End of beta, atmosphere, game-play challenges

With the first beta of Nauticrawl wrapped up, I felt there was enough interesting feedback to write a devlog about some of the reactions from the testers and what that means going forward to complete this game.

To give you an idea of just how varied feedback really was, here's some extracts:
"I think the game had a nearly perfect balance between simplicity and complexity."

" Figuring out how to work a machine with no previous experience is a fun thing to do. That said, I think it wasn't too complicated"

"Too many controls with little help to understand what each thing does"

Favorite comment award:
"I felt like sandra bullock trying to operate the russian space capsule."

The tricky part to what comes after this is figuring out how to make everyone happy, or to decide who stays on the ship and who is left behind. 


What worked:
The overall atmosphere is what people seemed to enjoy the most! The premise of being stuck in a machine you just stole, within a hostile environment that won't allow life outside of it once you start your journey, creates a plausible excuse for people to figure things out on their own.
Those with a very analytical approach figured out the clues without getting frustrated and reported a smooth yet enjoyable ride.
Of course we are not all methodical and we don't all pay attention to the same elements in the same fashion, so there's a good chunk of players that got lost along the way.

What needs some fixing, maybe adding another lever or two:

Bugs
That's the easy part, once reproduced a bug can be fixed and once fixed it is not up for debate anymore.
We had only a couple of bugs, this is actually very good for a beta, kudos to Armor Games for testing this game throughout! 
Those couple of bugs had all something to do with the procedural map generator, they *should* be fixed now, but when it comes to randomness it's hard to say for sure, fingers crossed!

I got stuck at...
There has been one major "I got stuck" situation that was not related to bugs but due to a design flaw.
This game has a core exploration loop reminiscent of old school dungeon crawlers, so it's only natural that some keyboard bindings are to be used, and I wanted to introduce these bindings in a subtle way to not disrupt the immersive experience. 
Evidently my subtlety was so subtle some players missed the bindings listed on the computer, and they got stuck when it was time to move the machine around and start the exploration phase.

This will be addressed in the next release with some less subtle messages, no popups breaking the experience of course, just a more visible message showing upon each restart should do the trick.
I'll also introduce new physical controls to re-establish consistency with the rest of the experience.

Here's a quick mockup with some old train levers that I think could work well for moving and turning.