You’ve told us some pretty interesting and weird stuff recently. In this first devlog we’ll be reviewing all the things you apparently like and dislike.
But first off, it's worth noting we didn’t expect so many of you to play the open playtest. Over 5000 people have given it a try and almost 400 of you completed a feedback form. That’s over 6,500 bits of feedback in the forms alone, not mentioning those of you that contacted us on Discord and Steam!
We’ve really strived to balance ranged weapons (melee is coming later). Earlier builds had a ridiculously overpowered Assault Rifle that was long range, incredibly accurate and extremely powerful. We nerfed the Assault Rifle and tried to give each weapon a niche in an attempt to give the game some balance. The stats speak for themselves:
We’re really pleased about the variety of responses here, it suggests a certain amount of balance between the weapons. For example, to see roughly as many people love the shotgun as hate it is great. We want you to play the game differently and there to be no one “correct” meta.
It’s also interesting because in previous playtests we’ve had people feel like Melee combat has been both overpowered and at other times underpowered. We modified some of the damage values and skills to help bring it into the fore and feel valuable, so it’s great to see a melee weapon in the top 3!
We’re also continuing to think about synergies between the different weapons. For example, the Pistol’s “Execute” works well on enemies affected by the SMG’s “Suppress”. This allows you to spray an area with SMG fire then have your pistols go in and murder enemies whilst they cower. Expect more of these!
One of the questions was “When did you stop playing, and why?”. This was really meant to determine if there was a specific game related reason that ended your playthrough, such as a bug, or a balancing issue. Instead, we got lots of details about your personal lives, which was genuinely great.
“i was playing while working, work is over”
“I have to pee...”
“I would've kept going, but it was dark.”
“Time to go to bed”
“I only stopped playing to go to work”
It’s always pretty nerve wracking to see if players actually like your game. It’s er, pretty important! Those of you that filled in the feedback form seem to be enjoying yourself thankfully - 89.6% of you would recommend the game and average enjoyment was 7.74/10. This figure went up to 8.30 after updates.
We’re really glad to see this as we’ve revamped the difficulty curve a number of times. We originally had the second dungeon be filled with Mercenaries, but that ended up being too deadly (as some of you may know!), so we tweaked it to Scavengers. We eased off the brutality of the wandering encounters to allow players to recover and level up their squad if needed to between story missions (Though some of our mobs may have been too hard even then...no names (Molten Cragborn) ).
It’s great to see so many of you enjoying long playthroughs of Space Scum. Especially given we’ve still got so much more content/polish/new systems to put into the game:
We know there’s lots of things missing but it’s still interesting to see where you think the issues are. The 5 most requested things were:
Comments about the UI confirmed much of what we already thought – that it needs some attention. Besides revisiting the general usability aspects of the UI, we’re also producing some mock ups in a new style. This should simultaneously give the game a visual boost and make it more fun to play. New UI screenshots will be shared shortly!
If we’re honest, most of the origins were last minute additions - we really weren’t expecting many people to try origins beyond the tutorial but as it turns out over 50% of you did?! It’s great that you wanted to try the variety and the different starts, it means we know they’re important to you and we’re definitely going to make sure they’re scaled, balanced and tweaked to be good fun for when the demo comes out.
We’ll be doing regular devlogs from now on. Future updates will give you more of an insight into what has been happening on the day-to-day dev and the thinking behind the design decisions being made.
And finally…thanks for all your help and feedback, lots of which has already been acted on. In the most literal sense we’ve have been overwhelmed by this, but that really is great!
Simon & Ed
Looking for more?Another Forklift-published game Roman Triumph has just launched in 1.0! 🏛️Build your city, defend it from invaders, please the gods, and see how long you can survive 👇🏻