itch.io

- I'm having trouble putting my finger on exactly what you did to make the game look so much better, maybe it's the new snow combined with the new suspension? But it's feeling downright beautiful sometimes, so good job.

- When reviewing my screenshots to upload for this post, I discovered that the screen was being stretched horizontally to fill the screen instead of the render FoV being adjusted for the new aspect ratio. This makes screenshots feel super weird to look back on, which is bad for word of mouth, which is going to be important now that you're moving into the Steam phase of things.

- The new settlement UI is slick and convenient, but the hover tooltip could use some work. Partly because it tends not to display in the right place, partly because it's too small to easily read, and partly because it doesn't match the rest of the UI aesthetically. Also, having a tooltip for each high-demand item is kind of redundant? The only information it's really providing is how high-demand items work, so the tooltip would be better-suited to when hovering over the "High-Demand Items" label itself than on the item listings.

- The tank exiting settlements facing forward is much more convenient. Still think it would be better if the claw arm started retracted instead of preserving its state upon entering, though, for immersion if nothing else.

- Holy crap, storage view is the shit, and you even fixed the weirdness with the claw arm being able to insert objects inside of other objects?! Awesome~!

- Holding the claw button to activate special features feels weird for some reason, but it works. It's pretty inconvenient the way it enforces a set arm length and camera perspective, though; I would definitely want to set down explosives as faaaaaar away as possible, and neither cargo covers nor explosives really need a special camera. I'd say it's actively detrimental with cargo covers, even, since it does not play nice with the storage view. It looks suspiciously much like a third-person aiming perspective that I suspect this is groundwork for the grappling hook, but what's good for the grappling hook doesn't seem to be helping for anything else. I would recommend reserving the arm and camera behavior to things that explicitly need it, and giving us a camera toggle if we specifically need a detailed perspective from the claw. Which would basically be a toggle between third-person video game view, driver's visor Eli view, and claw camera Elena view, which I think is inherently neat.

- Though at some point it became possible on paper to play the game with a controller, in practice it's not actually doable. First and foremost, the menu takes precedence over the key binding prompt, meaning it's impossible to bind up/down on the left stick because it moves to the previous/next option instead of binding. Past that, because you can't set separate keyboard and controller binds, there's a high switch cost due to needing to rebind all of the controls. The lack of controller defaults also means it's pretty much a non-option for people who don't play games regularly, as you need to understand game design at least well enough to know which button each function belongs on. Previously I would've said this was a low priority, but since you've moved to the Steam demo phase and generally seem more comfortable with UI design than most solo devs, it's probably worth reviewing.

- Said improvements have revealed a very minor weirdness with objects' physics not waking up properly if the objects they're resting on are removed without ever technically colliding with them. Which is easier than you'd think, with the new storage view.

- This tutorial message persists when triggered until the signal receiver is purchased, rather than dismissing itself after a while like it's presumably supposed to.

- I'm not sure what changed with the claw arm physics, but I just managed to haphazardly chuck a radiator around 400 meters. That small black dot in the center was in my claw arm five seconds previous. Pitching large items seem about the same. Realistically, the maximum pitching speed of the tank isn't going to be a simple matter of (Turret Rotation Speed * Current Arm Length), as the farther the arm is stretched the more its individual joints are going to sag under the stress. The heavier the object at the end of the arm, the more severe the sagging will become, so something like an I-beam or rail track might actually pitch faster if held closer. Even if we're ignoring this and letting the arm always move at full speed for the sake of player convenience, you might want to enforce a maximum pitching speed.

- The cloth draped over Crater's entrance is missing collision. I can see why this might have been intentional, since it's technically cloth, but cloth can get pretty tough once water has soaked into its pores and frozen solid. Especially with snow weighing it down on top of all that, I would expect it to be at least as tough as lake ice.

- Now that the snow is deeper, the end of your tracks has become much more noticeable. Snow trails should probably last longer, at least when it's not actively snowing.

- The metal cargo cover is more picky than it should be, especially early on. Even when the cargo is clearly not filled past the side, it still tends to refuse to attach.

- The dirt outside Metro has a weirdly small repeating texture, which feels very artificial once you see it. It didn't use to be very noticeable, but now that the snow is sooooo much prettier it stands out.

- There's occasional visual artifacts spawning in on top of ice, then retreating once the camera gets within a certain distance. Sometimes this retreating happens much closer within a single frame, not sure what the pattern is. Again, this was probably always there, it's just more noticeable now that my eyes are getting used to so much of the game being prettier.

