• Youtube Link / Twitch Link
• Graphics : Really rather kind of rough and ugly. The main ships are hard , jagged polygons , textures on numerous things like asteroids are rather low quality/res.
• GUI : Kind of rough and could use a touch-up. A few things just are off on their own, and are rather disparate. 
• Performance : Terrible
• Music / Sfx : 
  • Music : Seemed Fine
  • SFX : Seemed rather lackluster.
• Gameplay : It's a bit rough, looking around, controlling the ship in general, aiming, using abilities, etc just all feels rather slow and unresponsive.
• Misc Issues : 
  • Starting the game at all just about nukes my computer. It freezes absolutely everything , and even changing some options or starting a game also causes major issues.
• Notes : 
  • Quit shouldn't quit the game entirely post-run, but be a return to main menu.
• Final Thoughts : I didn't give the game much time as I was somewhat afraid of the game potentially damaging my computer to the rather large amount of issues I had in such a short amount of time. For what I played of it, it's a bit rough and rather unenjoyable due to a bunch of things listed above.

Hi!

I tried out the tutorial and here are my impressions and feedback.

At first, the camera can be disorienting since you can move in 6 directions. But since the game is in outer-space, it does make sense thematically. And after playing a while, I could manage it. The control also took some time getting used to. But after getting used to both the control and camera, it's actually fun to move around and shoot at things!

I can't play the single-player mode since the frame-rate is hovering below 10FPS (maybe it's because I am running the game on a 8-year-old PC). But even then, I think there are far too many objects hovering in the level. So I only did the tutorial. But still, I could not finish the tutorial because it's so easy to get lost. Perhaps making the move space more bounded would be better. Or having a more distinct marker so that players have a clear destination will also work. When Petra said she had marked the gate (the one similar to the sun symbol), I just couldn't find it after moving in random directions, so I replayed the tutorial. But on the next tutorial session, I got lost trying to find the goal marker for the boost tutorial.

There is a visual bug where I paused the game to look at the control help, the tutorial prompt is on top of the pause-screen. I suppose the tutorial tip would be under the pause screen so sharing it here just in case. Here is a screenshot of it:

Regarding the Lock-On... it says that it will center on the target. Does it mean like auto-focus? or follow on the target? At least that's what I assumed. But apparently, it just lock the camera so you can't aim on the moving targets. I kinda felt cheated with the feature.

To end on more positive notes, here are the things that I like....

The visual is amazing! I like that there are variations of colors and gradients as you move through space. The UI and HUD are also properly designed. One little thing that bugs me is the somewhat thick black outline on your ship. It gives a toon-ish tone to the game, which clash a bit with the overall visual. But anyway, great job on the visual.

The game has great background music too, it  complements the gameplay and atmosphere well. The synth sound gives a sense of outer-space. Every sound effect is well-designed and the human voices when you toggle inertia damping or the turret mode is properly placed. It adds a small sense of comfort in the lonely outer-space.

Great job in the visual and audio department!

Overall, I did enjoy moving around and shooting things even though I didn't get to experience the main content of the game. Then... although it needs a little bit of time to getting used to, the control has good sense of feedback to interact it. I would say for now, the game has a very good "toy"-like feature to play in it.

Hi! I played the splitscreen together with another dev on our team. This is the main feature of the update, so I will mostly focus my review on splitscreen Co-Op. Most of the testing is on controller.

Splitscreen Co-Op:

We did two runs, for both my partner went with the Tank. One run I went with the Dart and, partially because I for some reason spawned upside-down with my camera not aligned to my ship properly, I died in the rings resulting in the ring issue that they told you about.

The other run I went with the Carrier. That resulted in all of the early combat happening over in one area with my Carrier fighters valiantly not really doing much damage to the enemies, but keeping them all focused on battling the fighters. This meant that we were able to go collect things around the map. This is where one of the big things that I was afraid of came in. My partner's ship got lucky and got the upgrade "Spice", and that led to them being able to take out a lot more things, leading into them getting perpetually more powerful, and taking out most of the astroids that I could get upgrades from. In addition to this, I was getting terrible RNG with the Item Containers and Black Market Vendors, so most upgrades were basic, low level upgrades that did not help me much in combat. By the second zone, they were practically un-killable, while I was unable to get to any of the containers or vendors because if I stopped moving for a couple of seconds I would be destroyed. I think that having some sort of benefit to the other player when one player gets an item, maybe giving three quarters or half of the Item power to the other player, so that it is less likely for one player to become OP while the other is super weak.

I feel like for the towing you need to get a little too close to the other ship to really be reasonable for you to tow out your fallen ally if you do not get to the point where you become practically un-killable.

In general I feel like the game is not well balanced for two players. There are not enough high tier upgrades for two people. Same for the turrets. I also feel like the enemies are not well balanced. We were able to get a bunch of gear and upgrades early on because the fighters distracted the enemies, and the other enemies could easily be taken out by the Tank.

Other Notes:

When on mouse, after using RMB to zoom in, when I let RMB go I no longer could look around.

The updates to the controls don't feel good, I don't know how to explain this, but the controls feel slightly less responsive and a little off on the timing from what I expect. This is more notable on Controller, but it is also notable when using Keyboard and Mouse.

The restricted zones feel a little easy once you get to the third zone, I entered one expecting to probably be destroyed, but the enemies were the same level enemies as I was fighting elsewhere (Wasps, Tri-guns, Kilo Slow Gunners, etc...) I was expected a group of something like the Demons to be the challenge.

I feel like enemies should not be able to spawn right next to your ship, especially when they are high tier enemies.

It is not initially clear that you get the Throne's judgment when you start charging the gate.

The UI updates, and new models look good.

