Cortex Command 1.0

sleepy dan’s redemption

which humble bundle was this in? I’m looking through my old saved Humble Bundle e-mails and I don’t see which one had Cortex Command in it. I’m 100% sure I bought it, just need to know which one.

sorry to hear you didn’t like it, allen. can you please give some specfics so we can improve it?

Bought it back in 2004, or so my memory will have me believe. It was a fun buggy-holy-shit-this-has-potential tech demo. Fast forward to today and it still has a lot of the minor issues, but has managed to wipe the major ones and is a fun game that still has a lot of potential for fun. Just check out the modding scene for even more madness.

swole before trolls

dude, where’s your shirt?

Booo

hahah how to beat the tutorial ? ^^

hehe enlighten me!??

Allen hates everything, don’t worry about it.

Wow, that was great fun. Just spent the past couple hours playing it. Feedback:

The interface feels pretty clunky at first, and I think this would be prohibitive to newcomers, but once past that hump I totally get the design vision behind this and it’s really great. The UI can be a pain, too, chiefly because of small fonts used in menus. Can the font be enlarged?

The gameplay itself is conceptually brilliant, though I’d have to say there are definitely noticeable issues and as another pointed out, “feels like a physics sandbox with some game elements tacked on, rather than a game with a physics engine.” Controlling the ragdoll style characters can be frustrating and requires some finesse. The random and chaotic nature of the gameplay is very fun, though.

The graphics and sound are also great but not without their own issues, like some inconsistencies in resolution/rendering. For example, the clouds have this weird dithering and overall ugliness compared to everything else. The environment tiles are top-notch though and the character sprites are pretty good.

If I had to rate this game in its current state I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5, with easy potential for a 4 to 4.5 if these issues were fixed.

Thanks for this game and I’ll definitely be playing more of it!

Calling this 1.0 is really stretching it… Unless this was all it was meant to be and if so then I am really dissapointed and anyone who honestly think this is an awesome job well done for 11 years is clearly…oh whatever nevermind.
As others already have pointed out, it’s not a game at this point, it’s an engine. I feel bad for the people on steam who got duped into buying this. But I know, I know, Dan is a friend of Derek and no critique allowed on tigsource. So just disregard this and call me a troll and go back to circle jerking eachother off.

Actually you are right and I didnt mean to attack you personally and for that I’m sorry.

I was referring to the usual fanboy defenders crowd and I’m just frustrated about the whole thing. Theres alot of people outraged on the steam forums about buying this game and rightly so imo. I too am (was) a longtime fan of CC so why am I and the steambuyers so utterly dissapointed by this release and you only have good things report about it?
The reason I’m getting so emotional about it is that I think bad indie releases hurts the scene in general (and theres been alot lately) and that we could and should be alot more selfcritical. As a indie developer myself I dont want “indie title” to become synonym with “half assed”.

After initially being dismayed by some of the reaction in the steam forums, I have come to realize it’s really only caused by a very small, very vocal minority, led by a couple of individuals who have been harassing me personally and trolling the data realms forums for many years under many different user names. For what reason? I’m not quite sure, but i suspect they got overly emotionally invested/attached to what they _imagined_ the game was going to be/become and especially _when_ it was going to get there.
The disappointment of it not reaching those lofty expectations is apparently causing irrational and uncontrollable rage in some, despite my best efforts of managing those expectations with big red disclaimers etc. I know: “welcome to the internet”…

The game has always been polarizing, which I take as a good sign overall, since it shows people care about it and its potential. It’s just a bummer that some decide to express themselves through personal attacks and sustained harassment when they could just take their refund and move on to the next game that suits them better.

You get emotional about “bad releases”, but please explain why this one deserves such a label? Tens of thousands of people have been happily paying $18 for this game in a MUCH less finished state for almost five years now. I can count on my two hands the total number of refund requests we have had during this period. The version 1.0 released on Steam is a complete game, fully playable, but NOT fully polished. That’s why it’s called “1.0” and not “final”. We don’t have direct control over the text that goes onto the steam store page, but I’ve asked valve to add some language clarifying the current state of the game. I sincerely hope that satisfies you!

I am extremely proud of how the game has turned out, and look forward to making it even better with steamworks integration, achievements, and added polish. All the gushingly positive comments, reviews and gameplay videos from people who “get it” and actually _enjoy_ the steep learning curve do balance out the bad apples who can’t seem to handle their shit when they come across something they don’t like. That’s life, I guess ~

Stop trolling.

Welp, turns out there’s no real solution to this problem and it was also pointed out in someone’s post on another forum, followed by a string of very harsh criticisms for this game :( I really, really wanted to like this. I gave it a very fair shake and stuck with it, thinking that the flaws were just a lack of my own understanding of the game’s complexity… but after hours of playing only revealed more problems than answers to previous issues, I’m left with the impression that perhaps the game is pretty broken.

It’s very disappointing, because the concept of this game is brilliant, I WANT to play a game that incorporates turn-based strategy with fast-paced real-time action. I WANT to play THIS game, but without it’s buggy, broken issues. In my opinion, being able to drop an infinite amount of anti-air drones across the map and spawn-kill any opponent who attempts to attack you is a huge, game-breaking oversight. There’s no counter-measure of dealing with these things, either.

