Feedback on Demo

[Palandus]

Overall liked, wishlisted and followed. Other comments:

1) Why is the Red and Purple crates "uncommon"?

2) Had events spawn outside of the playable area.

3) If another boss appears, the first boss meter disappears, so you have no idea how far along you are with that boss.

4) Some upgrades require other upgrades, and shouldn't drop until you have the requirements met. Like shield regeneration speed, when you have no shields. Or shatter damage, without any freeze effects.

5) The firing angle isn't precisely correct. Or it depends on the weapon. But having 5 "rare" heavy cannons, they kept not shooting at targets within their attack arcs. Also not sure if strike craft placement matters or not.

6) Unique upgrades have no special outline to them, so you might accidentally miss them.

7) If you have a quest reward ontop of a regular unlockable crate, it prioritizes the regular crate, so you have to buy it whether you want it or not.

8) The speed up dash or whatever you start with isn't clear when it turns off and how long it is active for. Or if any movement from straight shot, deactivates it immediately.

9) Strike craft do not benefit from energy or projectile damage bonuses or other effects. Nor do they get your freeze chance (insofar as I could see).

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Will play some more, as its right up my alley, but probably later into the Next Fest.

[Palandus]

Played two more games, and more feedback:

10) Haven't won a match yet. It is REALLY hard and enemies get damage scaling the longer it goes... so a missile barrage at the 10 minute mark, vs 20 minute mark is a huge staggering difference in damage, yet our DPS does not even come close to matching them.

11) Shields are quite frankly, next to useless. My most recent match, I had 450 shields. One single barrage of missiles wiped it out around the ~15 minute mark. Then it took like 10 seconds for it to recharge, and any small impact would cause it to restart the cooldown. And as there are tons of small ships flying around, it makes it really hard to do anything.

12) Missiles seem like the only viable option available. I've tried a pure Strike craft, pure Guns, pure Plasma, and pure Missile build, and missiles were the only ones that got me to the 20 minute mark. They have decent range, decent damage, area of effect explosions, and they are ideal for a kiting strategy.

13) You have to kite targets in the game. Otherwise you get surrounded and overwhelmed very quickly. You can't stay in one spot for any length of time, making those defense beacons suicide late run (10 minute+ mark).

14) I really don't like how credit cost scales so much into the late game. Visited a store, and saw an epic that I wanted, but it was over 1200 credits. I ain't made of money and accumulating that much is REALLY hard.

15) If you get a chest/crate and open it, reroll it and hit skip, you get no benefit for doing so. Unlike level up where you can earn a pittance of credits. I say pittance as it seems to be a fixed 30, which does practically nothing lategame, so even though a passive might be totally worthless to your build, its better than skipping.

16) We do need a way to banish things we don't want to see in the loot pool. If I'm going missiles, I don't need projectiles, plasma, or the like. Whether this is banning things before entering the game (which is what Night Swarm does) or within the game proper (most Survivors do).

17) Ramming damage is a waste. You one-shot small ships without it, and anything bigger than that, trying to ram them does little damage and often way more damage to your own hull.

18) I don't understand the upgrade Impact Resistance. It doesn't seem to reduce enemy weapon damage from say projectiles, or damage taken when ramming.

19) I don't understand the Armory. I have credits, but many items say "Locked". I can't buy them, even though I have sufficient credits and the UI isn't clear on how to remove the "lock". Is it a lack of Research level? How do I increase that? Finally, is Credits the same as game Credits, in that your ending Credits is what determines how much you get at Defeat/Victory?

20) There seems to be a "lag" between when I get hit and the game notifying me of the damage taken. For example, latest match, I hit the afterburner and then died. But, my health bar still showed positive hull, before the match ended and showed the score screen.

21) The Calliope (I think its called that) Unique missile launcher, that fires a volley of like 8 missiles... well, it has a hard time hitting anything. Regardless of where I put it on my ship, it seems to have a minimum range (even though not shown in UI) and it fires at where the ships were, rather than where they will be. So most small to medium sized ships get out of the damage area before the missiles arrive. And since it fires a volley, you'd think it was good with crowds, but all the crowd ships, move faster than the missiles, so it just doesn't work.

