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[nenjin]

Now that I've had a chance to watch it in detail (the phone had a hard time playing it at the airport.)

*obligatory yes I know it's a prototype statement.*

I'm liking what I see. Loved some of the news items. "Space Invaders uncovered at New York pizzeria." (Something like that.)

You moved through that pretty quickly and there was a lot to digest, but I felt like there was a lack of contrast to the menus. There's different fonts and justification, some size differences, but not a lot of color variation. Things also feel a little cramped, which I get because you want people to be able to see as much info side-by-side as possible. That's why it feels so dense though.

What's your thinking on tool tips? Seems like a lot of stats have nested values. I personally love tool tips and I think this game especially needs them.

Will global travel (outside the mission area) ever pose challenges? (I suppose with high enough heat?) If it doesn't that's alright, I like that travel time has to be factored for. There's a lot of traveling though. Does that link in any way with operatives forming loyalties with each other. (You get to know people really well, perhaps too well, on business trips )

I like the sliding menu animation, although part of me wants them staggered in their presentation, or some other visual trick that makes their relationship to each other more clear. That their attached and run left to right does that, but it's what also leads to it being visually cramped.

I assume things listed under Mission Plots like Hack(Spy) is in the format of Action(School)? In the interest of contrast, maybe the school should be smaller and/or different colored?

I harp on contrast because games this data rich can really wear out your eyes. A back drop and the full UI I'm sure will do a great deal to ameliorate this, but I can see myself getting bleary eyed after an hour or two of that.

And will decision moments mid-mission be functional in the prototype, or have those not been implemented yet?

There seem to be a lot of crazy skills, which is a good thing! Humanities (History)? Interested to know what kinds of things those less than obvious skills apply to.

Anyways, for all that critiquing, I'm pretty excited to start playing around with it. I don't imagine there's a ton of content, but I"m eager to see how things are balanced and hooked together.

[sparkbolt]

Looks rough but functional, I really can't wait to get my hands on it!

Rough being the key word!

You see, I have had really, really great hopes for the finished game. Really.
And the prototype seems to be surpassing those already.
You might have broke my mind, mister! Mine very own, it-never-is-better-than-they-said-it-would-be, pessimistic mind! Are you proud of yourself?

And of course, because of the nature's balance thing, I have to be starting a new internship a day after the prototype goes live. There is no justice.

Well it's definitely got a lot of rough ends still, so that internship is a blessing!  Gives me time to work out some of the worst bugs, maybe even do some balancing!

As I've said, it's gonna look pretty rough for a while...  The vertical menus are mainly a way for me to quickly prototype ideas.  As certain items come up more often, I can make GUI prefabs for them, such as the operative buttons that show their status, or the plot buttons that fill up as it completes.  Once features get more locked down, dedicated interfaces for those elements can appear.  For example, once the world and movement stuff gets clearer, I'll be adding a world map!

Pretty much anything you see that is just text is to be replaced with a graphical element.
This is also why the menus are a bit drab, as they're supposed to have colorful and animated buttons on top of them, and the current items aren't supposed to fight those for attention!

Don't worry, I plan on iterating and improving the interface along with the game design and art!

Tool tips will have their place, that up to the but I find they're best for supplementary information.

The operative loyalty will eventually develop whenever they're in proximity working together, and traveling through territory controlled by enemies, or experiencing some conflict/disaster/etc, can lead to nasty things popping up! (just not currently)

I want to do some fancy 3D effects, but the GUI has been giving enough trouble for now.  It'll be restructured later.

Actually that "Hack(Spy)" thing is the objective(plot type)! I know... it's rough. I'm going for functionality right now.

Critical Event's arent in yet, still needmoroe of the core features locked down.

The less essential skills get implemented in a few ways...  Most plots can accrue a small collection of side challenges that can be fairly eclectic.  If you have an operative that has that skill, perhaps as a hobby, you can put them on the team to ensure your mission's success!  Sometimes a plot is all about one of the small skills, such as examining a forgery, or arguing a case, or scuba diving in the arctic!  Remember that all skills essentially worked the same way, it's more about what the plots require.

Now, Back to work! I'm about to implement a massive rewrite of a core class aspect. at midnight. 3 days from launch.

[Kaje]

Good luck, Sparky!

[Mullet Master]

Bump!

Let's all keep our fingers crossed that the rewrite went ok, I'm really excited for this prototype!

[EuchreJack]

I'm looking forward to reading the comments of beta testers!

[sparkbolt]

Prototype testers! Beta is a long ways away! small but important distinction, already dealing with some of the backdraft from people who were expecting a year's worth of work by a team. It's super rough right now, but it's more about outlining where we're going to take it, and seeing it grow.

