Hello!

GeorgeV here. Today I’m going to talk about a small change (still in testing) that we’ve done due to some experiences at i49.

Basically the demo at the booth went pretty smoothly except for one detail. Towards the beginning of the game some players would get a bit confused. The first thing you’re supposed to do when you get on the ship is read the quest that you’re being offered. It ideally would direct you to the ship’s locker where all of your gear is. However, apparently the ship locker wasn’t obvious enough and many players simply beamed straight down to the planet without gear and without knowing what to do. Some players simply didn’t know where the ship’s locker is or what the different objects on the ship were leading to stuff like beaming down on accident.

The good news though is once they got past that bump in the road generally everyone was easily able to play and have a good time. So us booth people would only need to check up on new players to make sure they didn’t get confused and beam down to the planet too early.

So we’ve thought up a few ways to address this issue. One step is simply labeling! Yeah, the text is a bit… texty but when it comes to playability maybe easier is better? The booth at i49 was practically a first Beta test as we discovered several things us Devs overlooked. It makes me look forward to the Beta Testing even more!

Hopefully now it’ll be painfully obvious what everything on the ship is. And it’s been brought up that it might be TOO texty and obvious so who knows, maybe we’ll change it. We are still in the testing phase after all! We also might use other systems to help make the “tutorial” even easier such as quest markers or anything that’ll help people unfamiliar with Starbound get around and play our game (at least for the early part of it).

Anyways, that’s that! See you next time. Feel free to discuss the “texty” looks. Everything is subject to change. :)

-GeorgeV