Hey, to me this one is more pleasant to watch. I think because it's far more easy to perceive depth and distances.
I'm sensing great potential, so good luck with nailing down the gameplay!

Good point. Thanks for the hint, fearless_donut, and thanks anyway!

[Loot boxes in outer space]

Loot boxes in outer space

Up to now items have been distributed separately to spawners. They can be bumped by enemies, shockwaves etc. Though they are placed in niches, they can drift away in some circumstances and end up in the void, which is unfair. Moreover the amount of items is going to rise, so that far more than half of the spawners would be occupied.

In order to solve these problems I introduced loot boxes. They appear as clusters of flotsam without collider and can contain several items. From a distance they are lettered "Flotsam". When the player comes near enough to pick up items, he sees that one item being atop within the cluster. Every second the first item joins the end of the queue and the second item rises. So the player is able to view all items step-by-step if he wants to. But usually the player presses SPACE and picks up all items at once, so that the flotsam vanishes. If the player's inventory is nearly full, one or more items may remain and the flotsam too.

The player can't create flotsam. When he drops items, they always appear drifting separately. If these items end up in the void, the players has to blame himself, not the game. And that is - to bring it back to the beginning - the difference between fair and unfair I think.

I'm working on levels 3-6, weapons and enemies. Here's a snippet of ingame action:



In this scene the player uses a boltgun and a grenade launcher. The opponents are misusing their tools: boltguns (weaker models) and welders. The environment consists of ice.

It works in an opposite way for long-range rifles. After you get too close to the target, it gets harder to aim correctly.

Makes sense to me. And I think players appreciate these gameplay details.

Hey, I got the demo but it didn't start, I suppose because I'm running Win32. Would be nice to have a 32-Bit demo, should the occasion arise.
Gameplay seems to be fun and sophisticated to me. (Quite often you find nicely looking visuals but gameplay is missing or isn't worth mentioning yet.)
I also like the atmosphere! But the UI overlays appear big, colorful and numerous to me and sometimes they spoil the atmosphere a bit.
I'm watching!

[Accessing Steamworks]

Accessing Steamworks
In order to use many common Steam features you have to pass in a C++ class as an argument. It wasn't that easy to mimic a C++ class in Pascal, but it's doable. I wasn't confident first, but at that moment when it turns out to work ... (I guess almost all of you know what I mean.)

Map HUD
The player can't see what's in the shadow-of-view. But those invisibel parts are overlayed (in terms of a HUD) if the player has seen them already:



I decided to take that map HUD away from the player or rather restrict it to usual map mode because it counteracts the atmosphere. This gadget is more comfortable than necessary in early levels. Later, when situational awareness becomes really important, the player will be able to craft an appropriate device.

Aggressive play style
Not everyone likes it to retreat from enemies all the time and to lure them into the void or hazards.
So I added a tool called "salvage ram" (which every scavenger relies on). It drives out by leap and has a low rate of fire. It only deals a little damage and a little momentum, but it's available all the time.

Good visuals, the theme is very solid, gj on that

Glad to read that!


Most lately I tried to interface my game to steam ... Ok, it's my own fault to code myself and to not use, e.g., Unity. Furthermore it has been kinda reckless to not get used to C++ but to Pascal. Anyway the steam overlay is showing up for now.

Regarding visuals, almost all of the item graphics have been redrawn:



Ingame preview:

I like how the sounds shifts from side to side when you move around. And the atmosphere is kinda creepy 

I might have to play this, I'm loving the way that you designed the ships and the graphics in general. Looks very cool.

The unique weapons are something else also.

Thanks!
A good occasion to remember that there are others involved ...

@DanTheMan112
There is a graphic artist behind the scenes. I redirected the bigger part of your comment.

@PetSkull
For now I'm using free sound assets from A Sound Effect and Freesound. I only edit this material for my own purposes.

The Steam store page is ready for now. It's a Coming Soon page with the common release date: TBA. A feature section and perhaps a few GIFs are still missing.

I wrote a description of the game:

Savage Vessels is a rogue-like 2D space shooter with pixel-art, physics and hard survival.

Within fields of asteroids and fragmented freighters you scavenge and combat against robot vessels. At the same time you have to keep away from the strange surrounding void, that swallows up smaller masses and backs away from larger ones.

With your carrier you got into this threatening area, where hyperspace reaches into our realm. In order to escape you have to determine your location repeatedly. It's rather simple: leave the carrier, visit some navpoints, land again and move on. But the robots won't let you. So you have to arm against them by gathering and crafting.

The levels consist of crafted regions, which are combined randomly. Items and enemies are also assigned randomly to certain locations. You get used to the levels, but every replay differs, so the game will be able to kill you even after 100 sessions. By the way you can look at Savage Vessels as a spiritual successor to Teleglitch.