22) Overall, the difficulty gets overwhelmingly hard. Last match I had roughly ~1200 hull, 450 shields, ~50 Hull Regen and +80% Shield Regen Time. And I just couldn't DPS enemies fast enough to get to the boss. I kept getting surrounded, even though I had 2 of those Calliopes and the rest were Tier 3 missile launchers. I had like +70% critical chance and other damage boosters, but I was barely tickling most enemies. Or I was killing them, but then they'd respawn faster than I could kill them.

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I'm putting the demo down, now. Its "fun"-ish, but the difficulty scaling and the lack of beating a match has soured my current interest in the game. Maybe at launch it will be better balanced.

[Queco Jones21]

It is very fun, but the beginning is very grindy before you can win a match, Took me a good while before I passed the first mission. But once you start upgrading the passives and weapons a bit you can easily coast.

Best bet to survive at the beginning is to concentrate on the auto cannons and missles. Forget everything else.

It took me until I completed all 3 missions or an unknown number of upgrades before I unlocked Tier 2, so I agree that it is not very clear at all on what we need to do to scale up.

At this point, the ship with more hardpoints wins. The passives for each ship is meh to be honest,

Pretty much agree on shields. They are a quick buffer, but the cooldown is proc'd over and over again by any little hit and they are almost always at 0.

Health is interesting. Since we get unlimited passive upgrades, there are a ton of upgrades that focus on health regen and adding health. Once you get enough of these you can last forever unless you stay still or get trapped by the bigger enemy ships that slow your movement down. Been able to get to the 35-40 min mark before I get bored per say.

So far the best weapons are the Auto Cannons and missiles. Coil/Rail Guns are pretty good as well.

Strike craft needs a boost to be viable IMO. 1/2 the upgrades don't appear to affect the little frigates you can get. Plus the frigates stay so close to you that they barely hit anything. Also a lot of the upgrades just focus on rate of fire and not really damage. So there is not a lot of difference between higher tier fighters/frigates. Don't really seem worth the cost.

[Palandus]

Yeah, took me 2 more tries (so 5 matches total) to finally beat first level.

Some other feedback:

-> Unique weapons suck. I haven't found a single one that I actually want for my build. Whether that is the Frigates, Torpedoes or the Missile Swarm. They just aren't that useful, regardless of the slot they get put into.

-> On the topic of Unique Frigates, if you place them in the middle rear slot, they bunch up on one side of the ship. But if you place them literally anywhere else, one goes to your left and the other to your right, up to the front of the ship.

-> Life Steal doesn't seem to be working. Whether its on hit or on kill, I don't seem to earn any HP on either situation.

-> Its kinda humorous, but you can collide with ground units on the frozen world, as if they were flying units.

-> If you choose Skip on a boss reward, you get literally nothing. Not even permanent currency. I had gotten the +2 fighter, frigate and swarm, and none of them were useful to my build, so hit skip.

-> I unlocked the highest tier auto cannon, but no matter what I kill, even bosses, I've not seen it appear once.

-> Music is very quiet and rarely can I hear it over the sounds of my guns. Especially missiles. Damn they are loud.

-> If cannons are placed anywhere but the front 2 slots, they struggle to ever hit anything. Even when enemies are in their cones of fire. Its like they keep deciding to target something else, and thus end up targetting nothing. They start to do alright, if you get target speed improvements. Otherwise, you are very restricted to where you can place your projectile weapons. Missiles are happy basically anywhere.

[Palandus]

Also, late game (20 minutes onward) performance gets atrocious. FPS drops sometimes to 20 or less, and when I get really swarmed, it hits single digit framerates. Its hard to maneuver or weave through enemies when FPS gets this low. Its also incidentally when I usually die horribly.

My rig should far exceed recommended specs too.

[Palandus]

If an enemy is frozen, ramming them doesn't deal extra damage, if you have the shatter damage bonus. I have +200%, and they take the same amount of ram time to kill larger ships.

[CODEBREW SOFTWARE]

Hey Palandus (and Queco)!
Thanks so much for taking the time to write all this out, and for really breaking down the issues you're hitting, this is genuinely awesome, detailed feedback and it's a huge help.

