The importance of playtesting

[nfiea]

You need to hire professinal playtesters to give you the help you so obviously need to take this BETA and turn it into a real game that people could play more than 2 or 3 times.

1: The gameplay reqires skill, but luck is vastly more important. A game is broken if one NEEDS GOOD LUCK to make it though the game.

2: As an arcade style game the unlockable ships are a way to make the game worth playing more than once, but this process is even worse than just trying to make it to the boss. Getting a stasis pod and opening it sectors later to discover that the rock homeworld doesn't have the crystal entity's planet is not something that a full version of a game would have. A full version would fix this porblem; probably in some easy way like forcing the guys planet to spawn and putting a quest marker over it.

3: For a game that trys to bring in stratagy the info on the weapons/equipment is limited; no specifics are ever given. One should know exactly how things work if one is trying to come up with a stratagey to use them.

4: There's nothing to show after you finish a run through; your score is kept and some stats about crew members is shown, but more info on the ships should remain; in fact one should still be able to play with these ships in an alternate mode

5: This game should have multiplayer; it wouldn't be hard to implement at all and there are various options for doing so

I'm sure I'm missing more because this isn't my broken beta

I know everyone on here is going to go with the classic excuse, but we all know the truth

"It's supposed to be like that" I bet they said that a lot when they were working on Superman 64

the reality is that this game is still a beta and needs playtesting so that these flaws can be understood and fixxed.

[icepick]

Look, you have some good suggestions, but you're setting the wrong tone. Please rethink your "I know so much better than the devs attitude" because no one is buying it.

Also all of this has been suggested before and none of it is the product of bad design or lack of playtesting.

1. Actually skill is much more important that luck, though you can get screwed by the random number generator. Losing is fun, and it's just part of the game.

2. This is a matter of preference.

3. There's all the detail you could ask for in the equipment tab of the ship menu. Have you ever even looked in there?

4. This is a good suggestion. Not the part about continuing an old ship, though.

5. No. This game is a single player short-form experience. It would be a lot of work to implement multiplayer, though you are correct about there being an infinite number of ways of doing so. The entire game would be different for multiplayer. It would double the development time to do so. It's not like they haven't thought of this, it was just outside the scope of their schedule.

[Icehawk78]

You need to hire professinal playtesters to give you the help you so obviously need to take this BETA and turn it into a real game that people could play more than 2 or 3 times.

You're right, none of the people here are playing this more than 2-3 times. A stellar start to constructive criticism...

The gameplay reqires skill, but luck is vastly more important. A game is broken if one NEEDS GOOD LUCK to make it though the game.

I've read a number of playthroughs claiming this, and certainly thought so myself, as well, when first starting. Upon many more plays, I've realised that this certainly seems to be a large artifact of the steep learning curve (which, as you predicted below, is in fact "designed" that way, rather than being a flaw).

A common claim I've heard is that due to the expensive requirements needed to beat the boss (scrap for upgrades and/or ship systems/weapons), you're forced to travel to every single node. While this is true on the surface, the sub-claim which is often tacked on, that you're required to take every risk at every node you come to (such as the several "you find something, do you want to try it and possibly get a reward or possibly lose a crewmember, or do you want to skip it?" style nodes). This sub-claim, however, is false - some risk-taking is certainly rewarded and, with good luck, can definitely make your run easier, but playing defensively with certain random encounter variables will not impair your run to the extent that you're unable to win with them.

It helps if you consider those choices as similar to the "sell x missiles for y fuel" nodes, except that instead of selling missiles, you're selling something like "hull HP" or "a random crewmember" and instead of gaining fuel, you're gaining whatever the possible outcomes of the event are (random weapon, large amount of scrap, augmentations, etc). And yes, the RNG may punish you for certain events by only taking your payment and not giving you the reward, but with nearly the same probability, the RNG may also reward you by not taking your payment, but still giving you the reward. If you're in a situation where you can't afford the cost, though, then you shouldn't risk it, any more than you should trade 2 fuel for 10 missiles when you've only got 3 fuel left.

As an arcade style game the unlockable ships are a way to make the game worth playing more than once, but this process is even worse than just trying to make it to the boss. Getting a stasis pod and opening it sectors later to discover that the rock homeworld doesn't have the crystal entity's planet is not something that a full version of a game would have. A full version would fix this porblem; probably in some easy way like forcing the guys planet to spawn and putting a quest marker over it.

That specific unlock was intentionally made extremely difficult as a reward for a specific backer from Kickstarter. If that one particular ship unlock seems excessive, that's because it's essentially not a main part of the game, it was added as an afterthought and intentionally made as difficult to acquire as possible.

(This having been said, I *would* prefer to be able to hover over sector names when warping so that I know whether or not my second sector choice is dooming me to miss all of the other species' homeworlds, assuming that those are generated when you start the game, rather than just when you arrive to a sector exit.)

For a game that trys to bring in stratagy the info on the weapons/equipment is limited; no specifics are ever given. One should know exactly how things work if one is trying to come up with a stratagey to use them.

They aren't? When I hover over most weapons in shops or on the ship screen, it tells me loads of things - how many shots it fires, how it interacts with shields/ship hulls/fires, whether it requires a missile or not, how strong the shots are, how fast it takes to recharge. I'm curious - what specifics do you think are missing?

