Loving the visual style and atmosphere! I realize this is a super early version so we might just be repeating stuff you already know and are working on, but I'd like to risk it and add some friendly critique. <3 Mostly about the controls and user experience:
Edit: Edited the above a bit after playing further, I'm seriously loving the game so far!!
- The controls are needlessly spread out. There's a whole bunch of buttons near WASD that aren't I or T and would make for a much smoother experience
- When you interact with something, you'll get an item window that can't be navigated with keyboard and can even contain extra confirmation dialogues for stacks of ammo again with no short hand commands. You can also get stuck waiting on character dialogue and choices like "use boltcutters" etc.
- Yet the enemies don't stop moving!
- This creates a frustrating gameplay loop where the main difficulty is all about battling the UI and controls with frequent savescumming
- Let us navigate the inventory with the keyboard, and cancel out of it with esc / pressing inventory again (even if the cursor happens to be on the item window, which rn prevents esc from working). Simply letting us use arrows to navigate all the way up to the inventory tabs, or using the page up / down buttons to switch tabs would work perfectly. :>
- If there was an option to always aim in the direction you're facing (so those who want to leave it disabled and still use mouse could), that would make for optional 1h controls with just slightly less finesse than KB+M. With something extra like "hold shift while pressing A/D to pan your aim left/right", even that would be fixed.
- Honestly I would consider just pausing the game during interactions regardless... but I get the Project Zomboid feel of having to work under duress. That said, if you want to go for that feel you have to improve that user experience.
At least let us instantly cancel out of actions & animations so we can defend ourselves, please. - Also I'd love a load command to the in-game menu. At least in its current state there's a whole lot of loading due to shots missing, taking dmg from those instant attacks when using melee etc, something we just can't afford to do without loading considering the lack of resources... and that loop of exiting to title -> load -> repeat really doesn't add much to the game. Ofc. better if the issues weren't even there so loading wasn't as necessary in the first place
Edit: Edited the above a bit after playing further, I'm seriously loving the game so far!!
Last edited:
