into the game already, this is the best reward a game developer can get. =) FTL was an inspiration for some of the mechanics in this game, sometimes so much that I needed to "force myself away" from it because I feared I'd end up creating a cheap copy. But I think I succeeded, my game has enough of "my own stuff" in it so it'd be harsh if someone would say it is a clone of FTL.

Thanks for the perfect score! =)

Thanks for playing and sharing your strategy! This might be a useful read for everybody who struggles with beating the game. You are right, the yellow line moves with the "total value" of your planet, (max value of all weapons and upgrades purchased so far).

Thanks for playing and the feedback! I know the "money incentive line" is often seen as a punishment, but I still think it is required to keep the player from grinding all the weaker planets. It would be possible to counter this by making the map corridor more narrow, giving the player less grinding opportunities, but this renders the scanning mechanic uninteresting because you only have very limited choices about where to explore next if the corridor is only 5 fields high. So the solution was to add the "money incentive line" to remove the grinding incentive while keeping the corridor large enough for the scanning mechanic to work. If you or anybody else that reads this has a good idea how to better solve this problem, please let me know via comment / pm, I cannot promise it will make it in the game but I'm curious hearing about these ideas to get additional perspective on this problem!

Thanks for playing and rating!

Sorry you found the button annoying. I added the shaking and the humorous (?) text messages because it seemed that nobody noticed that the Google Play graphic is actually a button that takes you to the download page. It is very, very difficult to get attention on the Google Play Store without a marketing budget, so I need to rely on some of these cheap tricks to get at least noticed a bit. If you feel menaced by the button again, try to imagine it more like a "friendly wave towards you". ;-)

Thanks for reporting! I have seen this as well but I was not yet able to reproduce it properly yet. I already created a planet full of shields in my development environment, but I was not yet able to find out what causes this. More investigation is needed, but I'm definitely trying to fix this at the moment.

Thanks fore playing and commenting! I agree, it happens to me as well that I die in one of the first battles after the beginning of the campaign. Maybe I should add something like a "starter zone" that reduces the difficulty for the first battles you'll encounter.

Thanks for playing and commenting! The game has been out for almost a month now and it is nice to hear that people are still discovering and liking the game! If you have a steam account and have not played it yet, I would recommend buying "FTL - Faster than light" for 70% off at the moment. It would be a miracle if you liked my game and wouldn't like FTL. =)

This is a another good idea, I cannot promise that I'll be able to add this because it might interfere with the "click" vs. "drag" movement detection on the map screen, but I'll have to try this out to be sure.

Thanks for playing and making suggestions! I will add an option to pause on keypress in a future update as mentioned in a previous game. I know that sometimes the battles can be a bit long, depending on the equipment of the two fighting planets. I'm not sure how to fix this yet. If I would make it so that the enemy AI looks at your weapons and buys weapons according to your equipment, this might result in the battles becoming boring because the AI will fight you with the same "countermeasures" as long as you don't change your own equipment. If anyone has an idea for this, please comment or PM me!

Thanks for playing! I could imagine adding a key control that allows you to pause the game regardless of there is a loaded weapon available or not. I could further imagine creating an optional automatic pause system that kicks in whenever a gun is reloaded, this might be helpful for people that play on a touchpad or aren't that quick with the mouse. I think I'll add this in a future update, thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks for playing and commenting! It is nice to see that people are also coming in from the Android version to play it on the web. In case you have not noticed it: The custom difficulty settings are now available for the Android version as well, and I have just released an update that added Leaderboards and Achievements on Android. I am happy to hear that you like the approach I took with the advertisement, I hate it myself when mobile games employ "interesting" tactics to make you click on the ads so I tried to avoid this with my game. I don't know what game I will create next but I definitely plan to continue making games as long as I can. =)

Thanks for playing & completing the entire campaign! I'm sorry that you encountered the problem with the laser gun, I just tried a boss battle in my development environment with switching to lasers just before the battle and everything worked as expected, so I'm currently not sure where this is coming from. If more players report this and / or I'm able to reproduce this problem I will fix it in a future update.

Thanks for playing and sharing your thoughts about the leveling system! I understand what you mean, but I don't agree with you 100% that it is meaningless: You are right with the line being pushed to the right, but from my experience it is possible to catch up with that line quickly by avoiding enemy planet signals while scanning on the way as far as possible. With a bit of luck you are able to catch up with the line wihtout or maybe 1-2 fights, which means that the higher you are in the planet level, the easier it is for you to advance from your starting position.

Thanks for sticking with the game until the end! At the moment I'm trying to answer every comment so the players know I have read their comment and I really considered the suggestions they are making. I hope I will be able to keep this up, but I'm getting a lot of feedback on various platforms and it is eating up a serious chunk of my dev-time already. =) Regarding your suggestion: It is right that it is possible to heal up by scanning carefully in non-dangerous areas of the galaxy, nibbling off fields one by one. I would not consider this an exploit since you need to leave enough "non-dangerous" fields behind to be able to employ this strategy. It happened to me more than once that I tried to heal up this way but I had only fields with skull left on the left side of the map, so I don't think it is an dominant strategy that will make you win automatically all the time. But I will keep an eye on this and adjust if more people report / comment on this being an exploit.