- The new ice mechanics are muuuuuuuch better. I'm not sure how well it's communicated outside of patch notes (I don't remember being explicitly told that ice doesn't re-crack when reversing), but once it clicked, I was able to navigate fairly consistently even without an ice scanner so long as I'm slow and mindful. I saw something about you weakening the edge of the lake's ice, but it's still fairly safe and easy to circle the valley (Caldera? Strip mining pit? Nuclear crater?) so long as you drive up to take the bridge between Oil Extraction and Metro. I'd recommend not changing this, as it's really only worth the trouble if you're travelling to the opposite side and already have all the torque upgrades. It's mostly only useful for cleaning up the last few deliveries before heading on to act II, before then I wouldn't call it any easier or harder than driving normally.

- I like that the invisible walls aren't so much invisible walls so much as invisible inertial dampeners. I feel like there should be something to make it obvious that this is a gameplay concession, though, given the potential for players to meet with an invisible wall over rougher terrain and not be able to tell it's not the terrain stopping them. Perhaps have the topographic scanner read as red outside the play area, regardless of slope?

- So, I barrel rolled the tank. I feel like Elena should've had an opinion on that~

- Overall, the difficulty feels much more consistent: Crater, Scrapyard, Oil Extraction, Metro - I got S on everything with minimal retries. (That boulder out front of the Scrapyard is evil, though.) That said, I've played the game enough at this point that it's going to feel more consistent to me than it actually is, so hopefully you're getting plenty of surveys in.

I was hyped to see DSD had a story mode now, and I was not disappointed. Here's my mostly unsorted feedback after finishing act I:

- I had the game freeze on me upon resting after delivering Yuri's weather pattern hard drive to Nelli. The settlement menu was still visible but I lost no progress on reloading, which I believe means that it froze during the scene switch itself. I tried resting again after reloading and got the same result, then got no freeze when reloading and leaving the settlement without resting. My suspicion is that the following plot event overrides the current weather with a special one, meaning the clear weather condition the rest button is waiting for never happens, getting it stuck in a loop.

- I wholeheartedly appreciate the way the topographic scanner was nerfed. It being toggled before encouraged me to just have it on all the time, which was effective, but it really worsened the game's atmosphere. Its current function remains an invaluable tool for tackling complex slopes, and it being something I need to tactically deploy allows it to add tension rather than take me out of the moment.

- Cargo broadly feels heavier, less slippery, and less bouncy overall than the last version I played, v0.4.3. The only time I had truly weird physics was when I was purposefully trying to break it by exploiting cargo's not-quite-physical nature while held to slide more into my cargo bay than it was physically capable of storing. This surprisingly resulted in my cargo going into superposition instead of exploding themselves and/or my tank, so whatever you've done to make the cargo bay behave more stably is impressively robust.

- I do still have problems with the claw unloading XL cargo onto settlement lifts and having it bounce into the air, however, as well as bouncing around a little when loading XL cargo into the tank. I've found I can get around it by rotating the crane upward, so it seems to understand cargo width better than it understands cargo depth.

- Probably related to the above, the claw will lower into the storage bay to allow you to set down cargo rotated rightside-up, but doesn't understand it needs to lower when you turn something on its side. This makes it more of a pain than it needs to be to fit L-size cargo in front of XL cargo, or to get anything especially wide (I-beams, train rails, cargo covers) into the bay at all.

- With the way cargo covers have been implemented, it would be very handy to have a rack to clip cargo covers onto. It would make cargo covers much easier to use when collecting scrap, rather than their current implementation of being best used for deliveries. The hooks on the back of the cargo bay seem like they should work the purpose, at least for the solid covers, or alternatively the space between the turret and cargo bay would work perfectly if you've no other plans for it. (And yes, I'm going to keep saying there should be something behind the turret until either there is or v1.0 comes around~)

- The tutorial message for navigating ice recommends to "DRIVE SLOWLY", so I did, and I died every time. I then went back to my old tactic of driving as fast as possible instead, and I stopped dying so much. This works because even though ice is damaged faster by moving quickly, it's nevertheless damaged by time instead of distance traveled. Even if moving quickly deals double damage, you'll deal the same total damage so long as you move off the ice twice as quickly. And if the ice does break, the more forward momentum you have, the more likely you are to land on a spot shallow enough to drive and less likely to slide backwards into the depths. Stopping to turn around is rarely ever a good idea, because by the time you react the ice is likely going to break while you're reversing course. For driving slowly to be the actual better option, the effect of speed needs to be at least somewhat exponential (twice as fast means more than double the ice damage), and most if not all of the damage needs to be dealt by distance traveled rather than by time. (Granted, once the player gets the ice scanner, the benefits of slowing down to closely follow safe paths may outweigh the benefits of speed.)

