Alpha Space Frontier. A year long project - need feedback!

This is a space exploration game with over 500 planets to explore, 25 enemy types, randomly generated guns, collectible ores to upgrade said guns, factions, Ship customization (select a wing, hull, thruster, and gun type.), and a lot more.

If there is something you don’t like about the game please tell me why! I want my game to be a good as it can be!

Any feedback is welcome!

What would you rate this game out of 5 for it’s alpha state?

  • 1/5
  • 2/5
  • 3/5
  • 4/5
  • 5/5

0 voters

Some hastily made screenshots:

Disclaimers

  • Yes, the galaxy is 2d. The reasoning behind this is user friendlyness. Trying to make 3d radar/maps and ship combat user friendly is extremely difficult. I don’t think it would add to the gameplay, which is what I care most about.

  • Yes, stars and planets are pretty close together and small. Once again, user friendlyness. I don’t want it to take 2 years to find another player or traverse around the map. The map is already 40,000 x 40,000 studs big, which is already stretching it.

  • Yes, the GUI is pretty terrible at times and I will re do it eventually. I have already had to redo 4 months worth of work just re-making all of the things I coded poorly a year ago. I have learned a lot since then.

  • This is really still in alpha. I am close as I am planning on having 50 enemy types and 50 world types before I go beta, but currently there are only 25 enemy types and 5 world types. This is far from the final form of the game.

  • Make sure to read at least the first little tutorial pop up, it has a few pieces of vital information for gameplay.

2 Likes

Really frustrated by a few things.

2D lock is one of them. I know you mentioned it earlier but it really is ruining what I think could be a cool aspect to the game.

Also the space police are overpowered and strange. I killed one of them, two more came over and I lost health even though their bullets weren’t killing me. Same thing with some planet I visited. I shot this enemy at least 20 times and only did ~1% damage.

crap it’s mass effect 3 all over again

3 Likes

Shows I need to work on the tutorial, lol. All planets are leveled, so you most likely went to a planet of a very high level. You start out at level 1, so this isn’t too hard to do. If you look at the radar you will see white(similar level), yellow(multiple levels higher than you), and red(way higher level) for the planets. You can also see the level when you click on them.

cough If you have time I would love it if you gave the game another try because of this cough As your input means a lot to me cough

Yes, the space police are another one of those things I have to go back and re-make for sure. Made those within the first month of development haha.

I agree with you on the 2D lock argument - I just believe that the average robloxian player will be turned off by those kinds of mechanics. If you look at a game like sky of robloxia, for example, you will see that the flight mechanics are one of the biggest (imo) things holding it back. I don’t like the idea of finding a planet / fighting a player being a challenge. (But at least the planets actually orbit something! :D)

not enough early game content

One thing you could do that wouldn’t require too much effort and really help the game play much smoother is work on the gun scripts. The gun I started with didn’t even have both arms touching it. My arms also had some weird transparent blocks and the recoil/spread seemed pretty nuts. Tighter controls could make some more addicting gameplay.

while throwing up from vertigo

Definitely. The gun you start with right now is meant to be pretty terrible in that regard - but giving a very nice first weapon would probably be better, especially for first impressions.

Ar’s are too inaccurate currently in general too.

Arms are supposed to be transparent when you are in first person, so that they don’t block your view in first person.

Adjusting the arms to be in the correct position has been hard for me as I want the gun to work well in first and third person - due to roblox’s strange arm/torso proportions it’s hard to position the arms so that they don’t disconnect from the torso. Of course I could always have a first person model and a third person model, I just haven’t been able to get around to that yet.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I honestly really like this game, hats off to you for one sticking to a game for a year, and two this is definitely a hefty work load so I applaud you. If I had to be nit picky I’d say that the recoil was a bit much with the weapon I got(I chose Illumi) and of course I’d like more detail in the planets. The one I went to had 1 gold bar and maybe 30 bricks

1 Like

I can agree with that. Perhaps I should re code the generation a bit to make low level planets more common, and maybe even edit the loot generation to make rare guns really likely at the beginning? I think that might change a lot about first impressions actually.

Thanks man!! The faction specific guns are actually earned from leveling up the faction (which currently you do from visiting planets or killing rival faction members), so your default weapon isn’t actually getting the illumi bonus.

Now that I think of it though, why wouldn’t I make a player start with a faction specific gun? I am so changing that.

Right now the world types are pretty laughable, not that they will be perfect later on as they are generated to an extent but I plan on making all world types much more detailed when I start working on them. (I will start working on them in a week or so, actually! These are place holders that were made in like, two hours.)

I’m a really big PvE fan so I checked this out and I was really happy that I was able to simply visit a planet and grab silver without much getting in my way. The square enemies felt a bit lame and the planet was one color which was a bit boring, trees could make it really beautiful!

The tutorial at the start was clear however I doubt regular players would read it. I’d highly recommend a tutorial (that starts on a planet to get them hooked) then do a quick space tutorial.

I’ll definitely be checking this out as you update it!

