In addition to some suggestions I have for the player experience, we encountered the following issues:
-Experienced an issue where the AA gunner attempted to interact with the loot box machine, after which his mouse look was disabled and his avatar became frozen on our screens. He attempted to leave and re enter, but the frozen avatar remained and even though he could move around on his screen, we could not see him.
-Similarly, after dying while trying to work out controls and things with just one player, I became stuck in mouse controls and could not interact with the menu, forcing me to ctrl-alt-delete my way out.
-During all runs, experienced an issue where pick up items were not synced across player screens. This presented issues in coordinating with bow gunner whom was in charge of the tractor beam as well.
-Periodically, the entire ships and all characters would begin rapidly teleportation back and forth between their current position and one about a feet away from where they were. This seemed to affect graphics only, and did not cause other issues.
-I don't know enough about game design to phrase this any better, but there was a weirdly high GPU load reported by the entire squad compared to how graphically intensive the game appears. My machine is older, so slow down or having to decrease resolution is not uncommon for me, but the bow gunner just purchased a new computer last year and was also forced to down rez their screen manually to get the game running smoothly.
-Building on the last issue, in the option menus, the screen rez options did not work for me. I could change them, but they did not affect the game or change anything. We had to do it in pc display settings
My personal suggestions regarding helmsmen and engineering duty:
-Please add a directional accelerometer and speedometer to the helm station UI, and perhaps an option to have the steering wheel have more feed back when not pushing the turn button. Being able to see only inside the cockpit, it was somewhat disorienting to pilot the railgunner with the slight lag between making adjustments on the controls and then waiting for the actual ship to respond.
-Suggest replacing some missile firing hard points on enemies with AOE effects similar to the nuke, possibly smaller, like mortars. The primary concern of the helm during our play throughs was simply to point the bow gunner in the correct direction, and making more damage dodgeable would probably fill out the role somewhat.
-Suggest adding an interface to open loot boxes either in the crew quarters or next to the upgrade console on the bridge. Duties had to be split up between crew, and having the boxes down with the bow gunner was inconvenient because we were unable to adequately communicate back and forth on how to use the device due to everyone being new, and already the bow gunner had been assigned the tractor beam as well. Both loot boxes and upgrades are essentially part of the same system, and trying to haggle with another player down stairs would have been a bit silly, so I had to stop and go down to the cargo hold every time something needed done.
-Please add an explanation of what each part of the UI in the top left of the screen means.
Feedback regarding the gunner's stations:
For this next section, the feedback regards a three man crew which had chose to assign helm, upgrades, and loot to one player, replace both guns on the upper deck with AA guns and assign them as well as the shield projector to another, and with the bow gunner operating the Ion cannon, tractor beam, and railgun on the lower deck. We found this to be most convenient...
-Suggest that the railgun fold flat or lower on to the deck, possibly under it. I think the bower gunner complained at one point that it obstructed the view on one side. I did not wish to move it back upstairs as that would have left a blind spot in the air defenses.
-Speaking of the railgun, I'm not sure if this is balance issue that implies it needs buffed, or that the other charge up gun need nerfed, but we pretty much never used it after we upgraded everything. It may need a rework, or perhaps some alternative “super weapon”, such as the nuke as another option for craft with already adequate anti-shipping weapons. Aoe of some kind would be welcome.
-Regarding this last thing, some more weapon choices would be nice, perhaps missiles or a mortar/hedgehog/etc or a mine layer would work.
-Similarly, adjusting enemy design to make weapon choice more important or to further correspond to specific enemy weakness than it already does might make ship design and upgrade choice feel more dynamic.
-Suggest reworking the shield projector to be more dynamic. We mainly just had the AA operator put it up for the boss encounters, and it would last for the entire time it took the bow gunner to pulverize the boss. Maybe have it have less health but charge up other weapons when it absorbs damage, or if it already has some secondary effect we didn't notice, make the effect more obvious.
I leave this as an after thought as I imagine the full game will have more options for difficulty. I know I had previously said the game should be easy enough for three drunk people that play it once a month and still have a good time, but upon playing, perhaps just a bit more difficulty might be welcome.
All this said, after restarting the game three times and lowering our screen rez to get it working, the bow gunner and AA operator both reported that they had a great time and loved the concept of the game. Working together cooperatively like this was great for group comradery, and we all seem to agree that ship design and piloting are an engaging and entertaining game play elements.
We'll look into the bugs like the control lockouts and desyncs. Long term we do plan to dig into optimization, but probably not a high priority until we are close to the steam demo release (unless the stability/framerate starts to become a serious issue).
