First impressions from a "serious" FTL player

[Mike]

Background: FTL is my favourite game, and I play it at the highest standard.

I played the Trigon demo for a bit. It's interesting to see a new take on FTL, but overall I found it frustrating. The game in its current form has significant issues. Naturally I'm comparing it to FTL.

FTL is a masterpiece of interface design; its interface is highly readable and intuitive. Trigon's is not, despite copying many design elements. The isometric 3D viewpoint makes it fundamentally harder to "scan" the interface and understand what is happening. This is a design decision driven by how you want the game to look. I can respect that, but it does mean you're already starting at a disadvantage in making your interface readable.

Given that disadvantage, you really need to work extra-hard to create a clear interface. Instead, you have tiny icons and text, with poor contrast. Everything blends into one. It's tough to see at a glance how much power is in a system, for example.

I found many things baffling, and this is coming from someone who knows FTL inside out. Granted, that could sometimes be a disadvantage when I expect something to work like FTL and it doesn't; but overall, I'm in a much better position to "get" the game than someone who hasn't played FTL.

For example, it's not obvious when you have destroyed an enemy system. In FTL, undamaged systems have a green icon, orange when damaged, and red when destroyed. That "traffic light" system is intuitive and easy to see. They even offer a colour-blind mode where additional icons are used to distinguish states like damaged vs. destroyed.

In Trigon, a damaged system is red and a destroyed system is ... a slightly dimmer shade of red. For a while I couldn't understand why enemy weapons were still firing after I thought I'd destroyed them.

I also had problems using missile weapons. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, and the only feedback was a vague "not working" sound effect. I had missiles, did I need to load them into the weapon? I tried, but the interface feedback is poor. FTL does helpful things like flash up "no missiles" when you're out of ammo.

Reactor bars are problematic. Try counting how much spare reactor you have in Trigon vs. in FTL. Again, the 3D effect is harming your ability to "scan" the game situation. When systems are fully depowered, the system icon is almost invisible.

All the interface problems are compounded by how "glowy" everything is. The backgrounds, the ships, the weapons fire, the red screen outline when something dangerous is happening -- the whole game is suffused with glow and blown-out highlights. Unfortunately, I suspect this is because the graphics are low-poly models with muddy texturing, and the glowy shiny effects are a way to cover that up. Everything looks quite plastic. To be fair, some ship design is nice -- like the Etari cruiser.

You're also missing basic things like the ESC key taking you away from secondary screens (like the map) and back to the main screen (your 3D ship view), and from there exiting to the menu. In general the interface is frustrating.

Some gameplay mechanics stood out as odd:

It seems that your ship effectively has a Weapons Pre-igniter augment, while enemy ships don't. So you always get to fire your weapons immediately. This seems overpowered, and indeed ship combat seemed very easy.

Enemies with teleporters steal your crew when they retrieve their own, and you then have no way to return to your ship! This is an extremely frustrating gameplay mechanic. FTL allows the player to do it, if they have both mind control and teleporter. But this is one of the very rare cases where the "rules" in FTL are different for enemies. Enemy ships can never abduct your crew.

The decision to make crew use up oxygen in a specific room seems odd. This might be an attempt at adding realism, but it has the peculiar consequence of encouraging the player to run the ship with all the interior doors open -- indeed, it's essential if you want to manage your power efficiently and turn off O2 during fights.

Many new gameplay mechanics seem superfluous -- like morale, and multiple currencies. They feel like adding stuff for the sake of it, rather than because it's fun or interesting -- but to be fair, that's also a superficial reaction, since I haven't played enough to really get a feel for them.

The writing is just bad. It's obviously not written by a native English speaker. It's riddled with errors, and the tone is bizarre -- sometimes even childish. "Mercy Pasta monster, have mercy" -- really? Those in-fight crew reactions in general seem random and weird, so they reduce immersion instead of increasing it.

I did find one thing you've added which is a clear improvement on FTL. You can speed up or slow down the game. That part of the interface is also intuitive. FTL has some tedious waiting for stuff like oxygen refill and "training" crew, so many players resort to using CheatEngine to speed up the game.

I'm sorry my feedback is so negative, but I hope it's at least constructive. I know that you love FTL and want to make a spiritual successor -- and that's great!

