David Pennington

I played through Jumplight Odyssey recently and here are my thoughts/experience.

- Really fun genre, spaceship management game where the crew organize themselves. - The idea of managing emotional well being was interesting - ultimately there wasnt much to do to remove the sad trait other than to take them off duty and hope that they recovered. - the only way i could tell to deal with grieving was to not have people die - loved the mechanics behind keeping crewmembers alive, but the base game felt too easy. since you started off with a ship that looked almost completely like my final ship that made it to the forever star. It was more fun to start with cooridors only, and try to build the ship as we headed out to space, balancing the immediate needs of the crew while also trying to plan long term (how many water tanks do i need? will i need a jumplight cartridge soon, and how am i going to get that composite) - The balance of the planets was something that i struggled with on my first long run, i basically ran out of water, and that was an interesting design problem for me, but i think it ultimately came from having too permissive rules around what i was allowing crew members to do (they would take way too many showers). - in a future run i basically deleted showers instead of going into code black when i thought we needed to ration water. I also disabled the greenhouse algae farms First couple voyages - I initially played the tutorial campaign and had a pretty easy time just getting through the initial phases, and then really didnt struggle at any point. i decided after a couple planets to try a harder configuration since i'd played a couple worker management games before. - I played on normal difficulty with corridor only from then on so that i was forced to think about the layout of the ship and to build systems as i needed them, instead of having the system to protect me at the start. - I tried out corridors only but that seemed like it was going to be much harder, in reality if i had learned that you could seal doors, i wouldnt have had an issue with this, and maybe ill try one more voyage with this in mind - My first real voyage ended in lots of sadness and despair, my princess was grieving the loss of her crush. I also couldnt get people to eat or shower and a lack of hygiene seemed to cause depressino which led to people setting the ship on fire, and I ultimately lost enough crew and got so backlogged on materials that i gave up. In this mission i learned the general order of construction that i wanted for my early game systems. Immediately after i started the voyage i created a 2x2 meal room and a 2x1 bathroom as close to the lifts as possible. I then added 3 double bunks to a bedroom. I also rearranged some of the rooms to be more efficient. - The next voyage went really well, however i hit a patch where i didnt have access to water, which ran out, and then started to cause all of the previous issues mentioned along with some starving and thirst/health issues, i decided to restart, however if I had known of code black I would have done that instead and tried to ride it out. My Successful Voyage My successful voyage came from realizing the importance of the water and manufacturing I built a huge storage of water which i filled as much as possible, i built actually too much water storage and decided to reclaim some of the materials after i realized how scarce it was per system. When i wanted to ration water i just deactivated the greenhouses, and the showers. I built a therapy pod as my first real medbay option, this seemed to be vital because there wasnt a good way to handle people with emotional issues. I did start with a very small medbay, and kept to only 1 or 2 beds in the med bay the whole game. I could have gone automated sooner, but i was always strapped for resources especially later. I also learned that you NEEDED to switch out the shuttle operators if you had humans operating shuttles, and mostly switched to drone shuttles (heavy especially but also fast shuttles seemed useless since they only affected duration/health and not increased load). by the time i got through the nebula my ship was complete for the most part, i mostly focused on improving my jumplight capability, and quickly collecting resources. And keeping people happy with chess/cards/books. The zutopans started speeding up just as I was complete with my ship, so i started to focus on the military missions, which i lost a bunch of roboshuttles to. When I hit the blackholes, i had already gotten 4 jumplight calibrators, but that wasnt enough to keep distance, so i had to man the turrets for 10 minutes at a time, this turned out to never be an issue, and there was never a boarding party that showed up. successfully. After my first close call i added a bunch of gun stations around the ships and 1 marine station point. Overall I loved the pacing, I was constantly engaged and even task saturated at points having the princess and ham cheering up anyone who needed it, managing prioritized tasks, taking people off duty, managing which systems were active to mitigate power or water issues, and building new rooms felt great(but took way to long for engineers/suppliers to do what you wanted). I liked the fact that there were room designations, and i overall liked that each system/resource had a room, I also liked that the builder provided a tech tree from within and it made it