itch.io

Thanks for your testing and feedback! (I actually wrote another post replying to this before, but it seems to have gotten eaten by itch. :/)

I also tried a little bit of the campaign mode. I didn't spend too much time on that since it was mostly levels I played in the tutorial already.

So yeah, the first levels in the campaign do just repeat the tutorial, but then it does move on to some new levels.

I was kind of intending for the campaign to replace the tutorial, but I'm not so sure about this plan now, and then if this doesn't replace the campaign I will need to separate out the levels and avoid this kind of repetition.

I didn't understand what the point of the "ghost" rocket was.

The ghost rocket is all about multiplayer, essentially.

You control the ghost rocket directly, with immediate visual feedback to your control actions.

The rocket with a coloured in circle then follows along the same path some frames later (15 frames by default = 1/4 second), and this then shows network synchronised state. This network synchronised rocket is then what actually interacts with things like switches, doors and enemies.

This is not actually needed when you play single player, and I should probably look into removing these delay frames when you play single player, I guess (although this will then make things feel and play differently in the two modes).

I feel like it had something to do with bypassing the beam, but I didn't figure it out.

Yeah, it makes perfect sense to look for some reason for that ghost mechanic, actually, given that this is not explained to you, and that there is actually *no* reason for this in single player. It's a shame this worked out as a kind of red herring, and got in the way of working out the beam puzzle. :/

I didn't care for doing the Mosh Pit level. Having to get just the right spot for the swarmers to build the stairs wasn't fun.

So this is actually what the trigger mechanism is all about. But most people don't understand this when playing that tutorial and this obviously needs to be communicated better. I'm then thinking that it could be good (and relatively low effort) to just add some images (e.g. bits cut out from screenshots, with highlights) in with the existing text explanation for the tutorials.

[Serpents + Pilots] Do you plan on adding single player variants of these?

Serpents is already something that is *possible* to play single player, with the goal of getting the most tail banked in the time limit, to get a place on the high score table, but this is much less interesting than Spirits or Neon Swarm single player because it lacks some kind of puzzle + completion condition. (Actually, I just realised this is the key point, as I was writing this response, and then a good next step for this game can be to add this kind of element, then!)

Pilots is the most interesting game with respect to multiplayer architecture, in a way, because it solves the problem of immediate feedback to the local player + synchronised simulation after network delay in an interesting way that *doesn't* require rendering the ship at separate local and synched positions, but this mechanism makes things tricky from a game design point of view. I should definitely extent this game in ways that make it more interesting for single/co-op play then, but it just requires a bit more thought.

There seems to be a bug with the name change tab. I wasn't able to type anything in at first. I refreshed the game and was able to get it working. But it might be worth looking into.

There was a problem with some controls (including text entry boxes) not working when in full screen mode, which sounds like what you report there, which is fixed for the next version. (Thanks!)