SMB Closed Beta: Founders update #2

Yeah Baby!

"The arena will gradually shrink."  This is very clever, "The Best of Both Worlds" in the language of my own little world.  You can have the map be too big at first, the larger area that modern gamer's expect, and a lot of the time that will work.  But if it is going too long, probably meaning that the faster player is refusing to engage, you can shrink it down to an SFB tournament map boxing ring on them.  I would have it not shrink at all at first, then have it fairly quickly shrink down into a "boxing ring" on them once it has gone on too long.  This really is a very clever way of dealing with this for modern gamers who might not like the "boxing ring" too much because it "isn't realistic".

Of course, it isn't realistic because the fight is not realistic.  They go together.  Nobody is going to fight to the death in open space for no reason at all.  Fights to the death would almost always happen over some type of objective, something worth fighting for.  The "unrealistic" tournament barrier is there to compensate for the reality that the fight itself is unrealistic and "against the laws of nature".

Thinking about this more... since the fast player knows the map will shrink, and it will be harder for them to win once it does, simply the threat of the map shrinking will make them want to engage and destroy the enemy before the map begins to steadily shrink down into a boxing ring.  You might wind up being to find a balance in this where the threat of the map shrinking solves the problem to the point that it rarely ever gets to that point among experienced players.

How big is the update?  If it is small I can just download it now, but if it is several GB I'll wait till the "early bird hours" where I can not use any of my limited fast time for the month to do it.  Satellite internet:-(

We'd love your feedback on the feel of the arena.  I expect that its something that will need tweaking and/or have multiple arenas with different sizes.  

The update is about 500M. 

This build doesn't like my computer, it is crashing a lot, so I haven't played it much yet. But I will keep trying to play it.

I am loving this! But it's definitely not what the audience is expecting of Star Control. Not that there is any big problem, but just like in the original Space Wars the gravity well at the center needs to be an option, or the gravity needs to be faint. What you have here is the beginnings of a good “Space Derby” map, it would just need to be a lot bigger with a stronger black hole and you'd have a great “race track”.

Now that the walls give you some perspective I notice a few things immediately.

The ships are all screaming fast. Compare the speed you are at to Subspace/Continuum and you will see what I mean. I thought I was having trouble controlling it because I suck with the keyboard, but it was also because of how fast everything is moving. You couldn't tell before because you had no perspective, but they really are all moving very, very fast. This type of game is already fast paced as it is, with everything moving this fast you don't have time to think or aim. Or dodge, because you are going so fast you are either turning in a wide arc turn or backwards and thrusting to change direction. You really should play Subspace a little, it had a good “thrust-to-weight ratio” and speed too it. The ships are all pretty much the same in that game, but they found the right place where ships are “turning left and right” with their thrust against their momentum.

The asteroids thing, done this way, isn't working. It's really bad. You get stuck in there. You can't even go beyond it. It's like a maze at the edge of the arena. If you are looking for a 1v1 duel fight, you really want a “barrier” the ships just bounce off of. They can just be bumpers, or “emp bumpers” that take energy away as a penalty, or damage you. In this game I would slow the ship down and take energy away for bumping into the “barrier”. I know this goes against the grain of a lot of thinking with this type of game, but this genre can't exist without something to account for the retrograde.

EDIT: If you look at Subspace... I haven't seen it in years.  It has a lot of different zones, specifically ignore "Trench Wars".  "Chaos" would be a good one too look at.  Any zone where the ships move "briskly".  The ships barely move in Trench Wars, for example.

This is the primary reason why I was rooting for something like this. Long matches suck in SC:O, and they sucked in SCII, in my opinion. Encouraging both players to engage each other and making the game more action oriented is something positive.

The Spaceship crafter needs a tab or filter for engines, because I cannot find engines to complete my outfitting.

As for crashing -- have you tried lowering the graphics settings yet to see if that helps?