Feedback Friday #129 - September 4-7, 2020

It's Feedback Friday time!

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What To Show

• Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play > everything else
• How To Scope Small (Unity tutorial)
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• Be concise.
• Specify what you want feedback on and what you don't.
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How To Give Feedback

• Be positive. There's something of value in every game.
• Focus on the design, not the designer.

Feedback Friday #128 is here.

 

Looking for some feedback on combat this time!
I've spend some time juicing things up, adding shakes, VFX and SFX, as well as improving graphics. I have also added a lot of odds and ends including auto-roll, lead-target-boxes only appearing at close range (to make the player close more).

This is not all the combat there'll be, just basic fighter_v_fighter dogfighting.
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https://www.dropbox.com/s/8t1xjfo9rg0suae/Centaurian.zip?dl=0

In this demo you spawn a wave by pressing 1, 2 or 3 (spawns that number of enemy fighters).

Feedback I'm looking for:

1. Is it too hard/too easy?
2. Is it fun?
3. Do the controls feel good? What about the auto-roll?
4. Overall do the combat mechanics make you go 'yeah!'?

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The game currently supports both gamepad and mouse/keyboard.

Gamepad controls:

Steering: Right stick
Throttle Up/down: Left stick up/down
Strafing Left/Right: Left stick left/right
Strafing Up/Down: Left and right shoulders
Fire guns: Right trigger
Fire missiles: Left trigger
Boost: Left stick press

Keyboard/mouse:

Steering: Mouse position
Throttle Up/down: W/S
Strafing Left/Right: A/D
Strafing Up/Down: Space/Ctrl
Fire guns: Left Mouse
Fire missiles: Right Mouse
Boost: Tab

 

@Billy4184

Feeling much nicer! Unfortunately I don't have a controller to test with now, but even on MKB it is feeling pretty good to me. I can't say anything critical about the flight controls. I found it easy to pick up and play and it felt right to me.

Enemies are more fun to fight. It feels engaging but not hard, so I think its hitting the sweet spot. Combat is loose enough that I feel free to experiment trying out different maneuvers, but enemies don't feel entirely harmless either.

The bit of camera jump when speeding up is nice. Maybe do that even more? It feels good. And a similar effect for strafing might be nice. As it is, strafing feels a little too slow to be a really useful way to avoid incoming fire.

One maneuver I am having fun with is coming to a quick stop, and reversing direction immediately. I suppose thats only something you can do in a space game. It feels pretty cool to do that, so I think the snappier you make controls so its almost effortless to do stunts like that, the more fun it is to play.

With enemy hit FX, maybe a distinct feedback sound to know when we are hitting shields, then when shields are destroyed, and then different sound for hitting armor? I think for SFX the big idea should be that if I close my eyes I still have a clear picture what is happening because there is distinct SFX for every immportant thing happening. I think you are just about there but maybe a few things are still missing.

I am not sure what the autoroll is so I can't say anything about that.

Did the combat make me go "yeah!"? I'd say so. It was good enough that just had fun playing with it for ten minutes and forgot I was there to make a critique.

I'm liking the colors and overall artistic feel as well.

 

I played with gamepad.

Just right -- except I'm terrible at aiming with analog sticks. It's the same as with shooters; give me mouse aim any day. Can you implement some aim assist for poor analog stick aimers like me?

The AI is just the right difficulty.

That's a little hard to answer with the current build. It's fun enough to shoot enemies for a few minutes. With enough varied objectives, it could certainly be a lot of fun for much longer. Back in the day (way back), I spent a lot of time in Wing Commander and especially Privateer.

Yes! Aiming is hard, but movement on the other hand feels great with the gamepad.

Yes to the mechanics. I know you're not focusing on game feel beyond the basic flight and combat controls, but adding juice -- screen shake, etc. -- will make a big difference to the overall feel.

 

I think it feels a lot better now. The visual feedback when firing the normal shots feels nice and I really like the audio and visual feel when using the booster. In terms of difficulty, I think it was quite spot on. When I fought 3 fighters at the same time, I usually took some hits, but managed to still win the fight.
I'd say the game feels a lot more fun than before and when I manage to destroy an enemy ship, it feels extra satisfying with the added explosion and subtle camera shake. Those were definitely moments where I went 'Yeah!'.
In terms of controls, I didn't find much use for strafing up/down and would have expected the rotate q/e controls to be mapped to the left/right shoulder buttons on a controller. I also think that being able to rotate could be fun if you plan on having navigational challenges, like flying through tight spaces. Though it didn't feel necessary to use while in a dogfight.
Over all, I think the controls worked better with a controller than with mouse and keyboard. However, that might also be because the steering with the mouse didn't work when I tried it.

In terms of the combat mechanics, I think that they worked pretty well. However, I felt that the feedback for hitting an enemy with a normal shot felt a bit lackluster. Perhaps add some more visual feedbacks when hitting an enemy?

In general, I think this version is a big improvement and I can imagine that it will get even better from here.

P.S. I went back and checked the auto-roll and I think it works really well. In fact I didn't notice it the first time around. It just felt natural.

 

Thanks for playing!

- Glad to see the difficulty is about right. What number of enemies did you usually go for?

- Good point about strafing, it's something that will probably be used a bit more when attacking fixed turrets/slow moving ships where you need to keep moving but don't want to keep going forward, so I didn't pay too much attention to it. Could probably use some extra speed.
I think I'll add shakes based on rate of speed increase, so it highlights the start of a new strafe or forward acceleration.

- Hehe I do that maneuver as well, and it's even more fun with static targets that are obstructed, so you can quickly zoom around and face the target. I'll definitely experiment with making the controls even tighter and less wallowing.

- I'll probably rely mostly on visual effects for hitting enemies, as your weapon sound will probably overwhelm any hit SFX. See how it goes, if I can manage it I will.

- Autoroll is how your ship levels out automatically, for example if you loop upside down it'll roll out of that automatically. If you didn't notice that's probably a good thing!

- Glad you had fun with it, and you like the presentation! It's much more representative now, but obviously there's work to do filling things out.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

- I'm also a bit of a noob with a gamepad, so I know what you mean. There is some aim assist (the reticule stays fixed but the guns will track a target that's a slight angle away from center) but maybe a bit more is in order.

- Glad the AI difficulty is good, I was keen to know what people found fun vs what I was used to.

- Yeah I guess this demo is about whether you can extract 3-7 minutes of fun just shooting a single enemy. Then different enemy types, varied contexts/environments etc will take care of extending that throughout the game.

- There is some camera shake (for boost, explosions, a very slight shake for weapon firing) but adding some more for acceleration I think will improve things a lot.

 

Thanks for playing!

- Glad you like the boost, was pretty proud of that! Spent a long time looking up sound effects hehe

- Good to hear you found the difficulty right. How experienced are you with space shooters like Everspace?

- Glad you found it fun and satisfying!

- Strafing is going to be much more useful against non-moving targets (capital ships, ship/asteroid turrets etc). I probably should have added some turrets in this one, but wanted to focus on one thing.

- Did you have a controller plugged in before you tried it with the mouse? I think detecting disconnects might not be working properly right now.

- Great point about hitting an enemy with a normal shot, I wanted to add some big glow effects but it didn't look right when shooting an asteroid or something. I need to modify the system to spawn different/additional effects based on where it hits, right now projectiles just have their own hit effect reference.

- Glad you found the auto-roll natural! Being all about fast-paced, tight controls I definitely don't want the player to feel like control is taken away.

 

Another weekend of good feedback! I think we're all eager to see where Centaurian goes.

This brings this Feedback Friday to a close. If you'd like free design feedback on your projects, please join us next Friday!