Once Upon a Galaxy has been my default game since I first played it.
It’s an asynchronous alternating activation autobattler (like Arcane Rush, or Storybook Brawl/Hearthstone Battlegrounds but you play against ghosts). Games take about 10-15 minutes.
It’s largely public domain fantasy themed, but has been expanding into the “legally distinct” cultural references as they add content, basically every captain/unit/treasure is a reference.
The shop mechanic is simplified, there’s no currency, you just get a set of choices, and can pick 1. You get two shops per round by default, lots of ways to get extra.
Asynchronous play means that you face challenging opponents that naturally evolve with the meta game but you can also take time to make thoughtful decisions.
The draft pool for the shop has a large base pool that you add to by selecting a custom sebset from a second large pool as your captain’s deck. The progression is through unlocking cards for each captain’s secondary pool, and unlocking new captains. You can naturally earn all cards through play, most captains are free, new captains are paywalled for a limited time.
Monetization is through 3 paths: cosmetics, acceleration of card unlocks, access to paywalled captains. I haven’t found it to be particularly exploitative or negative feeling.
My only gripe is minor, that it doesn’t have mid-run save/resume, but that is on their road map.
There is essentially no story, if that matters to you.
If it’s not obvious, I’m really enthusiastic about this game. I’m not affiliated/sponsored in any way. Happy to answer any questions.
‘Antiyoy’ is a simple strategy game, fit well for shortish sessions. Free and with minimal permissions. Iirc ‘Antiyoy Classic’ is offline-only, while the regular one has multiplayer.
‘Diplicity’ is a multiplayer-only (afaik) strategy like ‘Risk’, but with zero element of chance, only diplomacy. However the games can be rather slow, from what I’ve heard.
‘Fabularium’ is an app for running text-adventure games — one of many such apps, but I like it because it supports modern game formats. You’ll need to download the games themselves elsewhere, mainly from ifdb.org — there are a lot of games, some of them with quite novel mechanics.
‘Hocus’ is a geometrical puzzle with impossible shapes. Iirc additional levels are paid.
I’ve heard that ‘Mindustry’ is a good open-source clone of ‘Factorio’, but idk how it plays on a phone screen.
The control scheme in Total Annihilation where you can que up lots of commands for units has largely been ignored by RTS game makers except in Supreme Commander and Spring/Recoil engine games such as Beyond All Reason and Zero-K. I think it is a perfect example of why the RTS genre in many respects died after hyperfocusing on making Starcraft-likes resulting in the stagnation of innovation in a genre that progressively catered more and more only to a very narrow range of brains/players who enjoyed simplistic explicit rock-paper-scissors unit relationships and endless fiddly micro.
Can you explain what you mean? I never played TA, but being able to queue commands is pretty common in RTS games. Did TA have some kind of system to further facilitate that, or was it just taken to an extreme?
In TA you could select a unit factory then issue move orders and set up patrol routes and then any units constructed by that factory would follow those orders. Also, if there was a unit executing a repeating move pattern, you could select it, hold shift and give it a new order. It would execute that order, then when done it would return to its original pattern.
To add to what the other guy said, Supreme commander allowed your units to synchronize shots, for example for the big guns on battleships, useful for punching through shields.
They also allowed you to queue orders, display them and then edit them. So you could set up one big patrol path for 100s of helis and fighters and defend your territory that way, and when you want to expand you can drag the patrol points and all of those 100s of units would automatically adjust.
Also there were heli transports with lift and drop points and you could use that to ferry units quicker than they would walk. So you could set the drop point closely behind the frontlines and advance the drop point with the front line, allowing for quicker resupply of troops.
Quite a bit more advanced than you would see in starcraft or AoE2 overall.
Well know that you have outed yourself as a cool indie dev you must eventually post some sneak previews of your game to a gaming/game development community on lemmy/the fediverse!
I have a selection of custom names that I usually choose from depending on genre and the characters appearance. It’s like a mix of self insertion and roleplaying.
I think that there is a time factor and a complication factor. Like the longer the game lasts and the fewer characters available to name, the more people who will name and customize characters.
I wonder how many people completed Skyrim with the name “Prisoner”, though.
It doesn’t actually appear anywhere in game but Oblivion’s main character has an internal name in the editor. “Bendu Olo”. Very Geoge Lucas kind of name.
In web development, it’s customary to create a user named something like Constantine Constantinovich Constantinopolsky and see that the interface accommodates it everywhere.
Some racing games, and in particular the third-party app Crew Chief, allow the player to either set a name or choose an addressing like ‘dude’. I don’t like using a personal name, so my racing engineer says stuff like “an incident in turn five, mate”.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne