Responding to Feedback

I've been ignoring this poor-old itch devlog for a while, concentrating on actually updating and finishing the game, but a lot has happened and I've done a lot of reflecting on development.

Some of the earliest feedback I got on Aracore Astromining Ventures related to the difficulty of the first stage, and the controls. As I've written previously, a tutorial was probably needed, and some refinement to the controls was probably sensible too. 

In my years of playing games, I've played loads of big-release games and, just like big-release films and pop-artists, most have to cater to as broad an audience as possible: someone has paid for this to get made, they want loads of profit. I've been banging the indie-games drum for years, because it's a often a real creative outlet for people to say "I don't really care if anyone else wants this, I made it because there's nothing like it I can find and I wanted to play it". The world of crazy niche things is always awesome and doing something different is a breath of fresh air for a lot of people. 

One thing I wanted from the start of this game was an explosive intro that says to the player "you're screwed: you can't control this situation, and even if you try your best you can't fix it". This is (in a way that seems quite obvious really) the exact opposite of what most gamers want: too many people just wanted to be able to fix the whole situation in that first stage: shoot down all the asteroids, protect the ship, save everyone, and they absolutely could not accept that that's not even really supposed to be possible. I renamed the stage "Impossible odds" to give a more blatant hint, but people still won't like it.

When I think about it as a situation in a game, it's sort-of a rarity: you can get through it, but the outcomes still mostly range from "bad" to "awful". I tried comparing it to some things I remember:

• The first boss in Dark Souls: it kills you, but can just retry and you will beat it eventually. After you do, there are no real lasting effects of failure
• In Final Fantasy VII, some Sepiroth fights (including one with Aeris): you can finish the battle,, but loss is part of the story. It's still a binary though: defeat or be defeated and retry to get the scripted story
• XCOM 2: probably the closest I could come up with: the early fights are meant to teach you that you're already screwed.

I thin design-wise that it's ok if the player knows ahead of time that they're not supposed to win, but many gamers cannot live with any lasting failure, especially one that's outside of their control. I think for some players the asteroid strike stage in Aracore feels like being on the receiving end of a torrent of blue shells. I, as the developer am telling them "SCREW YOU: LIFE'S UNFAIR", and that's probably not a good idea.

It's definitely put some people off, and it actually doesn't match the choices you get in most of the rest of the game where you can choose a mostly-peaceful mission mining, or do something more action-oriented.

I didn't want to remove the mission. I love it; I find the absolute chaos, panic, and uncontrolled mess that you're stuck in quite refreshing. But, I also want people to play the game and not give up after less than ten minutes, so, in the latest update, I've made that stage optional and added a different, much more relaxed first stage. One of the pilots tells you he thinkks there's trouble and offers you amining mission with him.

Here's hoping people are a little happier with some calm space mining!