Post by erin on Sept 26, 2016 15:25:32 GMT
So as much as I have enjoyed playing thus far, I am coming up on some significant issues in plowing through the campaign. While I understand and respect if you don't have the funds or desire to continue development to large extents, the assertive tone of your blog posts worries me somewhat as regards your openness to some suggestions. Still, I'm nothing if not hopeful, so here's my list of issues.
Caveat: I've played up to Retaking Ceres so far, so I have not unlocked any editors yet. I've played a sandbox skirmish once.
1. The graphics.
As a one-person project, I respect your game quite a bit. Aside from the science homework there's clearly been a good amount of thinking put into how the command/control scheme works, and how that translates into gameplay. I'm drawing favorable parallels with FTL in the intuitiveness of the control scheme and how easy it is to get a basic handle on the mechanics... though in some respects it's an unfortunately basic one (I'll get to that soon).
But the graphics, particularly your models and textures, need a lot of work. No quantity of research citations can convince me that all combat spacecraft armor in the Plausible Midfuture is going to look like uniform silver tiles or solid grainy steel with some bumps on it. The spacecraft direly need the touch of an artist. Where is the suggestion of the myriad armored sensors not structurally simulated? Is there any suggestion of RCS thruster ports that I'm missing? Any handholds or grips or rails for crew or drones to hold on to to navigate the exterior or conduct patchups or repairs, at port if not in orbit? At least some of these things could be conceivably used to facilitate compelling realistic visual armor design... as well as more interesting plating patterns.
And heck, if ships can have painted insignias, why not other painted designs? At least, I haven't seen anything else thus far, and presumably it would be helpful in keeping track of the ships' orientations.
2. Completing missions should not be a requirement to use editors.
Especially not 1/2 of the campaign! I love the realistic mechanics portrayed in this game, but one shouldn't have to play for over 5 hours just to use any of the basic editing features... especially not for a game that's going to be drawing a large component of its playerbase from the KSP crowd.
3. Multiplayer.
This has definitely been iterated before but your game needs multiplayer if it is to spread in the long run or effectively simulate possible space combat tactics.
4. Orbital maneuvering and the (apparent?) lack of an orbital autopilot/course suggester.
The game teaches orbital mechanics pretty well in the first few missions, where the game gives you about as much guidance as you need to grasp the stuff intuitively. I appreciated the Luna rendezvous tutorial showing you how you could set the target spacecraft as your frame of reference. And the rest of the maneuvering tutorials were pretty interesting and educational, though I was a bit hung on the Mercury L4 mission... until missiles, and Uranus.
One shouldn't have to maneuver every single missile squadron manually in orbit. Clearly the AI has no trouble coming up with a half-decent flight path straight into my face, and finagling the missiles' trajectories wears me down. And...
In the Uranus radionuclides transport mission the Recommended Reading makes mention of synodic periods being useful to know in order to execute a proper Hohmann transfer. Yet there doesn't seem to be any resource to determine this number ingame. Eventually I solved the mission but not without significant fumbling with three different interlunar transfers, teaching me no more than I already knew about rendezvous.
I understand teaching the player the orbital mechanics they need, but for interlunar transfers there'd ideally be least a phase angle or something to start with suggested in the briefing -- and ideally, a guide line that you have to finagle your orbit to match could be very helpful for people who are coming in without previous spaceflight sim experience. One could contrive some kind of esoteric computer failure or something.
If nothing else, letting us type in the velocity change (akin to the Precise Node KSP mod) so one doesn't have to keep fumbling with the sliders would be immensely helpful.
5. Spacecraft design.
(Again I have not unlocked any editors, so correct me if there are more options for this, but I haven't seen any designs other than cylinders thus far.)
