PyWeek - Operation MoonLight - feedback

This looks cool but unfortunately I couldn't play it because it goes beyond the maximum resolution of my laptop. Sorry. :(

Was pretty hard to understand what I should be doing, even after reading the readme. But there seemed to be a lot of cool things going on.

It take much time to play, mainly waiting the transmit the energy to the right town. But nice game concept. Took me like 4 tries to find out how to make money.

This game needs a tutorial. When you start it you have multiple buttons, options, building, things, costs, upgrades, contracts and no idea what to do with any of it. I can clearly see that much effort went into making this, but with 30 other games competing for attention, I'm not willing to spend an hour trying to figure out what to do. Even if just the info in the readme was available in-game, that would maybe be enough to hook me. The art style is not very attractive, the buildings and landscape is ok, but the GUI and font used ... sorry, it hurts my eyes and makes me want to play even less.

Quite a fun game, and well polished, although the gameplay could have done with some more work.

The tech tree and contracts are a little bit broken, and the mechanics of having to wait for your contracted city are annoying, esp. since hydrogen production doesn't stop when your battery is maxed and wastes energy/hydrogen.

In the end, it seems like the best way forward is not to unlock much, just solar and batteries and then pick the contract for the city that's just highlighted, then send before it switches :)

ps. I don't think I ever got a contract for Shanghai, maybe there's an off-by-one error somewhere?

Simulator of good and rich enterpreneur! Just send clean energy from solar panels for free for everyone and occasionally do some contracts to become exceptionaly rich!

Looks good but had a couple of bugs. Unballanced even after fixes.

Very addictive. Don't know why.

When I play game, I feel like I am on moon.

I really wanted to like this game, but I just couldn’t figure out how to play: the rules of the structures etc. didn’t make sense to me: I downloaded the latest github. I found I could build stuff until my money ran out, but I could never produce enough energy to send to Earth at a constant rate without it getting drained too fast, so I guess this is why I couldn’t make any money to keep playing? Also there was nothing I could build for collectors or combiners: not sure how to activate these. After tinkering around as much as I could I never figured out how to progress beyond building a handful of batteries and solar panels until my money ran out. The graphics looked nice, and the choice of music was good. This game really could have done with a tutorial, or even just a little bit more explanation in the readme, to properly explain the mechanic.

I think this game would have benefited from a tutorial series of steps. I've read the instructions but I find myself just randomly clicking around things without any sense of making progress or purpose.

Kudos for an obviously large amount of work that's gone into this. I kinda see how it's a bit like a RTS with a technology tree and placing things on a map, but I can't figure out what on earth is going on..!

I had fun building out a sprawling network and making loads of money.

I would have liked a more detailed README or tutorial. It wasn't clear to me what was happening to my hydrogen or how much of my power was solar, etc. My hydrogen seemed to be going away and yet some contracts seemed not to complete.

Very well made but the gameplay is not hugely accessible - I reckon a tutorial video is needed to properly grasp the mechanics quickly.

The mouse movement is a tad temperamental and sometimes doesn't scroll without a bit of mouse twitching.

Anyway, the graphic style is very consistent and quite nice - I appreciate the custom icons and colour detail.

The placement mechanics are very clear and the button menu is well structured (though it would be nice to quit the placing tool when clicking back in the menu, at the moment you click back AND right click to reset the pointer and exit the placing tool)

Overall well implemented and designed, but the core mechanics make the game less pick-up-and-play and enjoyable - an alternative use for all the mechanics could be tower defense (more interactivity/reward/challenge)?

complexity and unclear goal (what is the reward? what is the challenge?) let down the nice visuals and good UI

Reminded me of computer games I used to play in grade school 25 years ago. Became tedious kind of quickly.

(NB. I rated the final submission, not the GitHub repository, to be fair to the other entrants.) Quite an ambitious entry, so it's a shame that it didn't really come with good instruction or a tutorial. I couldn't really figure out how to play the game properly. Nonetheless, it looks quite promising. I really hope you continue developing this game. Well done!

A lot going on. Not quite my kind of game. Took me a while to work out what I should be doing

Plenty of options. Worked smoothly

The pyweek version has the case insensitive filename error.

Why would you use anything but solar panels? Producing 2 hydrogen costs 5*2 = 10 energy and the plant gives back 12. Even upgraded, this is net +4 energy vs +6 from solar panels. Dihydrogen give 40 energy for 2*24=48 cost.

Even in the fixed version, upgrading the transimitter too much seems to be a downgrade since producing enough energy to keep the transmitter always on makes it much easier to fulfill contracts (I know the need more day-cycles later on).

Other than balancing, everything else seem to work pretty well.

Some bugs from the pyweek that may no longer be ther.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "main.py", line 5, in <module>
gameManager.start()
File "/tmpfs/operation-moonlight/modules/gameManager.py", line 152, in start
self._earth.sendEnergy(transmitter, batteriesList)
File "/tmpfs/operation-moonlight/objects/earth.py", line 34, in sendEnergy
if leftToSend <= 0:
TypeError: '<=' not supported between instances of 'NoneType' and 'int'

The transmitter seem to always consume energy regardless of if you clicked "send energy" or not in the Earth pane.

Otherwise seems like a pretty elaborate game.

Window got too big for my screen, really couldn't play the game.

Phew, I want to like it. But the whole "one contract at a time, and you can only transmit at certain times" feels like you can't actually set goals and meet them, you can just... wait.