itch.io

I also noticed this in a playthrough

Hey, cool to see someone go really hard in on it. I'm also loving it, but haven't had the time to go as deep as you have. 

I just wanted to comment here, and say I too experienced the audio glitch you described.

• 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.

I ended the sound the same way, but I also think you can end it by going into the ship controls again and resuming control of the ship.

Ver 0.1.1

The "Rumors" page has a few small issues:

• It looks like the Rumors are selectable /highlightable by mouse, but only the last one. This is not a game-breaking problem at all but feels weird
• Once a rumor is completed (ie: it tells me there is an upgraded unit to buy at a place, and I buy it), the rumor hangs around. The ability to clear a rumor, or automatically marking it as being completed (once the item the rumor refers to is collected) would ensure this list doesn't bloat for every rumor. 

I also had this one, just now

I have written on a few bugs and issues I have had here, and feel bad. When playing tonight though, I had a "cool" moment when some stuff started to click, and I feel I should share.

Transiting between planets, I took a few hits and had some damage to some ship components. This included the ship's thrusters, which I noted visually (the damaged section was visible in the cockpit, with the "gash" on the tile) and I repaired.

Later in my playthrough, I was in manual ship control and noticed I could no longer thrust right. 

My first instinct was that this was a bug or control issue (and went to make a note). Before I did, I went into ship diagnostic and notices that the right thruster was reading in the red, an error I hadn't encountered before and despite my repair. I then realised that the big fat "ears" on the head of the ship were the external portions of said thrusters. I went out, repaired the damage, and resumed my journey with ship control. 

At no point was I trained in their being a thruster issue, or was I explicitly told that thrusters were a component. However, all the information and skills required to deal with a new problem were passed to me in-game, in such a way that there was a heavy-handed tutorial.  I knew the thrusters existed (because I walk past the internal portions of them as I walk in the cockpit, and that sometimes triggered their info windows), and I knew I had diagnostic tools (form earlier repair jobs and ship exploration) so I can assess the problem before leaving the ship.

I felt I learnt lessons in a way that "felt" rather natural, and served me when a new problem emerged.

I can say this or that about interfaces, controls, issues, and such, and I feel like a nag. However,  that moment just had felt very strong, and I needed to share.

Version 0.1.1

Note: I may not be 100% correct o this bug. Trying again this morning, but placing the item directly in front of the NPC awaiting the bag resolved the issue.

I'll leave the report below, but I'm likely wrong (although the duplication of the item is still an issue)

Bug - Cannot complete a Job (possibly due to duplicated item)

• Received a Job from Job board to collect a bag on one planet (Kysil II) and return it to a person on another (Drist III)
• Got to Kysil II, landed, found the bag, and returned with the bag to the ship.
• Upon returning to the ship and stowing the item off the landing pad, I returned to the planet once again (I thought I was low on warp fuel and wanted to purchase some).
• Notice the white bag was still on the planet (possibly a duplicate).
• Returned to the ship, and confirmed the white bag i brought to the ship earlier was still there.
• Flew back to Drist III, and took the bag to the loading zone of the planet. The person standing in the zone did not acknowledge my return of their bag, and was unable to complete the job.
• Went to bed (real-life bed), so took no other action on my end to redress.

Possible other factors:

• I had two jobs for two white bags at the same time. I returned the white bag for the first job, but encountered the problem on the second. Both bags had in their descriptions clearly what their final destination was, and I returned the correct bag to the first job.

Version 0.1.1

Bug - Placing Item in Loading Zone

Cannot place an Item in a specific spot in the landing zone. 

I have a theory that the position was previously occupied by the item (A package) that was returned to the guy (top left) as part of a job, and that it might still be allocated to the spot, but invisible.

Misc - Replacing Coolant

I commented earlier, that I was unable to replace coolant. It seems that when buying a Ship upgrade, that the coolant at this point resets to 100%. So now I have solved my coolant problem (and my ship is now more easily in the green), how can we replace coolant without having to shell out several grand for an upgrade.

The shipyard is the big computer console near the loading area on a planet with a crane, it is not a building like the trading post :)

Playing Ver 0.1.1, in full-screen mode.

Loving what I see now, and ironing out a lot of the pain-points in the first release made putting an extending amount of play into things easier. Hoping things keep improving! 