All native English speakers among yourselfes are invited to point out my mistakes or correct them.

Also I began to twitter, which means I will show GIFs mainly in order to reach those who may like the game and show them the way to steam. I don't want to tweet around much otherwise. That's the plan anyway.

Not to make me rich, but to prove to myself that I actually can create and release a full game.

Your game is definitely not a low effort submission. So I like this attitude. Wishing you well on Steam! 

[sound system]

In the last weeks I was working on the sound system and on the sounds also. I needed a better type of sound emitter in order to attach persistent sounds to objects. I'm using sound loops and repeatedly played sounds for this purpose.

At the moment I'm setting up the steam page which is a kind of unpredictable process regarding the uploads ... Anyway! I made an actual gameplay trailer therefor. That video lets you gain an impression of the new sound.

[Download on itch.io]

A new demo version has been uploaded.
I said good bye to the rotating camera and there is a tutorial now.

Download on itch.io

Sorry to say it, but I don't like the monitor effect, or the green color for that matter. How about it, if you made it a darker gradient of your current FOW color ?

That Wing Commander reference was most of all provoking, I guess. I wasn't sure about it.
After some trial and error with patterns and colors I got to this one:

Looks much better now, with the fixed camera! 

Thanks!

I thought about enhancing the field of view or rather it's counterpart: the "field of blindness" or fog-of-war. I consider dynamics as well as the 2D shape as final, but what about colors?

In Savage Vessels the fog-of-war is a combination of blindness and map; big asteroids and big parts of freighters are blended in schematically if you have seen/visited them already. So I could turn the fog-of-war into a kind of HUD.
For this (testing) purpose I borrowed some HUD colors from good old Wing Commander. I took the cockpit's monitors background and text colors: dark blue and green. In addition I emphasized the scanlines because of the old monitor effect.

Old:


New:


And in motion:

Camera rotation is gone. See for yourself:



WASD keys move the ship, and the mouse moves the target cursor.
Ship and weapon(s) gear to the target cursor quite fast, but not instantly.

@fearless_donut
Thanks for your thoughts, this was helpful!

You're right about tutorials. I'll make one.

Yeah, I reconsidered camera design ... I personally really like the current mode, but (most) people don't; I look on that now as confirmed. So I will remove the rotation from the camera and assign it to the weapons. Aiming will be done via mouse cursor, just like Teleglitch by the way.

Bearing in mind that this game becomes a teleglitch-like, the field of view is a crucial feature and it has to be opaque and plain (not distracting). But if I ever come across a way to improve it, it shall be done.

After having the demo ready there was a break: for one thing I had to deal with other stuff, for another thing I had to consider marketing.

Some observations regarding marketing:

• I wasn't able to gather much feedback (on gameplay) so far. I suspect that some(?) people like what they see, but have an issue with controls & perspective, so I guess my game resides in a small niche.
  
• I can't work on this game constantly.
  
• I'm backing off from marketing.
  

So I went through some options ...
Terminate the project? -- Would be too bad.
Proceed without marketing? -- Too much effort for a secret project.
Search for an indie game publisher? -- Agreements involve obligations, deadlines, communication (in English). Not to mention that you have to find a publisher first.
Do marketing that is right for you? -- Sounds doable! Only show content and answer questions about the game. Don't share, like, follow or retweet.

This leads to my current plan:

• Set up a steam page. This would be the homepage, including a forum.
  
• Twitter. Post screenshots and GIFs once a week. Route people to the steam page.
  

That's it for now.
If you think that I'm missing something or I'm wrong with my cunning plan, please let me know!

I'm sure, there is no need to worry about your graphics!
The dialogues might turn out tricky. I'm curious about it.
Good luck for now!

@Rarykos
Hey, thanks for your great feedback!

Let's see ...
In the first level, when leaving your carrier, there are two items near you: a motor and chisels. Pick them up by pressing SPACE. Press C for crafting mode. Build a chiselgun and chisel ammo. Now you can shoot at them.
In level 2 you can find another motor and a rail. Together with spare parts these provide you with the sawgun you have seen on reddit. Take saw blades to make saw ammo.

Regarding the structure: besides your mission to reach 3 nav points, there is a boss somewhere waiting for you in level 3. This boss is jamming your nav system. You have to destroy him in order to make the nav points visible.
Perhaps I should add some of these tips to the readme file?

About the controls: the game is by design played/controlled like a First Person Shooter, not like a Twin Stick Shooter. I think this isn't obvious and I have to convey that early on somehow.

Sorry for the touch of motion sickness. A few people are affected. You have to put up with it or the game simply isn't your cup of tea. But I hope you will bear it.