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hythrain9 days ago

Hello and welcome to Feedback Quest 9! My name is Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts for this lovely event! I'm also one of the streamers, so both the game and this feedback are being done live! If you want to see the see the VOD, let me know and I'll link you to it when it's uploaded to YouTube!

So I'll admit I don't know if this game is featuring real isotopes. I know that thoron, a name you use for several isotopes, is actually just a commonly used name to refer to a specific isotope known as Radon-220, but beyond this I can't say. If this game is named on real isotopes, that's cool.

There are two primary complaints I have about the game, both stemming from the early game. The first is that players are forced to read a bunch of text instead of being taught the game in a more organic way. The more text a player has to read before they start playing, the less they're going to remember. Working this into the gameplay in a guided tutorial would be better, especially one that explains things like what the various numbers related to each isotope even mean and how to utilize shielding, cooling and ejecting.

Second, I felt like the game can start very slow due to the long half-life of the starting isotope. I think it'd be useful to have a function that lets the player alter the game's speed, both to speed it up and to slow it down, so that they can control things better.

Some other issues I had were that I found myself just not using the elements meant to absorb heat from other cells. it just felt so inefficient to me compared to just having stronger cooling systems in each cell. I also was really annoyed at the fact that I had to keep scrolling all the way down the elements list to what I wanted instead of the game remembering the last element I had put in and keeping the menu there when I went to put something new in. The last thing to annoy me was how isotopes start to cause a money loss once they have so little mass. Considering the idea is that elements will decay into other elements, having this function of the player losing money makes no sense because it discourages them from letting the isotope decay fully. And speaking of losing money, why do I lose money if I have no isotopes in my cells? That made no sense. I thought it might've been a bug, but even after I filled a cell and ejected it I was still losing money.

Overall it's a great concept, but I feel it needs some improvements to make it more fun to play.

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CSAF — Core Systems Asset Factory9 days ago

Thank you, and yes please to the VOD link when it is up. Watching someone hit the wall in real time is worth more than a write up, and this write up is already unusually specific.

On thoron you are right and we were loose with it. Thoron is Radon 220 specifically rather than a family, so using it as a label across several isotopes is wrong. The decay chains themselves are real.

The two economy points are the ones worth flagging hardest. Losing money with nothing in the cells is not intended. Neither is a penalty that punishes you for letting an isotope decay all the way down, because decay is the thing the game is supposed to be about, so that one is a design error rather than a tuning problem.

The element list not remembering your last pick is an obvious miss, and so is the lack of a speed control, which the long opening half life makes close to mandatory.

The text wall is fair and it is the hardest of these to fix properly, so no promise on a date for that one.

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hythrain8 days ago

What I could recommend for the text wall is a guided tutorial. I mentioned about teaching organically, and I view this in two ways: where the game makes it obvious you need to do a thing that you then figure out how to do (this applies more to action games), and where you're given a guided tutorial that lets you experience things in gameplay as you learn. The latter would be best for your game.

So for example, start the game with higher base money but nothing unlocked. Then, in a step-by-step order, have them do the following:

1. Buy their first cell.

2. Do research to unlock their first set of isotopes.

3. Force the player to use the slowest isotope.

4. Teach them how to use speed controls.

5. When the cell's heat level reaches about half way, teach them about heat. When it gets to near full, force the player to eject and get cooling. Also make them buy a second cell. Should they lack enough money due to poor decisions, you can supplement them with the money they need to do all this.

6. From here, let the player continue playing on their own for a while, as they now have everything they would've had from the start. When they gain the ability to use an isotope that requires shielding, force them to eject a cell, buy the first shield and put in an isotope that requires it. You can do another supplement if they don't have enough.

7. After they have more than 2 cells and have access to materials meant to absorb heat, teach them that so they can see it in action (Make them eject what they have in the second node, supplement their money in the event they don't have enough).

And from here, you leave them alone. You've covered everything. :D

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CSAF — Core Systems Asset Factory8 days ago(+1)
This is the most useful note we have had on HALFLIGHT, thank you. The opening text wall is the thing we suspected and couldn't name, and a staged sequence answers it properly. Buying the first cell, unlocking one isotope, then meeting heat as a problem the player has to solve rather than a paragraph they have to read, is a much better order than what is there now. We're going to cut the intro text to a single line and let the first cell teach the speed controls, with the heat lesson triggered by the gauge filling rather than stated up front. The money supplement is a good catch too, since a player who stalls in the first minute never sees any of the rest.
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CSAF — Core Systems Asset Factory8 days ago
Yes please, we would take the VOD link when it is up. Watching where you actually stalled is worth more to us than the notes on their own, and the staged order you laid out is what we are rebuilding the opening around.
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