I absolutely love Sea & Skies (over a 100 hours altogether since the quarantine), for the amazing world, ambience, writing, art, music, everything. The in-game feedback system doesn’t seem to be working for me, so I thought I’d mention some of the things I’ve noticed by now and do my part to help this series become even better. :)
I purchased from Steam and playing on a Mac.
BUGS
[ul][li]Inconsistent line spacing in some paragraphs, e.g. the Blemmigan recruiting event: https://i.imgur.com/1XJ5Mg2.jpg
[/li][li]Location labels can be obscured by randomly generated homesteads etc.: https://i.imgur.com/SGuDcTU.jpg
[/li][li]The first “bullet” icon in a rewards/events list is sometimes misaligned: https://i.imgur.com/7lPs17W.jpg
[/li][li]This icon (in the Nature Preserve I think) is very low resolution: https://i.imgur.com/0uvLHs9.jpg[/li][li]Sometimes the engine will keep moving when there’s a random event, like the stowaway. I was still able to control the engine while in the event and clicking on menu choices made the guns fire.[/li][li]Treating my nightmares at Magdalene’s does not visually update the nightmare gauge until I disembark.[/li][/ul]
POLISH
The map does not indicate your current location when you are docked at a port: https://i.imgur.com/Nw5Tepi.jpg[/li][li]“Bargains available” should not be visible when there are no bargains: https://i.imgur.com/4cCQFMa.jpg :)[/li][li]The floating in-world text for location descriptions etc. should be generated away from sprites to avoid the chance of it being obscured.[/li][li]Sometimes the icon for prospects doesn’t make sense, e.g. this seed for Lustrum and munitions: https://i.imgur.com/XiVUx8H.jpg (unless it was for a requirement or something)[/li][li]The stats of locomotives should be more detailed, because by just looking at the number, the Parsival-class seems worse in almost every way than the Spatchcock you start with, but it actually handles better.[/li][li]Mines don’t have any sound or firing animation, so they feel sorta tacky.
BALANCE ISSUES & EXPLOITS
Being able to change between locomotives at no cost makes the game a bit too easy: https://i.imgur.com/gPtoe7X.jpg[/li][li][color=#ffcc00]You can exploit the above loophole to get free repairs, by changing between locomotives of the same price! e.g. Pellinore Trader & Bedivere Escort. [/color]I think the cost of the trade-in should at least depend on how damaged your current locomotive is.
SUGGESTIONS & FEATURE REQUESTS
You should not be able to loot wrecks during combat. It doesn’t make sense, as the event description for looting etc. mentions actions that would not be possible during combat at all (such as your crew going inside a wreck).[/li][li]I think there should be a tooltip about assigning your officers if there are vacant positions. I kept collecting officers and it took me a while to notice that none of them were assigned.
MISCELLANEOUS FEEDBACK
I think Sunless Sky may have been a better name, and consistent with "Sea" instead of "Seas" :)
That’s all for now. I’ll update this post when things get fixed or new ones come up. edited by BlemmiganCommentariat on 4/20/2020
[color=#3366ff]Hullo, [/color]
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[color=#3366ff]Very glad you’re enjoying Sea and Skies and that it’s bringing you a lot of entertainment through the lockdown. I hope it’s continuing to do so.[/color]
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[color=#3366ff]Normally I’d say please use the in-game bug reporter but I can see you’ve been having trouble with that. Can you tell me exactly what’s going wrong with it? Will the interface not open? Will your reports just not send? (you need a good internet connection or else you’ll see a message that it failed to send).[/color]
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[color=#3366ff]As for your report, I’ll go over everything below. [/color]
[color=#3366ff]Fixed. Thank you.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]Yeah, this happens since they are randomly placed and don’t have a way to check for label placement. Since they are only there temporarily, i.e. they’ll spawn somewhere different next time you are in that segment, it’s not a major issue. Plus you can still see the the label on the chart and it happens very infrequently, so it’s not something we can really justify dedicating the time to see if anything can be done about it.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]Known and fixed in Sovereign edition. It was a hang-up from the old way of displaying quality results where anything marked as a ‘priority 1’ in our CMS was centralised and put into a highlight box at the top. This wasn’t properly removed when we updated the look and spacing of quality results in the last update.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]We’ll take a look at it, though I think it can be caused by using non 16:9 resolutions. That said, all your icons would look this way if that were the case.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]Yeah this is a nasty one where for various reasons that would take me too long to explain here, the game is thinking it should unpause in situations where it definitely shouldn’t. This should be fixed in Sovereign, thank goodness.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]Known and fixed in Sovereign.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]It does, it just doesn’t do it the very first time you open the chart. On subsequent openings you’ll see your position. Regardless, this has been fixed in Sovereign.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]Yup, I understand what you’re saying with this one but unfortunately it’s a limitation of our CMS and not something we can change. You’ve just got to think of it like an empty notice board, and you wouldn’t necessarily take the notice board itself down just because there’s no current advertisements ;)[/color]
