[Survival Feedback] Second Impact Survival Feedback

Dwarf-LordPangolin commented 3 months ago

Hi Tsuna! Since I've run into a bit of a roadblock, I wanted to post the survival feedback I've accumulated so far. I wrote it as I went, but have since gone back and sorted it by categories to hopefully make it easier to parse.

Before I get into specifics, the first and most important bit of feedback I have is: Survival is really fun. I can already tell I am going to enjoy the heck out of playing SEVO in Survival. I wanted to put that first, because I want to make sure that fact doesn't get lost in all the details.

Building

The assembler and conveyor systems work really well in survival, and just feel good. Building large refineries/factories is going to be fun in this game!
There appears to be no way to deconstruct a block without already having a block in your hotbar. This could be a problem for players if they place all the blocks they have in their inventory while far away from any source of other blocks.
I love the power cells; they remind me a lot of the ones from Subnautica. A smaller size of power cell would be convenient; the current one is good for larger vehicles, but hoverbikes will be tricky with a chonky cell like this. A 1/4m power cell would be amazing.
Building a hovercraft in survival is particularly challenging at present because the Hovercraft Core is extremely massive at 50kg; it makes up a significant portion of the vehicle's weight and balancing the craft around it is hard, and this becomes even more difficult when trying to make the vehicle look nice. In order to balance mine I ended up using stone blocks as ballast on the underside, which worked, but made the craft much more massive than it needed to be, and looked quite janky.
Also regarding hovercraft: the tool for viewing the center of mass should probably be a toggle in the Current Entity window; balancing hovercraft without it is very trial and error, which will cause frustration in players.
Center-of-mass issues aside, the hovercraft feel great; they make exploration vastly easier, but the planets are big enough that they don't spoil the experience.
Random thought: could we use rock to make concrete? The rock blocks are cool, but they can't be painted, and a block with the stats of rock but paintable would be nice for bases, since it's such a plentiful building material.
Just a random observation: I noticed elsewhere in the Github that you don't expect players to building ships ~300m in survival. While I agree that I don't think that will be easy or practical, my first impressions of the game's industrial side are that it scales up really quickly, and I don't think players will be lacking in materials for very long. TBH this is a good thing, since people tend to love building giant, productive factories and refineries in games like this.
The fact that the crafting table requires wood is a problem if you're trying to set up a base on the coast, or potentially if you're on a planet without trees like an airless moon.
Solar panels seem almost overpowered; a small one can provide power for a shuttle easily.

Movement & Navigation

This one is important: not letting the player use their jetpack to get around everywhere is absolutely the right decision. Space Engineers is too generous with the jetpack in survival (or at least it was last time I checked), and that makes planets too easy and too boring, and makes vehicles much less important. The fact that the player can't use their jetpack to get around everywhere from the start in Starship EVO is a really good thing. The little jumps and sprints it allows are just enough to help the player avoid frustration without making it too easy.
Once I started exploring for resources, I noticed that it would be easy to get turned around and lose your base. I see that in your own feedback post that you plan to add beacon blocks, so that should address that issue when it's added. Would it be simpler to add a beacon function to the antenna block?
Bunny hopping seems to be faster than sprinting; unless this is the desired mode of locomotion for players, you might want to add something to make doing so less efficient than just sprinting, otherwise it's going to look kinda funny.
Lining hoverbikes up with docking connectors is very tricky; would it be possible to give them some measure of lateral movement? Not much, just enough to let them line up with connectors. Sort of like how motorcyclists will use their feet to adjust their bikes in parking lots.
Being able to crouch would make it much easier to build things in Survival; there are often pieces you want to place on the underside of something, but without crouching you can't get the angle you need to put them there.
Thank you so much for re-enabling the ability to use the maneuvering keys while in free camera mode; it makes everything much more fun, and easier to boot.

