Feedback to Beta start - my 2cents

Very nice job with the beta release! free of bugs for me. one of the best first releases ive seen so far! im 30 and gaming for over 15 years.

I wanted to spend some time to put some personal opinion as feedback (WALL OF TEXT) to help and improove the game. thanks for reading! I hope some of this finds its way into the game! .

Proceduraly generated monsters:
The problem ist that they are perceived as "all the same". If a new monster appears you cant know about its properties (implement tooltips showing hostile/friendly, theire sklls please) which is why all of them are a threat of the same kind.

most of them have some animated kind of attack. You dont realy realize what it does exactly apart from damage. after killing 3 of the same kind another kind apears and you never again see the first. so there is nothing "binding" you to that enemy. no experience about it, its behavior, what to exspect. all of that leads to the perception of.:

-> there is currently only one type of monster in the game. "the random thing"

--> there should be fewer monsters per planet so you get familar with them. the effects should be more distinct and behave similar. i.e. a green effect should be associated with poison. maybe poinsonous monsters should have a certain greenish/yellowish collor range assinged. maybe monsters with a lot of armor should always consist of models which look armored or scaled. currently it is a bit to random which has to opposite of the desired diversity effect.you need to have more properties on the mobs which the user can remember and have associations with. even if its just tendencies. else the mind will not be able to create groups and instead put it all one one bucket. that is the opposite of what you wanted to achieve.

Building houses (homebase) on planet surface:
- one the first planet my multiplayer group did build a nice fancy house like we knew it from terraria.

- on the second planet we planned to build a house so we took the old one with us in boxes which stayed at the spaceship.

- since planet 3 we dont build any house but just beam down and loot. the spaceship itself is not configurable enough to replace the "build a common house"

Crafting benches where moved to the ship instead of the houses on the planet surface as we didnt want to pack/unpack everything all the time. so we didnt have a community house but instead everyone had its own ship which is not so nice. so with the many procedural planets it goes in the same direction as the procedural monsters. you associate with the planet after a while, but not enough to spend time to build a house after you have been on 5 planets which is very sad because the house building aspect was something very central in terraria.

so what to do about it ? i think youre spaceship should be like youre house in terraria. something which you build on and which you can take with you.
It is currently not because:
- it cant be configured block by block
- it can not land
- you have one per player and not one per multiplayer group

I think arriving on a new planet should look like this.:
- you fuel your spaceship and fly over to the planet
- you beam down (which has costs like fuel associated so you dont beam that often).
- you flatten a pieve of land so you spaceship (or a 2nd landing vessel) can land
- doors/ramps of the ship open with a lot of steam
- you start exploring/mining the planet.
- you make improovements to the landing vessel (add rooms, add engines, thrusters, flux compensators, whatnot) to increase its size. there should be rules like "you have to have 1 engine per 20x20 block size. it needs to be sealed hermetic. everything on the outside of the hermetic shield will go bad once youre in space.

that would be a "one object, one home" for the whole multiplayer group. something that you can carry youre stuff back to and something that everybody likes to work and progress on. some more permanent content in between the endless (procedual) space. it starts as a small one room capsulae and grows to a fliing city with mushroom farms and NPC shops and guards on it.


Others:
- pixel loss on death should be a server option.

- hitting mobs through the wall with i.e. a 2h sword is an exploit that needs to be fixed.

Thanks for reading, have a nice day !

 

I think a lot of this could be solved with the original idea of space stations. I don't know why they abandoned the idea, but I think it would be really nice to have them in the final version of the game.

 

I prefer having my own ship to customize, away from the input/interference of other players. My ship is my home and if I'm building on a planet it's more of an "away station" to me, or a communal space. I think, for a more continuous space, I agree with elazrath: re-implement Space Stations. For me, the stations were a major feature I was looking forward to. There should be derelict stations that players, alone or in groups, can spend resources refurbishing. Have one room on the station that isn't damaged, and power and life support are out. Now the players must spend resources (pixels, metal, wire, etc) to restore the broken systems and rebuild the broken rooms. Each room can be given a use, such as vehicle bay, research, crafting... This would give the game an overall goal outside of the story; a point to the resource hoarding. I believe features similar to these were mentioned long ago anyway.

Overall I'm impressed with the game, and it's obviously early Beta so much too early to fully review and judge, but many of the points you've mentioned have merit. All of the enemies do feel like the same thing with a different skin, and I'm sure that's exactly what they wanted to avoid.

[Edit] I would also like to state I don't like the idea of beaming taking fuel, but would love a moddable ship.

 

I added beaming taking fuel to distinguish between house and ship. I think moving to another planet should be a comittment so cost resources as is. In the same sense landing on a planet should also be a commitment, a smaller one though. Maybe you dont beam down and up, maybe you come down in a small veseel or pod like a shooting star. later on you can build bigger of those vessels with whole rooms.