We can see about adding some heads up display information for the pilot so they can see the force of the turn is being applied, as well as an indicator for the brakes.
We can add more missiles to enemies, one type used to always have them but now only elite versions get them, so we may adjust and give those long range missiles to a basic enemy instead. Those ones are fun to dodge, they show a circle like for the nuke. We also plan to add more things for the pilot to need to dodge...
Understood on the loot selection, we might add other spots for it to be accessible from so there is an option for who can choose it based on availability. We do want players to move around the ship though and not just sit at a gun the whole time, since that's not as fun, so we are also thinking of ways to have other things to do around the ship that would make getting up from a gun more worthwhile.
We can add further tooltips to explain the healthbars. They used to explicitly say what they were, but it was a little clunky looking. Perhaps a tooltip at the beginning + can be seen from the pause menu overlayed on the UI could help.
We've waffled on what the railgun should be able to do...moving it to other spots does make it into a blinder, which is not ideal, so we thought about removing the ability to move it around (it has a limited sight range, so requires coordination between the pilot and railgunner + possibly tractor beam to nail a shot - this limited sight range is rougher in different positions). Having some kind of animation to fold it away when not mounted could be cool, and lets its positioning be more versatile, but not quite in scope for what we have planned so far (none of the other guns have animations either besides vfx)...so we'll think about it. It is the signature weapon of the railgunner ship, so regarding the next piece of feedback, we obviously don't want to have it be overshadowed by others like the ion cannon, but it already oneshots most enemies (and has some AOE actually, not that you can really tell when something dies in one hit). We'll think of ways to improve it, like having a single path upgrade tree, or higher base stats, or maybe a tie in with other mechanics.
Other weapons are being considered, and likely will be part of the steam demo when more content is added. Mine layer was also something we were considering, though not as a gun...(also not sure what hedgehog means in this context).
Long term, we would like to pursue having different weapons better for certain enemies/situations. This would make the loadout selection that much more important and interesting. Frankly, it would require significant changes to the current enemies to achieve that, but with the content we have planned for the steam demo, we will likely revisit the current enemies to make the engagement with them more interesting in that way.
Heard on the shield projector, definitely has too much health atm, feels trivial to use. Having an active part to do would be great as well to make it a more viable station than flat defense, like parrying shots or absorbing energy etc.
The game was a lot more difficult before the flying enemies were nerfed, so perhaps their damage can be brought up a bit. The boss (from experience) is very hard in single player, challenging for two, and fairly simple for three or more (at that point, you can have a dedicated shield person). We can look into ways to provide more challenge, like maybe elites do more damage or have more guns, maybe some things scale based on number of players so it's not such a drastic change in difficulty level (currently nothing of the sort happens).
Thanks for putting all this together, sorry about the issues you faced when initially setting up, and glad you had fun! Thanks for supporting the game!
These are going to be in order of pertinence. Although, there's nothing truly game breaking and the demo is solid for a early beta.
Clipping and barriers - there's parts on the ship where you can jump and phase your head through. As well as there's a barrier that stops you from jumping off but it's not 100% secure. Also there was a point where a buoy enemy fell through the floor and shot me from under the map.
Enemies - although I was playing only with 2 people holy mother of GOD there's a lot of enemies. I'm unsure if you can die in this version but if you can the health pool is way too high for your ship. We were sitting there killing ads for like 5 minutes straight (unable to kill them faster than they spawned) and still didn't explode.
Particles - specifically the dust particles kicked up from your ship make it near impossible to see when doing certain maneuvers. My pilot was reversing and I was trying to shoot backwards and had to aim off the red croshair to get any type of hits
Optimization and options - it's beta I expect this. But just gotta put it in here that it needs a little more optimization. Options were actually really good but my main gripe is a full-screen mode
Menus - I thought I had soft locked the game after opening a menu with (E). Doesn't seem intuitive to press (E) again to get out of it. Maybe still keep (E) but add (ESC) as well.
Reloading - adding a reload button to preemptively replenish your weapons so you don't have to sit there and spam the rest of the weapon out to get it replenished.
UI - I'm not sure exactly what yet but the UI seems off. Maybe because it's too Stagnant, or that there's not a lot on it. But it seems off somehow
To the good stuff - the UI for the steering is amazing. Always know where you're going and how fast. The weapons feel good and satisfying, maybe a bit of tweaking in audio to really give it that umph that they need but design and feel were great.
