Alright, with your demo I do finally understand what you mean! Playing around with it a bunch I do think it would be more problematic for casual players than the current solution though, because the perceptual control flipping is one of the issues testers have brought up with my original, fully 6DOF control scheme. I had assumed your goal, like that of many testers, was to get to a "YGIWYS" kinda control where the relation between inputs and outcomes is always consistent. The lil' cam lag is very nice. In any case I probably won't have time to implement this before NextFest, so I'll have to see how it lands as is right now. Would you at least say that the new modern controls are an improvement and better for you to play with? I definitely appreciate you taking the time to make this prototype and I'll keep working with it to see where the controls go next! ps. can you send me the lil demo on discord or somewhere so I can have it locally?
Num1d1um
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Thanks for the detailed feedback! A lot to digest for sure, some of the more radical changes I'll have to consider very carefully. Did you utilize the hybrid control mode in your further play?
I'll definitely think about simplifying navigation in the way you described by taking the horizon out of the equation, but a full-on autopilot like you describe for following enemies is not something I'd do since I want navigation to remain a manual process during combat.
Most of the HUD things I'm already sort of coalescing into an update in my mind and many have been suggested before, I agree that more information about weapon state needs to be visible on enemies that aren't under the cursor and also that I need to better communicate sensor strength and its limits.
As for loot, all collectibles apart from items (weapons and modules) already have magnetism and move toward the player in a tractor-beam-like way once in range, maybe I'll just increase this radius a bit to make it more obvious. Since handling items is very disruptive I don't want to have them move around and potentially overwhelm players when they all show up on your ship at once!
Bullet and missile speed is subject to the weapon randomization and increases noticeably as the difficulty (and thus item quality) goes up, may receive a small bump to its base values. Missiles being slow is intentional, to make both fast enemies and fast players capable of outrunning them. The full version will also include a missile variant (via perk) that is much faster and agile, for fighting small enemies.
A small bounty for every kill is a nice idea, I'll implement that for sure - and I can also add more ambient enemies very easily.
Thanks again, I'd be very happy to also have you on the Discord, we have a suggestions channel there as well!
Thanks so much for giving it a shot, happy to see you put your mark on the leaderboard! I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by the camera function you describe and say you would prefer, mouse delta translates directly to orbit movement in both cam modes as is - or do you mean you'd like to rotate the camera itself instead of having it orbit around the ship?
I should also add that in horizon-alogned cam mode you can click on enemies to focus the camera on them, which allows you to track them without moving the mouse.
Hey Mark, thanks so much for taking a look!
Appreciate you giving it some time and the warm words even though it's not your cup of tea, I expect many folks to feel the same as it is quite niche. I also agree that the tone is fairly cold and oppressive, this is intentional.
I've experimented with gamepad controls in the past but haven't found a good solution both technically and in terms of dealing with the increasing complexity and required dexterity of the gameplay, maybe I'll manage to put something together before release.
I agree with your take on the ship selection screen and the tutorial flow, and am planning to make the tutorial more narrativized as well as include a pre-gameplay cutscene that explains the overall world and goals before throwing players in. I also plan to split several elements of the selection screen into their own subscreens, since most of them will receive much more content, by release. Right now the demo is quite cramped. Tooltips and video previews are a good call that I'll work on implementing for release as well!
Thanks again! I've had reports of the no-pickup bug after tutorial before but have sadly not been able to reproduce it myself, could I maybe bother you to send me your log? If it's not too big of an issue just msg me on discord and I can tell you where to find it.
On the other points, the UI elements are explained in the Help&Info section of the menu, past testing has shown that players do not have the patience to be told about UI so I've had to move that over to the menu while at the same time incurring the issue you encountered - not sure if there's a middle ground yet.
Weapon and enemy balance is a difficult topic. Catharage is procedural and (intentionally) has large variances, both in encounter and player strength and challenge. It is very much intended that players start with weak weapons and then invest currency to upgrade the starting power of their equipment and/or find better stuff during runs. For the tutorial it is guaranteed that players find a laser, because lasers are the most reliable weapon type for killing the tutorial enemies, but it's still possible to get unlucky. I'll look into maybe artifically increasing the quality of tutorial gear to make sure it's not too bad of a time the first go round, but I also don't want to impress a power onto new players that won't carry over into the "real" game.
A difference in targeting ability between overview and normal mode should be strictly impossible, so either you've found a bug or the enemy ended up just inching into your range right as you swapped to overview - hard to say without footage. If you end up sending your log I'll have a look for any errors relating to this as well but "normally" there is no difference in sensor function between the modes.
I'll think about making both control modes interoperable and non-switched, it would certainly make the tutorialization much easier!
Hey, I tried playing this but it seems broken(?) I start, see two brains that are immediately shot away by white bubbles and then I just watch the white circles float around but nothing happens while I hover over them, nor click them. Maybe I misunderstood the description but it seems like the build on the web player isn't working correctly.
Hey, thanks so much for taking a look! The tutorial has definitely seen some changes since before the jam started so I'd expect confusion if you came into like half of the tutorial then and the whole thing now.
The keyboard controls in indirect mode are somewhat of a relic and don't work quite as I'd like. They are always horizon-relative, even if the camera is aligned to the ship, and can overshoot the top and bottom of the worldspace and thus invert. In the next update I will remove this functionality and make a clearer and easier to understand distinction between just Keyboard mode (direct mode) and Mouse mode (indirect mode). Since mouse indirect control doesn't suffer from this inversion and camera relation issue it should work much better. I'll also look into making it so that swapping to indirect mode maintains your current heading.
As for telling which side of ships is up or down, all ships have a visual design that has reflective golden plating on one side ("top") and grey high frequency greeble particles on another side ("down"). This was done to address the issue you describe!
Trail length does scale with speed, but since the ships have a good amount of momentum, the trail doesn't "update" immediately. There's also a bar at the bottom of the UI labeled "THRT" that shows whether you're thrusting or not.
Locking onto enemies can be disorienting but you can still rotate the camera position around your ship using the normal camera rotation controls to get it back into view. This (and locking itself) are things I consider "advanced" features so the tutorial doesn't address them in its limited time and space, but maybe it should, I'll look into it.
The reason pressing space during tutorial popups unpauses and turns the screen to grey is because space swaps to the overview mode, which uses a grey plate as a transition animation. Since time is slowed greatly during tutorial popups, this transition also takes more time. I've not yet found an elegant solution to this problem apart from disabling the overview mode during tutorial popups, which has lead to complaints in the past. I'll make sure to push a changenote if and when I find a way to handle slowmotion and the overview transition better though!
Again thanks so much for taking a look, I hope you come back and play some more and I'll get to implementing some of the things you mentioned right away!
I played this for a bit, here's some thoughts:
-The player character is in a ball, which is a nice idea, but it doesn't feel at all like I'm controlling a ball. I would expect inertia and rolling momentum to be factors in the movement, but I can stop and revert on a dime right now.
-The camera is angled very shallowly, which makes the front of the playing field (the part close to the camera) appear much larger than the back and also means enemies on that part of the playfield are visible closer to the character than those in the back. I've nearly and actually ran into enemies a couple of times, especially after getting the full speed upgrade.
-Sound is alright for the style and overall feel but the music did get grating after a while.
-The UI style is kind of disjointed, the game has a very programmer-art / whitebox look in general but right on the loading screen I got two different fonts that didn't mesh imo.
Other than that I like the idea, I thought the upgrades and progression were fine and it might have the potential to be quite unique if you lean into the rolling ball controls and physics more!
Heya, I'll take a look at your game! Mine's this: https://num1d1um.itch.io/catharage