There's nothing to show after you finish a run through; your score is kept and some stats about crew members is shown, but more info on the ships should remain; in fact one should still be able to play with these ships in an alternate mode

Hey, these are actually good suggestions! So good, in fact, that they've both been suggested and taken under consideration multiple times over. The second suggestion would be a much larger implementation and will likely either be a DLC or possibly even another game, given that the scope drastically expands beyond what this game has staked out. Good ideas for a game are great - good games are made by aggressively combating scope creep to prevent overbloat.

(Also, to counteract your initial claim - the alternate/open world mode you describe seems to imply that you do enjoy playing the game enough to want to play it more, though that's neither here nor there.)

This game should have multiplayer; it wouldn't be hard to implement at all and there are various options for doing so.

It's nice that you think so, and there do seem to be many people who agree with you. Personally, I disagree and would not play a multiplayer version even if it existed, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be something that many people would like. However, again, this is a problem of scope creep - the base game itself would need to be entirely reworked to take into account any sort of multiplayer, and any alternate multiplayer mode would be an entirely new development. Like with the sandbox mode, this may be added as a DLC or as a sequel, but it's hardly "not difficult to implement at all", and claiming such severely belies your ignorance on the subject.

I'd also point out that a multiplayer mode would be a vastly different game - one of the key features as the game currently exists is that you can pause anywhere at any time, to take the time you need to evaluate your position/make decisions/set orders/etc. There's no way to do that with more than one player, since it's not "turn based", so the game would be reduced to "who's got better reflexes" rather than "who's got the better strategy".

I know everyone on here is going to go with the classic excuse, but we all know the truth

"It's supposed to be like that" I bet they said that a lot when they were working on Superman 64

the reality is that this game is still a beta and needs playtesting so that these flaws can be understood and fixxed.

Wow, what a well-supported and logical argument.

The real problem seems to be that the game they made isn't the game that you want them to have made - that doesn't mean they screwed up, it just means that your ideas and theirs don't match. (Also, look through their bug tracker and look at the "completed" section - they did massive amounts of playtesting, and the game appears to have improved leaps and bounds over the intial beta releases.)

[nfiea]

yeah I'm pretty much being a huge dick so everyone will read my posts and consider my thoughts as they dispute them(internet bullying, it's easier than you think)

I don't intend to be a long time member of this forum and I doubt I'll play this game very often after a few weeks.

as for the storing ships and alt playmode multiplayer being easy

This game seems fairly sophisticated; I'm sure the people behind this could create a simple multiplayer mode and a simple mode with waves of enemy ships with relative ease by reusing the code they've already written.

This game isn't bad at all really

[Icehawk78]

yeah I'm pretty much being a huge dick so everyone will read my posts and consider my thoughts as they dispute them; I don't intend to be a long time member of this forum and I doubt I'll play this game very often after a few weeks.

That's... special. You do realize, instead of being a dick, you could just give your opinion in a calm and reasoned manner? I'd have been just as likely to respond to your initial post saying something to the effect of "I hope they come out with these things eventually, I'd like it even more then" rather than "rawr I'm super awesome and you're all brainless twits".

as for the storing ships and alt playmode multiplayer being easy

This game seems fairly sophisticated; I'm sure the people behind this could create a simple multiplayer mode and a simple mode with waves of enemy ships with relative ease by reusing the code they've already written.

This game isn't bad at all really

Storing ships, definitely could be done if they take the save file structure and reuse it for the high scores file, though that would massively inflate the profile file (continue.sav = 3759 bytes, prof.sav = 1724 bytes with data from 20 distinct runs, in addition to the various other stats/achievements) beyond its current size.

As mentioned before, I really don't see how multiplayer could be added, both from a technical perspective (the game currently doesn't have any form of networking code in it, and likely wasn't even remotely built around supporting that, so an entirely new control/UI structure would be needed) and from a gameplay perspective (FTL without pausing wouldn't be FTL. I dunno what it would be, either.)

By "wave mode", did you just mean an endless series of new star systems to explore, or literally just chained space battles? Because the latter can already be done via a mod - it'd be fairly simple to add chained events to the end of, say, the final boss battle that just restarts the boss battle again, or that chains each of the three sections of the boss battle together without break in between.

The other form would require a bit of restructuring given the current ship systems to maintain any semblance of balance - on easy, you can often have your entire ship already maxed out by the time you get to the boss battle, so further star systems wouldn't really be able to add anything more.

[boa13]

Storing ships, definitely could be done if they take the save file structure and reuse it for the high scores file, though that would massively inflate the profile file (continue.sav = 3759 bytes, prof.sav = 1724 bytes with data from 20 distinct runs, in addition to the various other stats/achievements) beyond its current size.

Frankly, it's not much. Storing one thousand ships would take... four megabytes. I would welcome any kind of improved log of my past runs.

[Icehawk78]

Storing ships, definitely could be done if they take the save file structure and reuse it for the high scores file, though that would massively inflate the profile file (continue.sav = 3759 bytes, prof.sav = 1724 bytes with data from 20 distinct runs, in addition to the various other stats/achievements) beyond its current size.

Frankly, it's not much. Storing one thousand ships would take... four megabytes. I would welcome any kind of improved log of my past runs.

I agree, it isn't that much. Just pointing out the comparison in size to what it currently is. For a game with ~150 MB resources folder, an extra few MB likely won't have much of an effect overall, but it could seem like a lot to someone just comparing before/after sizes.

[Levache]

Yeah, just through in multiplayer, it's trivial...