Feedback / Impressions.

[Sounds]

First up here's a summary of my thoughts:
Positives:
 - No bugs found so far
 - Love the music 
 - Graphic style works well

Negatives:
 - The rooms feel quite sterile and don't compel the player to want to see what's it the next room. You might call it a "sameness feel".
 - Moving around small width walls in a room requires too much jarring back and forth with keyboard. Possibly a design decision, but affects immersion as you start fighting the controls rather than playing the game.
 - The inertia of the robot is sluggish and possibly needs tweaking (see previous point). However no inertia would also be too jarring.
 - Interest in playing further into the rooms/level/game wanes surprisingly quickly.
 - Felt little urge for repeated plays

Wish list / other comments:
 - Cooperative play; to increase the fun factor. Most likely beyond the scope of the game, but the game screams "play with a buddy" to get the most out of it.
 - Rooms need less 'rat mazes' and more the structure of the inner workings of a ginormous space ship.
 - A higher degree of interior room artefacts used as walls/barriers. Room environments need more personality that make it feel like you're inside a ship. Example: Massive ship weapons, engine wiring, equipment, etc.
 - Time limits on rooms. Theme based on overall ship destruction.

All that said; after reading other player comments on this forum, I'm very worried that giving any further feedback such as the above is too harsh. My reasoning is possibly more to do with the fact that I've been playing to death a lot of games with my kids of late that have similar themes/styles (e.g. Assault Android Cactus).

I don't think there's any systemic issue with the game design; it's more a case of my own burnout from so much play. Hence I'm going to withdraw giving any further feedback at this stage. As I don't want to accidentally skewer your core player demographic.

Sounds.

[PokerChen]

Room content and variety

Yeah, it's that tension content by RNG generation versus manual design. Specifically, one can point out the amount of material (like doodads, and controls) available to make unique/thematic rooms. The game here is more Binding-Of-Isaac in intent than, say, Alien Breed: Tower Assault.

Having said that, e. g. random replacement of 1x2 through 1x4 / 2x4 segments of barriers with striking decals would go a long way towards reducing the graphical monotony.

It's difficult to play more than a couple of hours a day for these kinds of games for me, in any case. Most of my hours on Steam are spent designing & testing (arguable more fun anyway as a content creator), more than serious play -

[Misery]

Yep, what Zharmad said is the case.

If you go and play other procedural games, like Isaac or Our Darker Purpose or any one of them (there's tons!) they all pretty much have this same issue going on with environments.   The sorts of things you're mentioning are more like "set pieces", things that are designed to add something to very specific areas only, which just doesnt work in a game like this.  There's just too many rooms and too much complexity within them.

It's not just overhead games of this type either; MOST procedural games of any genre have it.  It's very, very hard to avoid.  And often when the developers do manage to avoid it, it's at the cost of other gameplay elements.  That, is something we'd seriously like to avoid. 

To a point, it's also just a limitation on how much art can be made; the game has had a very short development time actually, and art takes alot of time to make.  With all of the different tiles, backgrounds, blocks, items, enemies, and all of that.... there's a ton of stuff there.  And hell, even just the bullets; I think there's about 600 different ones available, if I recall correctly.  Even just art for ships; there's a TON of it.  Not even remotely close to all of it has appeared in game.  There's sooooooo many.  Since ships are the mobile entities that you interact with, and the things that produce most of the challenge in the game, they get alot of focus.

What do you mean by "jarring around with the keyboard" though?  If you're finding a control issue, we'd really like to know more about it, it'd really help alot actually.  Any details at all that you could provide would be very useful!

And dont worry about giving negative feedback, seriously.  Say whatever you mean.  You cant be more negative than I am for that matter, and I'm one of the ones working on this.  All feedback, good and bad, is important and can help more than you'd think.  It doesnt help us to hear only positive things, when there's issues that are adding negative aspects to it.

[PokerChen]

Arguably, the hack'n'slash genre (Diablo) boil down to the same mechanics. What keeps people (me) going there is purely character progression between games.

I think this game can add things like engine, wiring, pre-existing damage, wear & tear, etc. to reduce the consistent sterile look. Progression can be emulated by varying the doodad pool selected for the existing room entities. On that point (and given that we've got so many ship textures left to be used by release), the post-mortem in a couple of weeks time would probably be "too much time spent on ship textures and not enough on room textures variations."

[Misery]

Arguably, the hack'n'slash genre (Diablo) boil down to the same mechanics. What keeps people (me) going there is purely character progression between games.

I think this game can add things like engine, wiring, pre-existing damage, wear & tear, etc. to reduce the consistent sterile look. Progression can be emulated by varying the doodad pool selected for the existing room entities. On that point (and given that we've got so many ship textures left to be used by release), the post-mortem in a couple of weeks time would probably be "too much time spent on ship textures and not enough on room textures variations."

I do agree on that at least, we could use some more decorative tiles and such.

Of course, actually applying them to already created rooms could be difficult, but that's something for later.

That being said, there are actually more tileset sprites and such than it may seem.  Particularly since a number of things are animated; heck, a simple chest by itself is 18 seperate images for it's opening animation.   Ships dont have this issue.