I think one of the things I've found annoying is the rate at which the ship degrades. I actually like walking around my ship and repairing it now and then. But I can't enjoy that because everything starts breaking immediately after you fix it. Without the fail state in the game I'm also just running around not caring about stamina, because there's no reason to.
A member registered Dec 15, 2020
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Alright, version 0.1.3!
Continued Gameplay Adventure:
After exploring the entire galaxy the last time I played, I decided to dial it back. This time Jonas Starhawk is just a simple man trying to get a big spaceship as fast as possible. In doing so I found a nifty trick. By allowing stamping machines to be bought, I made a little auto-stamp system with four of them. I really like this emergent automation and I think it could make for interesting ship upgrades. I got money rolling quickly and was living the high life in only a few hours.
For fun I decided to try the varying prices mechanic that trading posts have. I found one planet that sold Pineapple Chunks for cheap, and another that bought them for more than double what I paid. You made a joke about someone filling their ship with Bananas for weird reasons. Well laugh it up, because I bought 126 Pineapple Chunks at $51, sold them at $136, and made a cool $10,710 profit.
Was it terribly inefficient? Yes. Can I make more in ¼ of the time by doing freight jobs? Yes. Did I accidentally by 126 Pineapples first, load them up, and then have to scramble to find a buyer? Yes. Do I want this feature to be built up more and improved still? Absolutely.
I think this way of making money ties into an idea you said a few videos back about a character's personality drifting depending on their actions. Helping ships slides you more altruistic, so then maybe normal freight jobs pull you towards apathy. Oniris surveys could move either more altruistic or egoism, depending on how they tie into the story. I think my experimental pineapple delivery could be a new delivery type that skews egoist. Say there’s a building you can buy crates from similar to Oniris. You can drop those crates on items like in the slimes mechanic. Except, now that crate is carrying the item. Make each crate be able to carry ~4 of the same item, increase price differences, and boom, now my method is more profitable than normal freight. The player has more personal choice in which material to specialize in. They live or die by their own actions, a very private egotism choice. Idk, just something I thought of.
Notes on Sleeping and Stamina:
I decided to run a test on if Stamina increases if you stay in the bed. At level 15, it took 1:40 to regenerate to full Stamina while standing around, and only 50 seconds if in bed. Despite that effectiveness, it only took 18 seconds to use all my Stamina cleaning just 4 Air Cyclers, not even accounting for other residues or package delivery. These findings lead me to one of two conclusions. A) Drastically increase the natural Stamina regeneration, add new ways to regenerate Stamina, and decrease the amount of ship breakdowns. Or B) Just get rid of Stamina for a patch or two.
No matter which path is chosen, I think ship degradation and breakdowns should be highly reduced as more content is added. I never felt at peace for more than a few minutes while on my maxed out ship. I’d always be running around fixing the air or residue or coolant. Air Cyclers are the most significant culprit here, as another commenter pointed out. I get there being a lot of breakdowns right now since there’s nothing else to do in the current build. But once new secondary loops get added in my ship needs to stop breaking after one minute of jotting down notes.
I also just realized food was a useful thing this update from a comment. I tried it out, and it is kind of fun to fill a whole landing bay with apples and sprint through eating them. I’ll definitely experiment with this feature more in future updates. I do think it suffers from the same problems plaguing Stamina overall, mainly diminishing returns. I needed to fill that landing bay up twice with food to regen my full Stamina at level 15. The cost was negligible but I don’t think rapid overeating is the tone this game is going for.
Bugs/visual glitches:
- *BIG GLITCH* Random storage containers will be at ports I’ve never visited before or taken a quest to pick up from. They can also appear after revisiting already discovered planets. The ghost boxes luckily only messed up one of my missions, because new storage crates for the quest didn’t replace the ghost boxes and didn’t show up when new landing space was available.
- Contacting Galactic Freight from your ship's computer crashes the game.