Bugs

1. Glitch when putting down items

Encountered the same issue Mad_As_A_Hatter discussed, where the game can lock when placing an item in an "impossible" space. I encountered it when performing a "ship in distress" mission and crushing the little blob things by dropping boxes on them (Good mission, btw, was a nice little change). The scenario demanded dropping an item box multiple times, so it was likely to create the issue. After encountering the issue, and reading Mad_As_A_Hatter write-up, I attempted to recreate the issue as described, to the same result.

2. Regarding the Trading Post

• The back button is not working in the "Sell" page of the "Trading Post", when driven by the mouse.  Attempting to click it will "sell" the last item on the list.

• The up and down arrows are not 100% effective in the "Trading Post" menu. Downward arrow in particular. If you click too high on the icon, we can sell the last item in the list. Have to click real down low on the icon.

3. Mission not Updating

I got the ship upgrade item from the wreckage, and obtained the new warp drive, but the mission telling me to do this remains the active mission in the PDA, and the on-screen notice hangs around.

Issues and feedback on existing features

Not bugs per-se, just things I have noticed.

1. Controls. 

Experimenting with controls. I am using WSAD to move, and primarily using the mouse to Use Items / Go Back and interact with Menus (with spacebar as a backup use key). 

Mouse seems to be a "Use" / "Back" (independent of control setup), but not in all cases. Specifically, see waking up from a sleep cycle, which does not seem to acknowledge the mouse left as a "use" key.

2. Damaged Ship and Maintenance

As a test, I decided to take the ship back and forth in an asteroid region on the map and try to do some real damage. I was trying to get an end-of-game of some sort, but saw that the ship can only be severly damaged to a standstill (which is a good thing). Whilst repairing things, I noticed the following:

• When I really damaged things, I seem to have lost coolant from the reactor. Not the clean/dirty ratio, but the total volume of coolant. It dropped from 100% to 60%. I could repair the reactor, and purify the remaining coolant, but could not figure out how to get it back up to 100%. I tried all the tools, went to the trading post (in case it was purchasable), and visited a planet with a shipyard in order to try resolving it. Once I lost the coolant, I could never get the danger gauge (the green/yellow/red dial with the indicator triangle) to never move above the yellow region and felt like I was cleaning the reactor coolant more frequently.
• Warp Coil never aligns to 100%, even when I realign with the tools. It always appears a little off visually.
• Broken power lines can be obscured by placing items on top of them (as I often do, filling up the ship and just leaving the minimum route to move between rooms). Once I knew what I was looking for, I could see the sparks coming from under an item, but the sparks were not super obvious whilst walking through the ship and encountering the specific fault for the first time. Not sure if this feels intentional or not, but it threw me for a minute. I adjusted, but it might be understated.

3. Trading Post

With the selling lists in the trading post, I am not 100% sure how Items are being ordered in the list. Doing some testing, it seems that the list of sellable items is one-to-one with the arrangement of items in the loading zone (starting with the top left, go along row one, then to the next row down, and so on), trimming empty space from the array.

Is getting the list sortable by item name possible, or to stack the same item in the list (ie: Instead of having seven line items for potatoes, having one line item for seven potatoes?). 

I'm not even sure this is a good idea, as the current setup has the benefit of selling a specific item from your landing zone (ie: Sell the third potato).

4. Missions

Displaying missions, in the PDA. Could a mission have an indicator, that the item is already onboard? At present, if I have a few jobs going and split my play session over a few days, I can lose track of things a bit of what I was doing. 

I do love that I could go up to an item (from a half-completed mission) and it would tell me in the item description where I had to take it, which was helpful. That may be all the solution you want, and it compels the player to interact with the item itself (and not a menu abstracting those items' information). That could be baked into the gameplay loop, and having more detail in the PDA might destroy that.

Also, when on a planet, maybe show the missions on the "active" indicator on the top right (the text with the current mission).

5. Job Board:

This is less feedback, more than a question. Is the difference between the Job Board tasks and Freight Jobs? At first glance, Jobs from the Job Board seem to offer no price in their description, so you go in a bit blind, not knowing the reward. Additionally, they don't seem to have the time limits the shipping jobs do. Are these conclusions correct, or has my small sample size biased my opinion?