[BlindKitty]

This is looking great. Although, of course, not nearly approaching being finished, of course, but that was said before, so it should come as no surprise - but I can not only appreciate the potential, but also it being made on time declared before. My only little concern (which I will vocalize on the main game forums, too) is that I can't see which sub-challenge was failed in a mission. That is, if my operatives fail at Ambush!, i can't later check what exactly they screwed up. Most of it, probably, as they were all brains, no muscle, but I would be good to know still.
Anyway, even in this prototype stage, it feels nice to play with it around. When finished, I would expect really, really great game.

[nenjin]

Didn't get a chance to play it, it released right as I was going to bed. I'll put some time in today and give my thoughts later.

[Draco18s]

Initial thoughts:

1) Using the default resolution size, its possible to have menus expand sideways far enough to spill outside the game window
2) The ticker-tape at the bottom seems to move based on render-frames rather than time (multiply its movement by some factor of Time.deltaTime).  This is painfully obvious when you go into menus, the ticker tape will slow down dramatically as the game has to start rendering more stuff.
3) Do not like the main font face that comprises most of the text (the large-pixel format is very hard to read, especially on the buttons with corporation names on them).
4) Clicking a corporation under "Plan Mission" has no way to go back and pick a different corp without either clicking a mission type (Investigate was my only option and I was trying to find a corp that had another mission type) and then clicking cancel, or clicking the "mission menu" thing on the left.
5) It does not appear possible to fail a mission step without screwing up ALL sub-aspects.  For example there was a hacking segment that had 3 parts.  Hacking, Cracking and Data Flow.  Failing two out of the three was not sufficient to cause any additional mission parameters to get added and the entire segment was marked as "passed."
6) Scrolling down in a menu that gets its contents replaced when you chose an item (missions -> plan -> pick a company gets the last window replaced with mission type) doesn't cause that window to scroll back to the top, often making it look like you can't plan any missions against that target.

Edit:
Wat.
I can view the missions being performed by other corporations and pause them.

[ank]

This is looking really great!
Can I actually be Hydra in this?

[jhxmt]

Even just as a prototype, I'm enjoying this - thank you for letting people see progress this early, it's much appreciated. 

The Good

I love the music.  Seriously, I could've quite happily sat on the title screen listening to the music.  The mild jukebox functionality available in the options menu is a nice touch.

Graphical style is quite consistent, even in the prototype - nothing appears massively out of place with the aesthetic.  It's pleasantly retro while still being sharp and smooth enough to feel modern.

I can already see the potential for quite some depth of gameplay here, which is a HUGE plus to me.  I accept that the prototype is (necessarily) very limited in content, but I can see a lot of structure already in place to build stuff on, which is positive.  I like the idea of wheels-within-wheels, lots of relatively simple systems being able to interact with each other to form something emergent (e.g. operative traits affecting relationships, which can affect mission outcomes, which can affect relationships and traits, etc).

I love the news ticker.  It's a nicely sardonic sense of humour you've got going there mixed in with some slightly straighter flavour text, I approve.  Is the intention to eventually have news items generated and woven into the ticker based on your/other corps' actions, too (e.g. "Corp X suffers loss of Asset Y in mysterious criminal raid" type stuff)?

The Bad

Not a lot - it is, after all, a prototype, so most of what I would normally classify as 'bad' is simply 'early days'!    With that said:

The interface can be a little overwhelming when you're trying to navigate many items at once.  Given how much data you're trying to display, it's relatively clean, but it took me a little while to realise e.g. that the objectives when planning a mission are a pick-list, not a full list.  It would be nice to have a little more visual display for some items (e.g. an operative's profile might be nice to have a dossier-type presentation, rather than just the text box it is currently).  I accept that that's an 'early days' item, though!

Some menu items display on three lines, while the boxes they appear in are only large enough for two, leading to overlap (e.g. a mission in progress, when you dig down to the Challenges display, sometimes displays the name of the challenge, the name of the assigned operative if there is one, and then a time counter).  This might need either larger boxes or a slightly downsized font for that part of the display.

On the Intel menu, when I 'spend' my intel to uncover a corp's asset(s), it doesn't tell me on that page which corp/company they belong to - I need to dig down in the Corp menu and look through its companies to find out where they are.  Not a major issue, but would be nice if it was visible on the Intel screen as well.

A more general point: the buttons in the menus are big and visible, which is good.  The headings for each menu item are less visible, which may not be...I tend to reflexively see the buttons as menu headings, when they actually appear at the bottom of their menu section.  Spacing might help - at the moment, there's no space gap between menu sections (e.g. in the Corporate overview of my corp, the Operative list runs straight into the Intel section which runs straight into the Missions section, with no clear boundary between the two other than the great big buttons and some all-caps text).  That might just be me, though - my eye just sees it as all one run of text with some buttons, rather than distinct sections.

Again, this is mostly just look-and-feel type stuff, which I accept is going to evolve as development goes on!    Overall, as a pre-alpha prototype, I'm impressed with what I've seen.

Keep it up! 

Edit: one more 'early days' item I just spotted: I've seen a few operatives popping up with identical names (first and second).  A larger name list might help make this less common, but you might want to check against existing operative names and regenerate if needed - I got confused between my two Olivia Zods! 