- It's odd to me that the delivery preview displays the cargo on a 4x4 grid, when the tank's storage is more of a 4x3.5. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong to fail to get as much out of my storage bay as I hypothetically could, or if the preview is just intended to represent what I'm seeing loaded onto the lift inside the settlement rather than actually previewing how it will look in my storage bay.

- Now that the in-game menu is more useful, I think it'd be a nice touch to replace the mouse cursor with something similarly low-res as the menus themselves. Or if you already have, this is a bug report to say that it isn't working for me.

- I don't think I've mentioned this previously; the rest button's tooltip continues to be weird grammar to me. "Wait for day and storms to pass" sounds like "wait for (day and storms) to pass", rather than "wait for day (and storms to pass)", suggesting that it's for setting out on clear nights rather than clear days. Either "Wait for night and storms to pass" or "Wait for a clear morning" seem to make more sense to me.

- I often find the dialogue boxes not expanding downwards far enough to match the text.

- It is sometimes possible to get the tank stuck. I assume this is an accident, but if it's not, you could have a pretty traumatizing fun dialogue trigger there.

- On that note, I feel like you could have a traumatizing fun dialogue trigger if the player breaks the ice, sinks below their treads, then still manages to make it to safety. Snow-tight and water-tight might not be the same thing...

- The metal cargo cover is weirdly shiny compared to rest of the tank. It doesn't seem to have snow or rust textures, either, so it stands out even more when the tank is in poor condition.

- I adore Elena, whom I was stuck calling "the cute tank girl" until Nelli calls in on the way back from the Metro. Eli's name is said a couple of times early on, but Elena's doesn't seem to be. Relatedly, I might've misread, but I could've sworn Nelli was introduced as Neil and Nadya was introduced as Hadya. It's also a little hard to tell exactly what Elena's role in the tank is. She mentions Eli driving, but it's not clear if she's the navigator, claw operator, technician, some combination of the above, or if they're alternating drivers who wear multiple hats.

- The load door between the end of act I and the start of act II doesn't seem to be set up properly. It seemed to work fine when I first used it, but when I reloaded the game I found that my cargo cover and the rations from Yuri were missing. When I turned back, the cover reappeared, and I found that the rations were where they were...past the load door, as far as I'd managed to get before the screen finished fading to black. When I used the door again, my backup oil suffered the same fate. It was kinda surreal.

- Yuri needs a hug. Elena needs a puppy. Please, I'm begging you.

I might have more to say in a few days; having a proper story's spoiled me, so I'm currently on the fence as to whether I want to explore the act II map or wait until you've made more progress on that front.

Thoughts after playing 0.5.0:

- The new map is great! It's similar enough that I felt like I already had an intuitive sense of what to expect around each place, but the specifics are way more dynamic. When cresting a hill gives me a shot of satisfaction and anticipation, I know a map knows what it's doing. I like how Radio-chan was rearranged to be before the community previously known as Oil Settlement, too. I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses.

- The Fishery has a delivery for Radio-chan that doesn't require the Ice Scanner. Getting to and from without an Ice Scanner is much more doable on the new map, at least for this particular madwoman, but I don't think think rolling back blind with ten Anchors in tow was a bad decision I was supposed to make.

- I greatly appreciate the new junk items all being inconveniently shaped. It makes a lot of sense to me that it's mostly only packaged deliveries that fit neatly into the storage bay, and it makes for much better practice than just slotting Strange Cubes and Radiators into a grid.

- It feels like there are far more deliveries involving mildly fragile Handle With Care items, making deliveries a more risky but lucrative decision than they were previously. Which I enjoy a lot, because that combined with the expensive but inconvenient new junk items gives the game a significantly higher skill ceiling. I got to the end of the upgrade tree in a fraction of the time it took me the first time.

- It's not too important, but there seems to be a bug where if the claw is hovering over a delivery item when you respawn the delivery, the item's <> marker doesn't disappear on account of there no longer being an item for the claw to stop hovering over. The marker is cleared when reloading from the last save.

- I was expecting an easter egg when I saw that Radio-chan wanted exactly one of the earliest, cheapest items in the game, and was a little sad to see she had nothing to say about it.

