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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!

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!).

It's a cool concept, and I had a lot of fun running around trying to shoot the sun sphere at the various birds, turtles, and dogs. I couldn't get very far though because it's really hard to control the ball. If pulling the ball made it start following you again, that might make it easier to control? Or if it kept doing damage even after bouncing. Or if you could control the direction of the push a little easier, it would make it easier to time your attacks. Heck maybe even just being able to whack the ball in a specific direction with the mouse would make the bounce control easier. (Like deflecting bullets with melee weapons in Nuclear Throne).

I did run into a bug where the ball wouldn't move after I pressed space, it would keep changing color and getting stronger, but since it wouldn't move I never got to hit anything. It went away after I restarted the game and I was able to play normally.

But overall super cool idea, cool aesthetic, and I would love to see more. I think it's got a lot of potential if you're able to fine-tune the core gameplay a bit and make controlling the ball easier.

I ended up playing all the way through and really enjoyed it! 

Maybe could use some quest markers? Because it was surprisingly difficult to figure out that the peppers were in the bushes, but on the other hand, that did force me to explore the island a lot. 

I see that you added some changes from Roldy's suggestions, because I got a lot of use out of the auto run button. 

It was a lot of fun to see the water rise throughout the game and my only regret is not blowing up the boat before I left. 

This must have been a ton of work by yourself, so take some time to relax, you deserve it!

You could put this on steam today for $1 and get quite a few players. I did end up rage quitting because my poor platforming skills forced me to restart level 9 twice because I'd keep dying and the skeleton holding down the button would despawn. This is pretty much a fully finished game already that executes well on a super unique concept.

Hahaha yeah, the enemies are a little aggressive with barreling towards you...we plan to change that in the future when we do a full revamp of how the AI functions (which will take a lot of rewrite) so for now they all just kind of charge at you and shoot you.

Glad you enjoyed it! We had a ton of fun making it and even playtesting it at the end so glad it wasn't just rose tinted glasses!

Thanks for the feedback. We plan to implement the mouse lock in the polish phase, so it's good to hear that many people are asking for it and that it would help out their experience. My main concern was not being able to unlock the mouse, so until we get the pause functionality working again (which would unlock the mouse), we decided against locking the mouse (since then the only way to regain control would be an alt tab or hard closing the program - considering you may be playing in the browser, the alt tab may not be very intuitive). It's the top priority on our list for sure since we want it to be very easy to control and aim.

I will adjust the timings on the camera transitions - I agree that some are very slow and could be sped up or turned into hard cuts instead. Regarding the turret and railgun timings, at present you cannot fire the turrets while the railgun is on cooldown - this was a deliberate design change but is unintuitive to users, and with no audiovisual feedback letting you know that you cannot fire due to being on cooldown, it can lead to frustrations. I plan to separate them so that they can be fired independently and not be reliant on the other being off cooldown, and possibly implementing some kind of feedback if the user tries to fire while on cooldown (ie some kind of error sound and a red glow around the cooldown indicator).

There will be UI control for the aim mode to let you know that you can use the mouse to turn the ship in aim mode as well, not to mention strafe in any direction (which is currently bugged and not strafing based on current direction). The mouse aiming will also work better once the mouse is locked to the screen.

The railgun has infinite range - so if you can line up a shot against an enemy, you should be able to hit them (they'll be aggroed to you too if they didn't die).

Glad you liked splitting ships with the railgun - I laughed myself the first time we had it working. It's also fun to finish them with the turrets because the ship parts and projectiles have physics, so you can shoot around their pieces before they disappear!

Thanks for trying it out again! Unfortunately, the visual effects graphs we used in Unity are unsupported by WebGL and won't be feasible at all until WebGPU is developed (something like years away), so you miss out on exactly the feedback you mentioned (railgun firing visual, sand kickup, boost smoke, explosion when killing an enemy) when playing it in the browser. They do work in the .exe though!

Not sure we will do anything to address it in the polish phase, we would need to make hard modeled visuals instead and use some other system to get them to display, and the HTML5 version is mostly an easy way to get exposed to the game rather than the intended way (it has other limitations too).

You're correct about the drift (spacebar) making you turn faster! It halves your max velocity, doubles your max angular velocity, and decreases angular drag so you can get a sharper turn. The sand kick up happens all the time but you can really see it when doing a drift. I might do something like add a couple extra dust emitters that activate only when you drift so it really kicks up some dirt.

