I’ve received some good feedback regarding the tutorial and the gameplay it presented. One bit of feedback I’ve heard repeatedly was that it’s too blasted long, I worried about throwing people in too quickly, but that’s apparently not a concern. I also asked for feedback on the tigsource forums. I only had one person play the tutorial, but they had some really good, in depth, feedback for me.
The kind individual really didn’t like the movement, and did a very good job articulating what in particular they didn’t like. Chief among the complaints was the lack of control, you tell the ship where you want to go, and it does it’s rotations and it can be difficult to anticipate when or where the ship will be rotating. I’ve played it countless hours, and wrote the dang thing, so I have a good sense of what directions it will rotate in. Earlier on in my development I really wanted to find a way to give the player really fine control over the ship’s movement, but every time I tried to figure out how to give that to the player the interface would get in my way. I couldn’t see any way to grant the user that kind of control, and keep the interface simple enough for it to be usable by anyone but me. But something the person from tigsource said made me think. They said that it was frustrating that it had to be turn based even when they were just moving around. Which led to further thinking.
It’s not uncommon for turn based strategy games where there is an open world to wander around in, to have everything move in real time, until you get into combat at which point it turns to turn based. Typically you move your units around the screen by selecting them and clicking where you want them to go, and they then move there. But that just wouldn’t work for my game, because getting around is a major part of the game. If movement worked like all the other space strategy games, where the ships move without any sense of momentum, then I would lose what really set the game apart. That’s when I happened upon the idea of realtime with pause. So you’ve got your ships, and you pause the game, and you can chart courses for each of your ships. Charting the course works similarly to how it currently does, except that you can specify your moves out to any distance.
Another complaint was that the ships can only accelerate when their main engines are pointed in the right direction, whereas we currently have technology for space ships to adjust their course without using their main thrusters. That’s something I’m also investigating, allowing the ship to make minor course corrections without having to bring the main engines to bear. That could really change the game I think, I’ll have to see what kind of effect it has.
I spent yesterday trying to pretty the game up in order to provide a screenshot to the Utah Games Guild for some promotional material for Comic Con. I acquired some particle effects from the Unity store, and spent some time trying to figure out how to get them hooked up. I think the final image is a little bit busy, but it’s going to have to do.
