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Greetings one and all!

May I present to you the recently uploaded web-based alpha version of Slingshot - The bones of the game are built around real orbital physics, its fluff around the pseudoscience of alchemy. Cast adrift in an unknown sector of the universe it is up to you to explore the solar systems around you, collect materials with which you can upgrade and respec you vessel on the fly...and hope to fight off the hostile beings which occupy this strange space until you manage to find your way home.



A thankyou to all who give it a try  :) Any and all feedback is much appreciated, in particular regarding the ease of understanding the mechanics of play (As we are currently trying to nail down exactly how to tutorialise these things) and the controls.

The first thing that stuck out to me after booting up the game is the cropped background inside the background. Either make the outer background bigger, the inner one smaller, or add a border. It's an interesting idea to show the "tutorial" while loading, though.

The acceleration was a little bit too strong (as in, I went off the map by accident), and the particle trail didn't go directly behind me like it usually would.

Holding down both W and D made particles go both ways.
Shooting went in the direction you're moving, not where you're aiming.
I couldn't find the enemies for a few minutes, and once I did I couldn't really do anything because I was moving too fast and couldn't stop.

If you want the game to be accessible then you should make the friction ~10 times what it currently is and the acceleration almost double. Movement didn't feel natural, so it was hard to play.

I get what you're trying to do with the real physics. It'll be a constant uphill battle to train your players, but I think you can do it if you're careful. A very important thing will be to look at feedback people give, and understand when they're complaining about direct problems, or whether the complaint arises from some side effect of the mechanics you've been forced into because of "real physics."

Even with the second case, it's important to recognize what they're complaining about are still valid problems that you'll have to overcome for the game to be good/unfrustrating. These are extra challenges you've chosen to defeat by doing a "less" intuitive game like this.


Turning

It took me awhile to understand that your rotational velocity was included in the "real physics" category as well. For a long time, I thought random key presses caused me to over-turn. This is because the turn acceleration is low enough that it's hard to recognize for several seconds that your turn speed is actually increasing. Adding little turning thruster effects would really help to let players know you're counteracting their thrust automatically for them after they release the button (rather than there just being "some weird" turning stuff going on).

At the end of the day, the current system feels pretty clunky, and isn't really giving you any benefit, unfortunately. There aren't any cool tricks you can do with it, and there's lots of really bad situations that arise from it.

I would explore having a much more powerful acceleration/deceleration, and also automatically cutting the acceleration (so the player can't exceed a max turning rate). The end goal being that when the player lets go of the button, their turning stops much, much more quickly than current. It's not like the player will ever want to be spinning around super-fast as a strategy. It also makes the camera go really bad and you may physically ail some players with it.  ;D


General Movement

As Translocator mentioned, the acceleration is painfully slow. It can take several seconds of just accelerating and waiting to actually complete some maneuvers. Worse, since it takes so long to make course corrections, you have to limit your speed generally (otherwise things pop onto the screen and hit you before you can react), so the end gameplay is, "truck around really slowly on the map and try and do anything useful."

I know it feels majestic and "accurate" to have it like this, but again, what is the benefit it's actually giving your game? You need to think about how you can use this in a way that makes your game better than others, not worse just for the sake of being "real".

There's room for super-slow-acceleration games, but it's in more of a sim context, where things are spread out more and the pacing is slow enough that you can plan ahead. Instead, you currently have a small-view, action-y, top-down camera that doesn't zoom. Right now the two are fighting and it's causing frustration, not innovative gameplay.

I would way increase the acceleration so your ship handles more like an action game; at the very least make players able to react in time to objects coming onto the screen. Also maybe limit the maximum momentum they can achieve (by killing their thrusters at a certain velocity).

OR, make a super-scaling camera so you can see waaay out the faster you travel, and thus react to things in time, and increase the range of the weapons/adjust the gameplay accordingly.

I would also totally explore adding a left/right thruster movement (strafe). This would let you maneuver a lot more without having to (arduously) change your heading, as well as "dogfight" better, perhaps.


Main Gun

Right now it's inherently confusing the way the gun works. You're angling the projectiles on their true heading rather than their relative-to-ship heading, and that's causing confusion. I can understand why you did it, because it's really hard to aim. In theory, you can see if it's going to hit something by the direction it's travelling. However, this also breaks down if your enemy is moving relatively the same direction you are. Now, the bullets become untrustworthy again.

This is also all due to the fact that the bullets barely travel faster than you are currently. This is also unintuitive because people expect bullets/rockets/missiles to be propelled with some force. Even when I was thinking, "okay, real physics" the bullets weren't behaving the way I thought orbital physics would work, too. Because they're so slow, they're just inherently hard to use, as well.