- The repainting menu still doesn’t fit with every room added. You can also open the menu and scroll up to get what I could best call a “phantom” tab. Nothing is selected and pushing enter doesn’t do anything, but it doesn’t sync up like all the other menus.
- Still some lag on Uncivilized planets, can’t tell if that’s on my end or not.
- More than my last run through I had the issue of my character colliding with an item I’d just put down. This resulted in countless times where I would be halfway in a crate and couldn’t walk up or down to get out. Maybe placing items could “bounce” you to the tile where you were placing from so this collision wouldn’t happen
- If you stop holding space while buying the hull repainting, the card stays and doesn’t reset like other repainting stations.
- I’m glad Fuel Injectors and Warp Rings are getting dirty, they both now have the issue of never getting fully aligned. Injectors can only sometimes get to 100% and Rings still can be a very small (yet infuriating) amount of pixels off.
- Freight Jobs still have no description in the Menu.
Gameplay Ideas:
After playing through basically the same delivery and job board missions a dozen times, I’d like to throw some ideas into the ring.
- Pet Delivery: pick up cages, put them on your landing dock. Once back on your ship the animal escapes and has similar AI to the slimes, except faster. To deliver them you need to recapture them in a cage. Maybe get rid of doors crushing them, maybe not.
- Heating and Cooling: Highly specialized delivery missions where you have to keep packages around a heating/cooling device.
- Being able to rotate the crate stamper with the wrench for more customization.
- I had the idea of getting a push cart/dolly after a few freight deliveries. It could hold two crates and go faster than walking speed. Transporting full docks of cargo can get tedious and that could really move it along.
I’m liking these new features and I’m excited to see how NPC’s will interact with them. Good demo as always!
Okay, I think I’m the first one to do this. I played as Jonas Starhawk, who, after being sent 2,000 years in the future, decided to explore the entire galaxy and collect every material. And I did that, which is why it took me so long to write this comment.
Here’s proof of the accomplishment:
Me and my dad have watched Dev Diary together since September, and I was really excited to play this alpha. So with complete galaxy exploration under my belt, I can definitively state that this is a fun gameplay loop. Once the story is developed, I can see plenty of people doing different things with their playthrough. Someone might want to explore the galaxy, or get the fastest ship, maybe pledge themselves to a faction. There’s a lot of mechanics I can see getting better with more story depth getting added. I’ll get through my list of bugs and glitches before some suggestions I have for improvements on existing features.
Gameplay Glitch/Notes:
- No description of Freight Jobs in the Manual.
- Upgrade Units not appearing on Derelict Ships, but computer messages saying I’ve missed one. I first started noticing this after following a rumor to a ship.
- Game freeze when dropping any item into a door.
- Lag when landing on uninhabited planets or ship repairs. Could it be caused by items in my Landing Bay or ship in general?
- No way to restore Coolant after the system has been damaged besides upgrading the ship. I though I was being smart by throwing coolant bottles at it, but to no avail.
- Fuel in Warp Engines gets cleared when you upgrade any part of the ship.
- Some objects left in the Landing Bay can be deleted if the Landing Bay is upgraded.
- Navigating the trading posts with a cursor is clunky.
- Sometimes the residue timer makes something you’ve just cleaned 20%+ dirty.
- In the Jobs board, you can get quests for a ‘Berry Bunch’ or ‘Pea Pod’. Both are actually quests for ‘Berries’ and ‘Peas’.
- Your balance should appear in the repainting store like every other shop.
- Maybe I'm dumb, but I couldn't find any way to take off my characters glasses. I eventually got used to them, but it feels like there should be some way to do that.
- Maybe some differentiation between the hair and skin chair? Maybe the skin chair is actually a tanning bed.
Visual Glitch:
- In the countdown stage of the Warp Speed animation, number 2 shows a half rendered ship.
- Air puff texture can disappear if next to a wall at the top. It can also appear through the ship when entering warp speed.
- That damage texture doesn’t line up with the outside cockpits sensor thingies. I fixed them before I thought to take a picture, but it basically hangs out over space instead of the sensor.
