Quick Link:- You can get hold of the first chapter for free from Steam over here:
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Hi All,
I’ve got to an exciting part of my game development but also a scary one and am looking for feedback and any comments or advice.
I created a vertical slice, the entire first chapter of the game, and uploaded to Steam as a free demo with the aim of getting some feedback - it received some but not loads. Being a lone developer I thought it would be good to ‘get it out there’ as much as possible. It’s my first attempt at Unity so I’m starting this thread to seek feedback, comments, bugs etc.
2015
The game started as a contest entry to the Edge Magazine ‘Get into games’ 2015. It subsequently went onto win this contest and gave me a big boost. I refer to this version as the prototype as it sowed the seed.
Some background narrative:
"Abandoned for decades, crew MIA, the ICARUS.1’s job was to store mined minerals from the systems outlying planets. It orbits the local sun to maintain it’s solar energy and proved a lucrative business for JME corp.
After contact was lost no attempt was ever made to make contact with the stricken station, instead the project was mothballed - a cover up some may say. Many stories about what happened have become lore but Sam isn’t focusing on these ‘stories’, the goal is the cargo and the wealth it will bring."
Screenshot from the prototype version - Early 2015
2016
I’ve been developing it further and split the game into 5 chapters. I’m working my way through them and have just started chapter 4.
Screenshot from the 2016 Steam version
Any comments or feedback would be great. I’ll keep updating this thread with progress as I continue.
Thank you all kindly, I’ll finish this entry with a couple more shots.
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2 Likes
Although the game looks amazing, some criticism points I have are:
- Keyboard navigation for the pause menu is not as user friendly as mouse navigation would be
- Low resolution of the sun picture makes it very obvious that the sun is just a picture, and causes the game to be less immersive (you can even see a solar flare stop in mid explosion)
- Input is delayed, causing movement to feel clumsy
- A skip button is needed for the terminal as it loads text, such as that in Fallout 4
- Gameplay felt boring and repetitive as you sought to solve basic puzzles, only to find more similar puzzles. (Although this may be more opinionated)
Thank you so much for the feedback, I’ll take that all on board.
The first terminal has to be read completely to progress but the others can be exited. I’m adding a terminal logger that allows you to reread any terminals you have found in a personal inventory - based on some feedback from another player. This might help, I’ll look into a ‘skip and display’ option as well.
This first chapter is very short and in later ones there will be more physical navigation problems to solve (I hope!)
Again thank you so much for the comments. It’s greatly appreciated 
I’ve been playing around with switching to the deferred rendering pipeline. The positives are that I’m not going to worry about light baking anymore, the downside is that (possibly incorrectly) batching seems to be much higher even though objects are marked as static. Like doubled which is impacting on FPS. I’ve read various posts and threads about this but can’t get my head around the answer.
Am I right in thinking to some ways disregard the batches stat when in deferred? But how would you up performance in this case?
Admittedly I’ve added a lot of shadow (correction, all my lights are set to shadows!) lights into the scene. 
So I’ve realised that the bottle neck was shadows (and some image effects!) Think I’m back on track. Using deferred is a blast, so happy that my PC doesn’t need to lock up when light baking. Here’s a couple of screen grabs with the new deferred rending in place.
i really like this
i like the industrial look of your scifi environment without overdoing it in too much panels and weird wall designs and putting the detail in the props.
do u also have characters done allready? i would love to see those.
keep it up
Thanks Mister D, as far as other characters are concerned it’s a solo affair as the station is abandoned. It’s very much you as the player vs the environment and station … something is lurking. Slowly the story unfolds.
I think the minimal design is also down to my limitations as I’ve been learning 3D along with building the game, ha!
1 Like
ah ok
minimalism isnt bad most people dont know when to stop 
