I know we already got a chance to talk about this feedback, but I want to make sure that I also leave a comment here for other visitors to make sure that they know we had a chance to address these points. Posterity and all that.
VSync:
With SDL2 when you initialize a window, a rendering context is attached to it. My understanding is that VSync being toggled on or off requires a reinitialization of the rendering context, which requires a reinitialization of the window. If this is something SDL2 can toggle without a full reinitialization every time though, I'll try to sneak it in to the next update. Will research.
Menu Glitch:
None of us have ever seen the visual bug that you took a picture of, but we'll be on the lookout for it going forward.
Camera:
The camera panning is inspired by the camera in Cave Story. We have a setting to turn this behavior off, but it is not currently accessible from the rudimentary settings menu. We've considered having the camera follow the mouse cursor but most of us find that disorienting so it's unlikely to end up being changed to work that way.
Toggle Fire:
The reason we added toggle fire mod is because in the harder missions, we found ourselves holding down the shoot button for several minutes at a time as we carved through swarms of enemies. In the easy missions, the toggle is overkill. Whether or not toggle should be on by default has been discussed multiple times and neither side is really winning out. One of the major plot themes of the game is corporate psychosis and the unrealistic double standards that it imposes - which includes penny-pinching about bullets, the cost of which ultimately only matters during the early missions before the exorbitant rewards from completing sorties start to eclipse taking damage or strafing opponents with machineguns. This will be pointed out directly in the game's story text, but we're not there yet.
Ranking:
Just like office jobs in real life, the grade you receive has no bearing on reality. Your rank at the end of a mission is random.
Resource Management:
Games like Starcraft are a heavy influence on us even if it's not really this game's genre. Resource management and weaving things like that together just feels right for sci-fi.
Damage Report:
Will look into 0 damage being red. Should be green. Might have overlooked that.
Airbrake:
Airbrake is a new addition in this update and people seem to like it so far.
Story Progression:
There was a very consistent pattern of feedback for a long time about too much story text with missions that were way too short. We were procedurally-generating the story missions as placeholders up until two demo-days ago, and we removed a lot of the story text (temporarily) between missions because clicking through all of the dialog was frustrating for players who wanted to just jump in and try the meat of the gameplay. Seeing feedback about that text being missing was funny. Anyway, story text will be back again soon.
Gunbuddies are OP:
Gun buddies are intended to take some combat pressure off of you so you can focus on your job of being a pilot. They are, however, being nerfed with each successive update as more of their functionality is partitioned off to various upgrades that the player can pay for. You should have seen when they were auto-targeting destructible walls for hidden areas by default lol
Shop feels lackluster:
The shop is a relatively new feature that has been fleshed out a little more with each update. It also competes for space a little bit with the in-level shopping features which are simultaneously being expanded upon. The reason we added these shopping opportunities was to give players other methods to recruit crew members, unlock ships, etc, because we just have so many crew members and so many ships that we can't give them away fast enough. As we continue to iterate I'm sure the shop stock will become more interesting.
Gunbuddies buying shopping items:
We were unable to repro this bug but will be on the lookout for it.
Floofy:
Yes. Floofy is a little murderer. Floofy is responsible for more playtester deaths than all other hazards combined. This is unlikely to change.
CH01-09 / Dump Adventure:
This map has been the benchmark for making sure that the game actually performs properly under pressure and I'm glad that you got to experience it for the first time after we'd had a chance to optimize a ton of stuff with physics. Lots of testers have struggled with this map due to performance issues in previous builds of the game and we're glad that those kinds of problems are no longer common for people.
Boss difficulty:
Yeah I have no fucking idea dude some people get to this boss and just get owned, and other people just twist it into a pretzel and leave. There has been prettymuch zero middleground on the first boss - people either can't do it, or immediately toss the boss in the dumpster and move on. I am very proud of the design of this fight though and I think that it's a good introduction to using your shield effectively.
Sense of urgency or danger:
In the first chapter there isn't much pressure for you to move quickly. Later missions may have countdown mechanics. We wanted the first chapter to give the player a solid grasp of movement, crew customization, and using their shield + boost.
Money is fuel mechanic feels superfluous:
It is. This mechanic exists to give flavor to the world and doesn't really have much of a meaningful impact on the player. Several other mechanics are like that too and will be pointed out or lampshaded in the story text.
God DAMN there are a lot of characters:
Yeah. Probably too many. We're looking to cut several of them and merge a few others. The sheer scope of creating side missions to flesh out the story for every character is intimidating. At the same time, it takes a lot of bodies to run a logistics company. Nearly all of these characters and story themes are inspired by our experiences working in call centers, office jobs, warehouses, loading docks, and logistics- so we had a lot of emotional baggage different ideas to work through to really flesh out the dystopian feel of this world-encompassing (yet somehow completely incompetent) corporatocracy.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback! We love this kind of stuff and we read all of it.