Feedback Friday #96 - January 10 - 13, 2019

G'day folks!

If you're looking for a great way to get started on those New Year's resolutions, here's an easy one for ya! Get your game out among your fellow game devs who can give you valuable advice and assistance, so you can bring it home in 2020

Want design feedback for your work in progress and need some playtesting feedback?

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 #95 is here.

 

Hello Unity People

Biotopia 3D is a two People, german Hobby game developers Project (I am the coder, my friend creates gfx and Music).
It is basically an open world RPG with Minecraft-like digging and Building possible.

It is made with Unity3D of Course using UMA, Enviro Sky and some Animal and Monster assets from the store.

Standalone PC. May not work very well on very old PCs or older Laptops.
For example on a i5 with 8 gb and GTX 960 it works fine, on my i7 with 16 gb and rtx 2070 it works great.

Here is the complete Forum thread:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/biotopia-3d-open-world-role-playing-sandbox-game-please-try-for-free-and-gimme-feedback.509243/page-2

The latest Trailer:

The latest Version:
https://www.indiedb.com/games/biotopia-3d/downloads/biotopia-3d-free-playable-early-access-v-0983

It is free. I am unsure about the future, I guess we will just addd more and more stuff and improve it from time to time...
and see how it goes.

It is not completly finished and a growing project, but you can play it for a long while...

I am very interested in
- More feedback. We got feedback from two independent people, that's by far not enough
- Is the start and the game itself easy to understand and to handle? does the tutorial help?
- Do you like the idea of the game and the look of the game?
- What is the most annoying bug or missing Feature?
- Is it fun or just boring?
- Are levelups too fast or too slow? How is difficulty Overall?
- what needs to be improved most?
- are there feature requests / ideas?

This would help us a lot for the next updates

If anybody is interested, please help us make it better!

Thanks for your interest.
​

 

So I finally decided to suppress the "It's not ready!" voice in my head and create a semi-playable playtest for my project.

There are definitely a few bugs in this build but it would be great to get a bit of feedback so I've uploaded a playtest to itch here:
https://serinox.itch.io/spacecraft

If you have trouble getting started (which is very likely) I recommend you watch this video:

In SpaceCraft you build a modular spaceship, go out mining the universe and fight evil AI spaceships.

In the playtest you'll start with no resources so make sure you click the "GAIN RESOURCE" button several times to get something to begin with.

You'll want at least a few thrusters and blasters to get started. Make sure you set some keybindings!

If you're struggling to find any AI ships to fight, click the "RESET UNIVERSE" button and redeploy, hopefully some spawn nearby!

You can blow up the circles with your weapons and they'll drop small circles which are resources. Red is rubber and grey is metal. You can either push these into a "Resource Processor" or if you have a Gatherer module, you can switch that on and they'll magnetise to your ship.

You can get back to the ship builder screen by clicking "Modify Ship".

If you die, you can click "Modify Ship" and then "New Ship" to build a new ship.

I need to add some sort of tutorial, so let me know things that are confusing and I'll make sure to either fix them up or include them in the tutorial!

I'd love some ideas for different weapons/ship modules too.

Cheers.

 

@Firlefanz73 Your game looks very ambitious and interesting. I really want to test it out but I got this error when installing



Do I need to enable some sort of access before running the installer?

Also I noticed the installer appeared to rename itself to "trzB15C.tmp" after I opened it... weird.

Are you going for a humorous sort of game? From the video, some parts seem pretty funny where others are quite serious.
One thing that got to me was the lighting, it seems really intense.
Harsh lights and dark shadows, I think perhaps some more ambient lighting would go a long way.

Looking forward to more updates and hopefully I can try it out soon!

 

Hey there, I downloaded and played your game. Congrats on your progress so far!

