The Time I Invented No Man's Sky

Posted By: Dooley

The Time I Invented No Man's Sky - 10/12/17 14:19

A short article I wrote about my game and how it came into being...

http://www.indiedb.com/games/star-explorers/news/the-time-i-invented-no-mans-sky
Posted By: jumpman

Re: The Time I Invented No Man's Sky - 10/12/17 14:58

im going to buy your game when I get home.

Thanks for writing that up my friend.
Posted By: painkiller

Re: The Time I Invented No Man's Sky - 10/12/17 19:34

great article Dooley. I also used to think about why there wasn't any game were you could travel over the galaxy and land and explore the planets you found. I didn't try to make one myself, but when I heard about No Man's Sky I thought that was the game I was hoping for. Then I read the bad reviews and knew the price and actually I still haven't played it as of today grin . There is also another wip game, Star Citizen, which seems to be promising.
Good luck finishing your game and hope you get sucess with the final release wink
Posted By: jumpman

Re: The Time I Invented No Man's Sky - 10/13/17 03:11

Dooley....I played your game, and it was absolutely brutal frown Below are some critiques, but Im not a professional game developer, so they might not be something youll take seriously, but here is what got me:

Pressing the fullscreen button on a windows 10 64bit caused an error window to pop up about d3d texture unnamed. I had to task manager the game and close it.

When entering your name for a new game, you should make the name enter part a seperate 1st page, and when you press enter, move to a second page where you must press Okay as a confirm.

For some reason, making a new game, and a new name, gave me an error E1514, "Invalid pointer or handle in", the only way I could play the game at this point was by loading my previous name.

Why do you have to click on the mothership and warp there manually in the beginning? Maybe you should start the player's ship already warping to the mothership. When I started the game, I just flew around, and clicked a random star and flew to it, and wasted fuel not paying attention that I should have read to go to the mothership.

In the mothership, there is that first huge page of text for the first tutorial. I dont think this is a good start of a tutorial. I/many players dont have even short term memory, they just want to experience the game quickly. Walk through the player on entering a planet step by step. Auto-guide the player, keep him from exiting the ship panel, show a big arrow for which next button youre supposed to click.

I manually have to right click a tiny dot in the distance to warp to it frown this didnt feel right, maybe there should be a way to highlight every single warpable star or planet while looking out into space, so that its obvious which ones you can click on.

Maybe you can put all the info of a star right next to the mouse once you right click a star instead of at the bottom of the screen, but thats personal preference.

Space out the information at the bottom, current fuel and Max fuel are in different columns. There are no spaces between the rows for all this information, which doesnt make it easy to read at first glance.

I warp to a star that has 2 planets. I dont see the two planets that should be orbiting it. I fly around for a bit, try to encircle the star to see the planet, maybe its stationary and on the other side? The I get sucked in by the star and explode frown

The only cave I found was pitch black, and I couldnt find my way out. I could actually press f11 and see the bounding boxes of entities, but that still couldnt help me. Is there a flashlight?

Reloading my save file after a death, loaded me into the SORRY youre spaceship crashed into a star.

There should be a lot more hand holding from the beginning of the game in my opinion, and it seemed I was battling everything outside of actually getting on a planet.
Posted By: Dooley

Re: The Time I Invented No Man's Sky - 10/13/17 03:27

Thanks for the feedback. Sorry about any difficulties you faced.

Some of those issues are currently being tackled, some are already resolved, and some are new, and therefor very helpful to hear.

First, the flashlight - press F ... sometimes you have to press twice. (I'm working on it)

Windows 10 users have complained about errors that I have not encountered on any of my computers. (I don't have Windows 10)

I have recommended the following steps to help resolve those issues. The DEP thing has worked for those users who could not start the game. Some people complained, but then they must have returned the game, because they never came back to try my methods, so it's hard to say which, if any will work.

1. If your game is installed in your Steam folder (in Program Files) try removing and reinstalling it in somwhere else, like in My Documents. Steam allows choosing different locations when installing games. Program Files is usually protected by Windows, and perhaps that is causing a conflict.
2. If that does not help, try setting the game to run as Administrator.
3. Try running in compatability mode (Windows 7 or XP)
4. One issue that has effected other 3D Gamestudio games is the DEP settings. Here is an explanation on how to fix that issue.

Q: I have just installed Gamestudio on another PC. Now I get an error message (Error E1513) as soon as I start any project.
A. Check how the DEP (data execution prevention) is set in your Windows configuration. Go to My Computer / Properties / Advanced / Performance / Settings / Data Execution Prevention, and make sure that it's in its default setting ("For essential Windows programs and services only"). A wrong DEP setting prevents on-the-fly compiling lite-C or C-Script source code.

My main priority now it to streamline the gameplay and make it more user friendly. I am old. The games I played growing up did not have hand-holding. Those kinds of things bother me. However, I see that I should give more than I have if I want players to enjoy it. So thanks!

I hope you will consider trying it again when it is ready for a full release.
Posted By: Dooley

Re: The Time I Invented No Man's Sky - 10/13/17 03:30

This is one lesson learned by the way. Since releasing on Early Access, I realized that I did not do enough testing. I am working through that. It was a mistake, but I have resolved a whole bunch of even bigger bugs since then.

Learn from my mistakes. Test your games thoroughly before release!
Posted By: Dooley

Re: The Time I Invented No Man's Sky - 10/14/17 04:46

I haven't played No Man's Sky either. I want to finish my game first, or I fear I will never do it. Also, Star Citizen looks amazing!
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