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Ideas/Suggestions
Will Development of This Game Continue...?
Great start with your vision of a mars survival game, played about 40 hrs.. Was 8th on leader board as of Dec 3 2018... I'm thinking you had this dream of a great mars game but bit off more than you can chew and are just burnt out on it. I have been Looking but not seeing any New Dev Action here or on steam in quite a while...?
Its the holidays, I'm sure a break from game programming is in order..!
My suggestion is you make some visible showing at least monthly if you intend on continuing - Last day of each month just say i'm working on xxxxxx - Qr you can say in a pinned response here and on steam that the game is done and no more content will be added, And be done with it.
I feel I got my 15.00 bucks out of it - Nice to see another perspective on a mars survival game, personally I think people would like to know if they should keep following the games progression or un-install it and move on.
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Last but not least... A bit too much base Micro Management, I found my self repairing all three bases consuming valuable exploration time.. I fix a base 99% then turn everything off and go exploring... Get back to base turn everything back on to refill my 7 oxygen tanks and 6 batteries and get the buggy back up to 100% power, and also leave the base full on power and Oxygen... Takes a few ( 5 on average ) days time to do this.
The day before I leave to go explore I have to spend the entire last day repairing the base machinery back to 100% because I play with the game on big storms " Much more fun - Love it " so I have to be prepared to stay put in side for a few days if there is a radiation storm with the big fast moving dust storms... which i have had to do a couple time which is doable as long as the base is 100% powered and I have spare everything ready and machinery is 100% when it hits.
Dont get me wrong the balance isn't horrible, and I do leave everything off at bases i'm not using at the time so their fine... I use 3 heating elements because just a single element would require more maintenance & max fuses on all equipment - upgraded all solar panels to LRG - ( Boo on the 400 power cap with 5 Lrg arrays ) and in just 5 days of solid use the heater water and oxygen equipment can be down to 60% with some items down in the 40%.... at night only the heater and oxygen would be running conserving maintenance on the power and water. so either we need more time in a day or less time to repair equipment - it can literally consume all daylight hrs to fix all machinery to 99%.
So the end issue here is, i'm sometimes spending 4-5 days at a base prepping for a single day of exploring - I do have lots to do such as manufacturing items such as large solar arrays and other stuff while I wait for enough power and oxygen to fill tanks and batteries and recycling/scrapping items.
Mars daytime should be 14 hrs and night 10 hrs so you have more day light hrs to explore and or have some day left after base repairs. Thanks for your time... well if your still around that is.
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Either way... Thanks for the fun.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Oh ya last but not least... oh no you don't.... I have this giant base but it only holds 80 Lbs of equipment inside. by the time you get your 5 air samples and rock samples and complete tool supply you eat half the room in equipment storage, and in the beginning of the game the guy / gal can carry 50 lbs. and the buggys big cargo space only holds 40 lbs- oh no no no.
If you want to make base cargo max 80 lbs then tools and oxygen tanks should not be part of storage weight..
your guy / gal should start with 25 lbs max till they make the upgraded backpack to 40 lbs max - the buggy storage holds 60 lbs, and each of the 3 compartment at your bases hold 45 lbs each - Oxygen tanks and tools can have their weight reduce available storage space as usual but science rocks & atmosphere research tanks get stored elsewhere at the base - and don't add to the 3 storage compartments weight capacity. but they do add weight to your backpack or buggy to carry,,,!
Or make it so the player can make their own storage by converting one of the spare beds to a large catch all storage space, that would be acceptable. Base interior doors still close as you walk through them. And the boxes burred in the ground with a flag should be moved to where the dead space men are with a note saying they buried them so the wind wouldn't blow them away. just having them buried in a random open area makes little sense. just my thoughts.
Very Nice...! Glade to see you were on steam at some point on Dec 5th.... You say things are tight this month, sorry to hear that - Take the month off an clear your mind, hate to see ya burn out on making this game..
Mars survival games are one of my favorite Genres and I play them all, Take on Mars was the best so far for the story and building mechanics, So I just love that I have to build and craft in your game to survive as well - And the EA steam game JCB pioneer has allot of potential too and I think its a one man build as well.
You've done great keeping bugs to a minimum, game never crashed while I played and everything works pretty good. Cant wait for the story...
Chin up man there are many of us that appreciate your hard work...
Thanks. I really appreciate your feedback here too. I've usually kept to a monthly update schedule, but as you noted, the last few weeks have been difficult so I've slipped a bit. My plan is to put out an explanation of what's going on with the coming update. It should be available before Christmas. I'll also try to respond to your specific suggestions later. Thanks again.
I'm always puzzled when I read feedback about hab management taking too much time, not allowing enough time for exploration, because it really isn't the case. I think many players, for some reason, formulate an extremely inefficient strategy (or maybe it'd be more accurate to say that they don't have a strategy at all) for managing hab systems and then suffer from the restratints that doing so puts on them.
The most common mistake I see is that they want to keep everyting at 99% at all times, which is not needed at all. It's a lazy and very inefficient solution that indeed leads to not having time for anything else; a bad time management strategy for any survival game where one of the main challenges is how you split your limited resources, including time, between all the things which demand it. Maybe the game communicates something in a way that makes people think this is what they need to do (I don't think it does, by the way, the game never gave me any feedback on how I was doing things that would have prompted me to try to keep everything at 99% at all times; after having observed how things work and how fast the conditions change, I got a "feel" for what could be an optimal strategy to balance keeping everything in working order with being able to spend enough time with exploring for resources), or maybe people just want to settle for a very simplistic and minimal effort routine that doesn't require (re)evaluating the current situation and acting accordingly, just "maxing" everything all the time without thinking about it, which clearly doesn't work. (They fail finding a survival strategy that works, and are refusing to reevaluate and adapt when facing with this failure. In other words, they are not doing what a survival game expects them to do in order to achieve the main goal, survival.)
I only spend maybe 3-6 hours per 2 sols with repairing systems (since not more than that is ever needed), and then heading out for a 2 sols EVA while the currently used hab is running unsupervised and producing resources. During a 2 sols EVA, you can easily cover about 15% of the entire map on foot, and finding a PRT typically half way through speeds up the other half considerably. Exploring the entire map takes about 22-26 sols depending on how (un)lucky you get with dust and radiation storms. In all this time, I never lose a single system component, without trying to keep everything at 99% at all times.
All in all, I think game balance is just fine, some aspects are even too easy and could be tweaked a bit to be a little tighter. I have some assorted notes I might post about it some time.