I’m happy to provide some feedback on this awesome project. There’s a lot I like here, and a polished version of this would be an instant buy for me.
I have years of experience sending and receiving Morse code over the radio, and I’ve developed some strong preferences about how to do it. That colors my perception of the gameplay, so please take the following comments with that in mind; I may not be your typical player. Answering your survey questions:
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The tutorial was fine in structure, and I appreciated that it was optional. You should indicate what the controls are. The UI requires mouse clicks (which you might want to fix as well - keyboard should always be an option), and one textual hint implies I should use the + and - keys, but in fact the code has to be sent with the spacebar, and “Enter” fires the shot. Once I figured that out, I was ready for the game.
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“Difficult” isn’t the right word for what frustrated me in the gameplay. There are a few issues. First, having the view jump right and left is disorienting. That’s compounded by the isometric view, which makes it hard to tell which square a plane is over in the first mission. The timer for sending each character is another annoyance. I can send code a lot faster than the timer, but the only way to abort it and send the next character seems to be to hit “Enter,” which fires a round. On the second mission, that meant I was often out of ammo and waiting for the next round to drop into the chamber. Waiting for the character timer makes it hard to fire fast enough to complete the mission. Mission objectives were also a little unclear, especially on the second map. The commander talks about taking out artillery and intercepting a supply train, but then I saw guys walking around and piles of supplies, so I figured (apparently correctly) that I was supposed to hit those targets. Also, sometimes my shot hit one square, and sometimes three. I don’t know why. When I got the “Victory” screen, there were still some guys and supplies on the screen, so I don’t think I ever really knew what the objective was or exactly how I’d accomplished it. I did the next batch of dialogues, but then bailed out of the demo to write this post.
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I didn’t see any bugs, but also didn’t finish the whole demo, having gotten tired of the frustrating controls. Incidentally, I’m running it on Linux under Wine, which seems to work fine.
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Control sensitivity wasn’t an issue, as I was using the keyboard space bar for the missions and clicking the mouse for the dialogue. Was there another option?
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The game scaled correctly to my 27” screen.
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For a commercial release, I’d be fine with a PC version. My only other gaming platforms are iOS and Nintendo Switch. I know both are expensive for developers to get into, and iOS would be a horrible platform for sending Morse code anyway. I’d want the control, view-scrolling, and mission objective issues I outlined above to be ironed out, of course. Allowing people to use a game controller would be cool, though personally I wouldn’t. My preferred Morse sending interfaces are iambic paddles or a good straight key, but I don’t expect you to manufacture USB-connected versions of those for me.
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I think my comments above cover it. The visual novel portions are gorgeous, I’m thrilled that you’re crafting a real story around this, and as a serious Morse aficionado I’d love to play through a serious narrative game driven by code. I expect there are a lot of others who would, too (including many other ham radio operators like me). Good luck!