that the games evolution was based off of the build mechanic, which in turn was based off collecting resources. everything felt cohesive. My main gripes is that most of the systems were pretty shallow, - i never built anything other than basic generators in the energy room, and that was probably because they were tuned to output too much without any input, the rest of the generators had downsides. - the cargo room had no use since each of the rooms had their own cargo containers. - The food system was a bit clunky since you just have a number of food stations for people. I guess the ration station could have made this intersting but avoiding sadness was my main goal since it was so hard to fix. - The greenhouse was really cool, but it seemed like the best thing to do was to make whatever was water efficient, and the lights preference didnt make any sense. - The bathroom was super 1 dimensional, Speaking of, i dont see how you could support a sauna or a hot tub, I did have one hot tub initially but it drained my water incredibly quick. - The material generation room was fine,but after a period of time you couldnt get the material that turned into metal and it made the metal fabricator pointless. I ended up blocked by metal often in the late game. - The security room was useless but i see how it could be important for a harder variant of the game, blast doors and such. - Turrets were like 100% accurate so i didnt need turret upgrades or rapid fire, i basically never touched those rooms. - Princess room seemed like a waste, i added one at the end to see if there was any value to it. If I were to recommend changes to Jumplight Odyssey... - The ship is WAY too large. I couldnt have supported any more people than i did with the amount of water i was able to collect, and i collected the water from every single location possible. A smaller ship would have been a much more representative of the compactness of a ship in space, and it also would have presented new challenges/tradeoffs. I actually ended the game with very little water, and thats because i rushed through the last 2 acts. - The manifest should have had the ability to perform bulk actions from it without leaving the screen. there were multiple times where i needed to do something to a bunch of people at once, and this was a common process of open manifest, click on someone, do action, go back to manifest... and it took forever to load as well. - More opportunities for emotion management for the crew would be better. I want to target a specific person to get into the hot tub or force a specific person to go take a shower, finer grained prioritiation could have helped in that respect. - I also wasnt able to control who was on what shift, and it seemed like this would cause lots of subtle issues like having no scientists to run the med bay or no one to cook food, I could always switch someone's role who was in the shift, but having more say in the shift rosters up front would have been easier. - I started the game by removing most of the people out of combat, since I'd rather have suppliers and engineers. giving people in combat roles exclusive access to away party missions or extra duties like dealing with miscreants would have made them more useful as a class. - many of the systems in the deck werent usable at all, the science/supply/combat/engineer posts were just access to the division head, it seemed, having some configuration of the groups could have made it more intersted, trying to optimize the division for a specific type of work with tradeoffs. - division heads were just there to cause you problems, you needed to remove them whenever they got sad, and you also needed to remove them if they got a bad trait. I did cycle them a bunch, but the mechanic itself wasnt really interesting. Make it more influential or toss it. - Princess was not very interesting other than the story aspect, giving her the ability to cheer people up was good but same feedback as the last point. Make it more influential or toss it. If I were to make a game similar to Jumplight Odyssey... - Skip the "Hero" story, and focus on a lost spaceship trying to find its way out of deepspace - In space it'd be unlikely that you'd be chased by your enemy, its more likely you would encounter them at specific locations like space stations or salvages - Crews would pick their own captains, or captains, captains are the interface with the ship, the captain can disobey orders from the ship computer if players get angry with the ship they may jettison the captain and mutiny - Captains could force actions from specific people, this is similar to the jumplight mechanic but it would cause people to become angry with the captain - Emotional state was the centerpiece of the game, taking that a step further A more "realistic" spaceship sim could be more horror themed. Failure to manage emotions could lead to losing track of crew members, they could take down access to cameras, refuse orders, and become insane, causing chaos and forcing other crewmates to subdue and remove them from the craft - this genre could go way farther too, theres so many more ideas i've got for this type of game. horror survival builder on its own has so many options for keeping players engaged. Ok I know this is an out of order/maybe repeating list of notes, but it was a useful process for me to write my thought out about a game which is in the genre that I'd like to make something in.