Thoughts from another Game Developer (Reddit Link)
Coranth
Join Date: 2015-06-02 Member: 205160Members
Join Date: 2015-06-02 Member: 205160Members
Thoughts from another Game Developer (Reddit Link)
https://reddit.com/r/subnautica/comments/5mdb35/thoughts_from_another_game_developer/
https://reddit.com/r/subnautica/comments/5mdb35/thoughts_from_another_game_developer/
Comments
Maybe paste the whole post in your thread
Thoughts from another game developer (self.subnautica)
submitted 23 hours ago by booljayj
I'm a game programmer myself, and I recently started playing Subnautica. I have been really loving a lot of aspects of the game, but there are a lot of places where it falls short. I wanted to give my take on the game overall, and what changes I think would be beneficial. I'm totally aware that the devs have their own plan for the future of the game, and I applaud the effort that they are putting into it. This is just me putting my thoughts out there, take 'em or leave 'em.
Full disclosure, I haven't played to the late game stages. After playing for a few hours without looking up anything, I got to the point where I could finally start crafting a habitat. After that, I went through all the development videos to see what the progress of the game has been like and what the mid and late game look like. I'm excited to keep going and get all the vehicles, so even though I have criticisms I still really love this game.
Gear and Exploration
The synergy between the gear and the exploration mechanics is phenomenal. Seriously, it works so much better than in most other survival games. The way your explorable space is bounded by how far you can move reinforces the need for gear, which builds on itself and opens up the world in a very natural way. I hope this part of the game does not change significantly.
Crafting and Resources
The crafting system in this game is poorly designed. I don't mean to say that it's terrible, but it does not fit into the world in the same way that the gear and exploration systems do, so the design clashes with the rest of the game. It forces players to grind to gather resources, perform rather tedious inventory management, and does not reward actually learning about the world.
Resource gathering
The fabricator tells you what you need to find, but doesn't give you any indication of where to find it. After searching for hours to figure out where silver was, I eventually had to look online to discover that I needed to go to a specific location and hope on a random chance to get it. Instead of exploring the fantastic underwater world, I found myself hunting through the same red grass for hours to see small rocks in the hope that one of them would turn into silver.
During all of this, I would constantly run out of inventory space. Most of the time the small rocks would give me useless materials, and my only way to deal with them was to swim all the way back to home base to drop them in a big pile. This was not fun, it felt tedious and a waste of my time.
During this whole process, I found myself wondering A)Why can't I just see deposits for the types of materials I'm interested in instead of rolling a die, and B)Why can't I gather these materials from other sources. I see chunks of spaceship all over the world, but apparently none of those has a hint of silver, despite it being required to make computer chips and wiring.
Finding blueprints
I don't know about your experience, but I had a lot of trouble finding blueprints. When first starting the game, I wasn't even aware that fragments were a thing. Even after making the scanner, it took a while before I realized I could use it on some of the wreckage I found. My first uses were to scan around the Aurora, but I kept finding the same blueprints over and over again, which was extremely discouraging. I didn't even realize there were fragments in the safe shallows until I read it on the wiki, and I thought I had done a pretty good job of exploring that space.
That said, I think the blueprints are a great idea, and I would like to see them used to a greater extent. They are a perfect reward for exploring the environment, and they reinforce the explore<->craft loop that is in the game. Though, it would be great if every fragment was more useful by itself, always contributing to some blueprint. It's very disappointing to find a fragment only to see it's another damn vehicle upgrade bay (giving me titanium isn't much compensation considering how common it is).
A more integrated crafting system
To make a crafting system that really fits into the themes of Subnautica, I think you should start by looking at three things: the variety of alien life, the existence of the fabricator, and the core loop of explore<->craft.
The fabricator technology indicates that your own species has the capability to make objects automatically using a collection of raw materials. It doesn't make sense that you need to manually craft intermediate components before making something final - the fabricator is already capable of doing that. All I should need to do is tell it what I want and have it do the entire process for me from raw materials. Factorio provides a good example of this - if you have all of the basic components, it will automatically craft the intermediate stuff.
The variety of alien life, both flora and fauna, seems very underused. Each of these lifeforms may be composed of the raw materials I need, so why can't I extract all of those raw materials from these things? I have to choose whether to get rubber or lubricant from creepvine seeds, why can't I just process the seeds to get some amount of rubber and some lubricant, since both are present?
So, I propose a different crafting flow. You gather raw materials (plants, animals, ores) from the environment and take them to your habitat, then you process those raw materials into resources. Each raw material can be made of multiple resources, in different amounts. Instead of holding those resources in your inventory, they are stored in a massive inventory within the habitat itself. When choosing what to build from the fabricator, it uses some number of resources that are drawn from this internal inventory. You can also recycle crafted objects by processing them like a raw material, which can reclaim some of what went into making them.
