BEACON

Mutate yourself to victory as you scavenge an uncharted alien planet in this stylish sci-fi action rogue-like. · By monothetic

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Accessibility or is it just me?

A topic by Ower1908 created Jun 12, 2020 Views: 584 Replies: 5

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Ower19083 years ago(+1)

Starting off, I have to say I love the CONCEPT for the game. A rougelike shooter in which you mutate over time using the parts of monsters you kill? That's pretty neat. The music is nice, and the graphics look great. My only gripe with the game is my ability to play it.

I play on a dinky laptop. I got this game through the racial justice pack, and was really excited to try this game. Sadly, I don't think I ever will. Yes, the graphics are one aspect, but there is more.

Firstly, the settings for accessibility are decent at best. With only a slider for master and music volume, I can't hear any of the dialogue from the tutorial clearly, what with the background noise being so loud and there being no captions for the voice. If it weren't for the onscreen instructions I wouldn't have known what to do. The control menu also seems to not work? At least, I can't see all of my options clearly.

When I play the game, it's difficult to see what I'm doing too. The camera is angled in a way that I can see the general gist of what's going on, but can't tell what is what. I cannot aim properly or even tell what is a piece of terrain or part of the backdrop. The movement makes my game lag like there's no tomorrow, and it's pretty difficult to even open a box, not to mention shooting while avoiding projectiles. And I play on keyboard, I've seen the comments about controller controls.

Out of my very short gameplay up until the "energy fortress" area of the first map, my game crashed twice . On first loadup of a new game and after a few minutes in the fortress.

I'd love to play this game, but with the way it's turned out, I can't enjoy it.

monotheticDeveloper3 years ago(+2)

Sorry you have had such a bad experience trying to play the game, I'll try to respond to your issues 1 by 1.

Accessibility settings are something we are definitely planning to improve in Patch 3.0 (The final release). We're still in early access and some of the final features and options aren't fully fleshed out yet. More control over audio sliders is something we've had requested a few times the last week and we'll probably get them added in one of the upcoming smaller patches. There have been a few issues with the options for some players as well, sometimes caused only on the first launch of the game. If you restart the game and reset keybinds to default hopefully everything should be working as normal.

Enemy readability is something we're planning on improving as well. Yesterday we released a small patch that made enemies stand out against the background more, and we have a few other things we'll try for upcoming patches to improve that more.

Performance is something we have been working on a lot lately and the 2.6 patch released this week increased performance by an average 30%. Most of my playthroughs I get an average 140-180 FPS on a 4 year old video card, but you definitely need a medium to high end card and processor to be able to play smoothly. I'm not sure if your laptop has a dedicated video card but if it's integrated graphics I'm not sure we'll ever be able to optimize enough for it to perform smooth enough.

Controls are something we have also improved a lot recently, particularly on controller. Most of the comments you read on controller I'd assume are from before patch 2.51, but after the controller scheme overhaul we've heard a lot more positive opinions on the controls. If you have issues with the controls on PC you should be able to rebind your controls, but I think some of the issues you have with movement and aiming are more due to the low performance on your computer.

If you were playing on patch 2.51 before maybe try to update to 2.61 and see if it's an improvement. Otherwise maybe try again when we release patch 3.0 later this year, but depending on your computer specs I'm not sure you'll be able to play it smoothly without a more powerful computer.

ilikegoodfood3 years ago(+2)

Glad to hear that you're working on accessability features. I got this game as part of the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality and am loving it. It's a very pretty, smooth (on my high-end PC) game with solid gameplay and plenty of cool things to find and explore.