Going to try it with a more full crew next but here and now it's got an amazing baseline for where it's going.
Yeah the walls on the ship haven't been a huge priority to fix compared to features, once we made it so you can respawn if you fall off that got deprioritized. By the steam demo we will likely have those walls a little more cleaned up. I'm actually more curious about the buoy that was under the floor - they should set their height based on the terrain, so if you happen to remember where in the map it was, I'd like to look into that further.
I'm very surprised you didn't die - the enemies used to really pound away at you but we recently nerfed the flying ones a lot so they don't overwhelm. If you're pretty good about picking up armor packs though, you can stay alive fairly easily, but the boss can be overwhelming still without a full squad. We'll probably pull down the spawn rate, maybe up the damage a little bit to make them feel more impactful but less overwhelming.
We'll look into that dust particle issue - it shouldn't play them when the ship is reversing (for that exact reason) but I have a feeling it's not syncing the engine setting over multiplayer properly. When you were going forward but shooting enemies behind you, did you feel like the dust was still in the way?
Optimization and balance is going to be a big focus for us since we are pretty much done feature wise (for the demo), so we will try to get things running smoothly. F11 works for making it fullscreen just via windows, but we are working on fleshing out those options so you can set it (and it stays that way) in the saved settings.ini.
Menus - we'll think about this...currently ESC is how you open the pause menu, meaning you wouldn't be able to go into options from those menus unless you double tapped (leave menu > open pause menu). It is intuitive though to hit ESC to leave, so we'll come up with something.
Reload button is a good idea, one we've considered before. It would mean adjusting the controls around a bit since it would be R to reload, meaning upgrades would have to be on something else (F, Q, Z, V...who knows).
UI is something we are still trying to improve, though I imagine you are talking about the ingame UI, which we recently updated, rather than main menu UI (which is our next project). We can see about adding more life to it, maybe some VFX/animations, though that might come as an update post initial steam demo release. If you have specific feedback for it though, we'd be happy to hear it.
Glad you like the steering UI and weapons design! They've definitely gotten a majority of the focus so far.
With two players, did you manage to beat the boss? Since you mentioned not being able to die in the demo that makes me curious...
Thanks for writing all this up! Looking forward to the feedback with a full crew (if you have more to share!).
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In addition to some suggestions I have for the player experience, we encountered the following issues:
-Experienced an issue where the AA gunner attempted to interact with the loot box machine, after which his mouse look was disabled and his avatar became frozen on our screens. He attempted to leave and re enter, but the frozen avatar remained and even though he could move around on his screen, we could not see him.
-Similarly, after dying while trying to work out controls and things with just one player, I became stuck in mouse controls and could not interact with the menu, forcing me to ctrl-alt-delete my way out.
-During all runs, experienced an issue where pick up items were not synced across player screens. This presented issues in coordinating with bow gunner whom was in charge of the tractor beam as well.
-Periodically, the entire ships and all characters would begin rapidly teleportation back and forth between their current position and one about a feet away from where they were. This seemed to affect graphics only, and did not cause other issues.
-I don't know enough about game design to phrase this any better, but there was a weirdly high GPU load reported by the entire squad compared to how graphically intensive the game appears. My machine is older, so slow down or having to decrease resolution is not uncommon for me, but the bow gunner just purchased a new computer last year and was also forced to down rez their screen manually to get the game running smoothly.
-Building on the last issue, in the option menus, the screen rez options did not work for me. I could change them, but they did not affect the game or change anything. We had to do it in pc display settings
My personal suggestions regarding helmsmen and engineering duty:
-Please add a directional accelerometer and speedometer to the helm station UI, and perhaps an option to have the steering wheel have more feed back when not pushing the turn button. Being able to see only inside the cockpit, it was somewhat disorienting to pilot the railgunner with the slight lag between making adjustments on the controls and then waiting for the actual ship to respond.
-Suggest replacing some missile firing hard points on enemies with AOE effects similar to the nuke, possibly smaller, like mortars. The primary concern of the helm during our play throughs was simply to point the bow gunner in the correct direction, and making more damage dodgeable would probably fill out the role somewhat.
-Suggest adding an interface to open loot boxes either in the crew quarters or next to the upgrade console on the bridge. Duties had to be split up between crew, and having the boxes down with the bow gunner was inconvenient because we were unable to adequately communicate back and forth on how to use the device due to everyone being new, and already the bow gunner had been assigned the tractor beam as well. Both loot boxes and upgrades are essentially part of the same system, and trying to haggle with another player down stairs would have been a bit silly, so I had to stop and go down to the cargo hold every time something needed done.
