Feedback Feedback Friday #160 - April 9-12, 2021

G'day folks, it's Feedback Friday time again!

Want free design feedback for your work-in-progress project?

Then you've found the right thread! Feedback Friday runs from Friday to Monday every week.

What To Show

• Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play > everything else
• How To Scope Small (Unity tutorial)
• Post a link to a playable game, preferably WebGL. If you don't have a playable game, post something substantial, not just text.

How To Ask For Feedback

• Be concise.
• Specify what you want feedback on and what you don't.
• Resist the urge to write an immediate defense. Take the time to understand their points. Remember that your friends here are taking time out of their busy schedules to help you for free.

How To Give Feedback

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

Feedback Friday #159 is here.

 

Did some more work on my game, here's a build finally: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1palqQN6wrjhe3bKtImWD2fowYcN0e-LN/view?usp=sharing

There's a text file with some control instructions attached
The main part I want feedback on is the building/wall system, but what ever you wanna play around with and tell me what you think will be good.

BTW if you wanna follow updates outside Feedback Friday check out the WIP thread

 

I also have a WIP thread. The latest version of my game is here.

This update includes the climate controls added back in, as little cones next to doors with lights indicating temperature. The temperature of a cell determines the blob's growth rate - fast for high temperatures, slow or completely stopped for low temperatures. For some variety I made it so triggering a change for the current room also triggers the opposite change for any connected rooms.

Curious if this improves the experience. As can be seen in the GIF triggering a change for the current room can bite me in the ass for others, but technically if I wanted to I could just use this to completely clear out a room before moving on.

Changing the total number or location of the climate controllers might help with that (or returning to my original idea of having just one controller with a GUI to select multiple rooms), but I don't want to go too far in the other direction. Right now it feels like it adds the barest beginnings of a strategic layer, which I really like.

I'll be honest, my desire is to move towards something more "simulated." I'd like for objects like the power node to generate heat that affects a range around them, and I'd like for any climate control to happen from specific points emanating outward, similar to a normal HVAC system. But I don't know that that would be a meaningful benefit to the gameplay.

 

What's the size of your maps?
You can do a basic flow field for temperature.
Also, are you talking about actually simulating it during the game or baking it with the map as a hueristic/effector?

Cool stuff, reminds me a bit of Creeper World with how the thingy grows.

 

Actual simulation calculated in real time. Right now the only things that would affect it are fixed, but I think...

...I think I jus got the idea, while writing that sentence, to have the blob have "terraforming" structures that it builds that change the temp.

Right now the map is pretty small, but it's based around a 2D grid that is current ~40,000 cells. I plan for it to be larger in the end.

 

I played around a little bit. I think the single-tile "creation" events like building a wall or changing terrain would feel far more intuitive if they were click-and-drag, like roads and rivers.

 

You can hold shift and the mouse button to place multiple building.
I plan on doing the path thing for the walls too

thanks for the input and checking it out!

 

Hey there, I played the build of your game, here are my thoughts.

First off, well done for getting it out there to get feedback early on, I think it's at the right stage for that. The map generation and minimap is very cool, and I liked the island/water environment I ended up in at the start. My first impression is that it's a pretty complex game with a lot of parallel systems going on, and it seems like it will be a very fun sandbox game down the line.

The main problem here though, in terms of my ability to give feedback, is that none of those systems feel like they've been given really focused attention yet - the kind of attention that makes them a sort of complete mini-game in themselves.

For example, for the building mechanic, you can click a build item, put the cursor on the map and click to drop it. Cool! But that is about the extent of what I can give feedback on. To engage with this mechanic properly, I need some kind of objective. I don't know what any of the build items really is, what they are good for, or how they work together. So building something of any size and complexity is not possible. The flip side of this is that you can never give really good feedback on a mechanic until you are using it repetitively, in multiple contexts and with different intentions.

The same goes for the other mechanics I played around with. Things feel more like a sketch rather than a prototype, and I think this limits what kind of feedback can be given.

I suggest isolating mechanics (disable everything else) and provide a specific context and objective for the player, so that we can say "I did X with this mechanic and it worked well for that" or "When you try to do Y, it's hard to manage without clicking a lot of times" etc.

For playtesting, I have some feedback on the basic controls:

1. Moving the cursor to the top of the map doesn't move the camera unless you find a little space in between the buttons.

2. What's the middle mouse for? It made things move around pretty crazily.

3. Can you rotate the map?

4. I suggest levelling out the camera much further away from the surface, I basically had my nose buried in the ground before I could see the horizon.

5. The text style IMO is annoying, too big and bright/hard to read.

I think this is shaping up to be the beginnings of a very cool game, so I look forward to being able to playtest in more detail when the mechanics are more fleshed out

 

So this is way more fun since I last played.