I've just put out a steam post on this, but wanted to reply here as well.

Hot-fixes have been pushed quietly the last few days mainly prioritizing performance fixes this week and any quick wins, with hopefully another one addressing some major issues today. But I've tried not to touch balance until I can resolve it in a far broader pass.

I'll be collating everything from Steam and Discord over the coming weeks and putting together a full balance and fix pass trying to cover as much as I can, these will be pushed into the demo as well which I'll be keep available and fixing alongside main development towards the future release.

Thanks again for the interest and the time, I really appreciate it.

[Palandus]

Thanks for the reply.

Yep, gotta go for the quick wins.

Balance is more an issue for longevity and build variety. There is some best in slot stuff right now, that people will use until other things get buffed up. Though preferably not nerf the current stuff in the process.

Gotta get the quick wins where you can, especially during the Next Fest craze. I see the demo will stay up after the Next Fest, so I'll play some more of it after I get through my demo backlog.

Happy devving!

[tony_statman]

One thing is that Life Steal is not based on KILLING, but based on COLLECTING credits, and it is absolutely worth it: when surrounded by swarms, killing the pests and getting life from the credit drops is an absolute life saver (literally)

I've found the Unique Frigate to be pretty powerful. The Vortex weapon isn't all that great, but in the absence of Life Steal, it's a decent way to thin out the swarm.

Missiles are DEFINITELY the way to go right now, even though my preferred approach is fighters. :)

Question: what does "shield time +2%" mean? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

[Palandus]

That isn't very intuitive, that Life Steal is gained after collecting credits. Most games do it as Life on Hit or Life on Kill.

[Palandus]

Game is starting to feel good with the hotfixes, so playing some more. Some more notes:

-> To make ramming feel better, we need to be able to knockback enemy ships we collide with, rather than grinding to a halt. Perhaps the more ramming damage you have, the more you knock back targets.

-> May need a transparency option for weapons fire. Hard to see my enemies with all my explosions going off.

-> It might be nice if we ram into a ship, that it in turn rams into other things. So ram into a capital ship, for it to crush some small fighters for you, and they take the ram damage from impacting those fighters.

-> Perhaps ramming damage increases based on how fast you are moving when you impact them. So the slower you are moving, the less damage multiplier.

-> Perhaps to improve plasma weapons, they cause the target to take additional damage from all sources. Plasma is really hot ionized gas after all, so you'd think it would superheat an enemy hull. A softer hull doesn't absorb impacts as well.

-> Perhaps with higher Impact Resistance, it reduces the effect of the impact too, so you lose less speed.

-> Perhaps with Emergency Repair, you gain additional hull repair per second, based on your maximum health. So, you might get +1 hull repair per second per 40 maximum HP. That way it scales with your health. As it is, 100 total healing, isn't much late game when you have 1000+ HP.

[Palandus]

Bug: Well, maybe bug.

Got Expanded Hangars (+2 fighters +10% strike craft damage)
Had Resolute Frigates before it.

After it, I still only get 2 Frigates. So either a frigates aren't considered fighters, or its an actual bug.

[CODEBREW SOFTWARE]

Frigates are not intended to scale with fighter buffs, Or i'd use the keyword strike-craft as that's common to both.

yeah a broad theme im seeing in a lot of the feedback is "Improve the wording"

So that's going to be a priority for the Quality Of Life Patch.

[tony_statman]

Haha, +2 FRIGATES would be pretty devastating, it might make us rethink all-missile builds :)

[Palandus]

Originally posted by CODEBREW SOFTWARE:

Frigates are not intended to scale with fighter buffs, Or i'd use the keyword strike-craft as that's common to both.

yeah a broad theme im seeing in a lot of the feedback is "Improve the wording"

So that's going to be a priority for the Quality Of Life Patch.

Yes, and while you are at it, make sure to give an explanation for things that are hard to gauge their value. Like Twin Strike, Inertia +1, Life Steal, that sort of thing, where it gives you a label but not an explanation.

[Palandus]

Originally posted by tony_statman:

Haha, +2 FRIGATES would be pretty devastating, it might make us rethink all-missile builds :)

That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.