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ZNewman

5
Posts
A member registered Dec 27, 2020

Recent community posts

(1 edit)

Maybe it's just me, but I started a second run-through with the smaller base ship to see what changed and if it's actually moving any faster I can't tell the difference.

Also; after reading a few other people's comments I gave the autopilot a second chance and I think I may have just hit a run of bad luck with it, but now I have a different observation.  It seems odd for the ship to travel faster with the autopilot; the mini-game punishes me for engaging with it when it should be rewarding me with getting where I want to go faster.   

(Although in fairness I can't say that the ship taking longer to cross the system map while playing the mini-game isn't just a bug.  Or possibly an illusion based on the time cycle counting differently while you're playing it, I did notice that the ship visually moves even faster under auto-pilot while you're sleeping.)  

So this was a fun one, I logged out and the next time I logged in my stamper was gone.  Then I combined that with the bug that lets you accidentally accept a job several times and had 30 crates to deliver and no way to finish the mission.

One more bug report:

I accepted a shipping job from my console and it didn't show up in my quest log.  I went back to the Comms menu to see if it would pop up that way and I got this error:

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object obj_console:

Variable obj_console.bigjob(102080, -2147483648) not set before reading it.
at gml_Object_obj_console_Draw_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_console_Draw_0 (line -1)

(1 edit)

A few minor observations:

During the travel minigame it seems odd that the same screen-shake happens for both banking and hitting a rock.  One is something I'm supposed to do and the other is not.  Relatedly there's an increased sound effect for catching a speed-up lane but there's no UI effect for hitting a dust cloud , when a lower "I don't like this" grumble from the engines would be appropriate going through the dust.   Neither is an actual problem but they break my immersion somewhat.

It really feels like the air scrubbers get out of alignment a little too fast.  I get them sorted, sleep, and then spend half my stamina sorting them back out again sometimes.

I noticed that if you put several raw fuel rocks in the warp engines you will get residue buildup, but if you only add them one at a time as you need to make jumps then you won't.   I doubt that's intentional.

I deliberately left my package stamper on a planet to see how the game would handle it, and the next shipment job I took gave me a new stamper for each planet on the quest.  Getting three stampers instead of one seems like a bug, losing the stamper feels like an opportunity for the shipping rep to get snarky on top of docking me some cash for my carelessness.  

Taking a 12+ crate shipping job goes from a storage nightmare to trivial after you buy your first cargo-pod upgrade.  The increases in maintenance help make up for it somewhat but it still does odd things to the difficulty curve.  (Although maybe I wasn't supposed to take that job before I had the cargo pod, but then why did the game let me have it?) 

The level-up overlay hogs most of interface.  I had it pop up in the middle of trying to repair my ship after an asteroid impact and it reminded me of one of your other game reviews: "Congratulations, you have died a total of 100 times while inches from safety because you can't interact with the game while I'm telling you about all the achievements you're earning."  

Still loving the heck out of the beta though.

I found a handful of technical issues:

1) Attempting to set a key preference is not working.  It will (very) briefly register the selected key and show the "Done" and "Reset to Defaults" buttons but then immediately blank out the selection.  The program has to be closed to get out of that state.

2) Clicking the "Reset to Default" button without any changes alters the default keys.  I'd guess that the default that it's restoring is from a different stage of development than the one that it pre-populates on loading the game. 

3) The overlay for confirming that you want to start a new game in a save slot is mostly transparent, which makes it hard to read when it overlays the save-slot screen.

4) Switching between Windowed and Full-Screen mode in either direction causes my monitor to blank out a couple of times in a row.  That might be a problem with my old desktop and not the build itself.

5) Quitting to the title never seems to save the game quite where I left off.  For example, I did it right after installing two new air recyclers after getting the warp drive and when I logged back into that save file the recyclers were back on my cargo pad.  It seems like there should be a Save Game option on the same menu with Quit to Title and Quit to Desktop. 

Leaving aside the technical issues, the Bank Left and Bank Right controls in the travel minigame remind me a bit of your own criticism of the gravity switching controls in Gravity Rush, in that they could be 100% more efficient.   Up or down to select which way to bank, and then a different key to actually bank.  I also learned really quickly not to trust the auto-pilot, I could never seem to get back to the controls fast enough when it warned me asteroids were in-bound.  

None of that stopped me from playing for several hours straight, so bravo on nailing the core gameplay loop.