Raw Materials -break down-> Resources -build up-> Equipment/Tools/Deployables/Sustenance/Vehicles
The resources you need can be gathered from a number of sources, and you'll need to learn about the environment to remember what you need to actually gather. If rare raw materials contain more of the rare resources, then you still have a great incentive to explore deep or risky areas. Furthermore, the only inventory management is balancing what you bring with you (food, water, tools), with what you bring back (raw materials). You don't have the annoyance of partially-crafted objects cluttering your inventory.
Flora and Fauna
I love the variety of life in the oceans, it really feels like a living place. I had a wonderfully terrifying moment early on when exploring around the Aurora. I was moving carefully past some kelp and over these broken chunks of ground when all of a sudden, in the distance, I see what appears to be a huge lamprey-like creature, very hostile looking. It stopped me in my tracks, and I had to keep an eye on it to make sure I didn't get too close.
I've read that Subnautica models populations of creatures in the environment, which is a great detail to add. I think it might be a little too aggressive in some areas, as the number of fish in the shallows decreased fairly rapidly. I'm also not sure if they model the predator-prey relationships correctly, since the number of hostile creatures actually seemed to increase over time.
When reading about the creatures before I played the game, I came away with the understanding that I could manipulate the creatures in the world by learning their behaviors. This didn't really match my play experience. Apart from giving the stalkers a fish, there wasn't any way for me to interact with all the hostile creatures. Even trying to pit them against each other didn't seem to matter, as they were only hostile towards me.
A good example was dealing with the sand sharks. I managed to scan one, and read that they'll charge and bite anything that gets too close, and that they can eat fairly large fish. "Aha!", I cried, "those rabbit rays seem like something a sand shark would eat, and I remember reading that they are poisonous. I'll bet if I tricked a shark into eating a ray, it will die!" With this inference, I tried to kill a rabbit ray by attacking it, chasing it, and attacking again repeatedly - at least 5 times taking about 10 minutes. When I finally managed to kill it, I was frustrated to learn that I still couldn't pick it up. Seriously, why bother telling me this information if i have no way of using it to my advantage? Isn't this a perfect example of learning about and using the wildlife?
I would like to see a lot more thought put into how the creature's behaviors can be exploited by the player. Maybe make the sand sharks territorial so they'll kill each other if I lure two of them close together, or make them run far away when exposed to gas pods. The answer should not be 'just wait until you are finally able to make defensive equipment', because the hostile creatures are way too plentiful to wait that long.
It would also really help to display changes in creature behavior to the player. The first time I fed a fish to a stalker, I wasn't sure it actually worked, so still very cautiously kept an eye on it as I got close. I also wasn't sure when the effect would wear off, so I got out of there quick after a short time. I would signal the change in behavior by changing the color of the stripes on its back, like an iguana. Dark blue for calm, purple for agitated, and red for hostile. Is that super realistic? No, but it's one of those caveats that makes a game feel great.
Also, minor note inspired the the next section: make some of the edible fish much slower. They are all way too fast. Bladder fish in particular, thank you.
Performance
I had a LOT of stuttering, constantly. I'm playing on an SSD with medium settings and a good graphics card, and this game does not seem to be performance-hungry. This was particularly a problem when catching fish. Those little f**kers were so hard to track when they kept darting away and my framerate was tanking. Man, I hated that.
From reading the roadmap, I think I understand why this was happening. The world is made of voxels, and when you enter a chunk it generates a mesh using that voxel representation (for those not familiar: it's basically Minecraft if the blocks were much smaller and smoothed out). If something about a chunk has changed, the mesh is regenerated, because the voxels can be affected. This takes time, and when the world is made of a lot of these chunks, that results in some massive slowdowns.
From what I understand, terraforming is being removed from the game. Unlike some people in the community, I think this is a very good move. If the voxels are never going to change at runtime, then the mesh can be pre-generated when the game is built and more highly optimized. That should greatly reduce the stuttering, especially when crossing the boundary between chunks. The game can perform much better, and the designers have more control over the environment they create.
(To be perfectly honest, I didn't even realize that you could edit the terrain in-game until I read about the devs removing the terraformer. I recognized the voxel tool they were using when looking at a screenshot from the roadmap about adding more detail to one of the areas. Good on the devs for using asset store packages to smooth the development process.)
Minor Other Notes
Distant LODs are a must.
The Aurora is fairly good, but apparently there's also a mountain in the distance that I am unable to see
Without these points of reference, it's hard to figure out where I am and where I need to go
Eclipses? Simply amazing, awesome idea. Perhaps more things like this to liven up the sky?
