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[Alain]

I like the idea of crawling through the vents a lot and love when the systems in a game start talking to each other, like your "Physical" stat not only influencing the vent crawling mechanic but also the narration of the size of a character.

[Kamazs]

As touted, combat is 100% optional in Space Wreck. There are many ways to deal with threats, but here's one example of the engineer character using a remote control "gun" to turn otherwise hostile sentry bot into a loyal companion.

Context: there are generally five main character archetypes in Space Wreck - smooth talker, soldier, "thief" (stealth oriented), explorer and engineer (techie, hacker etc.). While there are more than few shades of gray and these roles often overlap and transcend each other, I try to provide solutions in one of these areas.

This example is of an engineer play style - granted you have high enough SCITEC and TINKER skills, necessary components, tools and access to a workstation, you can create a remote control device that allows turn your enemies into your friends (granted they are of metal). Given your success in targeting them with your PERCEPTION and RANGED, of course. There are other gadgets and tools you can construct that give you some edge in certain situations.

It's also worth noting that it is not a single skill you depend on. For example, SCITEC unlocks blueprints for items but you must roll TINKER to actually build these things. And, as I noted above, when trying to apply these in action, you must either have some decent RANGED aptitude or have to SNEAK close enough that that does not matter.

[Kamazs]

This "Enter random number" option is actually not just for show. There's a 1 in 10000 chance of being right, though it was hard to demo it. You'll have to trust me on this.

[Alain]

This sounds nuts, love it. Btw. the loading animation in the UI looks pretty cool, too.

[JobLeonard]

Yeah, that's a lovely bit of polish making the whole thing more immersive

[Kamazs]

Thanks! Good to know there's somebody that appreciates such tiny things like I do :D.

This is such a low hanging fruit; I am not sure why other games don't do it more often (or do they?). It could be something to do with not willing to "sequence break" the experience, possibly. For example, you have to find the PIN, but along the way, you meet characters, and events happen.

With Space Wreck, it is much simpler - sequence breaking is part of the intended gameplay anyway.

[Alain]

I'm actually doing something quite similar: I have a ritual magic system where you cast rituals by burning a certain amount (1-5) of a certain ingredient (~10 different in total) and say a 4 letter mantra (abbreviation of the ritual's name). When playtesting some players were too lazy to search the clues for the right amount after having found the ingredient and corresponding mantra, so they just brute forced it by trying all amounts. I was surprised that the players who did it that way thought it was fun to figure out.

[Kamazs]

Yeah, why not? Sometimes games assert only one certain way of progression.

On a different note - this week's update is all but air:



Because "Space Wreck" takes place in, well, space, you need a spacesuit. While you are exploring huge derelict carcasses of former ships and stations, the existence of air could be sporadic at best due to the present hull damage and overall age. That's where the small gauge below the HP bar will come in handy as it indicates whether you are...

a) safe in an oxygen-rich environment (green)
b) outside but safe (yellow)
c) exposed to vacuum and suffering.

An average person supposedly can survive around 15 seconds exposed to the vacuum of outer space. In the game, it varies between 5 and half-a-minute, based on your stats.

[JobLeonard]

That's a cool mechanic! I don't think I could take off a hazmat space-suit in half a minute though, that breaks the immersion a bit

[Kamazs]

That's a cool mechanic! I don't think I could take off a hazmat space-suit in half a minute though, that breaks the immersion a bit

Thanks! Yeah, indeed, that's a good point - you could not do it that fast. While for this case I just hardcoded unequip command to a button for a demonstration, it still takes some time.

[Kamazs]

Maybe a little fade out can help immersion a bit?

[a-k-]

It calls for a low-resolution dissolve transition, doesn't it? The game looks great, by the way.

[JobLeonard]

Oh yeah, or maybe the "ordered dithering" approach using a 4x4 Bayer pattern

[Kamazs]

By the way - we just grabbed our Early Access build (was planned for Feb 25) and released it Wednesday as a free demo!

This demo is more than just a demo - it is almost like a stand-alone game, intro, branching paths, secret lore, and multiple endings. You can even complete the main game's main quest in the scope of the demo.

Warning though - this is pre-early access build, so it has a fair share of bugs un issues. If you want a smoother experience, consider waiting for the original release date. There won't be a release on that date - because we released it already - but it'll be in much better shape by then.

If you still want an early taste of it, go try it now!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1063540/Space_Wreck/

[JobLeonard]

Somehow that trailer makes the mood feel a lot more claustrophobic than the game appeared to be from the devlog updates. Like, everyone is trapped on a tiny oases of life in vast space. Fitting for the concept though!

[Kamazs]

Somehow that trailer makes the mood feel a lot more claustrophobic than the game appeared to be from the devlog updates. Like, everyone is trapped on a tiny oases of life in vast space. Fitting for the concept though!

Good catch! Lore-wise living space is actually the most sought-after commodity in these survivor communities. If you dig into the lore, you'll see former inhabitants struggling with cramped space mentally. Common workers get usually nothing but a bed and locker in a communal room. Ship crews have even worse as there are not enough beds for everyone (space is precious!) so whole crew sleeps in shifts - basically, you always go to sleep in someone's else bed.