The reason is the way that the blob grows, it's growing in branches now rather than a huge blob. The way that this shows intention (extending in particular directions) as well as creating a barrier that is never too thick to feel completely overwhelming, makes the game waay more fun to play. I also really like how if the player comes into contact with the blob, it grows around them like tentacles.

When I got trapped, I felt like I could have avoided it, and there was always a chance of getting away.

So now, navigating the environment and breaking through the blob at strategic points is already enjoyable. How about more weapon types, interactable items etc?

 

So right now in that build there are three "weapon" types (with two elemental variations for each), basically a bullet that goes forward indefinitely, a "sticky mine" that sticks to things and explodes when an enemy gets in range, and a grenade that bounces off of the floor and walls and such. Or are you talking about another type?

Definitely agreed about interactable items, but I'm kind of stumped on what specifically I should be considering. Are you thinking of more things to affect blob growth, or just interactive elements in the level for the player to engage with?

 

Thank you very much for giving it a go!
I know it's objective-less right now, the next step is working on the city builder - so the buildings will actually have a purpose and you have something to do.

I disable edge scrolling if you're over UI, it's currently blocked on the top because of the button spam going on, it's going to be cleaned up soon.

it has two movement modes you can select in the options menu, grab/glide, it has a speed slider too

You can rotate the camera around the pivot with Q/E, if you're talking about the minimap - no

I found it annoying too, I have a plan for this, I want to create a separate height map for the camera to go on,
If this is the terrain and the red line is where the camera currently goes I want to make it go on the green line

I'll try toning it down a little.
I've been just throwing the text around telling myself I'll take care of it when I find a font I wanna use.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, hope to have something ready for next week!

 

How do I use the mine and grenade?

About interactable items, I think this should be grounded in objectives. What do you want the player to have as a goal, and then consider interesting ways they could achieve it. Like blowing airlocks, sterilizing rooms, mechanics that require doing things in a specific sequence or in a specific timeframe (like e.g. having two controls on opposite sides that need to be pressed within X seconds of eachother, and then the player has X seconds to get clear before something happens etc).

Think of it like an Alien movie rather than a maths equation, come up with stories and set pieces and mini climaxes.

 

Looking forward to it! I think you're doing well so far, I already feel like I want to play around with what's there, there's just not enough to do with any sense of purpose.

 

If you scroll your mouse wheel it will swap between secondary weapons, which are fired using the right mouse button.

 

@SparrowGS

Few of my points.
1. After loading a map, let it not start int the corner.
2. Allow click on minimap, to fast move to the location.
3. Holding middle mouse and dragging, make crazy jumps all over the place. Probably need tuning.
4. Remove duplicates of buttons on the top. Make left click build, right click remove.
5. Or remove duplicates and just leave bulldoze.
6. Elevation: make ADD, or SUB as default. Not equal. And set default value to 1, or something like that.
7. Nice walls. But right click should allow removal.
8. Animals can walk over the water.
7 Different features feel detached from each other at given time.
9. General feeling: sandbox.
10. Other than that, very nice progress.

 

I know, in future when the game starts it will start centered on your city, I also need to save and load the camera position

Already on my todo list

Yeah I noticed that with the "glide" behavior, I already fixed that - the speed was just way too high.

Hmm.. I'll have a think about that, right now right click is cancel/back

Good idea, I also want to add a "sample height" button, kinda like an eye dropper.

Did you try the wall inspector? left click while holding shift on a wall (without shift it will try to select an entity like an animal)

Some animals can, up to a certain depth.
I know it looks silly right now, the AI is very rudimentary and doesn't really care if it's water or not, just if it can walk there or not.
If you put a sheep on an island it shouldn't be able to "swim" out of it.

Anything in particular?

Currently It's basically the map editor, so I think a sandboxy feeling is right.
The next step is to separate the map editor from a play mode and start work on the city builder.

Thanks for the feedback! [/QUOTE]

 

Like small giraffe completely submerged under water?

Because atm. all is a sandbox, there is no feeling, that animals are related to climate anyhow for example.
And because speed of simulation is rather slow, or I would say it takes a time, these may skew perception of the gameplay.
Roads has 0 impact atm. as I understand. So it is like a sandbox, with steal many experimental features, with low correlation between each other. Just don't take it as bad thing. As long you plan to streamline and make it more connected at some point in the future.

 

haha yeah some are a bit weird, the giraffes and elephants can go into a depth of two, I think camels a depth of one.
Right now they're just walking on the floor, I plan on making them "swim" on the surface of the water.
Taking animal age into account should be also useful, haha

The animals have a bit of connection to the climate, but it's very weak atm, I won't spell out what is the connection, once the animal AI is done it should be a little more obviously

The roads effect entity walk speed

I can see why you get the feeling of random things slapped together, let's hope I can follow-through with my vision for combining everything into a game!