Feedback Implementation

I received some great feedback since launching this prototype, and I felt it was only fair to add some more dev time to address the issues raised. Here is the quick rundown of fixes and changes:

• Adjusted starting fuel amounts. Player now receives a little of all fuels at the start of each run.
• Set player starting position to zero and grounded instead of 50 units above.
• Altimeter now sets to zero at the start of every run.
• Camera look ahead time has been increased, along with max distance.
• HUD now changes colour from white to yellow to red according to hull health.
  
• Shield strength has been rebalanced / nerfed.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback. If anyone has any further comments, questions or suggestions, please feel free to comment.

For a more technical breakdown of some of the changes, please continue reading.

Player Spawning

To maximise freedom of choice in the Terrain Streamer Brain, the player starting position has always been at the whim of the Terrain Streamer's position. When and where the player spawns, the terrain could be 100 units up or 100 units down from the very initial starting position. To ensure the player didn't spawn inside the terrain, I simply spawned the player above the maximum height of the Terrain Streamer and called it a day. However, feedback has shown that this was a mistake. What I should've done is either A) spawned the player at the correct terrain height, or B) forced the terrain height and placed the player where I forced the terrain to lay. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods, but the safest is option B, so that's what was implemented. 

The terrain is forced to flatten at zero for the very first section of the very first chunk of every run. It ultimately goes against my ethos of letting the Terrain Streamer Brain rule all, but sometimes audience's expectations are more important than your own.

Starting Resources

The player must suffer in order to experience a true sense of reward. But suffering is not fun, and fun should be prioritised at all times. In this prototype, in order to make the player suffer, I intentionally limited the starting resources so that the player would feel starved within the first 10 seconds of every run. However, it turns out that players don't play much past 10 seconds if those 10 seconds were just suffering, no matter the reward. So I increased the starting resources by the smallest amount, giving the player about 10 seconds before they are forced to manage their resources, and then about 60 seconds before they become fully starved of resources. Only more player testing and feedback can tell me if this was enough. This change also allows the player to experiment right from the start of the game, which might help to capture a few more seconds of play time from the most capricious players.