-Please add an explanation of what each part of the UI in the top left of the screen means.
Feedback regarding the gunner's stations:
For this next section, the feedback regards a three man crew which had chose to assign helm, upgrades, and loot to one player, replace both guns on the upper deck with AA guns and assign them as well as the shield projector to another, and with the bow gunner operating the Ion cannon, tractor beam, and railgun on the lower deck. We found this to be most convenient...
-Suggest that the railgun fold flat or lower on to the deck, possibly under it. I think the bower gunner complained at one point that it obstructed the view on one side. I did not wish to move it back upstairs as that would have left a blind spot in the air defenses.
-Speaking of the railgun, I'm not sure if this is balance issue that implies it needs buffed, or that the other charge up gun need nerfed, but we pretty much never used it after we upgraded everything. It may need a rework, or perhaps some alternative “super weapon”, such as the nuke as another option for craft with already adequate anti-shipping weapons. Aoe of some kind would be welcome.
-Regarding this last thing, some more weapon choices would be nice, perhaps missiles or a mortar/hedgehog/etc or a mine layer would work.
-Similarly, adjusting enemy design to make weapon choice more important or to further correspond to specific enemy weakness than it already does might make ship design and upgrade choice feel more dynamic.
-Suggest reworking the shield projector to be more dynamic. We mainly just had the AA operator put it up for the boss encounters, and it would last for the entire time it took the bow gunner to pulverize the boss. Maybe have it have less health but charge up other weapons when it absorbs damage, or if it already has some secondary effect we didn't notice, make the effect more obvious.
I leave this as an after thought as I imagine the full game will have more options for difficulty. I know I had previously said the game should be easy enough for three drunk people that play it once a month and still have a good time, but upon playing, perhaps just a bit more difficulty might be welcome.
All this said, after restarting the game three times and lowering our screen rez to get it working, the bow gunner and AA operator both reported that they had a great time and loved the concept of the game. Working together cooperatively like this was great for group comradery, and we all seem to agree that ship design and piloting are an engaging and entertaining game play elements.
Wow, thanks for all the detailed feedback!
We'll look into the bugs like the control lockouts and desyncs. Long term we do plan to dig into optimization, but probably not a high priority until we are close to the steam demo release (unless the stability/framerate starts to become a serious issue).
We can see about adding some heads up display information for the pilot so they can see the force of the turn is being applied, as well as an indicator for the brakes.
We can add more missiles to enemies, one type used to always have them but now only elite versions get them, so we may adjust and give those long range missiles to a basic enemy instead. Those ones are fun to dodge, they show a circle like for the nuke. We also plan to add more things for the pilot to need to dodge...
Understood on the loot selection, we might add other spots for it to be accessible from so there is an option for who can choose it based on availability. We do want players to move around the ship though and not just sit at a gun the whole time, since that's not as fun, so we are also thinking of ways to have other things to do around the ship that would make getting up from a gun more worthwhile.
We can add further tooltips to explain the healthbars. They used to explicitly say what they were, but it was a little clunky looking. Perhaps a tooltip at the beginning + can be seen from the pause menu overlayed on the UI could help.
We've waffled on what the railgun should be able to do...moving it to other spots does make it into a blinder, which is not ideal, so we thought about removing the ability to move it around (it has a limited sight range, so requires coordination between the pilot and railgunner + possibly tractor beam to nail a shot - this limited sight range is rougher in different positions). Having some kind of animation to fold it away when not mounted could be cool, and lets its positioning be more versatile, but not quite in scope for what we have planned so far (none of the other guns have animations either besides vfx)...so we'll think about it. It is the signature weapon of the railgunner ship, so regarding the next piece of feedback, we obviously don't want to have it be overshadowed by others like the ion cannon, but it already oneshots most enemies (and has some AOE actually, not that you can really tell when something dies in one hit). We'll think of ways to improve it, like having a single path upgrade tree, or higher base stats, or maybe a tie in with other mechanics.
Other weapons are being considered, and likely will be part of the steam demo when more content is added. Mine layer was also something we were considering, though not as a gun...(also not sure what hedgehog means in this context).
Long term, we would like to pursue having different weapons better for certain enemies/situations. This would make the loadout selection that much more important and interesting. Frankly, it would require significant changes to the current enemies to achieve that, but with the content we have planned for the steam demo, we will likely revisit the current enemies to make the engagement with them more interesting in that way.
