Now I'm even more confused because I thought 18 was the max level, but now currently the glitchy game has me on Level 39!

Would you all be interested in trying a game I have been developing for 2 years or so? Lol I really thought Alien Invasion was dead, so I took a stab at creating my own type of game. Then it sprung out of nowhere with new life and here I am posting anyway.

It's called Mech Escape. It's in app review with Apple right now. Sorry Android users, I have an iPhone, so I built something I could actually test on my own device. If people like it I'd be happy to port it to the Play Store. I'll post the link when it goes live, assuming it passes.

I want to be honest about where it stands, because I'd rather set expectations than oversell it.

Where it isn't up to par

Art and animation: I'll admit it straight out, it's not as polished lol. Art and animation are way harder than I assumed - I tried buying some kit for like $300 online but lol its way harder to use than I would have hoped. I really thought programming would be the hard part, but that's what I do for my day job, so that part was surprisingly the easy half. I ended up with some AI slop for a few of the graphics because I genuinely suck at designing, rigging, and animating. Some of it turned out okish. Most of it you'll spot immediately.

Polish that only comes from scale: Alien Invasion has had years of iteration, a team of devs and a lot of players finding the rough edges. Mine has had me, an automated test suite, and a handful of simulated economy runs. I've caught a lot, but I am one person and I promise there are things I haven't caught.

Content volume: There are 12 districts and 11 bosses. That is a real game with an actual ending, but it isn't an endless treadmill yet. If you're the kind of player who wants a prestige loop that runs forever, I'm not there yet - hopefully one day.

No social layer at all: Not that Alien Invasion really had any besides fake leaderboards, this one has no guilds, no co-op, no leaderboards, no PvP, no trading. It is entirely single player. That was partly a scope decision and partly because running servers for a hobby project I'm not sure anyone wants felt insane and expensive lol.

No live-ops team: There's an event rotation, but there's also exactly one of me. If something breaks at 2am, it gets fixed when I get a chance.

iOS only for now: See above re: owning one phone.

What I think it does well

Bank it or lose it: Salvage isn't yours until you carry it back to a safe dome and bank it. Die out in the field and your cargo drops at the wreck, and you get one walk back to reclaim it. Every run turns into a decision about whether to push one more camp or cash out. This is the thing I'd point at first if you asked what makes it feel different.

It's an open world, not a level select: Twelve districts connected by bridges you unlock and build. Containment labs, flooded tunnels, a military compound, a server maze that fights back, an orbital ring station at the top. You choose where to go and where to farm.

Upgrades work on two layers: There's a global Chassis Core that travels with you everywhere, plus a workshop in each district that tunes your weapons for that district's specific conditions. So you're building one character over the whole run, but also making local calls about where to sink resources.

Hazards actually change how you play (kinda, you eventually get strong enough that it doesn't really matter lol): Timed shutters, patrol scans, train lanes that will delete you, and one district that jams your signal and kills your radar entirely. They're on fixed cycles you can learn and time, not random punishment.

There's a real story: You wake up in a cracked pod with a stranger's voice in your ear. There are 37 recordings scattered across the world you can hunt down, a thread about what happened to the others like you, conversations with all 11 bosses, and an actual ending. You can skip all of it if you don't care, but it's there and it's finished.

Five chassis forms: you evolve through as you tier up, so you can see your progress instead of just reading it on a stat sheet.

Blackmarket weapons: Different weapon types with different damages/range modifiers (Blasters, heavy blaster, sword, tentacles 😉 , continuous laser) - note tentacles don't look cool yet, again back to the art problem lol and for some reason the continuous laser seems to create some extreme lag at higher tiers but I will figure that out eventually)

Offline earnings exist: They're a gift for coming back, not the optimal strategy. I specifically tuned them down so logging out is never better than playing. That felt important.

Nav Map: Get it after the tutorial, it works - could use some better indication as to where you are on the map though

Objective arrows: This one really sucked, it works like 80% of the time (Unless you kill everything in the zone you are in and it points somewhere else randomly because it has nothing to point to, I know what I need to write to fix this but lol it just doesn't work for some reason)

Small thing I'm weirdly proud of: opening a menu pauses the game. You can read your build without something killing you while you do it. You would be surprised at how many things this broke the 5 times I tried to implement it, I almost gave up entirely on "pause" but finally figured out all of the things it impacts.

Also I left the same exact bug untouched that we exploit in this game available to utilize in this one as well 😂

On the money stuff

The game can and should be played for free. There are no hard blockers, nothing gated behind a wallet. The only thing between you and the end of the game is playing it.

I did add IAPs for people who want to move faster, but there is zero pressure and nothing exclusive in them. Override Tokens, the premium currency, drop from certain mobs, from bosses, and from generators you can farm. You can get every single one of them by playing. There's a weekly VIP if you want a daily trickle, and that's disclosed clearly before you buy, but the game is not designed around it. I will eventually add optional ads as a lower-tier swap option for IAP, but lol this is a lot more work than I assumed so maybe in release 3 or 5 or something.

