Factorio Forums

abregado wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 7:26 am

Blaster wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2019 11:14 pm Oh, almost forgot to mention. The bounding boxes for the diagonal cliff edges are too big.

This is being looked at.

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fnkrjnkie wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 4:46 am eh.... honestly the demo having the huge wave of enemies is a terrible decision. Biters/enemys in general should be disabled by default in the demo and the game. Leave the biters on as an option for for people wanting more of a challenge. They really do seem to be not liked as a general consensus. But I can understand as a developer disabling biters also takes away a huge chunk of the game aka researching military/weapons/etc.... But honestly.... the game is still great and fine without that. It really should just be an added difficulty experience. Not a default one. Just a personal opinion

warlordship wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2019 11:18 pm [...]
12- The power plant serves as a power pole AND generator in one. Which makes me wonder why we don't have that already on the 4 current power generators. It'd be handle, and could help simplify some builds. Imagine a solar panel blueprint that doesn't need to leave room for the substations in it. It may help some new players who can't understand why their steam engines are not working, since you didn't put THEM under a power pole. Having a power pole connect to them automatically would be interesting. I'm not sure how solar panels would work like this, but having a wire come from a pole on the steam engine/turbine or accumulators would be neat. You could even let them chain wires from engine to engine, so it indicates all the engines in an array are part of the same array. Giving them a small power provider range around them (even one square) would help sync up with them being like a power pole.

*- (Now that I think more about that, can we please get this? Let power producers give out a wire connection, and auto-connect to nearby poles/producers.)

• Factoriobots pathfinding is wonky from time to time. Mostly the trembling just before doing something is weird, especially in the beginning

• A burner inserter does not take an item when a belt takes a corner in front of it and the items are on the 'far' end of the belt, is some kind of warning neccesairy?

• The destrucable spaceship parts feel a bit odd graphic wise. I guess they are not revamped yet? They feel out of style compared to the interactable spaceship objects.

• All questst - top left - you start with the end goal and go down to the goals before, I found it weird and expected it to be the other way round. (last goal at the bottom, first at the top)

• The lone radar gets destroyed before I even noticed it was there
  • Something fun would be that the radar is powered by 2 solars, those only activate when you get close. maybe even walled in so neither the player nor the enemys can get those.

• And when finishing, just generating a random world around the starting world? That way a new player can immediatly continue his first world? Just use the standard settings for generation. This item would ad a lot of value to me when I would start playing Factorio a first time. I would feel a bit sad I need to leave my first base so early on in the game just to do the exact same thing again. (only 2 hours in the game and a startover is required, its only 2 hours, but you need to set up again a lot of things witch you know already, this means another 2 hours of doing stuff before encountering 'something new'"

Deadlock989 wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 12:43 pm [Moderated by Koub because off-topic. Reason described here : viewtopic.php?p=447727#p447727

abregado wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 7:28 am

ManaUser wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 2:33 am One quick nitpick: In the evacuation stage it asks me to pick things up. But I'd already picked up everything I wanted in the previous step.

If there is nothing left to take, the quest should auto complete. Ill look into it.

abregado wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 8:02 am Ahh, I meant the original pre 0.15 Demo, which is still available on our website. Load it up and have a go. I remember your previous playthrough of the earlier versions of Introduction Scenario. Thanks for the feedback you gave.

Yeah the Introduction scenario is the same in the full game and in the demo. We would expect that it is the first thing a new player plays, regardless of if they paid for the game or not.

1. as a newcomer
2. as someone who learns only if being taught (NOT by myself)
3. NOT as an antagonistic user. I played fair, and didn't try to mess things up

MENUS:

• From the start, when you click on "Play", then "Start campaign", the player is prompted with a choice... and THEN another choice, both of which are generic and redundant. No (real) choice available, but yet the player is asked to make one. Doesn't feel right.
• I felt I lacked a lot of context to understand the drive to craft and survive. The text on the Campaign screen was barely enough for me to entirely get the point of the game. This feeling was already there when I discovered Factorio a long time ago... but I knew I was trying out an Early access curiosity of a game, so it was fine. But eventually, especially in campaign mode, newcomers will need something to get what the hell is this game about.