Heard on the shield projector, definitely has too much health atm, feels trivial to use. Having an active part to do would be great as well to make it a more viable station than flat defense, like parrying shots or absorbing energy etc.
The game was a lot more difficult before the flying enemies were nerfed, so perhaps their damage can be brought up a bit. The boss (from experience) is very hard in single player, challenging for two, and fairly simple for three or more (at that point, you can have a dedicated shield person). We can look into ways to provide more challenge, like maybe elites do more damage or have more guns, maybe some things scale based on number of players so it's not such a drastic change in difficulty level (currently nothing of the sort happens).
Thanks for putting all this together, sorry about the issues you faced when initially setting up, and glad you had fun! Thanks for supporting the game!
These are going to be in order of pertinence. Although, there's nothing truly game breaking and the demo is solid for a early beta.
Clipping and barriers - there's parts on the ship where you can jump and phase your head through. As well as there's a barrier that stops you from jumping off but it's not 100% secure. Also there was a point where a buoy enemy fell through the floor and shot me from under the map.
Enemies - although I was playing only with 2 people holy mother of GOD there's a lot of enemies. I'm unsure if you can die in this version but if you can the health pool is way too high for your ship. We were sitting there killing ads for like 5 minutes straight (unable to kill them faster than they spawned) and still didn't explode.
Particles - specifically the dust particles kicked up from your ship make it near impossible to see when doing certain maneuvers. My pilot was reversing and I was trying to shoot backwards and had to aim off the red croshair to get any type of hits
Optimization and options - it's beta I expect this. But just gotta put it in here that it needs a little more optimization. Options were actually really good but my main gripe is a full-screen mode
Menus - I thought I had soft locked the game after opening a menu with (E). Doesn't seem intuitive to press (E) again to get out of it. Maybe still keep (E) but add (ESC) as well.
Reloading - adding a reload button to preemptively replenish your weapons so you don't have to sit there and spam the rest of the weapon out to get it replenished.
UI - I'm not sure exactly what yet but the UI seems off. Maybe because it's too Stagnant, or that there's not a lot on it. But it seems off somehow
To the good stuff - the UI for the steering is amazing. Always know where you're going and how fast. The weapons feel good and satisfying, maybe a bit of tweaking in audio to really give it that umph that they need but design and feel were great.
Going to try it with a more full crew next but here and now it's got an amazing baseline for where it's going.
Thanks for all the feedback!
Yeah the walls on the ship haven't been a huge priority to fix compared to features, once we made it so you can respawn if you fall off that got deprioritized. By the steam demo we will likely have those walls a little more cleaned up. I'm actually more curious about the buoy that was under the floor - they should set their height based on the terrain, so if you happen to remember where in the map it was, I'd like to look into that further.
I'm very surprised you didn't die - the enemies used to really pound away at you but we recently nerfed the flying ones a lot so they don't overwhelm. If you're pretty good about picking up armor packs though, you can stay alive fairly easily, but the boss can be overwhelming still without a full squad. We'll probably pull down the spawn rate, maybe up the damage a little bit to make them feel more impactful but less overwhelming.
We'll look into that dust particle issue - it shouldn't play them when the ship is reversing (for that exact reason) but I have a feeling it's not syncing the engine setting over multiplayer properly. When you were going forward but shooting enemies behind you, did you feel like the dust was still in the way?
Optimization and balance is going to be a big focus for us since we are pretty much done feature wise (for the demo), so we will try to get things running smoothly. F11 works for making it fullscreen just via windows, but we are working on fleshing out those options so you can set it (and it stays that way) in the saved settings.ini.
Menus - we'll think about this...currently ESC is how you open the pause menu, meaning you wouldn't be able to go into options from those menus unless you double tapped (leave menu > open pause menu). It is intuitive though to hit ESC to leave, so we'll come up with something.
Reload button is a good idea, one we've considered before. It would mean adjusting the controls around a bit since it would be R to reload, meaning upgrades would have to be on something else (F, Q, Z, V...who knows).
UI is something we are still trying to improve, though I imagine you are talking about the ingame UI, which we recently updated, rather than main menu UI (which is our next project). We can see about adding more life to it, maybe some VFX/animations, though that might come as an update post initial steam demo release. If you have specific feedback for it though, we'd be happy to hear it.
Glad you like the steering UI and weapons design! They've definitely gotten a majority of the focus so far.
With two players, did you manage to beat the boss? Since you mentioned not being able to die in the demo that makes me curious...
Thanks for writing all this up! Looking forward to the feedback with a full crew (if you have more to share!).