A house on a planet should be subject to the planet enviroment like goblin army attacks. The spaceship is seperated from the enviroment of the planet. If there is no cost assiciated with going into "save" orbit instantly then there will be no reason to build a house in the more dangerous planetary enviroment. Even if the house is moveable from planet to planet.

This is not because i like to pay additional ressources, it is imo necessary to give houses on a planet relevance. I would like to see that because i very much enjoyed the house building part in terraria.

I imagine as already described above more of a landing mission for every new planet. some kind of minigame where you would first secure the landing site (flatten it), bring your landing vehicle down, establish a perimeter (start the hellavator and maybe farms) to then go over to exploitation of the current planet in order to progress through the leveling system but also in order to progress you landing vessel. In terraria you could add rooms for additional NPCs, something similar should be done with the landing vessel. It needs to be a project similar to your character.

So far i distinguished between spaceship and landing vessel. That is not necessary. Both can be the same. Or maybe the habitable part of youre spaceship is the same as the landing vessel which can be decoupled somehow. so you leave just the FTL engine part and some frame in space (like enterprise). Or you could just do it modular and have the FTL connected via structure or corridors to several landing vessels in space which you can seperately undock and land on a flat surface. so there could be very small one room capsulaes and bigger farms, living quarters or cities. Tecnicaly space at seems to be the same as a planet already. Just that space is without blocks and only filled with a background.

The whole vessel needs to have an underliing ruleset if you want to be able to build it from blocks. it would be some kind of minigame just as youre character improovement is. things like that bind you to the game.
rules so that:
- so that people dont fly in a dirt or wood made spaceship which is not hermeticaly sealed and has no engines
- so that the outer dimensions of the modules or rooms all fit together
- so that there is content to achieve (need more thrusters to lift the the vessel up -> need more steel and ..., or need more live support modules for that size of interior)

It will be not so easy to find a good balance between "i want to build it the way i like to block by block" and the above mentioned ruleset but i definitivly think this would be a worthy addition of content and take the principle of theese kinds of games further. the home base is just a huge part of theese games, not just the exploring part. a moving base with procedural unlimitted content to use it in would be so much possibilities!

 

I like a lot of your ideas. Especially the part where you said you can flatten an area to make your spaceship land there or a landing vessel or something. You would be able to customize a ship/house and take it to every planet you visit! Or maybe something similair to the pirate ships in the desert. Being able to have your ship in the sky with an anchor attached to the ground.

 

I just added a little picture how a ship could be broken down in components.:



I imagine that some of them like the FTL and the cockpit would be static. Others like the 2 big rooms should not be static. I only displayed them here as the two static ones from the spaceship but theire shape should be arbitrary. You should be able to build them using blocks. The outer walls need to be of some kind of space resistent outer wall by rules. The background you can use also needs to be some space resitant material (not wood). those single modules could be interfaced with doors which are also avaible for up/down direction like the current stairs. I believe the general shape of the ship should not be constrained apart from it having to be out of space material on the outside and having to be hermetic. the area which makes up all rooms should be counted as some kind of cost. i.e. you need 1 thruster for every 200 room blocks to lift/drive it. you need 1 live support for every 200 open spaces inside the hermetic seal in order to make it habitable without spacesuit in space. things that are not inside the life support/hermetic shield go bad in space unless they are in a space chest/space suit.

Some of the above instances, like the rooms could then be defined as landing vessels. they might have to have a flat bottom, or some landing gear on the bottom. you might have 2 , 4 or 10 landing gears on it, but they all need to allign flat. it can be deoupled from the ship at certain fixed points (like the airlock doors) and land. you would probably need some more additional static items on it like some landing thrusters, some navigation console and the like.

i would make items on the ship like the teleporter platform, the consoles and things moveable only inside the spaceship.

in order to build on the outside you would have to wear a spacesuit or do it on the ground.

 

Its actualy quite easy to mod it . This is ingame grafic and not just a modified screenshot. I cant land it on a planet yet though .



When will the Toolchain for the asset directory scripts and grafics be avaible to the public ?

 

I wrote a mod that lets you customize your spaceship block by block. It cant land though. Thats just not modable atm.
Link

 

Maybe have all this for when a player wants to colonize a planet, or actually set up a permanent residence. It shouldn't be necessary for each outing. Again, I treat almost every planet like an away mission; most of the time I don't even build.

Love the ship mod.

 

That ship mod is sick stuff. You should try and find a way to expand the length of the ship as well as the vert.

 

Thank you! Its beeing worked on Depending on how much time i get there will be a mod update tomorrow or the following days.

Check out here. You can already build with only blocks in all directions with the current version of it.

 

madtulip, you may want to check this link and see what your buddy is up to. I think he is actively solving many of your stated problems as we speak...

http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/fight-for-universe-per-aspera-ad-astra.3781/