Again, what are you gaining with the speed being super low? Maybe you could sort of set up a missile run where you travel a set distance, fire a ton of missiles in a big cluster and then let 'er rip. But instead the missiles collide with each other. They're also travelling so close to your speed, you can't accelerate at all after you've fired.

The end result is that it's basically impossible to hit anything that's farther away from you and not moving in the same general direction as you. This is because you have such low authority over the absolute direction your bullets are going (i.e. bullets fired to one side or the other still fly in generally the same direction). They're functionally more similar to mines you fire out the front of your ship, than an actual space-usable weapon. (Who would build that!)

I would explore having more action-y bullets that actually fire out at a much higher speed. I would also explore other weapons like missiles or lasers. Whatever you feel is appropriate and matches your orbital physics vision, while allowing the player much more ability to influence where they're actually projecting their damage.


Niggling Bits

The particles emitted by your acceleration/deceleration thrusters don't follow the physics rules. It looks like they get pushed backwards along the path of your memontum. I would fire them out with your current velocity, plus a small amount pointing toward your rear thruster.

The "reverse" thruster on the 'S' key seems to slow you down, not reverse thrust. Also if you use it while stopped, it makes the camera freak out. I would add a separate "brake" button, and make 'S' actually apply reverse thrust. This would work well with strafing thrusters, as well.

Firing the gun while moving with low absolute speed makes the camera jitter.

The gravity of planets don't seem to affect you unless you're super super close to their center. This doesn't seem to follow what I know about gravity physics (is that really inverse square?).


Closing

In summary you have a really nice start. It's also a full game, though obviously you're not done with it. That's still quite an accomplishment, though, so congratulations!

Have you played Super Melee (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7_rm_l7WvI) in Star Control (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/)? It uses "orbital physics" as its basis, and it works really well. It breaks the rules frequently, but it's a super-great base to take inspiration from. It's also good to see when it breaks the rules and try to understand why. (Because it was fun!)

Seriously, thanks for the extensive feedback. This is ~just~ the sort of thing we need to chew over and you've given plenty of food for thought. We've started ourselves out with a tough project in trying to balance the physics element with the fun element, but it is one we really want to crack! This is all going to be of great help in doing so.

I'll be sure to direct Sean (https://twitter.com/DrSeanWalton), who is programmer on this project(I'm the art person), to this thread and get him tinkering with the engine. We've been iterating on things pretty quickly so it shouldn't be long before the next update.

So, Sean was already working ahead of me! :o A new version of the alpha (http://waltonia.co.uk/slingshot/) is already live, complete with changes to bullet speed, acceleration, turning friction, camera, screen shake and all manner of fun things. Check it out  :) 

I recorded ~20 minutes of me playing and giving random thoughts about the game:
http://www.twitch.tv/thisisavery/b/534426770

My main thoughts are below:


Handling

The ship flies much much better now - it's pretty good!

It's still a bit on the sluggish side, which is a little counter to its small size. But it looks like you're going for a more relaxed pace, so I think it's more about presentation at this point.


Core Loop

Something to think about is what your core loop will be, exactly. Is it defeat enemies -> get upgrades -> defeat better enemies -> get upgrades -> win game? Or is it more about exploration -> find new things -> get upgrades -> explore more things, etc.

Right now the basic activities you can do (fly around aimlessly until things float into view) will not do it for you in terms of player engagement. Really think about how you're going to lead/guide the player through your universe, in a way that will give him a good & fun experience.


Upgrade System

It's generally unclear how this works. I had to go out of my way to figure it out my trial-and-error. Regular players will give up before figuring it out. Lots of comments about it in the video.

I didn't know Ctrl was to "swap". The "X" looks like I'm disabling components, not trying to move them.

If you have free space, picking up a new component shouldn't overwrite your one component.

It's not possible for me to figure out how to use the components. Most of the time having them in different slots has no visible effect. It's like trying to guess recipes in Minecraft. Think a lot about how a new player is going to figure out the component system. The more intuitively, the better.

First Impression

I got a terrible frame-rate (Firefox), but it still felt pretty decent to fly around. After reading about the previous version, I wasn't expecting the new one to be as good as it was. (Note: I tried Chrome later and it worked perfectly)


Bugs/Issues/Weirdness

The bullets aren't facing the right direction as they move. Half the time, they don't move in the right direction, either, but I imagine that's because they're affected by my ship's movement far too much.

I fired at the boss for quite a long time and only did 2% damage. I tried the game again later and noticed it at 96% health somehow, then I warped and it was at 99% health. 

