Okay so, small review, just finished Liquid Gold and only have the Special Delivery left
Second playthrough, first one on a previous version where i got stuck on Oxygen mission and I have to say, Not Much Has Happend. I understand this is still somewhat the tutorial-ish zone? on the first playthrough i had a couple of Flight Errors, two or so messages, and a bunch of systems broke and i had to fix, all that during only the first two tasks
Second playthrough? Oxygen machine had an error and then i got Locked in the middle of nowhere, i turned the console off/on, tried docking/undocking, reset the systems so i just reloaded the save and nothing like that happened afterwards so im unsure if that was a bug or an event i messed up, other than that i got 1 message and one Life system error and I haven't seen the Threat pop up once!
Speaking of the threat
While your inspirations for this game are VotV and Iron Lung, i hate to say but the flight loop is more similar to Fnaf.
Since there are no Threats outside, only Inside, what i essentially end up doing is set the course, full throttle, get out of the seat and watch the hallway with the Life Form Count in view and sit there untill the console pings that it's locked and ready to dock
It uh, isn't much fun, worse, I'm stuck feeling tense waiting for a spooky scary Threat to pop up in my face, and can only relax when I dock, where i can re-start playing Viscera Cleanup Detail (I had two 4 boxes tall piles before i found my first crate and could finally sell them)
I was orginally going to comment how VotV's biggest "thing" is that its 90% Calm Nothing and 10% Holy Shit & Hype Aura moments, but while writing I realized the bits while on a station & docked are the "Calm Nothing" part of this game, still, that ends up with like 30% Doing Calm Stuff on Station and 70% Waiting for my ship to travel to Point B while I watch the hallway for any Funny Business. While orginally it was fine, I did find the note about the Threat becoming more active after Liquid Gold mission, and I was waiting ready for it to jump out, but it didn't even appear on the Life Form Counter! To be honest, it did break once and after that it started flickering, but I just turned it off/on and it was fine both times with no Creatures on Board
Anyhow, I'll be taking a break here and do the Special Delivery tomorrow, pretty good game so far!
Wow, I haven't seen such a review pinpointing actual game problems since the demo version. Thanks a lot for spending your time to describe what the gameplay fells like, this really helps me to see things as they are.
And to be honest, most of the described feels the same for me. For now I'm experimenting with balance a lot and change the sequences and I'm still unsatisfied. I believe there is a good balance point where there is not too much going on, but the game still remains fun to play. I just need to find that point.
Waiting to arrive somewhere is the main issue of the game. I asked about that on my Discord server and now kinda see where I need to go to fix that, but I'm still not 100% sure. In any case I'll continue with adding more content, just to give the player some room of interaction. I somehow need to make them busy for the spooky stuff to work. Or at least make the flights not boring.
Stations deffinitely will have some threats too, but I'm focused on differert part of the game for now.
The note related thing needs rework as it remains basically the same since the demo version.
The special delivery is now locked just to not ruin the sequence in further updates. I probably needed to completely disable this task but I was in hurry with that.
Again, thanks a lot for the review, I will try do everything I can to properly balance all the stuff and make it actually fun to play 😅
the game *is* decent fun! I was just a little high strung waiting for the spook only for nothing to happen for 5 minutes lol
Honestly for keeping the player busy during the flight, I don’t have many ideas, Iron Lung has you stuck to the seat navigating because you can’t see and you’re in tight underwater corridors which is the polar opposite of open space, maybe still you could add meteors that you have to dodge and keep a watching? Also, maybe a decent addition would be allowing the player to spin the pilot chair around lol, maybe some task minigames for the player to do while in flight could be decent too