What I liked about it:
- You've put a lot of effort into the tutorial, which makes your game more approachable.
- The voiced characters add a lot of atmosphere.
- Overall the game feels compelling, due to the combination of the voices, music, sound effects etc

What I think could be improved:
The main thing I have to say is that there's a lot of stuff in this game, but very little feels like it was fleshed out properly. The graphics, animations, mechanics etc all feel like they never quite got out of the prototyping stage. There is a lot of conflict between player input and attack/block moves (seems like a lot of 'exit time' or something for anims), animations are very lerpy (parry anim takes maybe five full seconds to stop moving), and the presentation of the UI and graphics in general requires more polish.

For a game with relatively simple geometry I also think you are really hurting yourself with the quality of your textures. It's not hard to create/buy really great textures either using substance designer or buying from GameTextures.com or substance source.

Also, I quickly died in my first encounter with a wild animal, I would suggest making it easier at the start to warm things up.

Overall, I think you have the soul of a good game here for sure, but the presentation of the animations and graphics needs improvement

 

Well done for putting this out there! Exactly the right time to get feedback I say.

I really enjoyed the game and the best part is definitely the ship building. I haven't played any similar games so I don't know what's out there, but it's very gratifying to put together a vehicle this way. However I think some things need to be improved.

Even at this stage, I think it would be a good idea to simply give the player a default amount of resources. Even though I read your post it didn't click at first when I was clicking around.

The second thing is that I strongly suggest that you either give the player a default ship at the start, or literally tell them what to do to build the first one. Before I realized it was fun, I thought it would be tedious, and I think you need to get the player over that bump. The video helped but it's not a substitute for an in game tutorial.

Getting the ship design sorted, once you understand things, is immediately intuitive and fun. This is my first humble design which actually wasn't bad to drive:



With that, I went looking for trouble and soon found it. Disappointingly, the ship was absolutely annihilated by about fifty rounds of enemy ammunition in a few seconds, pretty much before I even saw the enemy. So I strongly suggest you make the first encounters very easy because that was easily a "let's check out some other game" type of moment.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that if I push some objects into a circle named 'Resource Processor' I sort of expect something to start chewing and grinding. So that was an "erm and now what?" type of moment.

Anyway, I think the core game mechanic is already quite fun and has plenty of potential (although it needs a far better introduction). It needs to feel a lot more effortless to progress through the basic objectives at the start. The game also needs a lot of visual polish but I'm not sure what stage you're at.

Really looking forward to seeing how this one evolves!

PS I recommend using 'forward' and 'backward' to describe the thrusters rather than 'up' and 'down' etc since they are relative.

 

Thanks a lot!
Feedback like yours is very valuable.
It gives me a good idea how to continue, yes UI and animations (especially too Long Blocking duration) will be improved soon. And I'll test the wild animals at the beginning Maybe you were very unlucky

 

I was attacked just as soon as I went outside to cut some trees. The wolf struck maybe 4-5 times (and I did about the same) but it seems it got the better of my stats. I would suggest that the first encounter, the player should be able to use maybe 2 hacks to finish the job.

 

@Billy4184 Thanks so much for your feedback!

I'll try to put together a tutorial for the next playtest which takes the player through building their first ship and collecting some resources. It's good to know that it's intuitive once you know how to do it.

I'm not too sure how I'm going to handle difficulty yet, I suppose the enemies should get bigger and badder as you travel further from the "center" of the universe. That's good feedback though, I've playtested this thing 100 times so it's hard to know if the game is too hard!

I probably should have also mentioned that you can scroll to zoom out which helps to see enemies coming a bit sooner.

It definitely needs visual polish, but I'm leaving that till later on. The only custom images so far are the stars background and the circles.

I agree, forward and backward instead of up and down does make more sense, I'll change that.

That's all really valuable feedback and I appreciate your time! Thanks.

 

Same here. On top of that, AVG anti-virus removed the installer entirely.

 

My ToDo List got a bit longer today, that's good, thanks

 

Thanks for the info. There is no Virus and no online Features or something, that's really annoying

PS: It is the complete Unity Project build as Standalone PC, and the Setup I created with Inno Setup. How can I get rid of that Problem?

 

@Firlefanz73 - Troll TV at the beginning is a unique, quirky way to start the game. I like the concept!