- If you pick up an item while nearing/out of stamina, the emotion reaction will play. If you move immediately, the reaction stays where it is and doesn’t follow the player. Maybe since player tracking could be hard, emotions should stop when the player moves?
- Items in a Landing Bay lost their texture when landing on a repair ship. I could still interact with them even when invisible, and could glitch through them to move around. My items also appeared in the Landing Bay of the other ship.
- When upgrading a ship, if you have items laying on the ground (as I had), and the ship's arrangement moves, the items get put in this null black void area. They’re recoverable thankfully, the void disappears after they’re removed and the ship is reloaded. A similar thing happens when docking at a repair ship with items on the landing bay.
- If there are too many ship components, they clip underneath the repainting menu.
- The cursor pointing towards the ship on a landed planet clips above the menus.
Audio Glitch:
- I spun the ship around fast in the System Map. I left quickly and the spinning sound kept playing until I landed on a planet.
Suggestions:
- When in the Manual, there should be icons next to each description of the planet types. I only started understanding the differences because of attrition. Explanations for each planet type should probably be in the tutorial as well. Maybe the lawyer says “Go to the Residential planet ____ to get some new haircut options.”
- Civilized planets feel very desolate. As I was on my 50-60th Residential planet, I wondered why all these shops and medical services were on raised platforms. Why aren’t stores on the ground level, with people going in and out? If I could go down into the marketplaces of planets, they would have their own personalities and cultures. You’ve got the movement code for Zoobs, why not refine that and have residents walk around. No interaction required, just movement to make these planets feel lived in.
- While I was watching the most recent Dev Diary, one idea of yours caught my attention, sectioning off space for early gameplay. I like the idea, but it doesn’t make sense with the current layout of the map. All the systems are in this unnatural box grid, and cutting the players movement into another box seems stale. Taking a page from the Star Wars galaxy, I think the map should be circular and split into ‘rims’. This does a couple things. 1. It just looks more visually appealing. 2. It would show off the massive purple egg in the middle of the galaxy better. 3. It allows the player to explore varied types of planets as they unlock ‘rims’ through the story or other gameplay. Maybe lore-wise, the egg makes it difficult to warp jump without a powerful ship. You can still jump to it any time, but are more likely to get smashed by asteroids the worse your ship is.
- Playing off my ‘rims’ idea, I think the eventual factions the player encounters should have different areas of belief. Maybe the farther a system is from the egg, the less likely it is for them to believe it exists. Meanwhile those in the center worship or fear it.
- Another commenter talked more on this, but the day system is confusing. There's no calendar or way to track cycles yourself. The word only appears in freight jobs and while sleeping.
- I think sleeping should eventually be removed. I appreciate its current inclusion, since there's nothing besides cleaning and the small direct control game to do. But once the secondary and tertiary loops are there, I don't see any reason why sleeping can't be replaced primarily with food items. Sleeping is the player's way of saying "There's nothing left to do, let me just time skip", and I don't think the final version of the game should have that much to skip.
- I’m of two minds on the random system names and planet composition. On one hand, having a set galaxy where all players have the same experiences seems most beneficial. Plus you could flesh out the backstory of a world and by extension a crew member you can recruit from it. Other hand, randomness means a new story every time the player restarts the game. Randomness is also easier to program I imagine. I ultimately think it’s better for the game to have one structured setting (planet layouts, resources, size) and have random planet names, factions, and characters.
Final thoughts:
I loved this alpha. I only played one insanely completionist way, which isn’t usually normal for me. I can’t even imagine the story I’ll have with crewmates and taking the adventure slower. I started collecting all the items after I saw they had hilarious flavor text. And I can see how some items could be used with the new rooms and features. Reading through the menus and taskbars of this game is really enjoyable. I found a sneak peak of a repair shop faction in the Industrial Planet description, and I’m super excited for that. All my larger critiques boil down to me just wanting more to do, another feature to bite my teeth into. Can’t wait to keep playing this with each new release!