Alpha First Impressions [share your experience]!

hey folks!

hope you are all enjoying the alpha release! similar to this thread over on Curse, feel free to capture some of your “first impressions” here…

have fun! :+1:

So 10 minutes in, I’m really liking this so far. Well done for an alpha. Now here are some starter thoughts on what I think should be implemented for ease of play, or just something to help the game along misc or whatnot.

Camera control should be changed a bit. I love when AWSD is used to move the camera. Now while I also like mouse buttons and mouse control, it becomes a bit wonky. Also, I don’t know what it is called but when you left click to move the camera, the mouse moves across the screen. In many games that use this type of camera, the mouse disappears, but stays at its current location. I am really hoping this gets looked into as I HATE games that don’t utilize this simple yet important function.

Second as of right now, 15-20 min into playing I have no idea how to gather food. I know there is an icon that shows Gather Berries, but I click and nothing… then consequently my little ones starve. I’m not sure if this is a bug or am I doing something wrong but just thought I’d put this down. Kind of gamebreaking for me at the moment. I’ll add more as I think. Well, after crashing and being forced to start another new game, I managed to pick berries this time around. I THINK the problem was, the berries I tried to gather, were too far? I don’t know haven’t confirmed this yet, also there is no icon that shows you selected Gather Berries, like chopping tree’s.

ALSO, before I forget, placing a small house down, I see no way of being able to turn the house so you can only place them one way… I’m hoping this is changed and we are allowed to spin buildings before placement, otherwise this should be implemented.

Found something rather spooky. Sometimes when my little ones sit down, their head… dislocates from their shoulders. Same when they get up their body moves but their heads remain where they were sitting… very spooky indeed.

Would like to see the ability to remove items placed with the place item action. Like to remove a table and put it in storage or something. Rather odd to have to just relocate them every time instead of being able to put them back in the storage area.

I would love to see the ability to cancel an action, like chopping a tree. Or what I just did by accident, chop down a berry bush. Could find no way of cancelling it out so I lost one of my bushes oh well

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Hello :smile:

Ok, let’s see… First impressions. Well, the menu and the music are beautiful! Actually, the whole thing is beautiful. In all it’s… bugginess, laggyness and emptiness (lol)

Anyway, I can already see where will we be in the future. For now it’s quite entertaining to set stuff, see your little people walking around working or getting stuck or even settling on the mountains so they’ll starve (Mwahahha!) but there’s not much to do besides that. It will be glorious, tho. I feel it. A sage told me, actually.

Oh, and I had a lot of fun chopping those infidel, dirty trees like I told I would!

“EMBRACE MY TRUE FAITH OR MEET THE MAKER, SAPLING!”

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despite the various issues we all knew would be in this game at this stage, I’m still really enjoying the Alpha. It looks beautiful, i like the day/night cycle. There is much that feels good so far, the overall pacing feels good. Its fairly easy to get a feel for the game.

Is it just me or do others want to be able to move the camera around while placing items?
Is that something that is coming or can we do that already and i somehow couldn’t figure it out?

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Was a little underwhelmed to be honest, and I had low expectations already.

The whole thing feels more like a preview than an alpha. I may be a little bit too critical about this, but it felt skittish, glitchy, and buggy. To support this, I will explain why I feel this way. Yes I am aware that this is an alpha, and pray that the final product will not be this way.

  • There are frequent crashes (Window just closes, no error message)

  • Clicking F1 activates some sort of “Chunk” selection grid, which causes some insane graphical errors (Rays of random colors beaming down from the skies)

  • Frame-rates are incredibly low. On my office desktop, the game is un-playable (2 FPS if I am lucky). On my gaming rig with a mid-high range GPU, 8GB of high end ram(Upgraded my RAM recently), and an i5, I can hardly get a solid 30 FPS, which is my personal minimum playing frame-rate.

  • Workers leave buildings unfinished, despite the fact that they have enough wood.

  • Workers leave items on the ground when they have no jobs left and plenty of stockpiles accepting that item.

  • You cannot move the camera while trying to place items or build.

  • No full-screen option, as there was in the graphics test.

  • Controls feel very wonky. Building (This might just be my idiocy here) is very difficult. You can only really create a small room.

  • Pending job GUI does not pop up above berry bushes when you give the order to harvest them. Trees however do.

On an up note, I have a few positive comments.

  • While the musical selection is small, it is very good sounding and matches the game nicely.

  • The game looks good, despite the bad FPS and close up issues.

  • GUI’s look very professional and match the games style.

  • Day/Night cycle is a nice addition, although it could be a bit longer.

  • Terrain generation is very appropriate (No random terrain).

So, there is my two cents. I eagerly await updates.

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Game is beautiful indeed, though I think the day/night cycel is a tad too short, but I don’t know.

No you can’t move the camera to place objects, and I do hope they change this, it’s annoying. You can actually accidently drop items if you move your mouse off the screen. Least it happened for me so no idea there.

Odd, I get about 45-50 fps at most times, very randomly it will “hiccup” ad drop down to about 30 for me but it lasts a few seconds or less and seems to run fine otherwise.

I really loved it. Sure, there were a few bugs there and there, but overall, it was fine for the first release.

