Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void dev blog. This week we have a special feature – MrAtomicDuck has streamed an early version of Dandelion Void! This is more gameplay footage than we’ve ever shown publicly. Don’t worry if you missed it live -- you can watch the whole stream below.
You might know MrAtomicDuck from his regular coverage of Project Zomboid updates, his tutorial videos for other survival games, or his recent ARC Raiders content. He also featured our Project Zomboid mod Save Our Station in one of his mod lineups! We chose to give him this exclusive first look because of his vast knowledge of the genre, and his expertise in showing off work-in-progress content. We greatly appreciate his interest in Dandelion Void!
Spoiler label: This video shows quite a lot of Dandelion Void gameplay!
Playtest Notes:
As developers, we always have our little theories about what will be fun, but there’s no replacement for observing actual player behavior. Every playtest teaches us something new, and Duck’s stream was no exception. Below we've compiled some of our major takeaways!
What worked:
Leap Attacks: Last week we added a new leap attack for our “uproot” plant enemies, and we’re liking the gameplay so far!
Previously the uproots were a bit too easy to kite; players could slowly walk backwards, use knockback to keep them out of striking range, and leave most encounters without taking any damage.
The leap attack breaks this pattern by allowing the creatures to quickly close gaps, forcing the player to either move or take damage. We liked that this added texture to combat encounters and created a feeling of unpredictability.
An uproot winds up before a leap attack
Story Rooms: Over the past month we’ve been varying up our environment with what we call “story rooms” – unique points of interest sprinkled across the map that reward exploration. Right now these are static, but in the future we plan to distribute them dynamically.
The “survivor hovels” are little scenes with bedrolls and improvised furniture where now-perished survivors made their home. In addition to their narrative implications these provide little “starter bases” for players, which worked out perfectly in this test. Duck set up shop in the hovel in the Northwest corner of the map!
When Duck entered the “rat room” he was greeted by a half dozen rodents all furiously escaping into a hole. On their way they dropped a number of “rat axes,” tiny rat-sized implements improvised from a toothpick and a razor blade. Keep your eyes out for more rat content in the coming months.
Other story rooms included the mini-library, the room with the “LAND NOW” pamphlets, and the locked computer mainframe area. We hope to continue adding more story rooms to discover!
A little reading nook!
TwigSnapper: We were really happy with how our new enemy performed! You might remember them from our last blog post
Our intention with the TwigSnapper was to add more tension to the game. The basic uproots are hostile “on sight” and often ambush you by camouflaging against the ponic grass. The TwigSnapper is more dangerous, but it won’t attack you unless you fulfill specific conditions. This created tense moments where Duck was tiptoeing around the creature while trying not to wake it up.
We do think there’s more that we could do to communicate that the TwigSnapper is specifically sensitive to the player stepping on vegetation. Part of the issue is that the TwigSnapper is currently using temporary art (just a recolored uproot body with some little whiskers drawn on top) so there’s not yet a marriage of form and function. We are also interested in being more deliberate about spawning them at locations with just the right amount of vegetation, forcing the player to make tough decisions on how to proceed.
Terminals:
We want to make sure there are exciting goodies and interesting systems to interact with via the terminal, but we want to balance that with good tutorialization that teaches players unfamiliar with command line interfaces on how to use them.
While there's more to do in this regard, we were happy that the hints provided by our error messages -- combined with Duck's instincts and hacker skills -- were enough to help him breach the terminal-controlled door
Typing on the computer like it's 1979
What We Need to Improve:
Bleeding: Bleeding is a recent addition to our demo, and right now it feels a bit too much like a death sentence.
While there are bandages you can find in the world, they are for the most part confined to special medical crates that are hidden behind locked doors.
A big player expectation in this type of game is to be able to tear up clothing to make makeshift bandages, which are less effective but easier to access. We’d like to enable this gameplay.
Bleeding is currently coded to be nonlethal; it chips away at your health over time, but it won’t deal a death blow on its own. We like the gameplay of keeping the player at low health to raise the stakes of every combat encounter while bleeding, but the metaphor is unintuitive.
On one run Duck spent a long time waiting to bleed out so he could reroll the character, and it was confusing that he wasn’t dying. The current way bleeding is tuned would probably make more sense for a poison-based affliction.
Hurt, starving, tired, thirsty, and... bored?
Boredom: Our “boredom” mechanic needs some rethinking overall
We like the idea of your character having to navigate a whole “Maslow hierarchy” of desires, where the player must satisfy both bare survival needs as well as entertainment and enrichment. But right now this has some gameplay and balance problems.
Boredom is tuned too aggressively; it comes up almost as frequently as hunger and thirst! There’s some dissonance where your character can be “bored” even during life-or-death combat. A better design might have boredom only come up in between combat encounters
We would also like to improve the user experience for reading books (the text often disappears before the player can finish reading it), as well as adding more ways to relieve boredom outside of books.
There can be a conflict where if we’re making the player read too often, the player’s intrinsic motivation to discover the lore is subsumed by the extrinsic motivation of just trying to get the stat down.
Camera:
We recently added in the ability to rotate the camera, but without a smooth transition between the different angles it can be pretty disorienting
Terminal:
While we felt the terminal had enough for this playthrough, we’d like to hook more ship systems up to it! We’ve got a few of our own ideas cooking, but we’d love to hear what you would want to access with the Pergola’s terminals.
The locked mainframe area was a bit confusing in that it had one door which was terminal-controlled, and one door that was broken and had to be manually destroyed. The broken door had a cracked texture, but it didn't show up very well in the red lighting. The assumption was that both doors would be terminal-controlled, and this created some confusion.
Minor Bugs: While the build was quite stable overall, we did see a few bugs that we want to address!
Sometimes the player will get stuck navigating to perform an action (e.g. when the player right clicks to harvest a tuber across the room).
The worker uniform can clip into the pressure flight suit
Uproots chasing you will attack doors in their way, but they won’t abandon the chase if you leave the area. The doors take a while to break, and this leads to some nuisance sound effects playing in the background
This is especially pronounced during the time fast forward while you sleep!
Overall Next Steps for the Game:
Having covered the individual elements that did and didn’t perform well, here are our high-level priorities for development over the next few months:
Authoring more unique environments, story rooms, and rewards for exploration!
Adding more enemy types to vary up combat
Designing more “plant-y” and “spaceship-y” mechanics that lean into the unique setting of the game. We want to do more to differentiate Dandelion Void from other games in this genre!
Filling out the game with structurally important systems like crafting, character creation, experience gaining, save/load, etc.
A few more surprises that we’re not quite ready to tell you about yet!
Bonus: The Survivor hovel!
Our new survivor hovel area got some nice airtime in the stream, so we wanted to give you all a better view!
New models by Manzanita Interactive's Dara Insixiengmay!
The art direction here was to create the feeling of a cozy space with furniture improvised from materials found elsewhere in the ship. You might notice that the orange cushions on the bedroll came from the couch model, the orange base of the lamp is the wire coil junk item, and the spit roast is composed of various parts from a storage shelf.
Combined with our dynamic grime and plant system, these assets tell the story of a place that was once home to somebody. They woke up every morning on this bedroll, but one day they simply never came home. Where are they now?
That’s all for now. Everybody please have a great week, and look forward to our next post at the end of November!