Thanks for looking at this super early version of this thing.

I started tinkering with this last year while making Forager and then left it for 4 months, but I'm back to it now.

I'm trying to make a game about very slow travel, something meditative, that follows on from some of the stuff I've tried in Prowl and Trawl. It's boring and there's a lot of fiddly work to be done, and that's sort of the point. Though that will be punctuated by some nice and gentle traversal/adventuring and puzzle solving.

If you'd like to post any comments here in the forum that'd be awesome.

The demo said roughly half an hour and that was accurate for me - landed in Grub Heap just under 30 mins.

On the whole, really love the concept of slow travel and the idea that you can basically always see the goal but getting there itself is the puzzle. Was a big fan of Sunless Sea and Myst-likes so there's always room in my heart for plodding, atmospheric travel and I can't wait for things like sound effects and such to be added later.

Things I noticed in the game itself:

- WASD didn't work a couple times returning out of the periscope. You could look around but not move - if you click on the map table and then exit that, you're free again.

- The world sort of jumps occasionally, some sort of engine tile loading for the big map maybe? The smoke streams are misplaced sometimes, as if the entire island shifted over a bit. One of these jumps my player character ended up on top of the balloon's rigging, so I walked forward and fell back into the basket where you're supposed to be.

- There's sort of a weird UI where the booklet is numbered F1-F5 but the tooltips just beside it only go to F4, and they're slightly mismatched.

More subjective design elements:

I like the ruin exploration too, that seems like it has a lot of potential to sort of have different types of island or cool / interesting differences between them, really add to the variation and wonderment of your lonely travels. I mentioned Sunless Sea and feel like that might have some nice influences.

Maybe I was playing the wrong way, but I started mapping out the winds with the pegs and the clues and then sort of just flew into the air to test things out - I think I only placed five pins or something before just winging it. Not sure if that's worth noting as a punishable or encouraged gameplay style

Maybe it's a balloon piloting skill thing, but I felt like sometimes I was running forever across an island on foot to get to the ruin. Not sure if that's something to be fixed by more terrain / props / etc or maybe some sort of thing were you can drive the basket around while landed like a weird car. I don't know.

The red handle makes intuitive sense in that it's opposite the fire handle but also it's generally hard to see the cause / effect of the flaps opening unless you're specifically looking up / generally know what it should be doing. Sound effects will likely help this.

The variometer can go so green that it ends up back red, which is both accurate and also confusing to glance away and back at if you're not noting it in your head.

The ramp of which layer wind you're in could be a little more forgiving - if you're coming down for a landing and you have speed but drop below 100 you just stop that direction and drop straight down instead of this intuitive arc. It makes sense at a programatic level, but maybe there's some generous momentum or something in those instances.

But, I really liked it and I think it'll be lovely as it develops more

I had a bit of a slow start but things picked up, and I will fully admit it took me an hour or so to finally get to Grub Heap.

My bug notes are pretty close to LTKMN's,

• Closing the periscope always resulted in the player controller refusing to move; I assume you're just forgetting to re-enable it somewhere.
• Unusual jumps when traveling occasionally shift islands and smoke signals.
• The player controller WASD was a little sticky- in that letting go of a key would result in a short delay before it actually stopped, this made walking something of an unusual chore.

I really did appreciate the pacing, very meditative, relaxing sorta chill Myst-esk puzzle thing going on, and it was really lovely, obviously sound in a few places will go a long way, just as LTKMN said with the balloon handles, I honestly didn't know what red was controlling until I happened to see the movement above me.

Perhaps the 'use' distance on some of the balloon controls was a little short, a number of times I'd be reading one of the dials and look back to lower or raise the balloon, only to fall short of reaching them and have to scoot just a bit; minor but persistent enough to note.

But honestly I'm really pleased with what I've played, it's paced wonderfully, very relaxing and with just a little bit of polish I can see it coming into it's own really easily.

Hey, just finished playing. I didn't make it to Grub Heap, I landed in Moth Burrow and the game ended. I really liked the slow progression, and it wasn't boring because there was lots to think about, mainly the map, but also the balloon controls and the sort of "what's all this then" meta story.

I found it really easy to overshoot the 100 metre altitude brackets, I like the idea of some overshoot, but maybe a little less than what it is now. I found the compass / map tool quite fun to play with and liked deciphering the clues to work out which island was which on the map. I wasn't sure how exactly the directions related to the wind streams though, for instance with three points on the compass (left, right, and centre) does the wind stream pass through all of these or just the left and right points? If it passes through the centre then there are some weird v-shaped wind streams, alternately if it doesn't then there was some redundancy with multiple clues featuring the same start and end island.

I really liked the idea as a whole and could see myself really enjoying exploring the islands if they were a bit more developed. The sense of anticipation when you finally land on a new one is great. Picking up on what Zenuel said, perhaps some hook, or rope to pull you in to a designated landing spot when you get close to an island, there was a bit of walking to do when you land. Although more featured landscapes (hills, grass, trees) might help that too.

Yessss this is the best feedback, thanks so much for taking the time to play and write!!

