The overall reception to our alpha demo has been awesome! We launched our first demo update today that addresses much of the initial incoming feedback. See below for more!
Obtrusive Tooltips - Fixed (mentioned by 32 players)
Pain Point: Our old tooltip system blocked the view when placing factories, especially when zoomed out. It was based on the concept of having inputs near the center of the screen, which proved to be a bad UX rule to follow for FVC.
Fix: We moved the tooltips to join the rest of our HUD on the bottom panel and improved the layout so it never blocks the player's selection or placement process.
Placement and Belts - Fixed (mentioned by 30 players)
Pain Point: Players had a tough time placing belts quickly. In addition, they had trouble seeing the path of their belts and struggled with the positioning of certain belt setups.
Fix: We reworked our placement system entirely which now supports
Click-and-hold placement with autogeneration of rectilinear paths, curving, and the ability to place anchors!
Indicators that reveal directions of belts and belt neighbors.
Introduction of T-junction belts in input and output positions.
Pipette tool to quickly place objects, hotkeys to open building categories, and drag-to-delete options.
I/O Indicators - Fixed (mentioned by 24 players)
Pain Point: Players had a tough time knowing which direction would input into a factory and which one would be an output.
Fix: We built a custom indicator shader that shows this information on placement and on hover that pulses to the tempo of your music! Now you can FLOW easily!
Tutorialization Flow - Fixed (mentioned by 18 players)
Pain Point: Players felt that the tutorial and the tutorial screen system were excessive and constantly interrupted the player as it took up the whole screen and was unskippable.
Fix: We adopted a model of progressive disclosure and a tutorial tab to the main character menu. Now, when a quest pops up the player can solve it but if they take longer than expected to complete a tutorial task, a tutorial button will pop up which they can choose to interact with. We have big plans to dramatically improve our tutorial in the July update.
Bugs - Mentioned by 15 players
Of course, we squashed tons of bugs like menu lock-ups, instrument switching, settings saving, and tons more!
New Features
We also added neat new tools to play around with in CREATIVE mode like a Modulator to control the timing of your music and a Signal Splitter to modify the patterns of different sections of your composition! Check out some of the wild community creations in our discord!
What’s cooking for the July Update 🔨
New tutorial path – Reworking the early game crafting loop and tutorial. Our immediate goal here is clarity, not reinvention. We want to shave time off the “aha, I’m making music!” moment while protecting the sandbox depth that testers already love.
More QOL – Improved icons, menus, and tooltips. In addition, we have plans for blueprints and mass selection.
New Music Tools – Arpeggiation, reverse strumming and more!
Thanks for building the vibe with us. More soon! You can always access our roadmap or share feedback here.
— Unwise & the FVC team 🎛️🎶