Increase refresh rate of O2 gauge
It supposedly marks seconds, but the gauge is reduced by 3 every 3 seconds, or something like that
Just make the gauge mark the number of seconds you have left and your total breath time
More early-game surveying options
New equipment to help find wrecks or fragments
Some kind of very basic in-game map, or indication of where to look for certain materials
Make scannable items easier to see across the board
Some of the fragments blend into their surroundings
You have to get way too close before you get any HUD indication that you can scan it
Highlight scannable objects when the scanner is on, that way you can pulse it to see things nearby
Increase scanner speed and range by like 50%
It's good that it saves progress, but it still seems to take a bit too long to scan some things
Faster moving creatures are a pain to scan
I should be able to point in the general area of something and scan it
It can be hard to focus on a fragment from among some non-scannable wreckage
The game could use more configurable game modes
I didn't like the micromanagement involved with survival, but freedom was a little too easy
It would be nice to be able to toggle different systems or adjust the rates
I'm really getting tired of this shit.
Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine.
http://www.ecardmax.com/hoteditor/
I'm a game programmer myself, and I recently started playing Subnautica. I have been really loving a lot of aspects of the game, but there are a lot of places where it falls short. I wanted to give my take on the game overall, and what changes I think would be beneficial. I'm totally aware that the devs have their own plan for the future of the game, and I applaud the effort that they are putting into it. This is just me putting my thoughts out there, take 'em or leave 'em.
Full disclosure, I haven't played to the late game stages. After playing for a few hours without looking up anything, I got to the point where I could finally start crafting a habitat. After that, I went through all the development videos to see what the progress of the game has been like and what the mid and late game look like. I'm excited to keep going and get all the vehicles, so even though I have criticisms I still really love this game.
Gear and Exploration
The synergy between the gear and the exploration mechanics is phenomenal. Seriously, it works so much better than in most other survival games. The way your explorable space is bounded by how far you can move reinforces the need for gear, which builds on itself and opens up the world in a very natural way. I hope this part of the game does not change significantly.
Crafting and Resources
The crafting system in this game is poorly designed. I don't mean to say that it's terrible, but it does not fit into the world in the same way that the gear and exploration systems do, so the design clashes with the rest of the game. It forces players to grind to gather resources, perform rather tedious inventory management, and does not reward actually learning about the world.
Resource gathering
The fabricator tells you what you need to find, but doesn't give you any indication of where to find it. After searching for hours to figure out where silver was, I eventually had to look online to discover that I needed to go to a specific location and hope on a random chance to get it. Instead of exploring the fantastic underwater world, I found myself hunting through the same red grass for hours to see small rocks in the hope that one of them would turn into silver.
During all of this, I would constantly run out of inventory space. Most of the time the small rocks would give me useless materials, and my only way to deal with them was to swim all the way back to home base to drop them in a big pile. This was not fun, it felt tedious and a waste of my time.
During this whole process, I found myself wondering A)Why can't I just see deposits for the types of materials I'm interested in instead of rolling a die, and B)Why can't I gather these materials from other sources. I see chunks of spaceship all over the world, but apparently none of those has a hint of silver, despite it being required to make computer chips and wiring.
Finding blueprints
I don't know about your experience, but I had a lot of trouble finding blueprints. When first starting the game, I wasn't even aware that fragments were a thing. Even after making the scanner, it took a while before I realized I could use it on some of the wreckage I found. My first uses were to scan around the Aurora, but I kept finding the same blueprints over and over again, which was extremely discouraging. I didn't even realize there were fragments in the safe shallows until I read it on the wiki, and I thought I had done a pretty good job of exploring that space.
That said, I think the blueprints are a great idea, and I would like to see them used to a greater extent. They are a perfect reward for exploring the environment, and they reinforce the explore<->craft loop that is in the game. Though, it would be great if every fragment was more useful by itself, always contributing to some blueprint. It's very disappointing to find a fragment only to see it's another damn vehicle upgrade bay (giving me titanium isn't much compensation considering how common it is).
A more integrated crafting system
To make a crafting system that really fits into the themes of Subnautica, I think you should start by looking at three things: the variety of alien life, the existence of the fabricator, and the core loop of explore<->craft.
The fabricator technology indicates that your own species has the capability to make objects automatically using a collection of raw materials. It doesn't make sense that you need to manually craft intermediate components before making something final - the fabricator is already capable of doing that. All I should need to do is tell it what I want and have it do the entire process for me from raw materials. Factorio provides a good example of this - if you have all of the basic components, it will automatically craft the intermediate stuff.
The variety of alien life, both flora and fauna, seems very underused. Each of these lifeforms may be composed of the raw materials I need, so why can't I extract all of those raw materials from these things? I have to choose whether to get rubber or lubricant from creepvine seeds, why can't I just process the seeds to get some amount of rubber and some lubricant, since both are present?