As for accessability features, I've been thinking about the things that I find to be difficult or annoying and thought I might contribute to this thread with some suggstions:

Subtitles are an obvious one.
Separate audio sliders for music, background noises, sound effects (such as gunfire and enemy actions), and the voice-acting would all be good to have.
Enemy readability, as you're alredy working on, could indeed do with some improvement. As an additional accesability option, I was wondering about having a highlight for them, probbaly in the form of a slight glow effect on them.
An option to always show health bars on enemies could be useful. It would also double up as a way for them to stand out.
An option to have a highly-visible base-plate under the player character would be great. Especially once you've got drones orbiting yourself, which are larger than the player, it's easy to loose track of yourself.
An option to remove the particle effects from the foreground fog would be great. They're very visually noisy in the Waste Disposal level and harm verall readability.
An option to remove the fore-ground fog entirely would also make the scenes much visually cleaner. This would especially help those with imperfect eyesight, myself included.
An option to have the first-time pick-up notifications for passive items always activate, or a stat-only notification on repeat pickup. Currently it can be difficult to work out what my build actually contains.
An option to have the first-time pick-up notifications for weapons and slotted items (the ones on 'q' and 'c' by default) always show up, or a stat-only notification on repeat pickup.

This last one isn't an accessability feature, but while I'm here:
When reaching a new waypoint. having a 'Save & Quit' or 'Continue' verification before loading would also be fantastic. It'd save having to wait for it to load a new zone only to then quit. It'd also act as a more natural break-point. You also don't make it clear that each waypoint saves the game automatically. I only found out for sure by testing it.

I hope these suggestions are useful to you, and that they include something you hadn't thought of.

Thanks for this fantastic game, and thank you for putting it in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. I may never have discovered it else.

monotheticDeveloper3 years ago(+2)

Thanks for the thorough list of feedback! We'll go through it and add them to the upcoming tasks. Here's a couple of notes I had based on your feedback:

-Is there anything specifically you were hoping would have subtitles? The Tutorial VO is the first obvious answer, but in game there are rarely VO lines that we expected to require subtitles outside of a few Arena announcements.

-We can consider adding something to notify the player position more clearly as an option, it isn't something we considered that much before because the player is always in the same position in the center of the screen. I thought the recent ammo wheel addition along with the aiming lines help make the player more obvious, but if you're requesting it I'm sure other players would appreciate the option to make it even more obvious.

-I agree with the option to disable weather particles, but disabling the fog entirely would cause the background to look broken with the way the levels are constructed and also remove most of the individual identity of the different weather types.

-I definitely agree with the item pickup screen showing up being an option. You can always check the Index to see the items you currently have equipped but sometimes it would be simpler to just pick up the item and read it then even if you've looted it before.

-We can consider changing the order of saving at the Beacon Locators but I'm not sure if it's possible for us to save for the following level before it's been generated. At the very least we can add a UI animation to show that the game has been saved once you load into the next level.

ilikegoodfood3 years ago (1 edit)

You are correct that there aren't many voice lines, and therefore that there won't be many subtitles. On a side note, I don't know if you'd be interested in the idea, or if it would be within your developement scope, but Valve's half-life 2 has full closed captions that include noises as well as speech. Things like gunshots, enemy chatter, explosions and so forth.

I had honesatly not noticed that the player's positioon relative to the camera is fixed, and even now that you've said it, my brain is telling me it's not true. This may be because of the differing zoom-levels between areas, complex vertical environments or it may just be me, but I personally wouldn't consider position relative to camera to be a concrete and easy discernable enough guide for everyone.

As for saving, I had mistakenly assumed that you were saving the player's stats, loadout and a simple level ID, with the level being generated on load. I made this assumption based on the load times seeming similar to the level-transition times, and the fact that crates, enemies and pickups change when you quit out and re-load. As that is not the case, your choice to go with the current system makes a lot more sense.

EDIT:

I'm editing this with something that I literrally just noticed. Beacon doesn't have that many instances of flashing lights. Of the few instances that there are, the only to bother me personally is the intensly bright white flashes that accompany the lightning cell storm. This particulart instance definately needs toning down.

Furthermore, with a little careful examination of the game's lighting content, it may be possible to remove all regular or overly bright flashing lights, potentially making it safe for those who suffer from photosensetive epilepsy.

CyberneticSusurrus3 years ago(+1)

I would also add that some areas in certain levels are very bright and have poor contrast.
Bright enough that it becomes uncomfortable to look at and difficult to discern anything in.

I've noticed it primarily in the goo/lava/energy zones, so perhaps the solution is dialing down the intensity of the effects on those.
Relevant UI options might also help.

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BEACON

Accessibility or is it just me?