DEMO FEEDBACK

[pixeljammiles]

Post your thoughts, suggestions & bug reports here.

[Ikagura]

Nice update but the missile and laser boxes are a bit too big.

[ruolbu]

Just played through the demo for the first time. This is how I feel about the game. More impressions than suggestions. For reference, I'm a Star Fox 64 fan. I appreciate the first game, but never got quite into it.

I played with my DS4 via USB. The first thing I noticed was that banking left or right was on my triggers R2 and L2 not the buttons R1 and L1. Since the degree of rotation has no analog control and triggers are more sluggish to press then buttons I preferred using the latter. Are the triggers how you intend to control that feature? It seems odd.
Other than that boost was cross while brake was triangle. To me that seemed counterintuitive so I changed that as well. I wonder why you placed them like that. I prefer braking to get more time on stationary targets and find pressing the lower button easier while shooting.

On shooting. I enjoy the burst fire. The rhythm to get a smooth continuous stream of laser beams feels right and very close to what I recall from Star Fox 64. What does not feel quite right is the reticule. I get the feeling that I'm not quite aiming where I'm shooting. Maybe you've heard of that criticism before in regards to Star Fox Zero.
I was tinkering around with building my own game in this style for a while and as part of that I was figuring out why aiming in Star Fox 64 felt spot on to me but then so miserable in Zero. I think it comes down to the distance between reticule and ship in 64 being very close to the flight distance of laser beams before they despawn. You will basically never see your laser cross to the other side of your reticule in that game. Enemies that are right at that golden distance get directly shot at. Enemies that are closer become so large that the difference between where you aim and where you shoot becomes insignificant. In addition to that the render distance of the game was not that far out beyond the shooting distance. Overall parallax was rarely an issue.
If the game has a long range render and shooting distance but a close-mid range aiming distance parallax becomes more apparent. Zero had that a lot imho. And I feel like your game has this as well, yet less significantly. I noticed it with the scorpion boss the most. My ship was on the left side of the screen, I was aiming at the arm that was on the same side on the screen. The reticule was on the glowy bit, yet the shots landed often at the center body of the boss.

In gameplay I noticed this less so. Mostly because I was using the missile attack a whole lot. And here I think you game design comes into play nicely. I feel like shooting lasers is less important in Ex Zodiac than it was in Star Fox 64. To me it seems that the hit boxes of your laser beams are significatly smaller than I would like them, it's as if 64 had very generous monster hit boxes in comparison. As a result I have trouble getting rid of enemy formations with just my laser spamming, especially when these move. But to counteract that I can shoot up to three missiles, which helpes a lot with high numbers of quick targets. On top of that from what I've seen you get rewarded for destroying formations with an increased missile capacity. This creates a feedback loop where skillful use of missiles incentivices even further use. At times I feel less like a fighter jet, and more like a Gundam. I like that.

That's it for the most part. A couple other things:
- When I hold my shoulder button and fly my ship in that same direction, Star Fox 64 made you more agile. I think the og Star Fox did so too? Ex Zodiac does not allow for this. I kinda miss this feature. Any reasons why you left it out?
- Is the origin of the Scorpion Boss just "I think the Star Fox Attack Carrier looks a bit like a scorpion... if you squit"? :p At least I felt like it was a very familiarly looking boss ;)
- After you defeat a boss and your ship flies up in the sky, to me it seems like the direction it is moving in and the direction it's pointing at don't quite align.
- After defeating the Scorpion I still had my missile charged and for a second after every bit of the enemy had already vanished, my missile locked on to two targets. That seemed off.

Overall, good experience, nice style and presentation, looking forward to learning more about this.

[Ben]

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

The default controls for rolling should probably be moved to the bumpers rather than the triggers. I think it's currently set to the triggers as originally you could control the tilt of the ship, but it didn't really add anything and it was also harder to initiate a full roll, so I removed that.

As for the other default controls, they're probably a bit backwards as I'm developing the game using an XBox 360 controller, so things aren't always 1:1 with other types of controller. I might be able to try and detect this stuff in the future, but even then off-brand controllers can still throw everything off. I always recommend people configure the controls to their liking before playing.

You're not the first person to mention the aiming feeling slightly off, and I appreciate you sharing your findings :) I will poke around and see if extending the reticules distance so that it's closer to the distance the laser travels helps with accuracy.

As for tilting the ship for a speed increase, that should be working again. It was disabled until recently, but if your steam demo has updated then rolling to either side should definitely give you a noticeable speed increase in that direction.

The Scorpion boss was inspired by a de-forestation machine I saw in Google Images, I'm not sure the Attack Carrier looks like a scorpion to me no matter how much I squint... :)

There's still a few bugs with homing missiles, one of them is one you encountered where they stay locked on to something that's been destroyed. Hopefully that'll be fixed in a later version.