GAME:

• Right at the level start, Hints to teach the player basics WASD controls arrive way too late. Of course, the player can try it for themselves, but it doesn't hurt to show it earlier imho. Great hint boxes by the way! Nice visual
• Everytime the game turns into "lesson mode", explaining how panels work, there's a problem: you are teaching the player how to manipulate things, but in a situation where they cannot try it for themselves (player can only press TAB). In some situations, the game teaches like 2-3 shortcuts or mouse clicks in a row, and by the time these become actually useful, the player is likely to have forgotten about them. Either allow the player to interact with the game in those situations, or split these teaching moments into much shorter ones, so that after each "lesson", the player has an opportunity to try it (and hopefully remember it).
• There are also rare situations where two hint boxes stack on top of each other, mostly because a first hint box tells us to open a new panel, and then the next hint box sometimes appears over the first one. Worse: opening the panel at the very moment when the first hint box is glitching actually makes it loop in the background, which is VERY disturbing to the eye (it's okay for a split second, it's NOT okay for like twenty seconds ).
• Ship parts that are called "Large shipwreck" have a description that leads to believe they are containers, but they are not. Confusing as hell
• On many occasions, what should be accomplished during the tutorial is offscreen, but there's no way to tell. One might find themselves stuck right at the start. There should either be an offscreen pointer on the side of the game view, or the game should teach the player to use mouse wheel to zoom in/out. Also, map located objectives could be eventually appearing on the minimap once it is researched, but I believe that they don't.
• After having crafted the Stone Furnace, the game never tells players how to actually build said Furnace. There is an instruction to grab it from the inventory, but placing an object on the floor isn't intuitively a "building" action, especially if the player's inventory contains both objects (can be dropped), tools (can be used) and buildings (can be built). The game should explicitly tell the player (at least on the very first building of the tutorial) how to build an available and crafted building.
• Compilatron could be using ghost buildings to suggest where the player should place the first Tutorial buildings. It would clear a lot of confusion, and smoothly introduce the concept of ghost buildings.
• The "Insert coal" instruction is way too vague, way too early. It implies that the player knows about different minerals, about what they look like, that some minerals are in fact fuel, that fuel is a thing in Factorio... so many things that the player should know before being remotely able to understand what the "Insert coal" instruction is about, and what is expected of them. The game should start by tasking the player to look for the mineral, ask them to put it in the built furnace, and THEN show them "oh by the way, this mineral is actually a fuel, you can insert it to power machines, like with this furnace".
  There IS a tooltip when the player rollover the Furnace's fuel slot with the mouse, but it's very unlikely players would learn the whole concept of fuel by accident.
• Talking about Furnace, I would suggest putting icons similar to the Fuel icon on the two other slots to symbolize input and output. We vets are used to it, but it's probably confusing for someone new. The game tells the player once what the left one is, and what the right one is, but if the player needs a reminder, it's too late. Icons would solve that.
• To finish with Furnaces, I believe the game never explains that Furnaces will clog up and that, at some point, the player should consider emptying the right slot in their inventory... and that picking these items IS the whole point of using Furnaces Without this explanation, newcomers will probably never understand on their own that the Furnace isn't working anymore because an arbitrary amount of product inside the Furnace, and in a specific slot, WILL make it stop.
• When tasked to build a Burner Mining Drill, the player can easily miss how to actually do that. It's a building that must be built at specific places, contrary to many other buildings. The error message when trying to place it anywhere is a good clue, but it's probably not enough. Compilatron could be pointing out a thing or two at that stage (like using ghost buildings).
• For a couple of objective achievements, the green floating message doesn't appear, because there's an open window/panel in front of it. If you play without hearing the sound, one might easily miss it and get confused.
• The game never teaches the player that Trees are not just part of the backdrop (like the floor and the plants) but are actually harvestable.
• I've just realized something that is absolutely NON-intuitive, and might easily throw off newcomers: a couple of coal gravels sitting at the mouth of a mining drill can clog it, but a BIG wooden box is NOT obstructing the mining drill. There should be an explanation about how containers behave specially in that case, or maybe change how products pile up in front of drills' chute. As of now, it actually doesn't make any sense (now that I think of it... 200 hours later ).
• The ATL key shortcut should probably be taught way earlier. When the game points out that some "structures contain items" would be a good place to teach this.
• Some texts mention building things "beside" other things... idk... it fells like a very weird choice of word. "Next to" is probably less weird.
• Each time Compilatron says "Engineer required", the cutscene should trigger when the player is in close proximity, NOT when it actually touches Compilatron. It took me some time to realize that contact was mandatory (in the rest of the game, the Player is always able to reach out from afar to interact with everything... it doesn't fit well with this contact thing).

