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OverBern83 days ago(+1)

Saw it in your discord bio, so I played it before the jam. That time, I quit at the end of the tutorial because I thought the green cube that appears on the overview mode was the one I'm supposed to interact with. This time I found the white one.

Last time I didn't notice the control modes and the 1-2-3 to set movement (maybe they weren’t tutorialized or weren't in the game? They help a lot. I haven't used the other camera mode, though.

Posting this as I'm at the end of the tutorial. I'll play a bit more


Pressing the buttons in indirect control mode works weirdly. 
A and D turn you relative to ship. I have no idea what W and S turn you relative to the ship. Q and E do nothing.
I feel like the speed they move your targeting point should be based on like degrees relative to the ship? Not movement in space. If they don't already work like that.

I swapped Q and E with each other, so e.g. E brings the nose of the ship right.

I don’t intuitively know whether I’m thrusting or not. I figure that’s the job of the particles in space, but maybe there should also be some difference to the trail or something. Like trail color and width. Or the trail has a little velocity away from you, so if you turn thrust low, the trail disappears and what there was will fly away from you. I can imagine that being kinda difficult, though. Depending on how you model the trail.

I frequently end up on the wrong side of the ship so my controls become reversed. Maybe it should be clearer which side of the ship is up.

Locking onto an enemy is disorienting, partly because I can't see my own ship.

I feel like it’s intuitive to use indirect control for large-scale maneuvers and turns, and direct control for dodging and precisely moving to positions. This is hampered greatly by the way the indirect control waypoint persists when you deactivate it and then activate it again.

Pressing space while there’s a tutorial popup will unpause. It will also sometimes fill the screen with grey. Not sure exactly how this plays out.

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Num1d1um83 days ago

Hey, thanks so much for taking a look! The tutorial has definitely seen some changes since before the jam started so I'd expect confusion if you came into like half of the tutorial then and the whole thing now.

The keyboard controls in indirect mode are somewhat of a relic and don't work quite as I'd like. They are always horizon-relative, even if the camera is aligned to the ship, and can overshoot the top and bottom of the worldspace and thus invert. In the next update I will remove this functionality and make a clearer and easier to understand distinction between just Keyboard mode (direct mode) and Mouse mode (indirect mode). Since mouse indirect control doesn't suffer from this inversion and camera relation issue it should work much better. I'll also look into making it so that swapping to indirect mode maintains your current heading.

As for telling which side of ships is up or down, all ships have a visual design that has reflective golden plating on one side ("top") and grey high frequency greeble particles on another side ("down"). This was done to address the issue you describe!

Trail length does scale with speed, but since the ships have a good amount of momentum, the trail doesn't "update" immediately. There's also a bar at the bottom of the UI labeled "THRT" that shows whether you're thrusting or not.

Locking onto enemies can be disorienting but you can still rotate the camera position around your ship using the normal camera rotation controls to get it back into view. This (and locking itself) are things I consider "advanced" features so the tutorial doesn't address them in its limited time and space, but maybe it should, I'll look into it.

The reason pressing space during tutorial popups unpauses and turns the screen to grey is because space swaps to the overview mode, which uses a grey plate as a transition animation. Since time is slowed greatly during tutorial popups, this transition also takes more time. I've not yet found an elegant solution to this problem apart from disabling the overview mode during tutorial popups, which has lead to complaints in the past. I'll make sure to push a changenote if and when I find a way to handle slowmotion and the overview transition better though!


Again thanks so much for taking a look, I hope you come back and play some more and I'll get to implementing some of the things you mentioned right away!

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OverBern83 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

I did play through the tutorial again.

My Q and E swap was wrong - the ship was upside down at the time. I was supposed to swap W and S instead.

I know about the thrust and agility bars, they're just very off to the side and easy to miss.

Played first level and died to a big thing. A few last issues.

At the end of the tutorial, I ended up with a very low-damage laser that clears armor effectively and has very short range, together with a long-ranged, slow-firing missile with tracer. Killing enemies was painfully slow. Like I needed to pass the weakest enemies around 3 times to kill them. I feel like it shouldn't be possible to screw yourself like that with equipment choices you make in the tutorial.

Couldn't pick up equipment after the first warp. Even if my ship physically goes through them.
a shield and an engine. Then later some more equipment in the same area that I didn't see the first time.
The area was the overlapping area between two beacons. The first two items appeared before I had killed many enemies. Maybe they started spawned, or spawned when I interacted with the beacons. Killing all enemies near the beacons didn't let me pick them up.

Indirect control feels much more agile than direct. That might just be that it switches thrust strength to make large turns, though.

Able to target weapons onto an enemy (the big thing) from very far away (850ish) in overview mode but not in normal mode. Part of that might be because it has really high signature.


When you remove the keyboard control in indirect mode, maybe it should switch to direct mode when you do those keyboard inputs? And vise versa maybe - clicking automatically switches to indirect mode with movement towards that position. That bit might need a setting toggle, though.

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Num1d1um83 days ago

Thanks again! I've had reports of the no-pickup bug after tutorial before but have sadly not been able to reproduce it myself, could I maybe bother you to send me your log? If it's not too big of an issue just msg me on discord and I can tell you where to find it.

On the other points, the UI elements are explained in the Help&Info section of the menu, past testing has shown that players do not have the patience to be told about UI so I've had to move that over to the menu while at the same time incurring the issue you encountered - not sure if there's a middle ground yet. 

Weapon and enemy balance is a difficult topic. Catharage is procedural and (intentionally) has large variances, both in encounter and player strength and challenge. It is very much intended that players start with weak weapons and then invest currency to upgrade the starting power of their equipment and/or find better stuff during runs. For the tutorial it is guaranteed that players find a laser, because lasers are the most reliable weapon type for killing the tutorial enemies, but it's still possible to get unlucky. I'll look into maybe artifically increasing the quality of tutorial gear to make sure it's not too bad of a time the first go round, but I also don't want to impress a power onto new players that won't carry over into the "real" game.

A difference in targeting ability between overview and normal mode should be strictly impossible, so either you've found a bug or the enemy ended up just inching into your range right as you swapped to overview - hard to say without footage. If you end up sending your log I'll have a look for any errors relating to this as well but "normally" there is no difference in sensor function between the modes.

I'll think about making both control modes interoperable and non-switched, it would certainly make the tutorialization much easier!

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Num1d1um83 days ago

I've just now updated the game and implemented the changes I laid out in my first reply! Also overview markers for Outposts and Forges have been moved to be positioned identically to their interaction boxes so no confusion is possible on that front!

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