Help!!! I was hitting the F keys to see what each did, now my game is “frozen” not actually frozen but in a paused state and I cannot figure out how to unpause X_X.

Thanks for clearing that up for me.

excellent feedback folks, thanks! :smile:

and i applaud you for posting this… by providing constructive criticism, you can only help improve the game… :+1:

That was the intent, not trying to be a hater here :wink:

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Try F3, that’s what did it for me.

GAH! I double posted >.<

Hello there,

my first look mhmmmm …
I think, it was like "mhmm … nice music … ah … cool world, and nice, some sort of starting guide"
The look and feel is good, the camerahandling is in need of getting used to.

But i think, this will grow real cool! Realy excited about, how this game will go in future :wink:

Hey there,

thank you for this nicely alpha version. There is not a lot of content in it but I think for the first Alpha it is good enough to get a good impression of the game.

Here are some thoughts:

  • WASD controls would be fine in future (I know a lot of people said this before).
  • For an easier control of the environment: Enable the multiple select of bushes or trees. You can select some of them and then give one order to collect berries or chop them. In the alpha you have to select every bush or tree and you have to give an extra order every time.
  • Like someone said before: You can`t move camera wihle place buildings.

Now I have got an other thought. In your roadmap I saw that you will create a weaver job. Do you still have an idea or a prototype how it will be look in future or in the released version? I ask this question because I made an education as weaver and mechanic in a weaving department. I saw this job or game feature in other games and every time I had to smile a lot because they create this feature very cursory.
Today I`m an office fighter but I guess I have not forget all of my education. If you have some question about this feel free to ask. I know this is not a simulation of weaving but I would enjoy a good looking weaver job.

Greetings from Germany!

I can’t believe I’m missing out on the Alpha Uno…no access to PC…You guys look like you’re having fun :stuck_out_tongue:

Hi guys ! First I want to say “Thank you !” for the tutorials, the UI and everything that make the game UNDERSTANDABLE, I cant count all the alphas that I tried that you were left alone in the dark crying not knowing at all what to do. It is really professional of you and it shows that you guys care. Thank you.

The game look great Its gonna be fun, but I think its sadly broken to an unplayable state, but hey, its an “alpha” (I work in a game industry and that’s more what we would call a “prototype” than an alpha, but since its for the public I get why its called like that). I hope our tests will help you improve and bug fix the game, I’m pretty sure when it will work it will be a great game !

My bugs were all already reported (random crash with no error on Win7 64 bits, settlers not moving, not trying to finish the buildings, etc).

Keep up the good work !

Hey!

I’m utterly baffled by my enjoyment of the current SH Alpha build. I’ve already sunk about six or seven hours into it, and it’s kept me thoroughly entertained for the entirety of my time playing. Even in its current bare bones state. In any case, I thought that I should share my thoughts and experiences so far.

As for my expectations, knowing that the first release was probably going to be fairly minimalistic, I had three. Two of which were met.

  1. Settlers that could cut down trees. Check.
  2. Trees to cut. Check.
  3. The ability to successfully create a structure of some description. Not check. :frowning:

All of the other features included with the release were a pleasant surprise. Not even in my wildest dreams did I think that the ability to promote one of my settlers would have been available from the first release. As for the promotion window? I absolutely adore it and its little approval stamp mechanism. It took me about a minute to figure out how the crafting window worked, but I was overall pleased with its functionality.

On first launch I found myself thoroughly enjoying the music. Nice and upbeat, perfect for a game like this. The menu screen seemed like a pretty solid base, and had some nice art. I would love to see something like a different piece of art every time the game is started up. World generation was a bit lengthy, but that’s not really an issue, patience is always good right? Getting into the actual game was incredibly exciting. Seeing how far this project has come after this time was really enjoyable, and the future is looking pretty bright.

Aside from a few crashes and surprisingly enjoyable bugs here and there, my experience was pretty smooth. I was getting about 28-30 frames per second with a few spikes down to 25 every now and again. I’m sure in the future optimization will probably bring that number up. The only major issue I had was the construction of buildings, which, as I’ve gathered by poking around the discourse, seems to be a fairly common issue. On my end, settlers would get halfway to completion and then abandon whatever construction assignment I had setup. Unfortunate, but alpha is alpha.

Additionally, I took a few screenshots, but because I hadn’t bothered to make a discourse account until now, I can’t share them. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll upload them.

Anyway, that about sums up my thoughts so far. Congratulations to team Radiant for this milestone in the project. Looking forward to whats to come.

Cheers,
AlamoTom

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For an initial alpha, it is very stable. most stability issues seem to have little workarounds like not building on two segments using the F1 function. The graphics look very good and what has been implemented so far is very intuitive and seems to flow nicely. I am very excited to see what the next couple of months brings!!

This game is great and I am looking foward to the full release and this is why I bought the game because it is just really, really awesome and I can’t wait for the full release. Although this gae is great these are the Improvements I would like to see:

A better performance would be nice…
Fix all worker glitches so like when they get confused with the stockpiles and also when they do not build roofs on Houses.
And just some more stuff but the optimization needs to be better. (by the way before people say buy a good computer I have a good one)

Wrote by the alllmighty BunjiNinja/George