Playing Ver 0.1.1, in full-screen mode.
Loving what I see now, and ironing out a lot of the pain-points in the first release made putting an extending amount of play into things easier. Hoping things keep improving!
Bugs
1. Glitch when putting down items
Encountered the same issue Mad_As_A_Hatter discussed, where the game can lock when placing an item in an "impossible" space. I encountered it when performing a "ship in distress" mission and crushing the little blob things by dropping boxes on them (Good mission, btw, was a nice little change). The scenario demanded dropping an item box multiple times, so it was likely to create the issue. After encountering the issue, and reading Mad_As_A_Hatter write-up, I attempted to recreate the issue as described, to the same result.
2. Regarding the Trading Post
- The back button is not working in the "Sell" page of the "Trading Post", when driven by the mouse. Attempting to click it will "sell" the last item on the list.
- The up and down arrows are not 100% effective in the "Trading Post" menu. Downward arrow in particular. If you click too high on the icon, we can sell the last item in the list. Have to click real down low on the icon.
3. Mission not Updating
I got the ship upgrade item from the wreckage, and obtained the new warp drive, but the mission telling me to do this remains the active mission in the PDA, and the on-screen notice hangs around.
Issues and feedback on existing features
Not bugs per-se, just things I have noticed.
1. Controls.
Experimenting with controls. I am using WSAD to move, and primarily using the mouse to Use Items / Go Back and interact with Menus (with spacebar as a backup use key).
Mouse seems to be a "Use" / "Back" (independent of control setup), but not in all cases. Specifically, see waking up from a sleep cycle, which does not seem to acknowledge the mouse left as a "use" key.
2. Damaged Ship and Maintenance
As a test, I decided to take the ship back and forth in an asteroid region on the map and try to do some real damage. I was trying to get an end-of-game of some sort, but saw that the ship can only be severly damaged to a standstill (which is a good thing). Whilst repairing things, I noticed the following:
- When I really damaged things, I seem to have lost coolant from the reactor. Not the clean/dirty ratio, but the total volume of coolant. It dropped from 100% to 60%. I could repair the reactor, and purify the remaining coolant, but could not figure out how to get it back up to 100%. I tried all the tools, went to the trading post (in case it was purchasable), and visited a planet with a shipyard in order to try resolving it. Once I lost the coolant, I could never get the danger gauge (the green/yellow/red dial with the indicator triangle) to never move above the yellow region and felt like I was cleaning the reactor coolant more frequently.
- Warp Coil never aligns to 100%, even when I realign with the tools. It always appears a little off visually.
- Broken power lines can be obscured by placing items on top of them (as I often do, filling up the ship and just leaving the minimum route to move between rooms). Once I knew what I was looking for, I could see the sparks coming from under an item, but the sparks were not super obvious whilst walking through the ship and encountering the specific fault for the first time. Not sure if this feels intentional or not, but it threw me for a minute. I adjusted, but it might be understated.
3. Trading Post
With the selling lists in the trading post, I am not 100% sure how Items are being ordered in the list. Doing some testing, it seems that the list of sellable items is one-to-one with the arrangement of items in the loading zone (starting with the top left, go along row one, then to the next row down, and so on), trimming empty space from the array.
Is getting the list sortable by item name possible, or to stack the same item in the list (ie: Instead of having seven line items for potatoes, having one line item for seven potatoes?).
I'm not even sure this is a good idea, as the current setup has the benefit of selling a specific item from your landing zone (ie: Sell the third potato).
4. Missions
Displaying missions, in the PDA. Could a mission have an indicator, that the item is already onboard? At present, if I have a few jobs going and split my play session over a few days, I can lose track of things a bit of what I was doing.
I do love that I could go up to an item (from a half-completed mission) and it would tell me in the item description where I had to take it, which was helpful. That may be all the solution you want, and it compels the player to interact with the item itself (and not a menu abstracting those items' information). That could be baked into the gameplay loop, and having more detail in the PDA might destroy that.
Also, when on a planet, maybe show the missions on the "active" indicator on the top right (the text with the current mission).
5. Job Board:
This is less feedback, more than a question. Is the difference between the Job Board tasks and Freight Jobs? At first glance, Jobs from the Job Board seem to offer no price in their description, so you go in a bit blind, not knowing the reward. Additionally, they don't seem to have the time limits the shipping jobs do. Are these conclusions correct, or has my small sample size biased my opinion?
I tried to "self answer" by going to the in-game Manual entry for "Freight Jobs", but this specific entry was empty. A lot of the other ones are good so far, and explain some things and have been helpful.
6. Misc
- Can we have the volume setting persist as a setting? Each time I play, I have to come in and adjust. Someone else also mentioned the volume jumped between 8 and 10 (no 9), and I noticed that when I went in and checked.
- The readability of translucent menus is still a little difficult (though glad that interacting with the top menu doesn't influence the bottom menu). An obvious one this is happening on is the confirmation screen when opening a save.
- Save system is clearer (thanks for details in the release notes), but not clearer in-game itself.
- The Status Portrait for the player character is always their current orientation. ie: If I am moving "North" within the game world (facing away from the camera), I only see the back of their head in the Status screen.
- I can change tools in bed. Is this something I should be able to do? I feel like that in games with sleep/recovery cycles, you are sacrificing time and agency within the game (for a limited time) in order to obtain a benefit (regain stamina). Changing tools is such a small thing, but if a character is asleep, I would expect to be able to do nothing in this time (apart from waking up).
- Love the littering notice, when placing the items out of the delivery area.
Suggestions
New, random things, often sitting outside the primary gameplay loop:
- Would it be possible to name our ship? I don't remember the exact dialog of when we are offered our first ship, but I thought the designations there are only class names and not ship names.
- Regarding 0xygen on a planet, and wearing a suit. One thought I had was of divers, who go on longer explorations of undersea caves. They often carry additional cylinders with them, to extend their time underwater. As we can already carry an item, we could (in theory) carry a cylinder as that item, and holding this cylinder will consume oxygen from the cylinder (as opposed to the players' suits supply), for the duration of the carry. This could do interesting things for the gameplay (juggling between an item and the air cylinder, carrying them each in turn, to retrieve an item that is further from the platform), though I could also see it adding wrinkles and the need for additional systems to support it (ie: landing on a planet at present, I have no idea if the planet requires a suit or not - the game just adds the suit automatically for me when I land with the platform. If this cylinder idea were implemented, there would need to be a way to tell the player whether the planet has oxygen or not).
- You are doing some stat tracking and presentation (examples under the status page, and the star map), and there is the idea of "Cycles" in the game (get this done in X cycles), but I am feeling some disconnect with the ongoing perception of time and things being achieved. When doing a shipping job, I really have no idea of how many cycles have passed, I just know a line is getting shorter on the freight display. I'm not sure what I am asking for here, it's just a "disconnect" I have felt while playing. I do think to some sci-fi, or "ship" based shows, where characters have a "Captains Log", for capturing some sort of summary on the narrative and what is being achieved in an ongoing fashion.