While waiting to teleport, I got hit by a long stream of bullets and didn't seem to take any damage at all.

In Firefox, I noticed a lot of popping in the sounds. It doesn't seem as bad in Chrome.

Leaving the window and then returning during the warping charge-up time caused the charging sound to stop and not start up again.


Player Feedback/Info

Having different colors of engine exhaust seems a bit misleading, because I'm pretty sure the different colors don't mean anything (Or do they?). The braking thruster is also very strange because it shoots out exhaust in a direction that doesn't make any sense most of the time.

When fighting normal enemies, I had no idea if I was doing any damage. When one suddenly exploded, a green bar appeared in the wreckage but I didn't know what that was because it didn't look like anything. The crates that sometimes come out of things are also confusing. I have no idea what they did. Activating them in my systems area didn't seem to have any effect.

The "out of 200" reading for the fuel is really misleading. It made me think I needed 200 fuel in order to warp, but warping only uses 50.


Gameplay

I feel like levels need double the number of enemies they have now (which would have to give less fuel, naturally). It's so easy to overshoot things unless you go really slowly, and either movement style makes seeking out enemies a bit tedious. Even with the tiny mini-map, there's so much wandering around. The asteroids sometimes look like enemies on the map as well, which doesn't help.

Is there a reason that the warp takes so long? With the current enemy density, there's no tension while you wait. It's not a "Can you survive long enough to warp just in time??!!!" sort of situation. You can normally just go and float around a bit until warping, so the wait is just boring.


Questions

It didn't seem possible to avoid the boss's bullets completely (except when it failed to aim properly at one point). Is it?

I really don't understand the bullets at all. They often explode for no apparent reason, while other times they can pass right through a part of the boss without colliding at all. I thought maybe they were hitting shields, but the boss's bullets explode when they aren't near me. It wasn't from me shooting at its bullets, either.

Are the ship's systems working at this stage? Selecting weapons, for example, didn't really seem to do anything. If it does, it should probably have a visual effect as well. Maybe I just wasn't selecting them properly. I saw the X appear and assumed that meant I was putting more power into the specified system.

What is the significance of the ring sizes on the mini-map?


I may not have enjoyed the gameplay a ton (mainly because of the aiming issues) but the movement feels good at this stage and I really liked some of the background art (the wispy, center-of-the-galaxy thing was pretty cool). The atmospheric soundscape wasn't bad and I kind of liked the weapon sounds as well.

Thanks for all the feedback, it's all very constructive and is going to be very helpful moving forward (I'm Sean by the way  :P )

I'm not going to respond in detail to all the feedback, for the most part I agree with it, but I thought I'd just clarify what our vision is moving forward which should answer a lot of the questions.  Also bare in mind that the version you are playing is the raw engine without the 'game' part.

Firstly you might want to read (http://sean.crossproduct.co.uk/2014/04/27/capturing-the-feeling-of-homeworld/) these (http://sean.crossproduct.co.uk/2014/05/14/in-space-games-everyone-can-hear-you-scream/) dev logs (http://sean.crossproduct.co.uk/2014/05/30/implementing-flak/) which explain some design choices.

So everything I explain now will be explained somehow in game, we are figuring out how at the moment...

The basic premise is that you were part of some kind of expedition force invading an unknown part of the galaxy.  You warp with your fleet, but you come out of warp alone with your warp navigation systems fried.  This means the only way to navigate is to enter random coordinates into the flight computer.  At the moment the number you enter is just a seed for a random level generator, we will be making some kind of stargate-type interface for warping.  Your long term goal to find out what happened to your fleet and find a way home.  We will be dropping in scripted events every so many warps, regardless of the coordinates.

Each system you jump to has a boss ship which is spawning all the other ships.  It will be impossible to kill until you upgrade your ship...

The upgrade drops represent the 4 alchemy elements.  Each has a different effect on different systems, the columns in the UI in the bottom right represent engines, shields, and guns....  except that the black gems are just extra 'hull'  wherever you put it, think of it like you are making your hull thicker so less space for other stuff.   The red and white gems increase some value associated with the system, e.g. red - damage per bullet or white - bullet velocity.  The yellow gem changes the system in some way, e.g. the triple shot. All the gems stack so two yellows in the gun column is even more bullets  ;).  Based on watching ThisIsAvery play I'm going to increase the percentage effect of each gem so you notice it more.  All the upgrade UI stuff is placeholder right now.   If you get 4 gems of the same colour in a row that gives you an extra slot in one of the columns.  The reason I haven't used drag and drop is that the primary control for the game is going to be a 360 controller, there is just a chrome update related bug which killed controller support the weekend we released alpha  >:(  ..... so you use the d-pad to do your upgrades.  