[Graknorke]

Reminds me of a flash game I played once. Except this is more polished and detailed, obviously.

[nenjin]

Stream of consciousness post go!

Dat track picker in game. Love that.

And new music too!



Couple of these are really outstanding.

Omg, sooooo many Professions to pick from! And I can see a potential scenario where each one might be useful. The list probably needs paring down, as all lists do. But man that's exciting to think about.

I applaud your headlines, they're very convincingly written.

I'm really feeling a lot of "I don't know what any of these numbers mean" at the moment.

You might want to remove the trait from the Operative description text. Some of those parse a little weird. "A Drunk master of Exploration." It might be worth it to add that stuff as its own lines. "A master of Exploration. He is Drunk and Violent."

Is there a way to outright pause the simulation, or will there ever be one? Or is it intended to kind of run real time, all the time? I'm the kind of person that really, really likes to stop time and consider all my angles, without having to worry about the clock.

Each section of a mission plan should probably try to describe, probably by tool tip, what's involved. For example, I have no idea how "Stowaway" applies to this mission I'm looking at. In fact as I mentally assemble what this mission looks like in my head...I'm sort of wondering why I need research files if my primary mission is ostensible to follow some guy. I know the goal is for the player to largely put the narrative together in their head, but a little bit of extra writing might help that along. Something like "Stash the files" as a mouseover tool tip, or "Acquire information on target."

There really need to be hotlinks on all the corp names and such so you can instantly jump back to the corp in question with one click. Perhaps any instance of a named object needs that. In a game about data, you don't want to have to menu surfing to get to where you need to go. Unless you're planning to go the dockable menu direction at some point, that'd work too.

It'd be nice, if when going through Operatives for example, if the menu remembered where you'd last left it. So if I want to scroll through my Operatives I don't have to click, scroll scroll scroll....click, scroll scroll scroll...to get to the skill section.

Totally random thought, but it'd be sweet if you could actually recolor the UI. I know blue steel is the game's color, and I'm fine with it, but it'd be neat to set the UI to another color, to reflect you or your company's personality. I don't know how easy or impractical that would be for this.

Spoiler: I'd do this, if I could (click to show/hide)

I agree with the above, sorting out what's a heading within the menus is a little difficult. But I've been over some of that already, so I won't go on about it.

I'll get into actually playing the game a bit later. Suffice to say though, this already feels pretty good to muck around with. (The music does a lot for it.) With a slick UI and something going on in the background, this is going to be pretty sweet.

[Neonivek]

Dang it people, stop making me wish I was playing this right now!

[Mullet Master]

I like to keep my posts on these things as simple as possible. I think the prototype is very good, you can see the outlines of greatness but they're still really fuzzy. I know this release is very much a relief to all of us who have contributed to the KS, as well as the dev.

There are a few things I really like :

Music is solid, as expected. Slightly higher bass levels than I expected, my sub was really doing some work on a few songs.
Omnipresent ticker is cool and helps better illustrate the passage of time.
High number of skills/abilities for agents is very encouraging - it looks like this is going to be a complex game.

And, most of all - this game really has a "flow" to it. You get into a groove, get an idea of what you want to do and execute. There's constantly some pressure to continue acting as you watch your company's market share go up and down. You react to your competitors - some corp is doing well? They become the target. Mission taking too long? Hire more agents.... But the clock is continually ticking, and you have to be moving one way or another. I found I relied almost completely on gut instinct rather than trying to micromanage, just to keep that flow up.

That being said, I want to suggest  a couple of things since I believe they may be read by the dev here. 

1) Please evaluate how money is displayed and used. At the current time... it's not very clear to me as a player what is going on with it. I get that a certain amount of minimalism is required, but this seems like a major feature that is too minimal. Here's my line of thinking :

"Does an agent cost $15 salary? Is that per day? Is that per year? Will investing in a new asset cost $50 one time and pay off once per year? What is this unbalanced market share thing? How do multiple companies have >50% market share ( I know it is because they are in different sectors, but what are the sectors?)"

I think it would be better to break it up into a profit/loss sort of thing, do a real basic income statement with a time value, such as :

Spoiler: basic suggestion (click to show/hide)

Weekly Summary :
Income from Business Operations : 100
Operating Costs of Businesses : -60
Agent Salary : -20
Other expenses :  0
Total : +20/week

Since most missions take roughly a week, it seems like the week is the most valid time unit to me.

2) There are too few operative names, even for a limited prototype. This has a very negative impact on playability. Please increase the size of the name database and maybe make a unique identifier (such as a nickname, a corp ID number, or something ) "John Smith 441" would be preferable to having several agents in the list with the same name or nearly the same name. I mean, it could fit in the game world very easy - biometric data is used to identify someone that works for your corp since a name isn't very useful. Maybe a genetic sequence "checksum"?