So, I propose a different crafting flow. You gather raw materials (plants, animals, ores) from the environment and take them to your habitat, then you process those raw materials into resources. Each raw material can be made of multiple resources, in different amounts. Instead of holding those resources in your inventory, they are stored in a massive inventory within the habitat itself. When choosing what to build from the fabricator, it uses some number of resources that are drawn from this internal inventory. You can also recycle crafted objects by processing them like a raw material, which can reclaim some of what went into making them.
Raw Materials -break down-> Resources -build up-> Equipment/Tools/Deployables/Sustenance/Vehicles
The resources you need can be gathered from a number of sources, and you'll need to learn about the environment to remember what you need to actually gather. If rare raw materials contain more of the rare resources, then you still have a great incentive to explore deep or risky areas. Furthermore, the only inventory management is balancing what you bring with you (food, water, tools), with what you bring back (raw materials). You don't have the annoyance of partially-crafted objects cluttering your inventory.
Flora and Fauna
I love the variety of life in the oceans, it really feels like a living place. I had a wonderfully terrifying moment early on when exploring around the Aurora. I was moving carefully past some kelp and over these broken chunks of ground when all of a sudden, in the distance, I see what appears to be a huge lamprey-like creature, very hostile looking. It stopped me in my tracks, and I had to keep an eye on it to make sure I didn't get too close.
I've read that Subnautica models populations of creatures in the environment, which is a great detail to add. I think it might be a little too aggressive in some areas, as the number of fish in the shallows decreased fairly rapidly. I'm also not sure if they model the predator-prey relationships correctly, since the number of hostile creatures actually seemed to increase over time.
When reading about the creatures before I played the game, I came away with the understanding that I could manipulate the creatures in the world by learning their behaviors. This didn't really match my play experience. Apart from giving the stalkers a fish, there wasn't any way for me to interact with all the hostile creatures. Even trying to pit them against each other didn't seem to matter, as they were only hostile towards me.
A good example was dealing with the sand sharks. I managed to scan one, and read that they'll charge and bite anything that gets too close, and that they can eat fairly large fish. "Aha!", I cried, "those rabbit rays seem like something a sand shark would eat, and I remember reading that they are poisonous. I'll bet if I tricked a shark into eating a ray, it will die!" With this inference, I tried to kill a rabbit ray by attacking it, chasing it, and attacking again repeatedly - at least 5 times taking about 10 minutes. When I finally managed to kill it, I was frustrated to learn that I still couldn't pick it up. Seriously, why bother telling me this information if i have no way of using it to my advantage? Isn't this a perfect example of learning about and using the wildlife?
I would like to see a lot more thought put into how the creature's behaviors can be exploited by the player. Maybe make the sand sharks territorial so they'll kill each other if I lure two of them close together, or make them run far away when exposed to gas pods. The answer should not be 'just wait until you are finally able to make defensive equipment', because the hostile creatures are way too plentiful to wait that long.
It would also really help to display changes in creature behavior to the player. The first time I fed a fish to a stalker, I wasn't sure it actually worked, so still very cautiously kept an eye on it as I got close. I also wasn't sure when the effect would wear off, so I got out of there quick after a short time. I would signal the change in behavior by changing the color of the stripes on its back, like an iguana. Dark blue for calm, purple for agitated, and red for hostile. Is that super realistic? No, but it's one of those caveats that makes a game feel great.
Also, minor note inspired the the next section: make some of the edible fish much slower. They are all way too fast. Bladder fish in particular, thank you.
Performance
I had a LOT of stuttering, constantly. I'm playing on an SSD with medium settings and a good graphics card, and this game does not seem to be performance-hungry. This was particularly a problem when catching fish. Those little f**kers were so hard to track when they kept darting away and my framerate was tanking. Man, I hated that.
From reading the roadmap, I think I understand why this was happening. The world is made of voxels, and when you enter a chunk it generates a mesh using that voxel representation (for those not familiar: it's basically Minecraft if the blocks were much smaller and smoothed out). If something about a chunk has changed, the mesh is regenerated, because the voxels can be affected. This takes time, and when the world is made of a lot of these chunks, that results in some massive slowdowns.
From what I understand, terraforming is being removed from the game. Unlike some people in the community, I think this is a very good move. If the voxels are never going to change at runtime, then the mesh can be pre-generated when the game is built and more highly optimized. That should greatly reduce the stuttering, especially when crossing the boundary between chunks. The game can perform much better, and the designers have more control over the environment they create.
(To be perfectly honest, I didn't even realize that you could edit the terrain in-game until I read about the devs removing the terraformer. I recognized the voxel tool they were using when looking at a screenshot from the roadmap about adding more detail to one of the areas. Good on the devs for using asset store packages to smooth the development process.)
Minor Other Notes
Imagine having to first catch a Titanium fish ... hehe
I agree with a lot of these suggestions, though you can now use the Scanner Room to locate Wrecks and Fragments