Ahoy captains it's been great seeing you enjoying the latest playtest and come with suggestions for what can be improved. I've looked over all the feedback including the Let's Play videos (damn we suddendly got some traction!) and have come up with this list which is what we will focus on in the next month or so:
Tutorial & gameplay verbs not taught well
- Zooming. Fix: Show hint in tutorial, rightside permanent hint, start camera a bit zoomed out
- Turning sails. Fix: Move that part of the tutorial to be after lode anchor when sailing to port, rightside permanent hint
- Difficult to understand sails are not fully deployed. Fix: Make the input a bit snappier, tutoriali\e it better
- Bits of the journal can be accessed too soon. Fix: Disable them until reaching the first port
- Difficult to understand how to install equipment. Fix: Hint directly in the hover text
Keyboard+mouse input wonky
- Cannot use ESC as back action Fix: have it work as back button until the only logical step is to open the Pause menu
- One player would like to invert zoom when scrolling
- Be able to right click to unassign stamina points
Quests & Map
- If marker is outside edge of map difficult to know where to go. Fix: Dotted line to marker
- If having multiple quests it is not obvious what quest is active. Fix: Have quest headline underneath map marker
Ease of use
- Using the back action as a third UI option to for example install equipment is not intuitive. Fix: Assign new keybindings to it for controller and keyboard
- Be able to invert zoom input in Options
- Need better feedback crew has to get paid. Fix: Add a hint label to the harbour overview UI that the player needs to pay the crew before they can leave.
- No feedback when a rumour has been followed up on: Fix: Small XP reward when chasing up rumour and list it in the captain's log
- Crew member status widgets does not highlight text
- Morning duties assignment gets tedious to do again and again. Fix: Make animation faster, select the lock in button to start with
Balancing
- Economy is a too generous. Fix: Make quests pay less
Combat
- Need to make combat more varied. Fix: I got a bunch of ideas how to fix this that all tie into each other so will share more at a later point
Not being able to tilt camera up above horizon line
- Will be time consuming to solve in terms of technical issues with draw distance and rendering the horizon but worth testing out how it would make the game feel if the camera was more free and then decide if we want to make the change
We are planning on releasing another build this week with some of these fixes in and enable access to the playtest again.
Safe winds
- Captain Alex