I like being able to zoom in and out with your basic zoom. It helps when trying to snipe an enemy from afar.

The Item "Old Boomerang" feels quite powerful for being a Basic level item, maybe either decrease the chance of mirroring damage, or make it a higher tier item.

I feel like the boss is still not really a challenge, if you get hit by it's beam attack, you might be in trouble, but as long as you keep a little distance, the boss is easy to take out. An idea I have for making it tougher, would be to have it spawn enemies so that you cannot be just focusing on it.

I feel like the Carrier Fighters got nerfed, and like they cannot take enemies out most of the time. Maybe reducing the number of Fighters down to 2 but making the fighters more like they were before, so that they can take out enemies, but there are fewer of them so every one lost means more.

That is all for now, I like your updates, and look forward to where you take the game from here.

-R

I played co-op for almost 2 hours with one of our kids. We made it to the ring level. Going through the gate there I got the same crash as my previous solo game got on level 2. I'll send the errors on Discord.

On the single player ship select screen, it would be nice if L1/R1 would switch between Overview and Stats. Currently to change them I had to move all the way to the left to the Back button, then press up. The Back button itself could use a bit of touch up, as it doesn't really match the rest of the UI, and more blends in.

The co-op split-screen ship select could use with showing what button to press to select your ship.

"Do people even read these?" Yes, sometimes.

Our first playthrough my partner ended up dying in the rotating rings of the first level. I died trying to learn how to tow them out. When I selected play again it let use interact some, but we were in the same spots, and the Defeat screen never went away. I was pressing several buttons as nothing initially seemed to work, so maybe I paused at the wrong time. I was able to press Start to pause and, after a couple tries, was able to use the controller to get down to go back to the main menu.

Game 2 went better. My partner chose the Carrier, and I stuck with the Tank. All of the enemies bunched up and focused on the fighters, leaving us to explore the level and destroy everything. I got a turret fabricator that gave me a nice beam weapon with decent damage and over 600 rate of fire. I then got lots of shields and damage boosts. I went over to join the fighting, and eventually we decided to go through the gate at almost 30 minutes on the in game clock. My partner did not fare as well as I did, and while they got a number of items, they were low power. On the next level they continued to have bad luck, and ended up being destroyed several times. I figured with how powerful I was that it would be a good time to try a throne, so I activated the Throne of Blood. The swarms of enemies were constant and large, which did make things a bit more challenging for my partner, though I was able to revive them each time. I found that I had a hard time activating the tow, as well as triggering some interactions.

I think the issue was FPS, and it was often below 20, and sometimes dipped as low as 11. We were playing on a 4K screen. I tried various settings, but even 1080p was often in the 20s with so many enemies on the screen, and it did look blurry. Next time we will try switching to windowed mode or fullscreen on a 1080p monitor. The visuals generally still moved decently, but the inputs seemed to not respond as well, and the popups indicating you could interact also did not always show as you passed by, even when trying to slow down for them. My system is not amazing, but not too weak either.

Here's the Godot stats in the terminal: Vulkan 1.4.354 - Forward+ - Using Device #0: AMD - AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (RADV NAVI23). My CPU is AMD Ryzen 7 5800XT 8-Core & I have 64 GiB of RAM.

By the time we went through the last gate I had nearly 40k in shields, and over 1,500 HP. I was regenerating Energy from doing damage, allowing me to spam my Heavy Ability. A few good upgrades to start and it can really make the game.

I think the co-op mode is a great addition. Being able to revive your ally with towing to a repair point was an excellent choice. Without some way to revive a companion the game would not have been nearly as fun, and the towing mechanic fits the game well. The luck based nature of the game is a bit of an issue. On one hand, being co-op, when one is powerful, both benefit. On the other hand, I got really powerful from that 1 turret upgrade, and that helped me destroy a lot more stuff, even just from stray shots while dealing with enemies, getting even more upgrades and becoming even further ahead of my partner. The did take the Carrier, so were already a bit of a support role, and those fighters certainly helped us early on to get the initial upgrades, but as the gap between us widened, it was not as fun for them. While I was over 1,000 HP, they were still close to starting levels. It wasn't until the 3^rd level they finally got a 200 HP boost, which still meant their combined HP and shields were less than half of just my HP, and by then I was over 10k shields, and might have already hit that near 40k point. I think you may want to add a bit of rubber-banding should one player get significantly ahead of the other to help boost the lower pone up and keep things feeling balanced and fun for all. You could balance the boost for the lower player with lower chances for the player who is already ahead. I'd say that a focus on survivability at least would be good. Make sure that the more buffed player doesn't need to always go "rescue" the one less lucky. We had no problem with helping each other out, but I know plenty of people would have an issue with one feeling burdened by needing to help the other, or the one needing the help feeling like a dead weight.

The split-screen does impact the view, but it didn't feel too bad. The scaling did impact the menus, and on less than 4K they were a bit blurry with the default being very blurred and some things being hard to read. There was some overlap on the lower resolutions as well, though some of that may be from the low res setting on a high res monitor.

Overall, I think my main takeaways are that there needs to be some optimizing for higher FPS in co-op, and adding a bit of rubber-banding to keep the players a bit closer in stats. That and the bug fixes. Great work! The co-op is an excellent feature for the game.

POST-SUBMISSION FIX(ES):

- Noticed a game-breaking bug when spawning into Ringworld. Fixed.

- Added options for look sensitivity and deadzone

- Added "restore defaults" to options

- Fixed boss fight win not enabling Gate

- Fixed Gate discovery not triggering Gate icon/objective

- Added custom per-ship Tutorial Ability dialogue

- Made Tutorial asteroid invincible

- Skip Utility Ability Tutorial if Carrier has full complement of fighters