abregado wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 7:55 am Thanks for the long feedback.


It seems that a few of your points are simply you becoming confused because your regular Freeplay methodologies are not available in this scenario. I will address the other points because you have some good feedback here.

abregado wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 7:55 am

warlordship wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2019 11:18 pm 3- Also, what happened to the belts and miners I already placed and used in order to make the belts and inserters he asked for? It felt a bit rude he tore up a functioning setup in order to set down a sub-par setup that put belts on top of ore.
...
5- The game doesn't teach storage to me soon enough. I had settled in with the thought that I can't/shouldn't build anything the game hadn't taught me to do yet.

You are contradicting yourself here. If you are doing only what you were told, why did you build your own iron smelting setup?

abregado wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 7:55 am The low res sprites from a bygone era are going to be replaced eventually, but ALL the minable ones should contain Iron gears.

abregado wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 7:55 am

warlordship wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2019 11:18 pm 2- The robot tore up my current iron production to lay down some inefficiently placed miners and belts and furnaces. It also appears to have placed way more items than I gave it. It was strange to hand the guy one or two burner inserters only for him to lay down 5, plus more miners, and more belts. I'd recommend you have him request ALL that he puts down (to show that this is what you can build with what you made already) or build less.

This is to give new players a bit of a speed boost. Since production growth is exponential in Factorio, this helps get them over the very early stage.

abregado wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 7:55 am

The toolbar tutorial will come when it and all the GUIs are complete. For now, it is actually more confusing for new players to use than just accessing their inventory.

Amarula wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 8:34 pm Second observation: I play with biters on low difficulty (no expansion or evolution), so I don't have much experience with biters before I get lazer turrets and artillery trains. I was trying to play as a new player without using my biter experience such as it is. So I found the task to get rid of that first tiny nest almost impossible. I placed my two turrets protecting the iron field. I ran towards the biters to attack... and almost died. Run away! Waited for my health to come back up and ran towards the biters and almost died... repeat. As far as I could tell I never inflicted any damage on the nest. (Go ahead and laugh, combat is not my cup of tea ) I eventually researched and built a couple of repair packs, picked up a turret and placed it close enough to attack the nest, and kept the turret alive using the repair packs long enough to take out the nest and the worm.

userchron wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 8:07 pm Tech Tree made no sense, because once you start doing green science, you can research military 2 and finish the tutorial, why the other research?

DaveMcW wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 10:16 pm

userchron wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 8:07 pm Tech Tree made no sense, because once you start doing green science, you can research military 2 and finish the tutorial, why the other research?

If you're on the free demo you can't close the tutorial and start a new game.

abregado wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2019 7:55 am

warlordship wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2019 11:18 pm Can the chest be filled by the wrong item, and clogging it?

Just try it next time and tell me if it is bugged.

• Shortcut keys are not displayed and only item count is. I would definitely add those but with much dimmer color (grey or something) just for the player to catch up how to use it.
• It took some time for me to swap already set item to another. I figured out from previous times that I have to clear the slot first by pressing middle mouse button buth this was pretty awkward to do so. I did expect that whenever I pick an item and put it on a toolbar it would go there and instead I just kept selecting the existing item. I do understand that it is kinda controvercial as you might just click 1st item then click second and it would then generally swap them but still... Maybe it would do so when your inventory is open? And when it is closed behave as is... But definitely if I open the inventory I want to put item on a toolbar I just click the item and then bring it to the toolbar slot no matter if it is assigned or not - I am expecting it to accept the item.