Hello!
I thought that the recent v0.7 demo update was going to be the last before the release of the game, but there have been quite a few tweaks and fixes that I wanted to get in now since they're pretty important for a demo. What spurred a lot of these updates was a recent discovery that a small but significant number of demo players weren't playing further than the tutorial because they didn't realise the demo went on. This is obviously bad because the tutorial is only about 10% of the demo, and all the fun and interesting stuff comes in the other 90%!
I've written a bit extra about the bigger changes in the v0.7.4 demo update (full change log is at the bottom).
Tutorial Updates
This isn't the first time I've made a significant update to the tutorial, the previous time I re-arranged some steps to make it harder to breeze past the important sections on how the scanner works, and this time I'm adding more to ensure that players aren't getting stuck or confused by the tutorial steps. There's a step in the tutorial where you need to fly around and scan three difference resources before you're allowed to use your mining gun to extract them; quite short-sightedly I didn't add any kind of counter for the number of resources you've scanned, so players have been quite rightly a bit stumped at with this and only seem to get through by guess work. So now I've added an actual counter to the scanning and resource picking-up sections, which I hope will help with some player frustration. I also realised I should move the placement of the asteroids and resources closer to where the scanner is on the screen, to make it more comfortable when players are first learning this.
Terminal and Menu Updates
I had some feedback from a few different players that some things in the terminal screen are difficult to find, like the upgrades page on the market, and that the difference between cargo and storage wasn't clear at first. I think I initially went for a light approach to explaining this screen because I didn't want to get in the player's face with explanations that they might not need, but also because the menus were intuitive to me (which is obviously a trap most developers will fall in to).
To help with this problem I've added little popup explainers for most of the terminal pages that show when you first navigate on to them. I've kept these short since I don't think people like being assaulted with tutorial text all the time, but hopefully they'll nudge people in the right direction. There was also the issue of some players not realising that the demo continues after the tutorial, so I've made navigation to the "next job" page unavoidable, and repeat the term "next job" in a few of the popups they see up to that point, which should hammer home the existence of more stuff to play.
Another little addition which is only slightly related to this is a "NEW!" tag on items when they first become available in the market place. I added this because at the moment I'm adding a lot of new items and I realised it's not obvious when there's something new to go look at, and it would be annoying for players to go look and not find anything. It was a simple addition, but I think it looks quite neat and tidy.
Secondary Control Bindings
You can now bind a second key to a game control, so if you can't decide between WASD and Up-Down-Left-Right, you now don't have to! This is something I definitely should have had in when I first added control binding, but I thought it wouldn't be necessary and that I couldn't display it properly in the UI (I would have preferred to let you bind as many keys as you like to a game control, but there's just no way I could pull off the UX for that given the tiny screen in the game). The tipping point for making me add this was watching some people play the game on SteamDeck and see them trying to use the D-Pad or the left stick for menu controls, then I had to say that it's either one or the other, which made me feel like a half ass. :)
Here's a full list of the changes for Version 0.7.4 of the Demo:
Changes
- New market items are tagged as "NEW!"
- Back button can now be used to navigate back from terminal pages to the menu buttons
- Added item descriptions for some items that are now able to be picked up
- Items ejected from cargo are now pushed away with force based on their mass, so all items are pushed out at roughly the same speed. This is to stop heavier items getting backed up
- Added charging up SFX for gatling gun
- Scrap processor can now detect when an entity is stuck in its door and then turn itself off, pushing the entity out
- Updated some tutorial wording to make it clear that a button needs to be held down
- Added counters for tutorial tasks so it's clear how much needs to be done to move on to the next step
- The second secret message that the player can see in the game is now visible in the demo (previously it was only shown on the day after the demo ended, but better to show it in the actual demo)
- Upgrade info can now be viewed in the ship page, and can uninstall for a fee
- Main menu shows "no mouse controls" popup if you keep clicking the mouse
- Added popup explainers for most terminal pages
Tweaks
- "[install now]" button is selected by default when buying tool/upgrade that can be installed immediately
- Tweaked a scrap processor exploit so that it's less effective (but still in the game since it was funny)
- Terminal settings page buttons now wrap from top to bottom
- Video settings "integer scaling: on/off" now changed to "scaling: pixel perfect/stretch" to be a little more explanatory
- Day 1 ammo reminder happens after 5 shots instead of 10
- Tutorial asteroid layout updated to be closer to the left panel so it's easier to look between the scanner and the asteroids
- Turned on stuck entity detection for the extraction ship (if player exploded inside the extraction ship then the physics objects of the shrapnel would get stuck inside the extraction ship's physics objects and infinitely make collision noise)
Fixes
- Removed blank job spec from the end of demo job list (this was used as a blank slate when developing new levels and sneaked in the demo)
- Fixed some late game terminal features showing during the demo if you play for many days
- Fixed issue where you can start rebinding for a device you don't have connected (gamepad if on PC, or keyboard if on SteamDeck) and then can't back out of it
- Having negative credits doesn't stop you starting a job without a permit fee