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[KPas]

I reworked the shaping of light.

The short video shows some examples:

• the carrier's spotlights, jittering a little
• some searchlights, which focus upon the player and follow him
• muzzle flash

[PetSkull]

I like the look of it, but was surprised and not amused by the serious screen shake on small gun fire. Are you sure you want this? I would probably be nausea quite fast, playing the game.

[io3 creations]

I like the look of it, but was surprised and not amused by the serious screen shake on small gun fire. Are you sure you want this? I would probably be nausea quite fast, playing the game.

That didn't look like a screen shake. It looked more like "screen quake". 

[KPas]

Hey, I'm not sure of a whole range of things and appreciate your feedback. Thanks!
I don't want you to part with your last breakfast, so I will reduce the shake distinctly.
In fact I did it already.

[KPas]

There will be 10 or more levels overall. The first 3 levels are about mining, refining and terraforming. There are refineries and huge diggers, and the robots make use of chisels, saws, drills, and they move stuff around.
In the levels 4 to 6 the robots will try to build outposts, of which more later.

Currently I'm working on level 3. There will be a new and dangerous opponent. Indeed he is already known as the annoying mover from level 1, but he does something new, which is actually intended for terraforming:

[KPas]

Recently I thought a lot about items, weapons, crafting and so on.

Here is a current list of items:

a) Repairing

• Oil drum
  repairs 5% of your damage
• Spare parts
  repairs 25% of your damage; but also ingedient of many crafting recipes

b) Concrete parts of hardware

• Motor
• Rail
• Empty barrel
• Hollow shaft
• Thruster
• Plasmatron
• Probe
• AI unit

c) Raw material for ammo mainly

• Chisels
• Saw blades
• Drill bits
• Rods
• Plasma cell
• ANFO (explosive)

And now some example recipes for simple weapons & ammo in the first levels:

Chisel gun = Motor + Spare parts
Chisel ammo = Chisels

Chisel mg = Chisel gun + Empty barrel + Spare parts

Saw gun = Motor + Rail + Spare parts
Saw ammo = Saw blades

Especially the saw gun is a beginners weapon. It keeps all the small and fast enemies at arm's length until you learn to outmaneuver them:

[KPas]

I worked on the Game Loop.
This stuff shows up in the menus commonly, permitting me to show some pictures.

Here we have the main menu, which hasn't changed a lot.
(There is a little element beside the exit button, which is only visibel in dev's version.)



Next there is a menu, where you can choose your starting level after clicking "New Game" in the main menu.
You can see every level you have completed so far by name; in this game "Containers", "Mining" and "Terraforming". But not all of them are declared starting levels. Further you can see the prescribed positions of higher starting levels, which are "locked" so far.
I hope this is readable ...



And finally the options. Has nothing to do with the game loop, but I had to adapt the design.



The debriefing section is missing. I'm not quite sure about it.

[KPas]

After completing a level the following screen shows up:



You can see, what kinds of opponents have been killed and how many of them. But the player is only one thread for those vessels. Many of them have been swallowed up by the void or have been ripped by explosions or other hazards.

Your knowledge about areas, enemies, items and blueprints is growing. Every time you encounter something new (and survive it), an associated database entry is unlocked.

You can browse your knowledge. Known enemies are presented via some background action. You can see them flying around and attacking asteroids for example:



Your knowledge about items and blueprints is presented like this:

[KPas]

A quarter of a year has elapsed since the last demo. So it's time for a new one:

Download on itch.io
... and drop me some feedback

Specially made for the occasion: an actual gameplay compilation ...

[sidbarnhoorn]

Thanks!

By the way, I'm working on AI at the moment. Current step: Causing the vessels to evade the bigger obstacles in a somewhat good looking way ...

Awesome! Looking forward to playing this! I'll download the demo! Cool audio in the YouTube clips. What are you planning for music?

[KPas]

Awesome! Looking forward to playing this! I'll download the demo! Cool audio in the YouTube clips. What are you planning for music?

Hey, thanks again!

Regarding soundfx I use 3D sound provided via OpenAL, so you can hear distance and direction of sound events including doppler shift. The sound system is done more or less, but the sounds (the sound files) are placeholders mostly. More on that later.

And now the not so good news for any of you who are composers: there will be no music at all in this game by design. The ambient sounds provide informations to the player, essential for survival. Music shall not interfere with these sounds. Blame it on Teleglitch.

[Rarykos]

I've played the demo and it looks much better in reality than in the videos!

I had fun outmaneuvering bots, but I couldn't figure out how to craft a weapon
The void is a fun addition, and the pixel art is good! I just wish there was a bit more variety to the levels :O
I didn't like the controls, WSAD was moving me just fine, but then the mouse started behaving weirdly, it's also limited how much I can turn and the whole experience of using the mouse left me dizzy and a bit ill.

It's certainly capturing what made teleglitch fun, and the audio is already cool, I had to keep telling myself I wasn't playing a finished game haha! Teleglitch in space has potential, there's obviously a lot to be done, but this shows promise! I had fun :D



What about the structure, are you going to implement the same "find the key, find the exit" structure like teleglitch?

[KPas]

@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.

[KPas]

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!

[fearless_donut]

Hi there. You have a very nice game. I like it.

I'd recommend you to make small tutorial out of first level - nobody reads manuals these days . A few in-game messages about making a weapon, level purposes and fighting mechanics should be good enough. Making a tutorial is a boring task but inevitable since most things that seem obvious to developer probably won't seem the same to players.

I like the voidness but the fog of was(gray thing) is a bit out of style imo. This rough polygonic thing somehow contrasts with nice pixel graphics of yours. Maybe remove it or make it less noticeable(soft transparent clouds or something)?

I'm not certain with game style - i suppose it's not a bullet hell type but sometimes i want to rush into enemies and harsh reality stops me with 'no ammo' fact too often. The game is probably too hardcore for me and i wish there would be a shameful option 'easy' that (at least) allows to start from the same level on ship's death.

A sickness problem - are you sure you can't fix it? First time i played the game i felt horrible but then i somehow adapted to rotations. It'd be sad if some people couldn't play  this game just because of camera design. Maybe make alternative rotation mode and allow player to choose it in options? For example - the camera rotates to follow the ship orientation only when player press some button like 'shift', otherwise it stays static.

Sometimes i want to make camera move closer to ship to see the details...

Overall, i think this project has a big potential with such nice graphics and physical based combat.

And i pretty understand you about the marketing, actually i feel the same thoughts - it's probably the best way to make a steam page and start building a community there and 'early access' is not the worst case. I suppose most people on tig are devs and they don't have much time to play other games but their own so there is a little feedback on gameplay here.

[KPas]

@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.

[KPas]

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.

[PetSkull]

Looks much better now, with the fixed camera! 

[KPas]

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:

[PetSkull]

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 ?