I just realised this is a super long and rather self-indulgent post, so the TL:DR is:

I'm hugely encouraged by your feedback. With the exception of those three bugs, literally everything else mentioned is something I already have in the design doc if not actually tracked in Trello. I've been focusing on the balloon and navigation for so long, but now I'm really excited to get on to considering world-building and puzzles :D

I'm stoked to have Sunless Sea mentioned. I didn't want to say it upfront but the slow travel in SS is definitely an influence on my protracted travel. I loved that aspect of that game, the pacing of the torturous journeys punctuated by the adventure and excitement of the islands, the way that each section contrasts so dramatically with the other.

Interesting to see Myst mentioned too! That hadn't really occurred to me but it's definitely a fair comparison. Even more so once I starting getting some of the proper puzzles in. Each island will have a 'temple' of sorts to use the Zelda parlance, and something I'm really chuffed with is that you'll take your mapping instrument from the balloon and that'll be the key to solve most puzzles. Some will be similar to the map in that you'll use it to identify a piece of information that unlocks something, some will be more physical, where you'll use the instrument as a way to actually manipulate the level to traverse it to reach a clue. The temples will also be hidden, and you'll use the instrument on an island scale map to actually locate the secret entrance.

The plan is absolutely to have each island have it's own unique culture, within reason of course. The island names (Slug Heap, Foxes' Hoard, Turtle Pile etc.) are the start of this. One interesting challenge ahead is trying to make the impassable wasteland between the islands enjoyable to fly over.

The long distances between the balloon and the village once you land will be solved by the fact that the islands will be more interesting to explore once I start on environment design, with some traversal and exploration. It's funny you mention turning the balloon into a car, Brennan, as I've totally considered some sort of Segway or something that you could hop into, but I don't think I'll need to resort to that provided the environment is interesting enough. The streams themselves will also be tightened up to help deliver you to a more optimal location.

Agreed that the UX in the balloon is still pretty basic, sound will obviously help massively, and improved cursor hints will help here too.

The variometer and the other instruments are definitely pretty rough at the moment, the speedometer in particular is janky as fuck :p

Player controller is the default Unity one for now, which is a little gross. I have a custom one I'm tinkering with, so that'll definitely improve with time.

General tweaking to the altitude brackets, balloon momentum etc., are a constant thing, I'll hone in on that sweet spot over time hopefully.

It's absolutely valid to ignore the map, and that's something I'm 100% supporting. Audio will support this too, in that you'll hear when your stream is crossing another, so if you really want to go map-free then that's totally viable. It's also valid to ignore the clues, and then use your exploration to chart the streams, rather than the suggested opposite approach of charting the streams and following those. Crucially, you won't need to visit every island, so if you want explore every single island, or cut through as quickly as possible, that'll be supported.

Brennan, I'm particularly impressed you manage to find the crossing and find the stream to Grub Heap without mapping everything. How did you manage that?

Reported bugs:

• WASD/Periscope thing
  • Yep that's me being stupid and not re-enabling the player.
• Guide UI mismatch
  • Great catch, I added the Mapping guide page as the last thing before the build, so I clearly forgot to update the tooltips.
• The jump in the world
  • Yeepp... This is a tricky one. I stumbled upon a known issue in Unity I haven't had to deal with before. Apparently there are all sorts of floating point errors that occurs the further you get from 0,0,0, and this affects things like rendering, collision etc. Because the game takes place over an enormous space, like 40 kilometres side to side or something, this becomes SUPER problematic. The most obvious manifestation was in the shadows, textures and geometry just constantly flickering. It was like this for months before Nicoll Hunt educated me on Twitter.
  • So, basically what happens is that as the balloon moves beyond a certain distance from 0, the ENTIRE GAME shifts by that offset, so that the player and balloon are back at 0,0,0. It's a very rudimentary implementation of it currently that doesn't account for physics or anything, so hopefully when I revisit that I can hide that hitch completely.

My route was east to... is that frog? I can't remember, whichever that was. I figured out which island grub was with the map and the clues about the winds that use grub as a marker, so I knew where I had to get to and I knew the red stream was roughly in that direction if I could get close enough to drop into it (those were the two main pins placed on the map). Randomly I just tried the others until I went that vague direction - hopped into the highest stream and that got me most of the way, dropped into the lowest when I knew I'd be in that zone and it got me to the island proper.

So it was my third island, sort of by fluke of just trying streams and seeing where they felt good.

I feel like wind sounds and sail rotating sounds would mean you could navigate almost by sound and feel alone, that might be cool too.

Thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of figuring out the mapping tool (are those calipers?) as i had no previous experience with that kind of navigation tool and the intuitive steps to figure that out were really rewarding.

The above mentioned bug with the world chugging moving the smoke signals dissuaded me from deciphering too many island codes but i was quite distracted tonight so i think in general i would relish making a survey of the names. Having the icon based island markers was a great call too for getting started.

i was also really intrigued by the possibility of mapping out the air currents (the coloured marker/bird name correlation was a good call).

OK that's awesome, I'm totally happy for people to be able to make their way around without the clues! There'll be some locations where it'll be quite difficult to find without the mapping, but in that case they're kind of bonuses either way!

I'm also thinking some environmental clues might be nice for hinting at wind. I'll definitely have to have clouds in some form so that'll help there too.

Calipers definitely look similar but they're for measuring width/length. I did research into cartographic instruments and I think the closest thing is maybe an octant or sextant, but honestly I think my instrument is unique mostly because it wouldn't actually be very useful in real life :p