This is an important one that I feel most wary of bringing up because you seem very assured of your own logic in the assertion that "tapered cylinders are the best shape, hands down" without providing much more backing than 1. long, supports high thrust well 2. low cross-section 3. sloped armor and some simple trigonometry. These are good enough reasons to justify cylinders, and fair enough if that's all you wanted to focus on for establishing an initial combat model, but what's the point of having all this simulation if we can't probe the limits of what's workable with more outlandish designs? I can conceive of a flatter, broad knife-like capital ship being capable of bringing more weapons to bear at once in a well-angled broadside while keeping mostly its thin, sloped-armored faces and frontend exposed to enemy fire.
There are many other possibilities here, and I do not think that any shape other than a cylinder is going to simply immediately crumple under acceleration or other combat stresses, especially taking tactics into account. Real-life rockets with tremendous boosters or side-mounted payloads haven't all crumpled under high acceleration and supersonic air pressure. I realize that may not be the most well-conceived statement ever, but... it would be wonderful if we could simulate non-cylindrical spaceships and see how it goes. You have made a lot of statements about what is and isn't realistic on your blog, and for the general interplay of weapons in space I mostly believe you, but I really long to see it all backed up with actual numbers and visceral simulation results and be able to test it myself rather than simply taking your word for it.
6. Marketing.
I am by no means an expert on marketing. But I am an illustrator and I do a lot of science fiction junk, trying to sell people on realistic SF. The mechanics of this game are great! They're really fun. I bet a whole lot of people would be interested if they knew what it was about. KSP certainly proves that the general public will buy into realistic spaceflight.
But the game is not going to sell much on the appeal of scientific accuracy alone. That doesn't tell people about how the game plays. Most people conceive of realistic orbital spaceflight as boring and piddling, or primarily confined to small-scale exploration. If you want to move copies, you need to relate CoaDE to things most people are familiar and comfortable with. The combat is fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping, visceral, and swoopy, with battleship-size spacecraft darting past one another almost like fighters, in a sense. As I mentioned above, I draw favorable parallels with the systems-management combat style of FTL, and obviously Kerbal Space Program. Nexus the Jupiter Incident springs to mind as well although that is a lot more unknown. I'm sure there are others.
Giving a copy to Scott Manley was a wise decision. I can imagine major sites like Rock Paper Shotgun and their ilk might be interested too!
Caveat: I've played up to Retaking Ceres so far, so I have not unlocked any editors yet. I've played a sandbox skirmish once.
1. The graphics.
As a one-person project, I respect your game quite a bit. Aside from the science homework there's clearly been a good amount of thinking put into how the command/control scheme works, and how that translates into gameplay. I'm drawing favorable parallels with FTL in the intuitiveness of the control scheme and how easy it is to get a basic handle on the mechanics... though in some respects it's an unfortunately basic one (I'll get to that soon).
But the graphics, particularly your models and textures, need a lot of work. No quantity of research citations can convince me that all combat spacecraft armor in the Plausible Midfuture is going to look like uniform silver tiles or solid grainy steel with some bumps on it. The spacecraft direly need the touch of an artist. Where is the suggestion of the myriad armored sensors not structurally simulated? Is there any suggestion of RCS thruster ports that I'm missing? Any handholds or grips or rails for crew or drones to hold on to to navigate the exterior or conduct patchups or repairs, at port if not in orbit? At least some of these things could be conceivably used to facilitate compelling realistic visual armor design... as well as more interesting plating patterns.
And heck, if ships can have painted insignias, why not other painted designs? At least, I haven't seen anything else thus far, and presumably it would be helpful in keeping track of the ships' orientations.
2. Completing missions should not be a requirement to use editors.
Especially not 1/2 of the campaign! I love the realistic mechanics portrayed in this game, but one shouldn't have to play for over 5 hours just to use any of the basic editing features... especially not for a game that's going to be drawing a large component of its playerbase from the KSP crowd.
3. Multiplayer.
This has definitely been iterated before but your game needs multiplayer if it is to spread in the long run or effectively simulate possible space combat tactics.