This is infuriatingly fun! It really gives me Girls' Last Tour vibes, which is a vibe I don't get to have as often as I'd like. Easily worth sending you a few dollars. I'd like to recommend some things, listed in order of ease x importance:

- Some items are waaaaaaay bouncier than they should be, causing them to explode out of the storage bay at the tiniest bump or even at complete random. The oil barrels are the worst culprit, as they're also rounded, meaning they effectively do not have static friction and any of the tiny bounces they're prone to can be enough to roll them over the edge. After getting the last storage bay upgrade, I discovered that filling my bay with too many S items caused so much rattling that it sometimes pushes my tank sideways while decelerating. On ice to finish up the last two quests of v0.4.3, this was terrifying.

- When placing large or unusually shaped items into a crowded storage bay or onto a settlement elevator, they tend to clip with their surroundings and go bouncing off into the snow. This can usually (though not always) be solved by switching to the claw's fine placement mode, but that's more of a time-consuming hack to bypass a bug than a real solution. Items can also invisibly clip and bounce before immediately being stopped by other items or the storage bay wall, incurring heavy damage despite no visible movement. It made me especially wary of taking on fragile deliveries, so I avoided them entirely until after I'd purchased all the upgrades and was going for 100%.

- The ice scanner straight-up does not work correctly sometimes. I can be driving on ice marked as safe (yellow), then suddenly plummet into the depths as if it were completely unsafe (red). The orange sections are pretty inconsistent, too; if ice doesn't recover when waiting in settlements, it *really* should. Most of these problems aren't an issue if you happen to find the very safe (blue) path, but I didn't until my second trip to Radio-chan, so there was misery getting back...

- "Handle with Care" items seem to all have the same amount of health and impact defense regardless of size, judging by the fact that it's possible for XL HwC items to take a small amount of damage just from being carefully set down. Which doesn't really make sense, because if an XL HwC is as fragile as an actual "Fragile" item, then it should be marked and priced accordingly.

- The claw's in-out movement should be more fine for the first few ticks of the scroll wheel, or else while the right-click is held down. Currently, certain item placements are functionally impossible because the claw skips over the position it would need to be in to place the items there.

- While I see the utility in having the tread spikes be active only while held, there are times when I'd like them to be toggleable as well. Perhaps if the player taps the shift key such that they've already released it before the spikes finish deploying, the spikes remain out until the shift key is pressed again? I suspect all you'd need to change is to have the game ignore the KeyUp event during the spikes animation, so it could be an easy change.

- When cresting steep hills, the tank tends to slooooooooowly tip forward, or even get stuck vertical for several seconds. This can cause items to spill out the back as it hitches to a stop while still mostly vertical.

- I don't know if this is intentional, but once the walls are high enough it's possible to fit two I-beams between the storage bay and the turret. It mostly works, too, except you have to drive very carefully to avoid having them slide off the side. It'd be pretty neat to have an upgrade that adds a grip surface there to make it a little easier to keep them in place, turning this from a funny hack to a genuine mechanic that functionally awards bonus money for safe driving practices.

- It would be nice to have a storage upgrade that adds a lid, for when you have everything you can carry and just want to get where you're going safely. Something like a folding garage door could probably be added to the back of the storage bay without getting in the way of anything else, and since it doesn't need to be reinforced steel like the rest of the tank it should be pretty lightweight. It might even allow for an extra delivery item condition, if there's foodstuffs or something that can normally handle the cold but can't handle the rapid freezing accompanied by blizzards.

- Failing the above, storage bay lights would be nice. I'm constantly pinging my radar at night to make sure nothing's falling out.

- There doesn't appear to be any way to sell or keep items individually, which is a bummer when I pick up something that sells for half-price and would prefer to keep it and sell it elsewhere. Having to exit the settlement, dig the item(s) out of the pile, then re-enter usually isn't worth the time, so practically speaking I just lose money. If altering the settlement UI is too troublesome, perhaps have items' labels change color while on the elevator to match their sale condition (delivery / high demand / low demand / normal sale) instead of health? It would make it clearer how much leeway the lifts' sale zones have, too.

- Reloading resets most of the tutorials, which is a little annoying.

- Why destroy Babel?! O_o I took the bomb up thinking I was clearing the way to the basement, and was extremely confused to discover I'd just destroyed a (populated?!) historical site for no stated reason or obvious gain. The game also saves after the delivery is taken, so there's no easy way to change your mind. I ended up having to chuck the bomb down the cliff towards Radio-chan's, so it'd explode out of range of anything important.

Cute but creepy, psychological but whimsical, just the way I like it. Looking forward to the full release.