Suggestions

[Root]

Hey there 4Bit Games! I've been playing your game a few times since release and I'm loving it! If you are looking to improve it, here are some suggestions for you!

• I don't have friends : Sometimes I want to jump in and do some rocket shooting between two tasks I'm doing. A bot mode, or a target shooting mode would be greatly appreciated.
  
  
• I have too many friends : I remember Super Smash Bros had some great options to handle more than 4 players. The first one was a simple elimination tournament that could be filled with bots. The other one was a kind of waiting line manager. All players would be in a randomized waiting line. The first 4 could play a game and we had some options to choose who could keep playing, the winner, the looser, someone at random (or nobody). Then all other players would be moved at the end of the waiting line and the new first 4 could play again. It also had som usefull options like quick adding or removing a player and skipping a turn.
  
  
• What is happening : A lot of things are not explained in the game. We quickly figured how the game goals worked but we had a lot of trouble with the Mayeh special modes until we played Tournament and figured out that it was those upgrades. Also, some planets and suns seem to be the exact same with other skins. Some more information in the game would be amazing! If you don't want to ruin the first games surprise and randomness, you could do a kind of encyclopedia where you unlock entries after playing a game with that feature at least X times.
  
  
• Are achievements working : Fair question. I don't have any and I fell like I should have some like "First Tour", "Explorer" and "Mad King". I don't have progression for any achievement. My achievements of the game.
  
  
• Heat reset : When your ship is heating up, you can release the joystick to reset all the heat in a single fram and then keep thrusting. I don't know if that's intended but it's a little bit stupid because we never have to explode by doing this.
  
  
• No penality death : With every goal but Survive and Annhilate, there is no penality to dying and you then respawn will full energy. In Conquer, it's not too bad because you have to actively seek the goal but in Destroy, you can simply shoot two rockets and then blow yourself in an obstacle to reset your energy. It's even better to do so because flying around is more chances to be hit by a random rocket and giving a point to an opponent. I feel like we souldn't respawn with full energy (wich might be a problem in Survival) or have some kind of penality for dying.
  
  
• We are bad : Yeah. Destroy can go on for a long time because it's the only goal asking us to actually be precise. Sometimes we are faster and sometimes we aren't but this goal is still much longer than the other ones for us. I think that less than 10 kills goals would be better.
  
  
• Blocking gives energy.. twice : The last upgrade in the blocking skill branch has the same text as the second upgrade. If I'm not mistaken, this upgrade is supposed to reflect rockets.
  
  
• Flying blind : When we play, the camera is always cropped around the alive players which is overall a good thing. If there is a planet near we can remember it. However, when playing Survive, there are a lot of asteroids and going away from the camera can often get you killed without being able to react. It would be appreciated to have a wider camara in Survive.
  
  
• Conquer and repeat : Right now, Conquer is my favorite goal ( with Annhilate ) but it can be a bummer to have it when there is only one planet because it become repetitive. It could be a good idea to have at least two planets for Conquer or to have some static zones, not only around objetcs.
  
  So yeah, that became longer than expected but here are me and my friends' observations with our few games! If you intend to look into some of those, that would really improve the game for us!

[4BitGames]

Hello Sgt. Buttersworth.

Thank you very much for this great and detailed feedback, we really appreciate it! Pretty much all of your suggestions are spot on, especially when it comes to bots and more ways to play with others.

ORBIT was made when we were still students, so there were limits to what we were able to accomplish. Even though we've got more experience at this point, most of the bad code and systems in the game would have to be completely re-written. We recently managed to recover the source and make some improvements to performance and bugs on the PC version, which fixes many of the issues for PC players.

We greatly appreciate you taking the time to give us such valuable feedback. We've noticed that you've helped out other players here as well, and we're really grateful for that.

Sincerely,
4Bit Games


For instructions on how to enable the ORBIT update:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/348280/discussions/0/1693795812302725165/