[color=#3366ff]Totally agree. Unfortunately it’s not something we’ve had time to address in Sovereign, but hopefully one day in the future. [/color]
[color=#3366ff]Yeah those don’t refer to the item you need to deliver, rather it’s related to the quality requirement for the prospect. In this particular case Dominant in the Reach needs to be set to 1 (i.e. the Tacketies have the upper hand). The seeds icon is used for that quality. I’m not 100% sure why it was chosen for it, perhaps because the quality description is "Who rules this verdant domain?[/color][color=rgb(51, 102, 255)]". Unfortunately while we do have a fairly large pool of icons in Skies, there are way more qualities in game, and with limited art resources it means that we have to reuse assets and sometimes it’s a case of choosing the ‘best fit’.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]That’s a difficult one. The numbers shown on the engine yard relate to a locomotive’s attributes that you can see on the Hold and can alter with equipment, i.e. how much Hull it has, the number of auxiliary slots, whether you can equip large weapons to it, etc. Those are very visible and tangible in-game [/color][color=rgb(51, 102, 255)]stats[/color][color=rgb(51, 102, 255)]. [/color]
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[color=#3366ff]With regards to how they handle though, it’s very relative. We could list all the stats like forward, backward and lateral thrust for people to compare, but all of these are affected by other attributes too like the loco’s linear and angular drag, the skid suppression and the thrust depletion and regain. All of these affect the other attributes in different ways depending on their values. Since there are so many variables playing off of each other, the only way to really understand their meaning in terms of how it makes the loco handle compared to others, is to actually feel it by taking it out for a spin (and that informed our decision about cost as you’ll see in another point below). [/color]
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[color=#3366ff]So really we felt that not only would it be information overload (and that interface is complex enough as it is), but it wouldn’t be information that made sense and therefore be a bit redundant. [/color]
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[color=#3366ff]Besides, I agree with you about the Parsival, but it’s all relative in terms of what style someone prefers. Some people can’t stand how slidey the Parsival is.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]Tacky. Ouch. Known and fixed in Sovereign. ;)[/color]
[color=#3366ff]That’s a very deliberate decision on our part. Purchasing a locomotive is a rather big investment and given that they all handle so differently we don’t want someone to buy one, decide they are unhappy with it and then be really out of pocket and unable to get their old loco back. That’s why the buy and sell price of a locomotive is the same, i.e. the Parsival costs 2000 sovereigns to buy and you’ll get 2000 back when you sell it. This allows people to experiment with different locomotives, and trade them in to find one that fits their style (people are often surprised by how sluggish the Pellinore is, for example, or how slidey the Parcival is). [/color]
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[color=#3366ff]Of course the different tiers have different costs, so the tier 3 Altani and Agravain both have a buy/sell cost of 10,000 and the tier 4 Medea and Moloch are more expensive still at 20,000. The reason the Bedivere is free to trade to you is because it’s the same tier as your Pellinore. [/color]
[color=#3366ff]Known and fixed in Sovereign. [/color]
[color=#3366ff]While this has been around for a while and a lot of people know about it, this is one of those times where we’d say please don’t post exploits on public forums. Instead report them directly to us. It’s not a major thing in this particular case, but some people aren’t able to stop themselves from using exploits once they know about them and it can spoil the game for them.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]I get where you’re coming from with this one, though it’s not something we can practically change. Plus I don’t think we’d want to deny the opportunity for a savvy captain with low hull to potentially grab some repairs from a wreck part way through a losing battle, even if narratively it doesn’t make complete sense. [/color]
[color=#3366ff]This has been addressed in Sovereign where the first officer that you recruit for a particular role (quartermaster, engineer, etc) is now auto-assigned. The Officer and Mascots tutorial tip has also been updated to make this clearer.[/color]
[color=#3366ff]We like Skies, it’s very deliberate. ;)[/color]
[color=#3366ff]Thank you for all the feedback and the effort you put into this. As I said earlier we encourage people to use the in-game reporter as we don’t man the forums 24/7 and can miss things. Do keep giving it a try to see if you can get it to work, but as an alternative you can send bugs to skies@failbettergames.com.[/color]
Thanks! Looking forward to Sovereign Edition on the Switch!
That makes sense! But some people may read that as "Bargains are available" and wonder where they are. Maybe the text should be changed, into something like just "Bargains", or ideally "No bargains available" if possible.
That could be addressed by explaining it as such in a tooltip when hovering over the icon.
I think I understand now ;)
I’ll send further bugs via email if the in-game reporting system still fails to work. edited by BlemmiganCommentariat on 8/31/2020
