Regarding recent negative reviews
The recent review summary has become "mostly negative," something I've never had before, and it's my full-time job to try and make sure that doesn't happen. So I'm trying to better understand the main reasoning behind that to make sure I spend my time wisely over the next few weeks trying to correct the problems causing this.
A couple of important mentions first:
1. It's impossible to please everyone, especially with a (currently ~) $11.50 indie game made by one guy. There will always be negative reviews that I can do nothing about
2. There seems to be two annoying bugs going on right now, one with ranged bow attacks, and one that seems to only affect first time players causing the default interact keybind of F to not work. If you run into the interact key problem please try clearing the keybind and then setting it again.
3. I was briefly hospitalized on Sunday and have not been able to work since and may be unable to for another day or two, otherwise I would have fixed those bugs by now.
Having said that, I think one of the main things first time players are complaining about is the control scheme. We spent a lot of time and effort adding the RMB to move camera and click to target WoW style controls thinking that would make casting, ranged attacks, and UI interaction easier overall. For players that prefer a locked camera there is a toggle (default is V), but it seems a lot of people don't know there is a toggle and do not like the RMB controls.
Now of course there are a lot of little QoL things that can be improved and that will be my focus after we clean up the current issues, make sure the new multilingual system is working properly and get full controller support onto the beta branch. But this post is not about those.
I'm asking the people that left a negative review, or would consider leaving one still for responses along the lines of:
"I couldn't get the controls to work,"
"RMB to move the camera was terrible,"
"I didn't know I had to target mobs to attack them,"
"I didn't know there was a help window,"
"I couldn't figure out xxxx and gave up."
Things that caused you to go beyond "well that's kind of annoying," into "I don't like this game and what the developer is doing with it."
Some things I am considering to try and improve the new players experience:
- Adding tips to the loading screens
- Adding more buttons linking to the help window
- Adding pictures to and improving the help window
- Offering a return to the aim to shoot (no targets) locked camera controls
We talk about a lot of these things in the SC Discord server, but I know there are plenty of people, especially those willing to write a negative review, that aren't interested in joining Discord. I'm hoping this will reach some of those people so I can get a better grasp on how to best use my time improving things from here on.
Thank you and happy gaming!
A couple of important mentions first:
1. It's impossible to please everyone, especially with a (currently ~) $11.50 indie game made by one guy. There will always be negative reviews that I can do nothing about
2. There seems to be two annoying bugs going on right now, one with ranged bow attacks, and one that seems to only affect first time players causing the default interact keybind of F to not work. If you run into the interact key problem please try clearing the keybind and then setting it again.
3. I was briefly hospitalized on Sunday and have not been able to work since and may be unable to for another day or two, otherwise I would have fixed those bugs by now.
Having said that, I think one of the main things first time players are complaining about is the control scheme. We spent a lot of time and effort adding the RMB to move camera and click to target WoW style controls thinking that would make casting, ranged attacks, and UI interaction easier overall. For players that prefer a locked camera there is a toggle (default is V), but it seems a lot of people don't know there is a toggle and do not like the RMB controls.
Now of course there are a lot of little QoL things that can be improved and that will be my focus after we clean up the current issues, make sure the new multilingual system is working properly and get full controller support onto the beta branch. But this post is not about those.
I'm asking the people that left a negative review, or would consider leaving one still for responses along the lines of:
"I couldn't get the controls to work,"
"RMB to move the camera was terrible,"
"I didn't know I had to target mobs to attack them,"
"I didn't know there was a help window,"
"I couldn't figure out xxxx and gave up."
Things that caused you to go beyond "well that's kind of annoying," into "I don't like this game and what the developer is doing with it."
Some things I am considering to try and improve the new players experience:
- Adding tips to the loading screens
- Adding more buttons linking to the help window
- Adding pictures to and improving the help window
- Offering a return to the aim to shoot (no targets) locked camera controls
We talk about a lot of these things in the SC Discord server, but I know there are plenty of people, especially those willing to write a negative review, that aren't interested in joining Discord. I'm hoping this will reach some of those people so I can get a better grasp on how to best use my time improving things from here on.
Thank you and happy gaming!