4. Orbital maneuvering and the (apparent?) lack of an orbital autopilot/course suggester.
The game teaches orbital mechanics pretty well in the first few missions, where the game gives you about as much guidance as you need to grasp the stuff intuitively. I appreciated the Luna rendezvous tutorial showing you how you could set the target spacecraft as your frame of reference. And the rest of the maneuvering tutorials were pretty interesting and educational, though I was a bit hung on the Mercury L4 mission... until missiles, and Uranus.
One shouldn't have to maneuver every single missile squadron manually in orbit. Clearly the AI has no trouble coming up with a half-decent flight path straight into my face, and finagling the missiles' trajectories wears me down. And...
In the Uranus radionuclides transport mission the Recommended Reading makes mention of synodic periods being useful to know in order to execute a proper Hohmann transfer. Yet there doesn't seem to be any resource to determine this number ingame. Eventually I solved the mission but not without significant fumbling with three different interlunar transfers, teaching me no more than I already knew about rendezvous.
I understand teaching the player the orbital mechanics they need, but for interlunar transfers there'd ideally be least a phase angle or something to start with suggested in the briefing -- and ideally, a guide line that you have to finagle your orbit to match could be very helpful for people who are coming in without previous spaceflight sim experience. One could contrive some kind of esoteric computer failure or something.
If nothing else, letting us type in the velocity change (akin to the Precise Node KSP mod) so one doesn't have to keep fumbling with the sliders would be immensely helpful.
5. Spacecraft design.
(Again I have not unlocked any editors, so correct me if there are more options for this, but I haven't seen any designs other than cylinders thus far.)
This is an important one that I feel most wary of bringing up because you seem very assured of your own logic in the assertion that "tapered cylinders are the best shape, hands down" without providing much more backing than 1. long, supports high thrust well 2. low cross-section 3. sloped armor and some simple trigonometry. These are good enough reasons to justify cylinders, and fair enough if that's all you wanted to focus on for establishing an initial combat model, but what's the point of having all this simulation if we can't probe the limits of what's workable with more outlandish designs? I can conceive of a flatter, broad knife-like capital ship being capable of bringing more weapons to bear at once in a well-angled broadside while keeping mostly its thin, sloped-armored faces and frontend exposed to enemy fire.
There are many other possibilities here, and I do not think that any shape other than a cylinder is going to simply immediately crumple under acceleration or other combat stresses, especially taking tactics into account. Real-life rockets with tremendous boosters or side-mounted payloads haven't all crumpled under high acceleration and supersonic air pressure. I realize that may not be the most well-conceived statement ever, but... it would be wonderful if we could simulate non-cylindrical spaceships and see how it goes. You have made a lot of statements about what is and isn't realistic on your blog, and for the general interplay of weapons in space I mostly believe you, but I really long to see it all backed up with actual numbers and visceral simulation results and be able to test it myself rather than simply taking your word for it.
6. Marketing.
I am by no means an expert on marketing. But I am an illustrator and I do a lot of science fiction junk, trying to sell people on realistic SF. The mechanics of this game are great! They're really fun. I bet a whole lot of people would be interested if they knew what it was about. KSP certainly proves that the general public will buy into realistic spaceflight.
But the game is not going to sell much on the appeal of scientific accuracy alone. That doesn't tell people about how the game plays. Most people conceive of realistic orbital spaceflight as boring and piddling, or primarily confined to small-scale exploration. If you want to move copies, you need to relate CoaDE to things most people are familiar and comfortable with. The combat is fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping, visceral, and swoopy, with battleship-size spacecraft darting past one another almost like fighters, in a sense. As I mentioned above, I draw favorable parallels with the systems-management combat style of FTL, and obviously Kerbal Space Program. Nexus the Jupiter Incident springs to mind as well although that is a lot more unknown. I'm sure there are others.
Giving a copy to Scott Manley was a wise decision. I can imagine major sites like Rock Paper Shotgun and their ilk might be interested too!
