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[wizered67]

Just saw this game and decided to try out the demo for a while (I think I played around 30ish minutes, up until the first city). Anyway, here are some bugs and feedback I had:

• The text at the bottom when Benedict was talking seemed to move a bit too slow.
• I feel like maybe battles should pause automatically when they start because otherwise the enemy often gets some free hits on you before you can even react.
• For the regular text when talking to other people, I would have liked a way to skip the text scrolling without skipping the message entirely.
• In the bridge screen, the skill descriptions are wrong (Snipe had placeholder text and said it cost 2 EP)
• At one point I was ambushed by pirates, but the battle immediately ended in a victory.
• I found myself forgetting and being confused by the need to choose which skills to equip after unlocking them. I would have preferred that skills automatically get equipped when you have less than the maximum number of skills you can have equipped.
• There were some typos eg one Traveler said "starts" instead of "stars".
• I found the tutorial section at the beginning to not be very engaging, but I understand the need for a tutorial. It seems like in terms of story there was a lot of random exposition at the beginning and a lot of the guy telling you about background.
• The art looks nice but it seemed like there was way too much brown. The mountains were brown, the houses in the city were brown, etc.
• Besides the city, everywhere kind of looked the same. There was nothing that distinct.
• There was no way to save the game :/

I hope that doesn't seem too negative since I'm mostly pointing out things that were broken or I think should be changed. I think there's a lot of potential for the game! The feeling of upgrading your ship and leveling up your crew seems addicting! And I really like the idea of getting new crew members as you go. Please keep up the work and I think this could really become something great!

[Oxeren]

It's been quite a while since the last post. And there are reasons for that. After public alpha I've decided to introduce some preeeetty big changes to the game. Here is an in-depth text about reasons and the changes I've posted on Gamejolt:
__________________________________
So last October I’ve released the open alpha version of the game. After I had evaluated the results, it became quite clear that something ought to be changed. First, I’ve roughly estimated the amount of time it would take to produce remaining content, and it became clear that finishing the game would take a looong time. More importantly, even though general feedback was positive, it turned out that the game in its current form was somewhat boring and, let’s say, not very catchy, so finishing the game the way it was would be… um… an unwise time investment. It’s not like I have not made knowingly unwise time investments before, but this time I’ve decided that I have made enough mistakes to finally exercise some wisdom.
I have to admit, after that I was kinda demotivated, and haven’t been working on a project for several months. But recently I got inspired again and decided to rework the game. I’ve came up with some changes to hopefully fix the gameplay, and make it so I could finish the game in a finite amount of time. Some things will stay the same, other things will be heavily altered, other stuff will be completely cut from the game.

So here are some basic gameplay changes I’ve introduced to the game:

Combat:

-The combat is turn-based again, as it was in the very first version of the game. Real-time combat with active pause turned out to be not as good after all. Watching for gun cooldowns is not very convenient and, well, not very fun. And many people who played the game couldn’t even figure out how exactly it works.
-The player now controls multiple ships.
-Ships are now able to move around the battlefield.
As a result, the combat is more tactical, but without being overly complicated. If I were to draw a comparison, I’d say that now the combat is somewhat reminiscent of Fire Emblem series.

Metagame:

-The main change is that the exploration mode, as it previously was in the game (flying around the world and stuff), is completely removed. Yeeeah, I can hear your booing It was an extremely hard decision to make, especially considering huge amount of work already put into it. But it turned out that producing levels was incredibly labour intensive. I had to admit that making a game of decent quality and sufficient length this way is just not possible for me. Instead, now there is a global map with various locations, that are unlocked during playthrough.
-Player’s characters now control entire ships instead of manning guns. So basically each character is a pilot of their ship now.

"But Igor," you say, "if you tell us finishing the game that was already this far into production was impossible, how on earth can remaking it be faster?" And that is a reasonable question. But no worries, if anyone has concerns about that, I have good news: I’ve already implemented everything I’ve mentioned and most technical tasks are already done, so I’m currently in the state of mostly just content production. I won’t show any images yet, since the visual side of the game is still kinda rough, but that will be fixed prety soon.

So stay tuned and don’t lose hope in the game (please, I’ll finish it, I promise ಥ_ಥ )!

[Oxeren]

Have not posted the big news here for some reason. The game has been released on Steam!

Here is a trailer




The game is completely different now (see previous post for details), but still, it is finished and playable! Releasing my first commercial game outside of a company was a pretty big milestone for me. I'm not completely satisfied with how everything turned out, but I'm glad I did it.