Galactic Empires (WebGL version).
Galactic Empires (Downloadable PC Version).
I’d love feedback on this 3D space shooter. Specifically, what does it need to “take it to the next level” and make it worth buying.
Some ideas I have:
I’m impressed by the graphics, music that changes when in combat, and overall gameplay. However it feels less like a spaceship and more of aiming a gun that slides around. Changing the view to either be 1st person showing the cockpit and guns, or 3rd person where the camera is more zoomed out would be a big improvement. Directional keys add thrust to the ship while mouse rotation turns it.
A few things I recommend :
Mouse cursor locked and hidden. It goes offscreen and you can see both the aim cursor and mouse at the same time.
Normalize the values of movement so going diagonal isn’t 2x as fast as only going one direction.
Transport ship not able to take damage from player. It starts directly in front of you and first thing the players wants to do is click the mouse buttons.
Booster sound effect and booster particles when moving forward and ship model rotating while turning.
Enemy health bar needs to be larger and rest beneath the aim icon.
FPS counter hidden by default.
Asteroids should float and be a bigger threat. Or using asteroids to hide from enemy fire be a tactical option.
Exit button shouldn’t immediately end the game. I’ve accidently exited many times trying to close the pause screen.
Guns firing effect is a big vertical yellow particle larger than the crosshairs themselves. Remove it and instead add particles to the bullets, so you can see where they are going.
Missiles are way slower than the bullets, making them useless even at very close range. They should either be faster, home on the enemy at a distance when the target is locked on, or home when they get close to a target.
UI text is black on a dark green background. It’s hard to read.
The “Escort Transport To Waypoint” UI be overlayed to the upper left of the screen and disappear after a few seconds, instead of being attached the the transport object.
Enemy ships firing particles are way larger than the ships themselves.
Opening the pause menu glitches the Shields, Health, and Weapons cooldown UI. They stop updating.
The destroyer launches a long stream of missiles at the slow moving transport. Once you get close enough to fire on him there’s already 50 missiles guaranteed to hit their target.
Guns should overheat faster.
The idea is solid but it could use lots of polish.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to try it out and to write such a comprehensive and thorough list of suggestions. Those are all good and made me aware of some issues I hadn’t noticed (e.g. UI glitch after pausing).
I’ve been reading about Cinemachine so I might look into using that for a 3rd person camera.
If you don’t mind, could you elaborate on a few points?
Booster sound effect and booster particles when moving forward and ship model rotating while turning.
There are booster sound effects (the background rumble changes in pitch and volume when thrusting).
When I switch to a 3rd person camera I will add the particle effects/trail renderer.
Asteroids should float and be a bigger threat. Or using asteroids to hide from enemy fire be a tactical option.
The asteroids do damage on collision. Besides floating (I guess by this you mean moving instead of just rotating) what would make them a bigger threat?
The “Escort Transport To Waypoint” UI be overlayed to the upper left of the screen and disappear after a few seconds, instead of being attached the the transport object.
I’m worried not attaching it to the transport would make it unclear who the players are supposed to escort.
This looks great! 
Playing through again I noticed the booster effects. The player’s shoot effect seems much louder that you can’t really hear the other effects.
Rockets cooldown is so fast that even holding button down it never stops shooting. I’ve challenged myself to make it to the first checkpoint using only rockets, to kill even the easiest enemy means losing half shields. They barely move faster than the ship.
The only time hitting an asteroid was on purpose, they are a neat idea and gives the player something else to think about, but only seem to do a tiny bit of damage. The transports path mostly avoids them completely.
How did you manage the movement AI in space? I’m guessing not the built in Navmesh Agent, and it seems like they are doing more than just raycasting.
Maybe Transport UI could be offset above him or below slightly. Though it’s pretty trivial detail. Improved controls and balancing to the weapons would be more important to keeping players interest.
Okay, I’ve implemented several of your suggestions. I’d love to get your thoughts.
https://midniteoilsoftware.itch.io/galactic-empires
https://midniteoilsoftware.itch.io/galactic-empires/devlog/172538/galactic-empires-a-3d-space-shooter
Hey, good to see the updates coming along. A lot of changes since posting the last download link. I played it for awhile before realizing there was a newer version.
The cockpit view is impressive, makes aiming and knowing when something is shooting at me easier.
In 3rd person view, ship blocks the bottom center of the screen. Maybe it could be scaled down? Or if you aim downward the camera rotates in that direction.
If missiles were scaled up and given a booster sound effect it would make their impact more satisfying.
TrackingUI could benefit from smoothing lerping to its destination instead of having the position be set.
Pilot overshoots his target while turning or moving forward. Maybe this could be improved by
GetRawAxis and or increasing Input.Dead higher or lower. Instead of flying in a straight line it zigzags. Hard to describe but seems like ship direction is based on current mouse position instead of mouse input axis. If you move the mouse in a direction then let go it will continue moving in that direction.
Lazer’s feel like they almost do the same damage as missiles, their recharge rate seems a little too slow.
Booster particles could be set in local space instead of world. As they will usually end up going in directions they aren’t meant to go.
Ship turning speed might be a bit too slow. Though it lead me to realizing you can barrel roll by using the Q/E keys, that was fun to play around with. Maybe there could be highly agile enemies or obstacles that take advantage of this feature?
I might be mistaken but it seems like some waypoints only spawned a single fighter.
It would be neat if you made a post or even an update screen in the start menu - some kind of roadmap of what features are planned for the future.
Thanks. I’m still working on several updates. I am adding powerups/drops that will replenish torpedoes, recharge the particle beam capacitor/shields, repair hull damage, etc. (did you notice that I added ammunition for the torpedoes?)
The enemy ship spawner spawns a random number of ships and the number of ships it will spawn increases over time so it becomes more difficult the farther into the game you get so yeah, sometimes it might only spawn a single fighter. The interval before spawning new enemies also gets shorter so early in the game there may be longer gaps between enemy ship spawns.
I’ll have to look into the mouse movement suggestions. One issue I found is that WebGL doesn’t like to restrict mouse movement to the game window. There are ways around this I’m looking into.
I’m always tweaking the player ship turn rate.
I want to add a F1=Help option on the start screen and change “Press any key to start game” with “Press Enter to start game”. Maybe I’ll add a roadmap screen there as well.
Thanks again for trying it out and providing feedback.
Hey, I thought you might provide feedback on my more recent changes. I’ve made a few tweaks, added powerups and a tutorial on the start screen.
