One the playtesters is better than me at my own game and I need your help knocking him off the top of the leaderboards!
6 Likes
Great concept! I like the geometric world and the basic premise - very straight forward and easy to understand. The lowpass filter on the music, lightning fx, etc really underscore the main mechanic, and tells you when you’re doing well.
My thoughts, as they happened:
- Controlling the craft feels a bit sluggish, meaning it’s hard or impossible to make quick adjustments. I think I’d prefer if the game was more about here-and-now decisions than continuously planning ahead for maneuvers to come.
You could also introduce other aircraft to control, with different mobility / speed / aerodynamics / … I think that would be a worthy feature. - The engine mechanic seems exponential (ie being somewhat close to something gives largely no boost and being right next to it gives ~20x the boost), which rewards being right on the edge as much as possible. I think this is essentially why a few are a so far ahead in the leader boards - there is a huge difference between being close, and being very close.
You could level the playing field by maxing out boost earlier, making it easier for most players to achieve the same high speeds. - It’s a bit grating dying over and over - I find it’s the one aspect that makes this experience frustrating. Since the main mechanic is about risk/reward, one tends toward risk all the time, and usually die and start over.
If the intention is to create a tense, repetitive, serious experience, then that’s fine - if you want to create a game that’s broadly entertaining and hard to put down, maybe progression could be easier, and skill could just distinguish low scores from high ones. Crashing might only cost time / reset the player a short distance / … - It might be nice with a way to see the up/down angle of the craft, it can be difficult to make out when flying parallel to a surface, and it’s critical information.
- Why not have yaw control as well?
2 Likes
Thanks for the detailed feedback! I originally had the craft a lot more nimble but playtesters complained it was uncontrollable and twitchy. The balance I settled on was limiting the maximum control surface deflection such that quick changes in direction are still possible but you soon hit an absolute turn rate limit. I might experiment further, though I’m going to rule out different craft for the time being.
Making the engine boost cap out slightly farther from the ground is a great idea, but such fundamental changes will have to wait for alpha 2 because it means wiping all the existing scoreboard and ghost data.
The “par” for each level was intended to be the achievable goal for most non-scoreboard chasers. I probably need to make it more apparent that it is a thing, might end up with a tiered system with times for one star, two stars etc. What I have found though is that it doesn’t matter if someone can easily hit par by playing it safe, they still won’t do it, they want to fly to the limit all the time, and who can blame them.
I’m somewhat hesitant to add yaw mostly because it means too many buttons and less accessibility, especially for touch screen players. But then again the touch screen controls are pretty horrible already so maybe I should just bite the bullet. When I’m next making breaking changes to the flight model I might add auto-yaw to keep coordinated flight.
Thanks again!
1 Like