However, in the full game, there are also vast - usually outside - errr, wreck-scapes that contrast these narrow cramped chambers.

[Alain]

Wow, this is great news! I'm pumped to play the demo, hopefully this weekend!

[JobLeonard]

However, in the full game, there are also vast - usually outside - errr, wreck-scapes that contrast these narrow cramped chambers.

Yeah but those would have that claustrophobia of doing a space-walk in a suit while surrounded by desolate vacuum, right?

[Alain]

I played the demo yesterday and wanted to share my experience a bit more in detail, I hope this helps.



I played with my girlfriend from the couch on a projector with keyboard & mouse. To give some context: We usually play turn based single player games with a focus on combat. Turn based single player games are most fun for us, because you can talk about what to do next easily and pass the mouse between each other. Our favorite games to play together are For the King, Mutant Year Zero and recently X-Com2. For RPGs we prefer not to manage big parties.

It is a quite old projector (1280x800p) and it worked great without needing to scale up the UI via the options menu. We had problems with small UI text in games like DOS2 for example, so you beat Larian Studios

I think we did not use the keyboard at all, which is nice for the way we play.

We wanted to play a charismatic female captain who is good at managing her crew and is a gunslinger. So we created a custom character with all points in Perception and Charm. Something like a female Han Solo maybe.

You nailed the intro cutscene, it established the atmosphere in a great way with a great pacing. It did not bore with details on politics or the world as some RPGs do. If you wanted to polish it even more bringing it from a 95% to a 100% you could think about working on the voice acting, but this is by no means necessary in our eyes.

So we got to the space station and started walking around. We climbed down the ladder. There was a little bug that repeated playing the sound of us climbing down the ladder, but it did not bother us at all or break immersion. I just wanted to mention it as a heads up. We found our first items and gun, broke the computer, because our protagonist knows shit about computers. We loved that.



It was interesting that we could see what was inside the shelves of a locked room, but I thought it is a nice touch and made me want to get in even more. After finding some items, we played around with the inventory a bit and it was easy to learn. Great work on the writing of items. I especially remember the turtleneck, we chuckled about that Steve Jobs reference. We wanted to see what it would look like on our character and put it on. And of course we died, because we are in space. We loved that as well.

We were a little bit stuck then, because we did not see that we could go farther south from the ladder in the upper level, so we thought our only chance to access the rest of the station was through the vents. We were carrying too much stuff to fit through (ST 1), so we dropped everything. Being small enough then, we found out we need a screwdriver and went searching for it. We found it on the dead body near our shuttle and went back to the vent. Unfortunately we broke it, because our protagonist also knows shit about tinkering. So we had to find another way. We picked up our stuff and went to the shuttle, because we had not entered it before. Over the radio we talked to one of our crew members. This is where the game really shone for us. The dialogue was amazing and we could play exactly the character how we imagined her to be. We dropped some funny and ironic lines and the male crew member laughed and we had a really nice interaction. Our character was able to talk about "killer robors" on the station, that we had not encountered yet, so we knew we had to go exploring even more. We did that, found out we could go south the ladder on the upper level and found the robots. Sneaking was not an option. But we had our gun and thought our time to shine had come. Unfortunately we had forgotten to load it with power cells. So we had to run away to the lower level and loaded our gun. It was showing "5/10" so I clicked reload again. It then showed "0/10", which might be a bug. Or did we just drop the 5 power cells when reloading? We could not get past the robots this way and had to pause our playthrough.

Maybe you can tell us if we did something wrong. We are by far no experts on this type of RPG and might not be your target audience.

If this was the beginning of the game, assuming we had payed money for it, assuming we could continue playing from this point on and assuming I was just a player not a fellow dev, I think I'd write this Steam review:

"Space Wreck is a very atmospheric indie RPG with amazing nostalgic aesthetics. There are multiple ways you can tackle a problem according to the unique character you want to play, which can lead to humorous situations. The game is super indie but manages to give you the feeling of a classic Fallout game, but in space!" Thumbs up

We are really looking forward to playing more and shoot those robots and find out how we like the actual combat.

[Kamazs]

Wow! That was a very cool story! Thank you for sharing, that cheered me up . Though I never thought Space Wreck is a "couch" game :D but apparently...

Maybe you can tell us if we did something wrong. We are by far no experts on this type of RPG and might not be your target audience.

No, you did not do anything wrong:). I will check out this ammo bug, but just for the record - you can work around any hostile enemy in the game, even if you fail all your skill checks.

If you are looking for combat, it is going to be a bit tough, because all the guns you can find are usually in bad condition and thus low damage output. You can repair them with other guns as you explore the station but I think I should adjust the level design so you can get a better quality gun before confronting those bots. Melee / unarmed characters have better outset because they don't rely that much on item condition.

Thanks for sharing again - this gives us great insight into how players actually approach the game and we can tune it accordingly.