I tried to "self answer" by going to the in-game Manual entry for "Freight Jobs", but this specific entry was empty. A lot of the other ones are good so far, and explain some things and have been helpful.

6. Misc

• Can we have the volume setting persist as a setting? Each time I play, I have to come in and adjust. Someone else also mentioned the volume jumped between 8 and 10 (no 9), and I noticed that when I went in and checked.
• The readability of translucent menus is still a little difficult (though glad that interacting with the top menu doesn't influence the bottom menu). An obvious one this is happening on is the confirmation screen when opening a save.
• Save system is clearer (thanks for details in the release notes), but not clearer in-game itself. 
• The Status Portrait for the player character is always their current orientation. ie: If I am moving "North" within the game world (facing away from the camera), I only see the back of their head in the Status screen.
• I can change tools in bed. Is this something I should be able to do? I feel like that in games with sleep/recovery cycles, you are sacrificing time and agency within the game (for a limited time) in order to obtain a benefit (regain stamina). Changing tools is such a small thing, but if a character is asleep, I would expect to be able to do nothing in this time (apart from waking up).
• Love the littering notice, when placing the items out of the delivery area.
  

Suggestions 

New, random things, often sitting outside the primary gameplay loop:

• Would it be possible to name our ship? I don't remember the exact dialog of when we are offered our first ship, but I thought the designations there are only class names and not ship names. 
• Regarding 0xygen on a planet, and wearing a suit. One thought I had was of divers, who go on longer explorations of undersea caves. They often carry additional cylinders with them, to extend their time underwater. As we can already carry an item, we could (in theory) carry a cylinder as that item, and holding this cylinder will consume oxygen from the cylinder (as opposed to the players' suits supply), for the duration of the carry. This could do interesting things for the gameplay (juggling between an item and the air cylinder, carrying them each in turn, to retrieve an item that is further from the platform), though I could also see it adding wrinkles and the need for additional systems to support it (ie: landing on a planet at present, I have no idea if the planet requires a suit or not - the game just adds the suit automatically for me when I land with the platform. If this cylinder idea were implemented, there would need to be a way to tell the player whether the planet has oxygen or not).
• You are doing some stat tracking and presentation (examples under the status page, and the star map), and there is the idea of "Cycles" in the game (get this done in X cycles), but I am feeling some disconnect with the ongoing perception of time and things being achieved. When doing a shipping job, I really have no idea of how many cycles have passed, I just know a line is getting shorter on the freight display. I'm not sure what I am asking for here, it's just a "disconnect" I have felt while playing. I do think to some sci-fi, or "ship" based shows, where characters have a "Captains Log", for capturing some sort of summary on the narrative and what is being achieved in an ongoing fashion.

Reading through the fixes and changes, and it sounds like an awesome amount of work went into improving things. Keen to try this out tonight!

Loved my initial play session with this, but the save bug took the wind out of my sails. I wasnt that keen to give the game another go for a few more days, and single session it. However, I do have some feedback.

The fact that vast majoritay of feedback is Technical and Quality of Life stuff is a good sign, that the underlying gameplay is pretty cool and enjoyable.

I didnt reach the "end game" as it were. I was post -revival, pre-warp drive,  so some of my feedback may have been addressed later in the game

Technical Issues:

Any thing under this heading feels like something that is broken.

• I have encountered the same save bug others here have, so won't repeat it here. 

• If I have the ship menu open, when approaching the first planet in the tutorial level, the game will not fully close the menu, and control will not return to me. Basically, a lock and I cannot return to the game. Had to restart.

• Issues with the Mouse cursor and fullscreen mode. Mouse cursor is offset from its actual position, and I was often pointing to the far right bottom corner, in order to interac with the menu. This was not a problem im window mode, so played the game there.

• Issue with the mouse and menus when stacked on top of each other. It was possible to interact with both the top menu, and the menu underneathat the same time. The best place to see it when selecting a save, and the confirmation menu appears. Both menus can be interacted with simultaneously, and it is confusing.

• Issue with the mouse overriding keyboard commands. If the mouse was on a menu, and I was trying to drive commands via the keyboard, the KB command appears to execute and then the mouse. This gave me the impression my inputs were not being received. Was particularly noticable on the Starmap menu, with all its little boxes. When I rememebred to move the mouse far off to the side, I was fine. When I went to do something as I played, and used the mouse, it could recreate the issue for me. Maybe a test that mouse position command is only accepted if the mouse moves between frames / steps? 