Here are my suggestions of just a few methods you could use to solve this problem:

1) Orbital Strike. This option would be available to attacking players similarly to the surface scan. For a few thousand ounces of gold (maybe 5 – 10K?) the player would be able to fire an orbital strike which would clear the entire surface of the map before attacking. Since bases are typically built downward into the earth, most units would be completely safe.

2) Put a limit on the distance from your base/brain that you can place objects in build mode. This would also be a great solution to the problem.

3) Give the more sophisticated but heavier and slower drop ships MUCH more armor, so one missile doesn’t clip their wings and send them reeling. Allow the player to customize the loadout BEFORE starting the attack. Hell, if they want to drop their brain in a cargo crate, which is a lot faster and has a much lesser chance of getting shot down, allow this. If they want to arm their drop ship with a payload of bombs to neutralize anti-air drones on the surface, that would work, too.

I feel like the solutions to these problems are easy as pie and pretty much already built into the game’s tech if you only flipped a few switches. I really hope you’ll consider fixing this issue using one of my methods, because I don’t think I will be playing this as much until this issue is fixed :(

rest assured, we are still working on polishing it and adding steamworks integration, which will blow open the doors on the CC modding universe that has already matured for half a decade!

Okay, awesome. I do hope you focus on the polishing aspects over the Steam stuff, though; I couldn’t care less about achievements and all that. Are there currently mods that address some of these problems?

On another note, have you anyone from the modding community considered online multiplayer? Would something like that even be possible to patch in at this stage?

i feel like you’re making a mountain out of a molehill with this one AA exploit tactic that can be so easily remedied (as you pointed out several alternative ways).. does this really “break” the game completely for you? how about you just agree with your friend not to be lame and not cover the surface with AA turrets in the name of good sporting fun, until we implement and test a proper way to disable the exploit.

Networked multiplayer is not on the plate for CC 1. Its engine was programmed naively by me without the required rigorous determinism etc in mind. Our next project’s engine, on the other hand, has been built from the ground up to run a fully deterministic sim, and therefore is a much better candidate for networked mp.

Yeah, well that’s pretty much what we’re going to have to do to continue playing the game fairly. I’m sorry if it seems like I’m giving you such a hard time about this, it just really surprised me that this exploit wasn’t caught sooner since people have been playing the game for years. Wouldn’t you agree that a 1.0 software release should aim to be exploit-free? I understand that there will always be bugs and oversights, but I think that after 11 years people are going to hold you to a much greater scrutiny with these kinds of things!

Well, you might never see this, but I’m not a part of that very small, vocal minority, because although I paid for your game years ago, I haven’t said anything about it yet.

So here goes:

Ever since I paid for the game, I’ve never tried it or had it installed for more than 5 minutes. Why? I always encounter some interface quirk I never get past, and figure “well, it’s just an alpha/beta, it will get fixed”.

However, even the 1.0 version didn’t last more than 5 minutes either. First of all, in the combat tutorial when I was asked to switch control of characters, that didn’t work. I had to remap a few times to get it working (and I remapped to the same Q and E keys). Then I got to walk and jump around and get the first weapon. Only the AI instantly killed my robot and then swarmed the tutorial base, and I still had no clue as how to get more weapons, so I was just mowed down. Not really fun!

Second, I don’t think the strategy part has a tutorial at all. Or at least, I didn’t find it. I was making and ending turns and scanning (and scanning, and scanning because it seemed I wasn’t allowed to do anything else) without a clue what was going on. Meanwhile, my opponent seemed to do a whole bunch of things.

I bet there is a really nice game in there somewhere, but the user interface is not done for the masses, and I think that is why people are venting their frustration on the Steam forums; first the have to combat with a difficult interface and then they have to combat with a difficult game.

Beautiful looking game, but as this thread has heavily covered, there is much more to come that’ll make this game a lot better, so with that, I am looking forward to future updates! HIB3 buyer here! Good luck and keep improving CC! Always loved the visuals of this.

Hi guys. Long time lurker, first time poster. I’m sorry to chime in with a negative note, being a huge fan of this site and of its contributors, but having bought CC I must express my disappointment. At first I accepted the incompleteness. It’s in development. That’s fine. But playing the latest version is torture to me. I’ve given it many, many tries. I said to myself, maybe it’s like Spelunky: hard and a bit frustrating at first, but then the manifold rewards come. But no. When playing I’m mostly thinking why the fuck is this fucking piece of shit fucking not working like a god damned game should work? Again, I apologize for the negativity, but fuck. Buggy piece of shit.

How about a Demo? It’ll stop some of those haters. I love CC, And I hope it will be further developed.

Am I just missing something or is the balance in this game totally out of wack? Attacking any site with an established base seems like a crazy proposition since you drop in pretty much naked (regardless of how much budget you could have) and then need to fidget around in the menu, waiting for reinforcements to arrive while getting mercilessly hunted down.
Well, the game is generally pretty unpredictable though. In my first campaign attempt with 3 CPU:s I was getting stomped until I was left with one brain. I landed beside a steep cliff with a base on the top and started frantically digging through the menu when i heard someone shout “Ungh!” and got my first victory out of nowhere. After that I was sitting pretty as the guy who totally dominated the game didn’t attack me for some reason (out of brains?) Still, dethroning him was pretty impossible.
It’s an interesting game to mess around with, though the physics engine makes for lots of nasty surprises (units flailing and dropping their weapons, fresh dropships blowing up and crushing your expensive cargo, etc…)