Hey folks, I hope you're all well! It has been about 5 days since I opened the playtest up to the public and the response has been awesome so far. I've received a ton of feedback that has been super helpful already, and I just thought it would be worth making sure you all know that I hear you and am working on improving the game's weaknesses. This post is mostly focused on the areas for improvement that have come up, but rest assured that I know there is plenty to like already.
Areas for Improvement
Menus
I think this is the thing I've heard brought up as an issue most often- many players find the menu that appears when selecting loot to be unintuitive. I've also found that people struggle a bit to tell me exactly what feels wrong about it. Because folks don't mention a lot of specific issues with them beyond the keybinds not making much sense (fair by the way, working on that) I'm left to fill in some gaps. I'll outline some of my plan here, but I would also appreciate specifics about what folks would like to be more clear or intuitive.
Here's what I'm thinking:
Improve the existing keybinds I mentioned this above but I know it's something a lot of people bring up. The existing menu keybinds, specifically for the mid-mission menus, were thrown in quickly and without much thought after I received a couple bug reports from people who didn't think they could exit certain menus. The root problem there is that I didn't anticipate that many people don't recognize buttons without a border as being buttons (understandable). I also think, though, that it's reasonable to want to use keybinds for those buttons instead of navigating to them, especially for controller users, so I'll make sure to implement some more intuitive keybinds in the near future.
Make it more obvious that Volatile Mod slots are, well, slots Currently they are a bunch of borderless black squares that don't really read as anything when mods aren't equipped. My current plan is to add some kind of border or background around each slot.
Add a toggle to show your selected weapon for comparison One of my main goals for the roguelike progression system in RIG Riot is for your weapons and mods to affect one another. This is partially why I show your weapons and mods at the same time, even if you're only ever picking one type up at any given moment. However, you currently have no way to look at the Augments applied to your equipped weapons while selecting new loot, and that's a big problem.
I have some other ideas as well and plan to do some more research on systems in other games to try and determine what would feel better to folks, but again, please let me know if there are any specific things you can think of that you'd like addressed.
Melee
The other most common problem I've seen brought up is the melee experience. My intent was always that melee weapons without a homing dash or similar mechanic would provide additional opportunities for creativity and skill expression during combat. However, I don't think that's actually the main complaint I've heard. More often it seems like people feel like the melee is too slow. My intent with the current system was to let the player dash through enemies with the weapon's hitbox due to it becoming active as soon as the blade shows up, but it is clear to me now that people would prefer something snappier.
Here's my plan for melee:
Melee 2.0 Even before receiving feedback about the current melee system I was planning to give it a rework from the ground up. This is because the melee weapon you see in-game is actually only 1 of 9 planned melee weapons. The current system was not developed with this in mind whatsoever and is going to be replaced in its entirety. This will mean more variety in melee style to suit all the different preferences that could come up. This will also mean the existing Volatile Mods will be much more compatible with melee weapons than they were before
Snappier Animation This is specifically in regards to the current energy blade- it will be receiving a totally new animation which will begin the swing much faster. This should take a lot of the guesswork out of using melee
Possible Homing Dash Now, I know I said I didn't think it was the main issue, but I do think there are folks who are interested in some kind of homing dash that pulls you to a nearby enemy with your attack. I wouldn't want it to be the default but I recognize that, especially on controller, it can be a little tricky to make melee happen as intended. I've tried to ameliorate this with the Kick by making the hitbox especially wide, and I think it has helped, but I'm open to trying to include a little more if there's a way that makes sense.
Other
Melee and Menus are, of course, far from the only issues I've heard about. Here are a few other issues that I'm aware of and working on.
Onboarding Teaching the player to play a game is incredibly important and, while I think RIG Riot's tutorial is passable, there are a number of things it doesn't touch on. For instance, I received a number of requests for a Manual Reload mechanic. It has always been there but I failed to mention it in the tutorial originally. A number of people also struggled to find Health and Ammo restoration stations, so I added a couple of those to the tutorial so people wouldn't be seeing them for the first time when they were in combat and low on resources. I also plan to create a more involved tutorial later on that teaches the player more about the structure of a run. I'm trying hard not to overwhelm the player but at minimum I'll be working to make sure that all the available actions available to the player are presented somewhere in-game.
Progression and Parts Players who have put more time into the game will be aware that the parts menu can become a bit of a nightmare after completing a God Run. To summarize my thoughts on this topic: I don't want to devalue parts, I also don't want to be stingy with parts, and I don't want people who have an early God Run to be cheated out of the experience of progression. I'm tentatively thinking about unwanted parts being exchanged for some other kind of currency that serves more as bad luck protection than as the vehicle for overall meta progression. I'm also thinking about reducing the amount of parts the player receives from bosses, or at least reducing the amount of extra drops the player earns on later loops. Again, I don't intend to be stingy with parts, but I also don't want to devalue one of the most important aspects of the game. Rest assured, too, that I will be adding sorting and filtering of some kind to the parts menu.
Getting Lost Despite changes I've made recently to improve visibility across maps and make beacons easier to see, I have still received a number of complaints about it being too difficult to find the transporter or hotspots. With this in mind I will be adding a radar system to help the player see exactly where they need to go regardless of the geometry in their path. This way I do not need to make sure the player has clear sightlines to all hotspot and transporter spawns from everywhere on the map, which means more room to create more interesting levels without making players miserable by accident.
End of Run Event Some people like to survive infinitely on their god run, and some people want to be able to call it quits when they've achieved their objective or found new parts they'd like to try. While it does work to simply quit to the main menu, I recognize that it's not fun at all to do. I'm working on adding some kind of End of Run event to serve as a "Victory" for the player- this will also provide a reward of some kind, and should help with the feeling of being "stuck" in a run that feels too good to quit.
Everything Else This list is of course not comprehensive- there are a number of other bugs, balance issues, and game design problems to address. Some additional things that I'm planning to introduce are: the ability to save & quit between stages and resume a run later, an end-of-run screen with details on your performance & what killed you, improvements to the game's handling of rebinding inputs, clarity on the behavior of various Mods and Weapon Augments, tweaks to make head parts more interesting, changes to make backpacks more unique, and much more.
Thanks you so much for being along for the ride. I'm a solo developer working on the game in my free time so updates may not always be as quick as I'd like, but know that I'm committed to making this game the best it can be. The response to the playtest has been incredible and I'm feeling more motivated than ever to make this game into something special for you all to enjoy.
Thanks,
Sage