As it stands though, Trigon makes me think you have not understood why FTL is a great game. It starts with the basics. You need a clear interface. FTL is a complex game, and it's important that players don't feel they are fighting the interface.

I think you have a lot of work to do beating this game into shape. Justin and Matt repeatedly made major design changes as they developed both FTL and Into the Breach -- they threw away stuff they'd worked hard on, because it just wasn't working. If you aspire to match the quality of FTL, I think you'll need to copy them in that practice too.

[Sernur.tech]

Wow!!! First of all, thank you for playing the DEMO and for your feedback. Good job. Really appreciate it and it is a pleasure to answer for you.

You don't need to sorry that you point me negative side of the game. Comments like yours are the best I can get to make the game better. Yes, it is hard to read - like we don't have anything good at all, but we both understand that it is not. I am happy that we have an involved players community.

I completely agree with your comments. And I see the same as you do.

I'll tell you a little about how I came to what we have now.

When I realized that ten years had passed since FTL was released and that I really decided to make a spiritual successor. I immediately realized that time dictates its own rules. And my vision of this is reflected in everything. Scene with more details and special effects, the pace of the game is higher, the music is more dynamic. I expand a lot of the mechanics. Like O2 you mentioned, but a little bit later about this one. More complex weapon stats. Units with a perk tree and active abilities (this part has not yet been fully implemented, in fact, in the current state you see only a small part of it).

That is why I need to handle my personal way with UI. And this is my 3rd attempt to make it good enough. And I have to make 4th.

So yes, I am trying to find a design solution to make energy/HP bars more readable. I think about it every week but have to handle everything else to move forward with other parts of the game. So right now we don't work at the UI but it is on my to-do list at the top of it.
There is no vision of how it will be in my head right now, but I will do my best to make UI better.

And we solve some of the points you asked for already (but it will come with next update)
- Auto-substitution of shells when installing a new weapon
- Autoloading shells if you run out of some, but there are others in the warehouse
- Teleport warming up mechanic has been added. Before triggering, the teleport warms up for 5 seconds, during which you can have time to react and take your units out of the compartment so that they are not taken by enemies. It works both sides. You can try to steal enemyes too.

ESC button - if we have problems like that it means we are not so bad ))) I will add this, sure.

About O2 System. I am proud of it. And think in this case you just can't forget about your previous experience. I will tell you why I think this model works interesting and better.
- Each race has differences in oxygen consumption. You need to upgrade O2 for the big Rakkhs crew on ship.
- More door control is needed. If your O2 is broken and crewmember starts to suffocate you can open doors and get some air from other rooms. It brings a lot of decisions when you have fire on board and O2 problems at the same time.
- It forces you to move units more not just staying and operating the system all time

I like how it works and in a new balance, I have amazing situations when game AI surprised even me.

Writing - shame on me. It is hard to make for me. But we will fix all text before EA. In new update (new DEMO will be available next week) some parts of the text will be much better, thanks to one of the involved player.

We have a lot of things to do and will work hard. This is my first game and I sure I will make a lot of mistakes. But I understand when you make a game after FTL you need to jump over your head to make at least equal smooth of gameplay. And I will do my best to make it.

Thank you once again. I am going to make a post about Closed Beta Test on our discord channel. It will be a pleasure if you will join us and try a new build.

[Mike]

Hey, what a great response! Hats off to you for such positivity and thanks for taking the time. =)

Everything you've said sounds very encouraging, especially that you're aware of the interface issues and continue to think about options. I could definitely see this game going from "too many problems" to "a great new take on FTL".

Some of the gameplay issues may be fine with more player experience, UI improvements, or perhaps tutorial content.

Showing work-in-progress is always tough, because it gets judged by the standards of finished products. And it's extra-tough when you are being compared to FTL. FTL itself looked pretty bad in early builds, and also players like me easily forget that Advanced Edition added a lot of polish.

I see what you mean about the O2 consumption. It definitely opens up new possibilities for decision making and interesting micro. This could well be a case where I'm guilty of seeing everything through the lens of familiar FTL.

Writing is really tough to do well. I don't know if you can afford to hire a writer.

In any case, best of luck with your continuing development!