I'll leave it there for now, I've made a check list for me and Barry to work through over the coming few weeks.  Thanks again!

Hi Sean.

Yeah, I thought maybe the explosions were from flak fire, but they looked too explosion-like for that (not enough smoke, I think) so I rejected the thought. It's amazing how much just using a certain color can change my entire impression of what something is...

It doesn't feel right to warp out of a system without defeating the boss ship of the area, especially when I know I'll never be able to go back. Do you think you'll allow backtracking for people who don't like unfinished business?

Black gems are for the hull... Well, that explains why they didn't do anything to my weapons. I never would've guessed that putting something into my weapon system would increase my hull armor. A slot for "hull" would make a bit more sense, I think, but I'm guessing you want to force players to make decisions between their hull and adding power to other things.

I never encountered yellow or red gems, just a ton of black ones and a white one. Was I doing something wrong? Am I supposed to destroy asteroids in addition to enemies, or do the other gems just come into play after a certain number of warps?

I didn't mind not having drag-and-drop. The arrow keys work really well for that sort of thing.

Smoke, as well as various explosion effects, are on my art assets 'To Do' list  :) At the moment everything is running off one set of recoloured particles, one set of bullet graphics, etc just to have ~something~ in place so things are playable. Varying these elements up to improve player feedback from the game is on a high priority  - alongside finishing up the rest of the ship models.

Yellow and Red materials should drop as often as Black and White and in the same way - From destroying asteroids. I think you've just been having a particularly bad run  :o Or it's a strange bug...I'll leave that for Sean to decide.

If you know the coordinates of a system you can return to it - you just don't know the coordinates of the first system :P  At the moment that just resets the system, in the future we will do something like save the boss health or something.  We've even been toying with the idea of some kind of time travel-side effect of warp flight element where you find ghosts of your own ship if you go back to a system, or even having a database of systems on-line where other players have visited and you get ghosts from them ala dark souls --- might be ambitious though....

What I foresee is you playing the game with a notepad and paper, noting down system coordinates, maybe you'll have your system for farming warp fuel, maybe you'll have your system where you farm gems.  Maybe players will share good system coordinates on-line, since the same coordinates give you the same procedural system.  Also before I forget I've reduced the number of planets which can spawn in a system but increased the number of enemies in the dev build, I think it helps with performance and gameplay.... I'll upload it some time this week.

The gem thing is purely random, but maybe I should make it random-but-biased towards what you have the least of....

Hey guys, cool info.

Remember that we're just giving out random suggestions, for the most part. If the answer is, "yea, that's not really in there yet," don't feel obligated you don't have it in yet, or you need to defend yourselves to us or anything. We're just here to provide useful insight!


Regarding the thought of, "increase the percentage effect of each gem so you notice it more," I'd advise that percentage increases are simply inherently difficult to recognize. Most often you need to increase to things like ~200% each, and even then it can slip by because players don't know to look in the right area.

Like bullet speed; if you said, "don't you notice your bullets are faster," a player would likely squint and go, "oh yeah I see that now." But the player's really thinking, "I move this white thing around I don't see anything happening," and won't know to look at bullet speed.

All I mean to say is, think carefully about how you're going to present that information to the player. Since you're still designing, I might be preaching on what you already know. But if the plan is, "make the trial-and-error slightly better," I'd caution against that, and go for more/better presentation of mechanics to the player.

Looking forward to checking the game out again later! Great work so far!

We really appreciate the insight, and I for one don't feel the need to defend myself :P

So I pushed a new build up, I won't detail the changes I'd rather you just played it and saw what you thought.  All the changes are in response to your feedback, but we are no where near done.  I for one think it plays much better now, so thanks again for your play time!

Alpha build ver. 0.009 now up, including such modifications as:

Change to interceptor AI
More AI
Improved collision detection
Engine special ability changed to 'flamethrower'
Enlarged physical shield
Tried to add visual hints to upgrade effects

I pushed out a big update this past weekend.

The enemy AI has been improved, and what's more is that the longer you stay in a single the system the smarter they become....  However the longer you stay in a system the higher your score multiplier becomes, so it adds a push your luck element to the game.  This is in response to a lot of the previous feedback on players not really knowing what the aim is or what to do.
 
I would love some feedback on this aspect, since it is quite tricky to balance the difficulty...  Does it push you to warp to new systems?  Are the resources too scarce or too abundant?

You can play the game here http://waltonia.co.uk/slingshot (http://waltonia.co.uk/slingshot)