wow, thank you SO MUCH for actually play-testing the game and writing out the feedback <3 nobody that I dont know already went this deep yet
I am gonna address the points here in the thread for posterity right now, and start working on actually improving and fixing the gameplay experience later.
“Found and activated a synchrotron but couldn’t figure out how to work it; seemed like I needed more inventory so I drove off collecting… but then I couldn’t bring up the synchrotron anymore… did I need to be at it to work it?”
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the game’s currency for doing particle collissions in synchrotrons and almost every other structure is Energy in the form of electron volts. Your current Energy balance is displayed top left in green as MeV/GeV/TeV, based on how much you currently own (M=mega, G=giga, T=Tera). The way to get this energy is mainly by collecting particles in the world and then converting them into energy in the Particle Exchange menu - openable at any time by pressing X. In this Exchange, you can trade the particles you currently hold in your inventory for energy by Einstein’s E=MC2 equation, which is physics accurate.
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you always need to be within interaction radius of a structure to be able to use it. You cannot collect structures, you have to be physically at them to use them.
“Engaging landscape but I didn’t get any sensation of compass direction or where things were relative to each other; I have no idea what path I’ve driven or what shape the world is or whether I could just drive straight indefinitely and eventually find everything.”
- good point, I usually look at the XYZ coordinates top left to see where I am going since I got used to it by playing Minecraft a lot, but I understand it is not very player-friendly. I should add a compass, or ideally a minimap. This is a great feedback that made me realize this.
“F and TAB sometimes did things and sometimes didn’t; sometimes I could jump and other times not; what other controls are there?”
- all the control bindings are displayed bottom left, like WASD for movement, Space for jump, Shift for sprint etc.
- TAB and Space should always open Inventory, and jump - if that doesnt work, that is a bug that I have not encountered yet! There is also some weirdness when played in browser vs. installing the game on your machine, because hitting ESC in browser likes to exit you out of fullscreen before exiting in-game dialogues. This is a big friction for me, but through tens of hours of playtesting I have got so used to it I forget to think about it anymore and thats not the best, since I intend this game to be for outsiders, not just me.
- ideally, I sugest installing the game for the best experience, but I know allowing an untrusted executable on your machine is a big ask
“Got into a couple of dialogs/views that were hard to get back out of.”
- every dialog is be exitable by pressing ESC, Enter, or pressing the button that opens it in the first place. E.g. - Particle Exchange opens on X press, and closes on another X press. If that didnt work for you, another bug I will look into.
“Everything suffers from that attractive-but-tiny text that seems to go with a lot of vibe-coded games these days.”
- I actually got this feedback before and I added UI scaling to the Controls menu. But I see it is probably too hard to find, and the default is too small. I develop and playtest the game on a MacOS with a 4K retina display and that probably lulled me into thinking this is the default gameplay experience. I think making the default UI scale larger than it is will fix this easily, good point
Again, thank you so much for putting the time and expertise which you clearly have into this!!
I will work on integrating all this feedback into the game when I have the time (and tokens lol) <3
Will post updates in this thread