Thanks for playing, and good to see you did not give up despite dying multiple times, that is the right attitude for this game. =) I have stated it somewhere else before, I would have enough ideas for a sequel but I have not decided yet what game I will create next, so stay tuned. ^^

Thanks for playing, and I'm very sorry you encountered this issue! The tutorial can be a bit misleading during the upgrade screen, since multiple players got stuck like you experienced it. I have just uploaded an upgraded version which now treats the buttons on the upgrade screen a bit more restrictive, so you can't buy / sell anything until you are supposed to according to the tutorial dialogue. If you press "continue" in the main menu, you should be able to play this part again and then complete the tutorial. Again, I'm sorry you encountered this issue and I hope you will give the game another chance.

Thanks for playing & commenting on your experience with the game! Your comment shows that you took your time to discover the game mechanics which apparently paid off in the end, well done! Thanks for all the praise, I think the game still has some issues but it is great to hear that players are already enjoying it in its current state.

Wish no further, I have released an update just now that added a "skip" button in the lower right corner. If you find the time, please comment on the other things as well so I have chance to fix these too. Thanks for playing & commenting!

Thanks for playing and the positive feedback! I'm currently working on an update for the game that still has not fully been tested yet, but it should arrive soon.

Thanks for sharing your experiences with the game! Discovering the weapons, finding out what they do best and dying in this process is part of the Planets Gone Rogue! experience. =) I hope it was not too frustrating and you'll give it another try soon. Thanks for playing!

Thanks! I noticed apparently nobody was using the Google Play button to check out the android version. I thought that people could mistake it for an static image that does nothing, therefore I added the wobble effect and some funny text to give it more attention.

Thanks for reporting the bug! I think you are referring to the railgun? Or do you mean the plasma gun? If it is the railgun I could imagine that this is rooted somewhere in the calculation for the partial damage for the planet, I have to double check this. I hope you did not find it too annoying and thanks for playing!

I think it is fun to find a working strategy, but I think this game still has some balance issues, for example players have told me multiple times that the rocket launcher is too powerful. But there is an update in the works that will address this along with other issues, and I'll try my best to deliver more updates until the balance is right. But thanks for playing and the positive comment!

Thanks for playing and commenting!

Thanks for spending so much time with this game and not giving up on it despite the difficulty issues mentioned earlier!

Thanks for playing! I got diverse comments on the difficulty so far, some people think it is way too hard, some think it is too easy once you have figured out a working strategy. I think different difficulty settings might be the answer for this, however I have to think of something to make such a change working together with the scoreboards, I guess I'll have to set up additional scoreboards for hard and easy difficulties.

Thanks for playing! Do you mean a better balanced difficulty in general or do you mean the possibility to switch between easy - medium - hard? I'm currently working on balancing the game according to player feedback and I released the first update today that addresses some of the suggestions people are making in the comments. I could also imagine adding a difficulty setting in the options, but then I would need to adjust other things like the score reporting as well, so I can't promise if I will be able to squeeze that in in the next updates. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for reporting this, I have to double check the tutorial to make sure you cannot buy things before you are supposed to to avoid this situation. If you start a "new campaign" from the main menu you should be able to redo the tutorial and avoiding the point where you got trapped. Thanks for playing, I hope you'll give it another chance!

Thank you for playing! As I wrote in an earlier reply I was worried people might have difficulties finding a good strategy to survive long enough to see the end of the game, so I'm glad you wrote this comment. =) I have not yet decided what kind of game I want to make next, but I have a lot of ideas that did not make it in this game, so it is not completely impossible that I'll make a sequel one day. ;)

Sorry you encountered such a difficult planet early on. :( I hope you will give it another time some times, the enemies and the galaxy layout is different when you start a new game, and you might encounter planets with different weapons at the beginning. If you do encounter a planet with missiles again, I would suggest saving all so your shields (or other defensive weapons) to deflect the missiles, and maybe concentrate the fire on the missile weapons until they break. Thank you very much for playing and your constructive feedback!

May I congratulate you: You are the first person ever who has completed the game! (I can tell from the "campaigns completed" high score). Thanks a lot that you put so much time into this game, I feared that nobody would be able to complete the game because they either would lose patience or would have difficulties developing the right strategy to upgrade their planet. Because you completed the game early on, I'm a bit more relaxed now since you have proven it is possible to beat it for someone who is new to the game. You rock! ;-)

Wow thank you, you are too kind! I was not sure what to expect when I uploaded the game and it is great to hear that people actually appreciate the long dialogues in the tutorial. I was worried everybody would be annoyed because it is so much to read before the game starts. Thanks for the praise, and as long as there are people as nice as you I will continue making games. Much appreciated!

Thanks for the feedback! The game was difficult to balance for me in the end since I already knew all the tricks / the best strategies. I will keep a close eye on how many people are able to finish the campaign, and I will adjust the difficulty accordingly. Thanks for playing!