Long time has passed since the previous proper test session report, but now we finally managed to spend an evening with beer, pizza, blathering and some occasional ATP tournaments and coop-matches. Here are a couple of clips and text chapters of what happened. (Don’t mind the erroneous date in the videos.) I organized another similar session on 28.1. I will talk about that in the next post. 

The game seems to be coming together fine: no crashes or other oddities. All four gamepads were identified and handled successfully, and the new controller browsing is much smoother than virtual mouse. But of course, there’s always room for improvements.

“More stats, the better.” Statistics in the tournament ending screen seemed interesting, and more was wanted. I added cannon hit count and accuracy as well as the number of modules that were lost because of energy overflow; the last one hopefully clarifies the concept of energy also. I’ve tried to keep all stats on screen at once for all the players to read, but I probably have to rethink that as more stuff is added.

Ships were often overdrawn and hidden by crosshairs especially when shown from a distance. I added a setting to adjust the crosshair opacity; on a dark background, translucent crosshairs remain distinguishable, but interfere less.

Some testers hoped for random surprises such as black holes and other gravitational trickery, but some others weren’t keen on any extra chaos. These take a bit more thinking, and require a clear graphical representation also.

Preselected ship collections (similar to tournament fleets) could be user friendly in co-op-games, as now it is hard to find well balanced ships. Then again, my ship selection is cluttered with dozens of dev/test ships that are useless in battles, so this may not be a problem with others.

Smaller improvements to graphics and AI were noticed and suggested also. I will try to fix those in the next release during the spring.

Thanks for reading this far. I organized another similar session on 28.1., and I'll cover that in future posts.