Hi, thank you very much for the constructive feedback, it's appreciated.
I hate installers when testing games. Having to uninstall one version and reinstall the next is a hassle
Yes that's understandable. Uninstalling previous versions won't be necessary next. It's stated here because of the previous alpha which used a very different file system and format. Further beta won't require an uninstaller. I will provide a zip file next time as well.
I really like the title-screen music.
Thanks, most of our tracks have been done by
Alexander Jordan, which i highly recommend. Can't be sure of which track you're referring to, it's played at random (unintended issue i noticed post packaging).
The title is really misleading, considering you have to pick a pre-defined map at the beginning of a game. It's not "unending" at all, although it does seem pretty huge.
I realize now that I should have stated a bit more than the commercial blurb about the state of the game. I was a bit tired and kinda forgot people here don't follow the development process (oops). Procedural galaxy generation is planed, ability to travel between galaxies will happen through wormholes. Unending GalaxIES would probably be a better title, though.
Rotation is really jerky. For some reason, the final 30 degrees or so are almost always extra choppy.
Yeah, I am thinking about switching to a more standard thruster +/- and steer left/right mechanism instead of a shoot'em up control scheme to be honest. Rotations have a hard time keeping up when ships can do 180 on the spot. Also the ship points in the direction it's currently heading. In what you call the last 30 degrees, basically it's rotating more slowly because your ship is still drifting sideways. I'm used to it and barely notice it, that's why a new pair of eyes is invaluable, I will at least change that part.
The mouse wheel function felt reversed on the galactic map. I'm used to rolling it up/forward to zoom in on things. It's nice that I can change it, but it seemed weird that it was set up like that by default.
Yeah another tester told me that as well. Forgot to make it a default. Will fix.
Pressing F3 didn't close the sector information window. I also couldn't keep flying with it open, which seemed to defeat the purpose of having it as an overlay. F1 didn't close the Empire Manager. It only seemed to work with F2, but I feel like that's really convenient and should work for all windows.
Yes, side effect of recent changes to the menu system. Added to bug list.
The buttons in the Empire Manager are just a little bit too short, so the bottoms of the lower-case g's get cut off.
Damn another one I didn't see. You have no idea how many buttons and fonts i resized to avoid that
Added that to the list (same issue in the log at the bottom of the screen).
If I select a ship in the Empire Manager assets, it would be nice to be able to return to the Assets page without having to go press F1 again and click the tab again.
Same goes for the diplomacy. My user interface doesn't track the last opened menu which lead to annoying stuff like that. It's a known issue I will definitively fix.
The "Jump" option never worked the first time. It made a sound and a glow, but never made me jump until I tried it again.
Oh, that one is weird. It seems to work for me. I will investigate.
I didn't play very long. My two biggest issues are the speed and the feeling that I had almost no awareness of, or control over, what went on in my empire.
By default, and I realize it's not the best way to showcase the game, if you start as an empire, instead of a simple pilot, everything is fully automated (diplomacy aside). It's mostly done that way so the player can follow the small (not ingame yet) empire management tutorial on the wiki. But I understand the issue. It may have been a very different experience if I had put a scenario with just enough to colonize your first solar system instead. Will do for the next beta.
The speed is an issue for me because there's so much empty space and it takes something like 40sec to travel across a sector, so even jumping near something of interest doesn't actually mean you'll be encountering the object/enemy anytime soon. I've played 3D space games that were similar, but I think they had one big advantage: I could see planets and suns in the distance, so there was always a feeling that I was moving toward something. Maybe markers on the edges of the screen could show points of interest in nearby sectors? Those games also generally include some sort of booster or time-dilation feature to speed things up a bit. It might help if there were more traders or patrols wandering between sectors as well, so I'd actually see things happening in some of the emptier spaces.
Yeah that's a very hard thing to balance properly, I am still experimenting with that. You probably haven't played long enough to notice that factions (including yours) build a sort of warpgate in each solar system. You can use it to travel instantly to any solar system you're not at war with and that has a warp-gate too. From there it's fairly easy to jump to your destination quickly. The issue is that none are pre built when the game starts (no matter the settings) and they have a fairly long build time. I'll get on that.
About outside of solar system activities, you're perfectly right. This is not within the scope of this beta, though. There are some hidden stuff, but not enough. There are also a few timed events that only happen on specific conditions. We are (mostly) done with the general framework of the game, adding this kind of content is what will be done during the next few beta versions.
I kept seeing messages pop up about battles, things being built or destroyed, etc. but I had no idea where any of it was happening. Maybe the map should show where battles are taking place or where things have recently been built by my faction.
This is the downside of running everything in automated. Disabling the managers give way more control and is generally more efficient. As stated, using this startup scenario as a default option was a bad idea. You can however have the camera being automatically centered on events of your choosing (empire manager / event logging). Sectors targeted for an invasion by a faction are circled (well, squared) in red. Military overlay on the galactic map can also be a good indication of where the action is or will be.
I never felt like I was ruling an empire. I was just a guy in a very, very slow ship wandering around and hoping to find something to do while my empire did things without me.
To be fair, you can switch ship any time (E key by default iirc). You start with enough funds and ship parts to buy or build basically any ship (some are very fast) you want. That said, when played as an empire, navigating the map in any ship isn't really necessary when you can move whole fleets via the map. It's more a thing that you're supposed to do when you play as pilot. Another side effect of leaving everything automated (not your fault as stated), you should be too busy building stations, managing your fleets and turning other factions on each others to think about moving that slow battleship around
It didn't even seem like I could interact with anything, apart from accidentally blowing up a ship that was following me (even though friendly fire was disabled?). It just wasn't that fun for me.
Fire friendly fire is always activated on the ship you have targeted (to avoid switching constantly), but I shouldn't activate it when it's something owned by your faction, it's a bug and I'll fix it.
For the "nothing to do part" well I covered that already (empire settings). There's also more to do when you're not an empire as you can do some (of the very few currently implemented) missions, hunt pirates to collect bounties, smuggle stuff between pirate stations and factories, save or enslave crews lost in space, mine asteroids or hunt space creatures.
Thinking about it, the default start should have been the
federation trader one, 2 fighter crafts, a transport and enough money to trade, buy mining ships and equipment, or a handful of additional fighters. But I was kinda worried that people would only move cargo around (and obviously find it boring) if I used a starting scenario like this one and completely miss the fact that you can control an empire too.
That said, it has a lot of potential and from a technical standpoint I found it impressive. There's a ton going on in there and it seems to work well for the most part. A few ships moved in strange ways, and there was that rotation stutter, but I didn't come across any other bugs as far as I could tell.
Thanks !
That was some invaluable input. If nothing more serious (bug wise) comes to light, I will probably publish a hotfix for the small bugs discussed here before moving to beta 2 development (which is adding actual content regarding pirates and cops and their related 'guilds').
Cheers,
SK.
Developer