[Worgen Freeman]

I just finished the updated demo. Feels like the first level is pretty gold for how it plays, the second could use more healing items in it. It would also be nice if both shoulder buttons were mapped to rolls since using the LB and RB feels better for that kind of thing then the triggers on the xbox gamepad. Also, I would tweak how the laser firing works, like I like the 3 shot burst but it should keep that up if you rapidly press the button or just tap it. Holding it feels awkward unless your trying to lock on your missiles, it feels much more natural to button mash for rapid fire. The only other thing I can think of is changing the one big 'muzzle flash' to two smaller ones for double lasers.

[Lavama]

Pretty Smooth flying, Ben

[roy]

Well done! Enjoyed it.

[spacearnaud]

I tried playing the demo... it froze repeatedly during the tutorial. I spent less time playing than waiting for the game to unfreeze. I gave up after a few minutes.

[NicoNeco]

I just finished playing the two levels. So far the game is a huge plus from me! Smooth 60 fps and simple polygons is a such a aesthetic. The controls are nice on a XBOX ONE controller. All the music I'm hearing is amazing! I can't wait to play the released version, I love it a lot!

[Ikagura]

Will be there an option to choose the zoom level of your camera (and eventually a cockpit view)?

[TimeLincoln]

absolutely fantastic feel and control. workshop support for custom ships and maps please! also some kind of endless run/score attack/survival mode would be cool.

[King of Sorrow]

Missiles are slower than equivalent (Starfox 64 Charge shot tracking.) munitions fire, and while the game encourages locking onto multiple enemies - the game in particular seems to punish you for doing so by missing targets or having them skitter off-screen in mere moments.

Tilting the ship for tight turns still feels unresponsive for the sheer "get out of the way" functionality. This results more in "memorize the stage" versus "flight adaptation ability". Particularly for the second level demo boss that makes the fire pillars. No weaving through them, just make them land far apart!

Lastly (First Access gripe.): Asteroid Belt level crashes 5 out of 5 times halfway through against what looks like the mini-boss. Can't say if it's good or not since I can't finish it!

[NVDragon]

So, this is already the best Starfox game since 64DS. The controls feel great, the bosses feel unique-yet-intuitive, and there genuinely seems to be a choice between spacing out your shots for burstfire vs holding the button for homing.

I'm playing on keyboard, which has inherent issues, but I found a control setup that worked for me (WASD movement, Lshift boost, space fire, then Rctrl break, arrows for banking, keypad0 for bombs) to minimize the pain.

I think I found a bug regarding control setup, by the way: before starting my first run, I set up my keybinds, left "invert Y-axis" disabled, tested the settings, it felt great... then went into a game, and it inverted my Y-axis so my controls were reversed. I had to back out and set up my keybinds again to fix it.

Another gripe is that there isn't much feedback for when you hit targets. It makes it tough to tell how accurate I am; to strike the obvious comparison, SF64 has a very obvious noise and visual-effect when you deal damage, and an even more obvious noise when you hit something invulnerable. In Ex-Zodiac, shooting the flashing parts obviously feels like the right thing to do, but I found it hard to tell if anything was happening unless I was watching a boss's healthbar or unless the target exploded. (Biggest example was the windmills - the blades have flashing tips, I tried shooting at one, nothing happened, so I assumed they were invulnerable until I accidentally blew one off later. I still don't know if the flashing tip is a weakspot, or just an indicator that they're destructible.)

Lastly... it feels a little lame losing powerups at the end of each mission. I wiped out the enemies, blew up the boss, didn't die, and in the next level... suddenly I'm doing way less damage and I can't lock on to as many targets. It's made worse by the fact that I don't yet have the best idea of what the powerups actually *do* - they're all just boxes with letters, and aside from "L for Laser" I don't know what the letters stand for. It makes it tough to value one over another, and if I happen to pick one up, I don't know how it should impact my gameplay.

Hopefully this feedback helps a bit. The game IS great so far, and I definitely plan to grab the final product - it just needs a few satisfaction/accessibility tweaks before it really puts Nintendo to shame.

[Zerker]

Just finished the demo using a flight stick ;) (Thrustmaster T.16000M) Controls generally mapped quite well to it with the roll assigned to the twist axis (and analog too!). Couldn't figure out exactly how the barrel roll was supposed to work, but I also have an issue with that axis not reaching its limits. I need to fix my calibration before retrying, but that's somewhat annoying on Linux :).

[Ikagura]

You should pin this thread.

[JB]

I played the demo a few minutes, but for what I see it's looks fun and all.
However i don't get how to access to the menu while I'm in game. In most games I just had to press Escape (don't have a Controller available right now so I didn't test with Start/Select).
Also it'd be nice to show when there's no bomb available instead of just nothing.

In the good points, I often wish for a "60fps/HD/high display distance" version of Star Fox SNES and.. that's basically what is it :)

Anyway, good luck to finish the game and for all the future console ports ;)