I second what others have already said. Biotopia3D has more than enough features to make it a very fun game. It may be time now to carefully go through every aspect of the user experience and polish it up. This includes in-world graphics (texturing, lighting & shadows, post processing, color palettes, etc), controls and animation, UIs (text in particular is difficult to read because of the lack of contrast with window backgrounds), audio (remaster voiceover to get rid of echo, add a little more logic to the tutorial voice if the player gets a little off track), etc. Consider picking some polished games to use as quality bars for comparison. Try to bring each aspect of the user experience up to the polish level of those reference games.

 

Thanks again. Very helpful.

 

@Serinx been playing your game a bit, it's quite addictive! I think you've got a very solid mechanic going on.

I built a bigger ship with four lasers and a shield, and the enemy did not get the better of me this time!



I noticed that when I put the shield on, I couldn't click a lot of the squares inside it (though I could still click and drag to select?).

It's also tedious to move the cursor around to click on the 'assign key' button every time you add something new. Perhaps double clicking the square would do that job?

I also don't think it's a good idea for the player to spawn at the start every time they modify the ship. You want the player to be using the building mechanics a lot, not feel hampered by it.

I also didn't realize I had to shoot the resources first (I suppose it makes sense but since I could move them into the resource processor already it wasn't intuitive).

Looking forward to being able to build stations, defenses .... space colonies?

 

That's good to hear!

Ah yes, I'm aware of the shield bug, I'll fix that up.

I was thinking of changing the assign key button to activate "Keybind Mode" where you can assign multiple keys by selecting cells and pressing the key (without having the click the button every time) and then pressing escape when you're done - do you think that would solve the problem?

Yes, I will work on saving the position of the ship when you modify it.

I'm not too sure about how I'm going to handle the resource processing just yet, I'm wondering if the resources should just be automatically added to your inventory when you fly near them but I wanted to do something a bit more unique by having the player tow them back to a point.

Once I add more things like planets and space stations, I might rethink how the resources should be collected and stored.

Thanks again for your input, I'm glad to hear you gave it another go and took out an enemy ship!

Here's a list of a couple of things I plan on adding in the near future:

• Planets you can trade with
• "Sectors" with different looks, resources, and dangers (this is half implemented but not visually)
• A full map which show which sectors you've revealed
• Beacons to help you navigate and return to key locations

 

That sounds like a good idea.

I don't think it would be a good idea just to give resources when you fly near them. I think the current system is fine, I just didn't know I had to shoot them before I pushed them into the processor, because nothing was happening at first when I just pushed stuff in.

For me the key factor that makes your game interesting is that I have control over exactly how the ship handles and what it is physically capable of, in the way I build it.

It stands to reason that you would then want to maximize the amount of physical interaction the ship has with things in its environment to give the player as much feedback on the results of their designs as possible. So definitely it's best to keep the 'resource pushing'. In my opinion, you want to make this more of a sandbox of 'building things that interact with other things' rather than worrying about how much of a 'true space game' it is.

Sounds good, I would add things like:

- Pushing and towing resource processors to take them closer to resources.
- Tractor beam as well as pushing?
- Black holes that make it harder to steer the ship.
- Solar flares that fry your electronics.
- Planets and asteroids you can 'dig into' to get resources.
- In-game repair of damaged cells.
- Ability to build non-moving stations and infrastructure the same way that you build ships, and which have to survive all sorts of dangerous events.
- Ability to use your ship to go around and repair damaged infrastructure.

In short I think the main thing is to give players as much stuff to physically do with their ships and the building mechanic as possible, and see what sticks.

 

@Billy4184 Those are some good ideas! I'll add them to my list. Space stations and blacks holes were definitely in my vision too, just might take some time to get space stations implemented! Black holes should be a fairly simple addition, they might appear in the next playtest all going well!

Edit: In fact, I'll just do it now:

 

@Serinx good stuff!

Thanks to you and @Firlefanz73 for putting up your work for feedback, and everyone who provided it! Gonna wrap this one up until next weekend.