comments for Planetidal

A bit confused on how you gain ember

Small bug, some upgrade does not work upon refreshing the page, most mainly, "less tiny". I fully upgraded it, but upon refreshing the page, the tiny rock weight went back to 10, severly slowing down progress.

Hey Dev here! For all the people playing, just released a new patch that reworks Embers! I hope that they are far more understandable and better now <3

Just wanted to say I'm really loving the game so far. Any chance you could add export/import saves as text strings instead of files? It would help a lot with the galaxy cloud save feature. Thanks!

I love so much about this. The mechanics for each planet are unique and clearly had a lot of thought put into them.

There are some UI elements I take issue with: I would expect a button to be at its highest contrast when it's press-able, but the upgrade buttons are the opposite. This makes some sense for the ice world toggle, if we think of the button as on or off rather than press-able or not, but then, they appear to be down when they're in their off state and up when they're in their on state, which isn't what I'd expect. I'd say that I could never intuit the state of buttons at a glance. It is actually convenient for those H and O buttons to be toggles, but then I'm not sure there should be two of them. As it is, if I see that one of the tanks is empty and I click the button for that tank, I would expect it to turn that tank on, rather than toggle it (possibly away from the state I'm seeking). There's no way as far as I can tell to discern which prestige resource is which, except by trial and error and memorizing the symbols. Some of the upgrade tooltips aren't perfectly clear: for instance, I believe it mentions flame being converted into carbon, so I thought that you were supposed to build up a bunch of flame and then turn the heat off. Imagine my surprise when the last .4 flame turned into the same amount of carbon as the first 4000. It took me a while to get used to navigating around the different tabs. 'a' is the hotkey to switch to alpha, and to collect alpha, so if you don't notice which tab you're on, you can collect early by mistake. Possibly there could be a miniaturized version of the interactive tab on the upgrade tab itself so that you only need to switch when you want a more detailed view. Just showing '8/15' with a small collect button on the alpha tab, for instance.

I hate that you have to choose between actual speed and quality of life in the ice world. Ice is obviously a limited resource with a harshly scaling cost and there was never a point that I reached where automation wouldn't have meant a significant sacrifice. I also think the first stage of automation in the first world is more likely to cause a new player to not realize that most of the production from the alpha planet comes from letting the bar fill up than it is to ever actually be useful. Maybe if it collected the pile at 1/x it would be convenient for later runs at least. The upgrade to grant a percentage of income when there's a full bar also seems nearly useless. It doesn't appear to work with any of the multipliers, so you can get 100k remnants for emptying a full pile, or <1 remnant per tick for letting it stay full. I guess you can earn a tiny income while getting carbon, but even with every pure remnant upgrade I could reach on the prestige tree, I didn't even notice that tiny trickle.

The first prestige for both the ice and fire planets is kind of an insane grind for very, very little benefit, compared to the first two prestige resources which are practically free if you do short prestiges (literally free for the travel nodes). I like that maxing upgrades can unlock others--the skill tree nature of that--but it did lead to maxing some upgrades that weren't worth it only to find out they unlocked nothing. Maybe an indicator is warranted?

I think there's a bug where multipliers linger when you level up the alpha planet. I notice my first collection would always be several thousand and then drop back to single or double digits. Somehow I got to -1 on one of my prestige resources.

All complaining aside,this is one of the most interesting and innovative games I've played in the genre in a long time and I did genuinely love it. I'm not sure if there's much content that I didn't reach, but I'm not sure if I have the heart for another fire or ice grind just now. Best of luck and I hope to see more to come!

I don't like how the barcode graphic is used for both upgrades you can purchase and upgrades that have already been maxed. The pixel art for the upgrade pics is kinda neat, so I don't like that it goes away in an uninformative way. It'd be fine if it the barcode only showed up for (currently) maxed upgrades, though.

I still don't get Embers now. It says I need to lose heat without making carbon to get embers. How do turn off carbon accumulation with 0 heatmetre? The Heat/Flame to next ember won't budge regardless of any setting I've tried.

Anomaly stuff is confusing and badly explained, I haven't touched any of it because it sounds like I'm at risk of making the game permanently harder for myself in ways I don't understand, for rewards that I don't know what they do, so the only safe approach is to avoid it entirely. It could really use some clarification to guide players on how to interact with it.

When Vulcan says "Heat left till next ember", what is Heat? I see flames, carbon and the heatmetre, but I don't see Heat anywhere. And the ember stat doesn't move.

I think that a "what's next?" tab would be really good, because I was confused quite a bit. Otherwise, absolutely love this game.

less tiny randomly reset and when this happens so does the pile

I would really like more info about stats (like the chance display for the pool upgrade ice release), maybe even a dedicated stat page. That would go a long way toward making the game easier to understand and it shouldn't be too hard.

On anti-reality, if you click a node you already bought, you waste a fragment.

In the first stage (I don't know how to name it, at the beginning I guess), when I ctrl + V, the game somehow resets as if I'm doing a hard reset.

Seems interesting so far excited to keep going

Dev Here!
I am very sorry for the issues with the less tiny upgrade (and other upgrades), and the accidental issue with the antireality reset. I also changed the ember scaling and made it a lot smaller. If you lost upgrades because of the Antireality issue, then I suggest going into the save file and giving yourself some fragments (it is encoded in base64)

Anti reality nodes seem to sometimes deactivate after a antireality? And I can't buy them back either.

What is the chance to gain ember? I feel like I've lost over 10k heat and I haven't gotten a single ember. How much heat loss should I be trying to gain ember at?

ok at first i was a little underwhelmed, but after a little bit of messing around i have to say the mechanics of pool are pretty good. impressive. this game could go places.

This is a very lovely game! I do think that getting Ember is very confusing to understand. Honestly need a text that says how much Flame you lost, the ember roll chance for that loss and whether you won that chance or not. I picked Vulcan first and right now I'm just sitting at 3 heat hoping to magically gain Ember, i suppose. Still, I really dig the UI vibes in this game!