• Visual issue with platform control console sometimes hiding behind planet elements. I could still use the platform, it is just more of a wierd visual thing.

Game Feedback

Actual feedback on the gameplay itself (not much here).

• The portion of the game where I am tasked with getting the 6000 and the ship upgrade felt a little grindy, though I am also thinking that may have been the point (its a job, and it can get a bit like that). I actually had the ship upgrade part before Dripbert told me about it, so I pre-emptively skipped a stepping stone that would have occured before this point, and I had a stretch where all I had to do was work to earn the credits in an undirected fashion. It didnt help that while hunting for work to do, the Job Board seemed to not have jobs that were useful to me. A lot of them were "Collect a thing, retun it to X person" but some part of the job required access out of system. I got frustrated, and ended up just collecting warp fuel from one planet, and shipping it across to another. It would have worked (baring the save crash), but it felt a bit like I had fallen away from what was intended.

• Dripberg dialog regarding his "Clue" for the upgrade units. If I already have it, is the clue necessary? Could the dialog of the clue be modified, to acknowledge that you have it already? Still have him call in, do his spiel (which does give information in story as to what it is), but also give some context dialog like "Ohhh, you already have it? Great!". I always like it in games when you get the jump on things, and the dialog acknowledges it. (though in saying that, how would Dripberg have access to this information that you already obtained the item?) 

• Text in the Communications (not the character dialog) when it approaches the end of line. The last word in the line that will exceed the line lenght will start to print  on the current line, then jump the last word of the line to the start of a new line. It fine, its not broken, but it made reading these as they came in a bit jarring / jumpy.

• On a planet, I sometimes got a little lost from the platform. The worlds are not that large, and without the pressure of a death state from lack of oxygen, the stress of getting back quick isnt there, so I can take time to find the platform . However, knowing the general direction to the platform  would help when you add the O2 limits and other such aspect in.

• And for my stupidest feedback - Dumping toxic waste on a uninhabited planet feels like it should have a reaction of some kind. I know there is no life there, and its a "victimless crime", but it also feels like something a Captain Planet villain would do. Not sure if I am asking for consequences (a cargo being hazardous and affecting the player), but maybe acknowledgement of it being a less-than-great thing? This might be something  you will come back to on the story side.

General, Misc and Stickler Feedback

These things dont feel broken, but just need some polish. "Quality of Life" feedback.

• Backing out of the menus feels inconsistent. In the PDA menu that accompanies the player at all times, the Escape key can be used to step back up one level in the menu. In the ship menu, particularly the diagnostics for the ship, I had to select a distinct "back" button. 

• When does the game save its progress? If its communitcated to the player, I dont know and may of missed it. It feels like it saves each time you return to your ship, or tied to the end game event, but that is just at a guess based on my one good save and reload (before the bug). Not advocating for a particular solution (a big intusive "GAME SAVED" propmt, the ability to save anywhere, in-story acknowledgement of a save mechanic) rather just a little clarity here would have made me comfortable in my first playthrough before I went to bed.

• A way to skip the opening text crawl (if only for dev builds like this, where story is not a big factor). We had the option to speed up most other dialog (and was appreciated)

• Starting at the title screen, and going to settings menu, using only KB input (no mouse). The settings menu is a stripped down version of the PDA with only one node (settings). I still needed to select the Settings node, before getting access to selecting the options within. It feels like in this case, the node should be pre-selected, saving a button press.  My narration is shit-house.

• Key displays that show a "mini-version" for the Ship (the navigation minigame, the starmap) have a ship sillouette that always has the ships nacelles in. Visually, this is great (as it gives the ship a rough triangular V shape to it, so direction of motion is clear) but when I was tramping around without the warp drive, I saw it and then couldnt un-see it. Other places (particularly the ship diagnostic views) d adjust based on whether the ship has nacelles or not. It just feels inconsistant.

• The ability to remove missions from list (particularly missions aquired from the Jobs board ). I accepted a few I didnt mean to (for items I did not know, or planets I could not get-to pre-warp), and they hung around in my list. This was towards the end of my playthrough, so the feature may already be there and I missed it. Apologies if this is not an issue.