2 Likes

This game is awesome. However, I think it needs to be polished up before becoming mainstream. Obviously it is in alpha so I don’t expect much, but I just want to emphasize that polish is really important for a game like this. Specifically, I think the visuals need to be more accessible and engaging.

Also, I disagree with ScriptOn. I think the 2D is fine but maybe make the camera more top-down or something? I think it’ll work well for gameplay; it just needs a bit of fine tuning.

I’ll probably play this game again when it’s not 3 am so I can give more/better constructive criticism.

1 Like

I totally agree! It’s funny as those square enemies are just one out of 25 possible enemies - They are supposed to look like part of the map before randomly attacking you… doesn’t help that they are a different color than the map, eh?

As said with causticity,the current maps are placeholders. I can’t wait to add some pretty maps to the game.

I was thinking all about the tutorial last night. I didn’t think the problem was that it isn’t clear, but perhaps it was a bit rushed and players may just feel like skipping it - and then they get a bit overwhelmed with how many things they can do.

I think having players start on a planet is a great idea. Last night I thought about how cool it could be to make players crash into a planet in the opening scene, and having dialogue appear saying something similar to “What happened… I can’t remember anything” before fading in from black. Then you pick up a gun and need to kill x enemies to repair your ship. I could cover 90% of the tutorial in a much better way than I do now.

I am soooooo doing that.

1 Like

Sounds good!

Absolutely, the GUIs need a lot of work before I start marketing the game, as well as a lot of the animations/gun scripts/planet maps.

The ship game play is another thing I really need to redo - heck, the ship bullets glitch through the ship when you shoot something close currently. I am planning on adding a “lock on” for other ships so you don’t have to be that great at moving the mouse to the right pixel to shoot something, as a way to improve combat.

I have thought about making the camera top down a lot, but I am worried that either the player won’t be able to see far enough ahead for combat and the like, or the camera will be zoomed out enough so that the player’s ship is barely visible. I still might do it for the sake of making the “2D” universe look more natural, but I’m still not sure.

Can you add a 5/7 choice to the poll? I want to give the game a perfect rating.

1 Like

Won’t that remove the current votes?

Posting your rating in chat works just fine haha. I would have gone to 10 if I thought it wouldn’t make the post too long.

(And I appreciate that you want to be accurate with your rating. Thanks man!)

Any criticisms?

The game really lacks polish. It looks really neat though but it feels like it needs more pizazz. I also became bored extremely quickly but I haven’t really been able to get interested in a game recently so it’s probably not your fault… I think the game has tons of potential and is definitely of the quality that could be quite successful on Roblox. Keep up the good work.

Yeah… It’s hard for me to spend the time to polish everything as I make it - I always just want to say “That’s good enough” and move on to the next feature. Unfortunately although polish in games is always great to look at, I have always just cared a lot less about it than most people for some reason. Dwarf fortress is one of my favorite games as an example… Hard to prioritize something that I care less about.

As far as getting bored I feel my game has been really hit or miss with people for some reason. Probably has something to do with whether or not you know what to expect. One person will play hours upon hours and the next will play <5 mins. You can see this in the poll - The ratings are all across the board.

I do know the tutorial/intro are areas that I probably need to prioritize though.

Thanks for the feedback!

1 Like

It definitely has potential so I’m gonna add my thoughts.

  • The UI is good and probably one of the better ones I’ve seen in a ROBLOX game, keep it roughly the same as it is now.
  • The game seems to run well so far at least in comparison to other ROBLOX games now.
  • Hit detection seems to be good so far.
  • The enemies I faced definitely seemed placeholder. I hope we get more than moving cubes in the 1.0 version.
  • Controls are a bit funky. I would make it to where Right Mouse Button aims and you also have iron sights that increase accuracy. I would also make it to where Right Mouse Button would only work in first person view imo.
  • It needs some more factions.
  • It needs some more faction trait abilities.

So, overall, I like it, but it needs some work currently. 3/5

Thanks man! I have always viewed the guis as one of the games main weak points - so that means a lot.

So the enemy you fought was most likely square by design - they are supposed to be the same color as the planet so as to be a “pretend rock” enemy, but I didn’t code it in for them to be the same color yet :expressionless: . Notice how it’s health bar didn’t appear unless it attacked, for example.

As far as controls go I would prefer right mouse clicking to aim too, but it doesn’t make much sense to make it right click while zoomed in and press q normally. Also, one of the lesser reasons the guns don’t have iron sights is that they are much easier to balance when the amount of spread is always totally controlled.

The reason I made the guns able to zoom in/out instead of locking first/third person is I wanted to appeal to the widest audience that I could. I feel like most players who aren’t used to an fps would prefer third, and those who are used to it would prefer first but adding some sort of zoom lock I feel would just add yet another thing that could frustrate the player if they are impatient enough to learn how to switch the camera lock. And of course it makes things easier.

As far as factions go, I was worried that if I added too many there wouldn’t be enough players in any given faction to have actual battles or take over a significant amount of planets. I am worried about doing the work to add another faction or two just to reduce the overall game play experience. But, that is my opinion of course. If players ask for it whenever I start advertising I will definitely add a few more.