Resource Gathering & Refining

The wreckage is a great way to give the player the starting resources they need. I don't know if this is intentional, but my starting place was nowhere near the water, and that seems like a good thing if you want the player to go Outpost>Power>Hovercraft>H2. Is the game set up to guarantee the player doesn't start near water?
Mining by hand is appropriately slow; it doesn't feel too grindy, but it does encourage the player to build a mining vehicle as soon as they can.
You appear to be able to gather more resources than can actually fit in your backpack. If you drop those resources by accident, the chunks are too big to pick up, and they're stuck on the ground. I'm assuming the backpack just isn't done yet.
Silver and gold are required early on, but they were all comparatively deep; this required a lot of digging. I saw that you mentioned you didn't want the game to immediately turn into Deep Rock Galactic, and were thinking of adding more surface deposits; that would definitely fix this. However, if you need them to be deep for balance reasons, working ladders would also make the digging much less painful, because currently there is no way to dig vertical shafts in the early-game without getting stuck at the bottom; shafts have to be dug at an angle, which greatly increases how far the player has to dig/time spent digging.
One useful feature of Space Engineers is that the drill has two modes. The primary mode is slower but allows mined resources to drop, while the second is faster but does not allow resources to drop. Sometimes the only resources a player will want to get to are very deep ones, and sometimes the player will be digging to construct a base, and won't want the resources anyway. Adding a secondary mode to the Mining Tool that allows for faster digging but without resource drops would be very useful.
Not sure if this was included in hotfix, but: the Crucible can get stuck if it ends up with an unsmeltable amount of rock in its input, when it's finishing a stack of stone; it would be a very helpful QOL change if it went to the next item if it couldn't smelt the current one.
It looks like the player can reach the planet's water table if they dig down far enough, allowing players to access water without going to a water source if they're patient/obsessive enough. Is this a desired outcome?
Setting Fuel Scoops to harvest oxygen in a habitable atmosphere doesn't seem to do anything. It should be possible to refill a ship's oxygen tanks from a planet's atmosphere when landed on it.
Limited player inventory hasn't been a huge problem for me so far, apart from getting way more Rock than I want. As I noted above, a secondary mode for the drill that lets you dig holes without dropping resources would fix that.

UI

It might help to rename the Mining Tool to something else; new players might not realize that you can also use it to get wood from trees, or to deconstruct wreckage.
The UI for a lot of things like the Assembler, Crucible, etc. feels kind of cramped; you might want to consider increasing the size of those windows as a QOL improvement. For convenience, a lot of the windows that need to be toggled should probably be visible simultaneously; having to mouse over the little buttons and toggle them slows the player down when they're trying to get stuff done quickly.
When you run out of a block, it is removed from your hotbar, and you have to add it back in later; it would be a nice QOL change to make it so that items you've run out of are still in your hotbar, just faded out until you get more of them.
I haven't been able to tell how charged power cells are, and it took some trial and error to determine whether they were charging or draining. Maybe a glowing texture on them that shows movement towards or away from the charger depending on whether it's storing or giving energy?
As a QOL improvement, when trying to add more items to a stack, if the whole amount being added does not fit then as many as can fit should be added.
Minor note: could the color for O2 in the HUD be changed to something other than purple? I get that shields are already blue, but most games represent oxygen as some shade of blue, and purple is a little unintuitive. Maybe a darker blue for O2?
When selecting an block with the Link tool, it would be helpful if all blocks showed their power consumption.
It's hard to tell how much of a block we have in our toolbar; the units used seem to be for a particular size, but it's not clear what that is. Once you start placing and stretching them it becomes clear how much you can build for that grid size, but it would be helpful to show that information on the block itself before trying to place it; I keep having to go back to the assembler because I have less than I thought I did, and that will cause frustration.
The HUD elements are hard to see against light-colored backgrounds; some kind of outline or other way to provide contrast regardless of what's in front of the ship would be helpful.
In many games, shift-click transfers items from their current inventory to whatever the other available inventory is. Adding that functionality would be helpful here.

Vibes & Ambience

I love the fact that the player can start stranded on a planet instead of being given a premade starter base. It's a great way to introduce the player to the game's mechanics and how they all interact, and the vibe it gives is also perfect.
I've really fallen in love with the oceans in this game. I also really like the improvements you've made to shoreline generation; the cliffs and wider beaches look a lot more realistic.

tsunamayo commented 2 months ago

@Dwarf-LordPangolin Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, I will digest it and get back to you! Interesting stuff.

tsunamayo commented 2 months ago

Hi, okay so I am adding my piece to the feedback loop:

Building

The assembler and conveyor systems work really well in survival, and just feel good. Building large refineries/factories is going to be fun in this game! => On top of that I have recently added a feature to dispatch queue on idle assembler. Next update will have one-way, valve, router and filter conveyor tube to better manage inventory.
There appears to be no way to deconstruct a block without already having a block in your hotbar. This could be a problem for players if they place all the blocks they have in their inventory while far away from any source of other blocks. => indeed, I am not sure on the best way to proceed. This rule is there in the first place because I dont want you to move inside your ship and delete stuff by inadvertance, this I am still willing to enforce especially for survival where you will actually use your ship, not just build it.
I love the power cells; they remind me a lot of the ones from Subnautica. A smaller size of power cell would be convenient; the current one is good for larger vehicles, but hoverbikes will be tricky with a chonky cell like this. A 1/4m power cell would be amazing. => yes this was requested elsewhere, I will work on that.
Building a hovercraft in survival is particularly challenging at present because the Hovercraft Core is extremely massive at 50kg; it makes up a significant portion of the vehicle's weight and balancing the craft around it is hard, and this becomes even more difficult when trying to make the vehicle look nice. In order to balance mine I ended up using stone blocks as ballast on the underside, which worked, but made the craft much more massive than it needed to be, and looked quite janky. => I see I can reduce this to 20kg or even 10kg.
Also regarding hovercraft: the tool for viewing the center of mass should probably be a toggle in the Current Entity window; balancing hovercraft without it is very trial and error, which will cause frustration in players. => Okay I will add this!
Center-of-mass issues aside, the hovercraft feel great; they make exploration vastly easier, but the planets are big enough that they don't spoil the experience. => great to hear! I hope you like the "new" grab tool to flip them upside-up when needed
Random thought: could we use rock to make concrete? The rock blocks are cool, but they can't be painted, and a block with the stats of rock but paintable would be nice for bases, since it's such a plentiful building material. => so a rock just like the base rock but paintable? if this is the case I think I am gonna want to remove the paint feature of stone for simplicity. I did that to reward exploration like tree bark in Minecraft, but it seems it upset people more than anything.
Just a random observation: I noticed elsewhere in the Github that you don't expect players to building ships ~300m in survival. While I agree that I don't think that will be easy or practical, my first impressions of the game's industrial side are that it scales up really quickly, and I don't think players will be lacking in materials for very long. TBH this is a good thing, since people tend to love building giant, productive factories and refineries in games like this. => we will see, I would love to see it, although I can seen plenty of issues related to that.
The fact that the crafting table requires wood is a problem if you're trying to set up a base on the coast, or potentially if you're on a planet without trees like an airless moon. => well I ensure that the starting planets have tree (and all the other resources needed). If you want to set base on another planet it will be necessary to plan and bring some resources along.
Solar panels seem almost overpowered; a small one can provide power for a shuttle easily. => yes this is something I need to adjust, I dont like to see them on ships so I need something to address that (nerfing output being one possibility)

tsunamayo commented 2 months ago

@Dwarf-LordPangolin round II

Movement & Navigation

This one is important: not letting the player use their jetpack to get around everywhere is absolutely the right decision. Space Engineers is too generous with the jetpack in survival (or at least it was last time I checked), and that makes planets too easy and too boring, and makes vehicles much less important. The fact that the player can't use their jetpack to get around everywhere from the start in Starship EVO is a really good thing. The little jumps and sprints it allows are just enough to help the player avoid frustration without making it too easy. => I am still very much not satisfied with the way jetpack works, it needs another pass. But yes I dont want to make too powerful
Once I started exploring for resources, I noticed that it would be easy to get turned around and lose your base. I see that in your own feedback post that you plan to add beacon blocks, so that should address that issue when it's added. Would it be simpler to add a beacon function to the antenna block? => yes that is exactly what I want to do, antenna will be visible through the scanner function.
Bunny hopping seems to be faster than sprinting; unless this is the desired mode of locomotion for players, you might want to add something to make doing so less efficient than just sprinting, otherwise it's going to look kinda funny. => yep indeed.
Lining hoverbikes up with docking connectors is very tricky; would it be possible to give them some measure of lateral movement? Not much, just enough to let them line up with connectors. Sort of like how motorcyclists will use their feet to adjust their bikes in parking lots. => I see, I wanted to give another control scheme for hovercraft with strafing. I am not sure docking hovercraft is the right way though, that seems a bit tedious. Do you need that to transfert inventory?
Being able to crouch would make it much easier to build things in Survival; there are often pieces you want to place on the underside of something, but without crouching you can't get the angle you need to put them there. => this was requested many time, I will put this higher on my to-do list ^^

tsunamayo / Starship-EVO