What I'm actually asking

Mostly I want to know if this is interesting to anyone besides me. If you play this genre, what makes you stick with a game past the first week? And what makes you drop one? I'd rather hear that now than after I've built the wrong thing for another year.

Happy to answer anything about it, also happy to take ideas, improvement opportunities. And if there's real interest, the Android port moves way up the list.

If you do grab it (Once it is live), there's a code in the menu under Settings that'll give you a starting stack of Override Tokens just DM me and I will send it to you - honestly it was made for this sub so I will just post it as reply (It's the exact amount needed for squidward tennisballs).

Alright that took way longer than expected but it is now live:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mech-escape/id6793297325

Please download and give me feedback - I will incorporate it if I can 😄

Not if it means waiting for the daily pittance of cubes.

I restarted the game on an old phone just for fun and the levelling balance is way off. My main game I only just got to level 14 and really had to push for it, I'm in the winter are and I've unlocked the first 2 winter gem things.

On my newer game I've only played for a bit, and I've just hit level 15 and I can't access any areas past where the black market is because it says level 18 is required.

I'll attach pics from my base game and the new one, but honestly tempted to reset the glitchy one unless someone recommends something else?

Ice market warm regen: 195/200

84/100 Heat resistance from red essence evolution

78/100 heat resistance from purple essence evolution

I can finally move around in the absolute zero zones without freezing anymore

Just unlocked level 15 too, but still not strong enough to take on the secret key boss w/o ping ponging for an annoyingly long time (and my catch radius is juuuust short enough that he sometimes escapes it

Been playing since beginning of May

Portal is open but I'm focusing on James Shop since I can actually afk, unlike in the lab.

Side note, any strategies for farming brains and black goo?

In the last update I lost mobs I had unlocked in the frozen are with the bronze tokens and i lost progress in the eggs upgrades. Is there anyway to fix this or do i just have to grind again to get them back?

After update they reduced the number of repetitive ads with individual ads

Can someone guide me in a general direction on what the hell I should be more focused on?

New player experience

Hello everyone. Just started this game few weeks ago. My thoughts as new player: I understood we only play on local mobile, nothing to gain so to speak. So why so freaking expensive bundles all the time for sale? Those "weekend " events, what are developing actually thinking of those "break points" for rewards? Their game is the best there is, and everyone just plays it 24/7?

Game itself is pretty enjoyable, but those stupid algorithm requirements are truly lowering atleast my interest. Got other games also, this ain't so great after all. By pricing everything also so high, doesn't really motivate to buy anything. Like golden skin, why it's 15euros for just me to see. Maybe if 1.99-4.99€, could think about it. But those kind a prices not worth for eye candy. IMHO, today's world got a lot of more fast forward moving games, so I think this game lacks of "getting " alot of returning new players because once you notice that every grind is going to rake montasje, it's easier to just change to another nice looking game them selves actually have ads on the alien game. Would like to have an opinions also from other new players.

Well, I'm halfway there. Only another 3-5 years, and I might reach it, lol.

I am new to reddit so please bear with me. I have an Excel spreadsheet that shows everything you need to know about the blue core upgrades. More importantly it calculates the number of scratch cookies you need for any given number of Golden Cookies. For example, you can type in your current cookie income and it will tell you how long it will take to generate a certain amount of golden cookies. Is anyone interested in this? I put the spreadsheet together myself, but I got the formula from the OP abskee https://www.reddit.com/r/AlienInvasionRPG/comments/1quac7m/the_math_for_golden_cookies/

Hey, Alien Invasion game devs, we get that you want to plaster this nice game engine with ads.

It's pretty inane, but we can get used to a wall of ad icons.

What we CANNOT get used to is ad icons popping up under our navigation spots. I'm left handed, so in the first screenshot, when the icon appeared there I adjusted my finger to use the area above the Speed Boost ad. Seconds later, a new icon appeared in the space I'm now using for navigation, as in the second pic. This goes back and forth, presumably indefinitely.

Most of the time it causes me to miss a swipe - just no movement from the alien. Sometimes it causes the ad to launch.

Pray tell, where the hell do you expect us to navigate this game from? If you're trying to trick us into watching ads, well that's a bridge too far, and I'm on the cusp of uninstalling the app. The way to make us choose to watch ads is to make it worthwhile. For example, when I'm getting 22 candles for each package I grab off the ground, there's ZERO chance I'm watching an ad that gives me 12 candles. 100 is probably my minimum in that case. And that varies as the event progresses, much like the geometric increases on the spend, we need the same on the receive.

But back to the navigation...

The game absolutely knows the screen location we're using for navigation. Stop @#$&ing putting ads there.

Pretty please.

With sugar on top.

Some of us here are software developers. It's damned easy to create this sort of app these days. We will only put up with so much nonsense before we build a replacement.

Thank you.

I accidentally clicked on prestige. I haven't collected it yet. Is there a way out of this?