Help and guidance

Warning

BUT after that, no explanation is given about anything, we have to learn ourselves that with no “blue bar” (oxygen) you die and that you can build lots of different “buildings” for your base.

Advice

For these particular issues, you can add a little recap after the character’s death and a quick description of the function of each building before or after we build it.

Sensation of control

Warning

With a controller, the same input is used for aiming with the "vacuum cleaner" or an item and moving the camera: the right stick. And with the mouse, we have to use the right click to turn the camera around. This means that we can’t turn around easily while vacuuming or moving an item.

Advice

A solution could be to lock the camera behind the character when the "vacuum cleaner" is out or an item is selected. This means the camera would always have the character and the target in a line in these situations and still allow to look around freely the rest of the time. This could even allow to remove the right click input and thus, simplify the controls.

Choices

Good

After guiding us to do the basic interactions the games leaves us with tremendous possibilities.
For example, we were 3 to test this game and none of us had the same experience. One made a rover to explore farther, one tried to build an efficient base and the other made a big complex to ease his access to oxygen.

Advice

In this “sandbox” type of game, offering a lot of opportunities is very important to leave the player experiment boundlessly and create unique experiences.

Experimentation Space

Good

Astroneer leaves us on an unknown planet with an earth shaping vacuum cleaner and from that we can do anything: building, exploring, collect... It even poke our curiosity by displaying mountains and strange structures in the distant skyline.

Advice

Astroneer is a very good example of this criteria: In this kind of game, you have to leave the player free to make his own journey. The use of procedurally generated environment allow to shape new planets for each game, creating even more unique experiences.

Failure

Good

Death isn’t penalizing in the game, we just revive at our base, it even invite us to try again because the body remains were we died with all his inventory and a marker displays its position in the distance to easily find it.

Warning

BUT an issue remains, when we die and as the game goes on, we tend to use most of the resources close to our base. It can become harder to progress the more we fail which is not a very good moto for new players.

Advice

A solution could be to make some of the resources respawn around the the base if the player stays in a zone too close to it. Or to add events that reshape the terrain and create new opportunities over time.

Skills acquisition

Good

At first, the tutorial is really simple and we understand quickly what the game is about, we find ourselves really free to experiment as we like.

Warning

BUT after that, and really early, the game provides no more explanations and we have to understand and remember how everything work ourselves. It can sometimes take hours to figure out necessary functionalities and sometimes it feels impossible without looking for the wiki online.

Advice

It doesn’t hinder the discovery to sometimes explain functions or hint about how to use objects with a little text or sound. Or even add a “bestiary” in the menu to list the crafted objects function.