We'll try to look into the sand shader again to address the reflection on the dark side, thanks for the feedback.

Multiplayer unfortunately is still not really where we would want it to be and we plan to focus on that mostly this week. You can join a lobby together but non-hosts (it seems) are really wobbly unless they mount a turret and there isn't much that is synced between players besides the ships (you can't see other players for some reason, you can't see them shooting sometimes, enemy health and position is not the same). But you can get in a lobby together and ride around in the ship while someone else drives!

Great aesthetic, simple, elegant game.

The font is a little small and hard to read, but it's very easy to tell where to go visually either by shape or color. I mostly played quick because of the timer and was seemingly rewarded for going quick instead of planning, though my most successful run was my first one where I was playing very slow, just figuring it out. Love the idea. I think the level generation may need a bit of a tweak because you can get impossible starts, but since it's a quick restart and a score attack game you can just assume they will be back at it immediately.

Cool game! Took me a bit to get used to the controls and what the game was telling me. Not sure there is really a consequence for letting the trains go out of order though. It could be a little clearer which switch does what (though you can figure it out from the visual board) and it took me a long time to understand "up" in the phone call directions meant the starting direction and "down" was the reverse direction. The demon really scared me a few times so that was great, adds a little bit to the tension with the ticking and phone ringing too. Lots of great ideas at work here that really go well together. Not sure I could handle if it got more complicated (I only played level one) but I really like the execution. Great stuff!

Short and sweet, a little spooky but not overwhelming, nice story. I like the aesthetic. Seems complete(? ) which is awesome. Some music or sounds would bring the immersion up a lot. The only complaintI had is with the cutscenes - I mostly used spacebar to instant scroll the text, so it was kind of odd needing to press the right arrow to get a text box to show up in a cutscene. Otherwise the game worked great and I had no issues!

I think that this game could be cool, but it requires a tutorial to tell what is going on. Any new player has no idea what any of the audio cues mean, and given that there is no visual indicator for what is happening (even how much health you have left, which might be a good idea as some kind of feedback for getting hit), you can't really figure it out yourself either. I think it really has some potential and even this genre itself has some great potential but it is impossible to understand what you need to do as a player without some guidance. I got score 100 a few times and had no idea why. I couldn't really tell when my gun was charging either, though I heard some sounds a few times that sounded like it could have been that. Really want to see what a finalized version of this game would look (or sound) like!

Thanks for the feedback!
We plan to fix the weird shadow issue with the shader (already have in fact).

There is going to be a rework of the camera for sure, pretty consistent feedback is that it seems a bit out of control - it was basically just slapped on and worked so we moved on to the more complicated things like trying to keep the player on the ship and smooth hovercraft mechanics. Ideally we want it to be freely controllable, but track to behind the ship or something so it's easier to see where you are going when driving. At minimum, we will be pulling it back a lot so that you can see more of what is going on - at one point the ship doubled in size but the camera distance stayed the same, so that's partly to blame.

There will also be more UI elements in the future - visual for railgun cooldown (possibly a reticle wherever it is facing, we'll see), visuals for cooldowns for other abilities to come, not to mention visuals for the drifting mechanic - there is actually a boost if you drift long enough so that you are launched in the direction you're now facing, and a super boost if you drift for a long time, so there will be some indicator either with UI or mario kart style to let you know that you've achieved it.

Thanks for the pointers and we hope you enjoy the next version as well!

In the future you'll only be able to take one weapon with you (for now you can use both weapons just so I can test them in the game easily). There will be weapon arts as well that are unique to each weapon so the sword will probably have stronger stuff. We also debated having it reflect projectiles a la nuclear throne as well. I actually prefer the sword when I test because it does more damage and one shots the basic guys, so once you know the patterns it's kind of a cakewalk. Good to keep in mind though!

The boss lag I'm aware of, I think his shield is using precise collision checking per frame or something instead of a rectangle which is why it gets so rough there. It's on my list of things to fix.

Next will be props in the level that can be broken/add some flavor to the background as well as spawn some enemies potentially. After that will probably be character abilities/upgrades ("aspects" and "pacts"), since the weapon arts will require unique animations.

Thanks for the feedback, it's really appreciated!