A deal’s a deal! This afternoon three forums and a reddit subforum all came online. Please check them out, register for any you like, and join in the conversation. If you’re wondering what to talk about, why not start with the Captain Jameson Alpha? I’d love to hear about bugs, suggestions, and stories from the final frontier. All players should find themselves exploring the same map, so it might be helpful to start sharing route tips and mapping data. If you get stuck in the game it might also be a good place to ask for help.
Since Jameson is still in alpha I wasn’t comfortable posting it in the main site menu, but you can find it tucked away in the community page as CJALPHA.BAT.
Enjoy!
<3 Farbs
I see successor and impostor, but no Jameson.
Sorry, I didn’t understand your note about the community page, but I see it there now.
Click on Community, then u see on the top CJ Alpha.
My experience with this so far is:
Spawn, go south to the beta oxygen facility, remember that you don’t spawn with full oxygen, slog back, go to beta again, get some more oxygen, since I’m nearly out by the time I get there.
Next, I look around for some lone guys. If there are more than two guys, you can’t fight them, since you never have enough air. Gather up some modules, with many trips back for air, then strike off for the charlie stations.
Get there, get jammed trying to get oxygen, as soon as he appears he destroys all my modules and I am left plinking away at him, wondering if my oxygen will last long enough to finish him off. I kill him, but we have spiraled away from the oxygen station, so I die.
Repeat first two paragraphs, but the charlie oxygen is now free. Try to get the charlie scrap open, and it’s pretty much the same as the third paragraph – lose all my modules, nuzzle up in a hole I cut in his armor, then have to break off to get more oxygen from the very nearby station. Return, and a different Jammer, with full health and mods, is there instead. Very frustrating.
My problems with this game, and ideas that would remedy them, are:
1. Not enough oxygen in combat. It seems to be, what, 105 seconds of air? I don’t mind the limited exploration range, but the extremely short timer once you get there means that you have to throw any modules you find onto yourself as fast as you can, without having time to place them correctly. If distance between station clusters was doubled or tripled, and oxygen was doubled or tripled, this would keep the slow exploration but allow for more interesting combat.
2. The wimpy start/command module. In the others, the command module cannon is at least as powerful as an alpha cannon, and you get items on top of that. If you could buy a variety of cheap modules with banked money, instead of whatever one thing the factory has, that would go a long way to alleviate this.
3. How long getting oxygen takes. 2-3-2, wait for it to fill up only takes about 10 seconds, but that is about 10% of your time if you have to do it every 100 seconds. Maybe make getting oxygen a matter of just bumping a docking module.
I love what you do,but this game is just frustrating in its current form.
HORRAH!
go captain Farbs you are quite awesome! i am currently sitting at work on break bored wondering what to do and though to check this to see if there was an update just to read this! im totally counting this as an awesome 21st b-day present which i will enjoy when i get home! ill be sure to post back here if i notice anything, but i just felt the need to remind you that you are indeed awesome.
I’d say you should be able to plug into (bump) a OXY station to refill, not bring up all the interface and whatnot.
I dunno, the fact that you have to enter VMEDS to refill oxygen doesn’t bug me. It only adds a few seconds.
Though sometimes I wish I didn’t have to do it quite so frequently. But I understand why it is the way it is.
Not being able to save at a dock is very annoying. Not getting pieces off the jackers, which come whenever you need to start anything (especially that down-to-the-wire Oxy station) is also annoying.
The duration of O2 is the issue, I’d love it if it lasted 2 minutes full, and 1 Minute could be added for each Oxygen tank you connect to your ship. Everything else is amazing though!
Pretty much what Kranren said…Random Bonuses? an oxygen topup would be handy, as well as a weapon upgrade for command module.Teleport!!
This kind of reminded me of an old NES game I used to play called Solar Jetman. Neat little game, and when you lost your ship you turned into a little man who could fly around and shoot and stuff.
Yeah, the routine of getting oxygen coupled with the weedy command module make things get stale very quick.Dead Space is pretty crappy too.
But a few tweaks here and there and I can really see this turning into something amazing…
Good work Farbs!!
Please fix the oxygen!!!
Spent a while playing and managed to get a group of red stations on line, and died trying to get another group up. It included a red dock that seemed to have generated with another module overlapping the named module (sorry – didn’t think to get a screenshot – too busy dying).
Very pleased to see rockets are much improved. I did enjoy the oxygen mechanic, but i’m also finding the sheer amount of work needed to stay alive a bit frustrating. Stumbling into a new station group while lost and low on oxygen, then managing to find the oxy station and get it working was a cool moment.
Presumably you’ll provide some purpose for banks in the future. I invested some credits in one, but was disappointed to not to earn any interest… What i really want is to be able to bank modules, so I can make a small fast ship for scouting, then come back and swap modules to become a heavy weapons ship to activate the next station group, etc.
Maybe if you invest credits at a station group you’d be able to spend them remotely on having oxygen deliveries sent out to you?
The number-keys interface worked quite well – it was always clear what to do, but as i got used to it i found myself stumbling over the way the order of stations on the menu changes. I’d select a nav station when i wanted an oxy station quite often. Having to wait for each page to draw helps to pull me into the aesthetic a bit, but is also frustratingly clunky.
@moth – cheers for the update, and great work hitting Delta already!
The banks are the only way to save credits if your ship dies. I recommend keeping a few bank accounts well stocked so you can buy your way through the levels in case of disaster.
I thought the point was to make the older games free when new ones are released, yet successor is still supporters only even though impostor has been out for ages. Or has the plan changed completely?
I’m not saying this because I don’t want to support you or give you money for these*, I’m just saying it because I’m pretty sure you did say that that was the case.
*Would if I had the money but this is just one of many games I want but the money I have is little, though more importantly my computer is slowly dying. My graphics card conked out a couple of weeks ago so I have a shitty spare one that my dad had (Radeon X600), my network card and motherboard don’t even support windows 7 even though that’s what I’m running, I only have one gig of ddr2 ram and every time it boots my dvd drive causes an error, which requires me to press F1 before it will do anything else “Secondary Slave is not an ATAPI compatible device. Press F1 to continue.” Sure my pc isn’t the worst thing in the world but I’d rather spend money on a new one than a game.
@roblee – Sorry, that was never actually the plan. I think making Forever free when Successor came out set a precedent in a lot of people’s minds, and so it was occasionally misreported this way.
Hey farbs, have you considered doing something similar to the way Minecraft is going to do mods; i.e., release the complete source under several conditions of use? I’d love to make a CPF mod.
@CW – Hmm, maybe but certainly not for a while. I’ve been thinking about a different mod-based project though. Is still a very abstract idea but might go somewhere. We’ll see.
I like the VMEDS interface. It’s a lot more straightforward to use than I thought it would be and fairly fast too once I got the hang of it. I didn’t mind the oxygen refilling so much after I got my first sprint boosters. I managed to get three Charlie sprint boosters at some point, so I could get quite far before I needed a refill. I found the refill sound a little grating, though. The most frustrating part for me was getting my weapons blasted off and not finding any boot/jackers for a while, but I think trying to get the stations unjammed in a different order next time might make some difference. I really like this game so far, and I think experimenting to find the right strategy is going to be interesting.
Farbs
I enjoyed Captain Forever, loved Captain Successor, and thought Captain Imposter was a big step backwards. I love the fact that Captain Jameson is moving in a 4x direction, but I’m finding a few of the design decisions so oppressive at this point of development that I’m going to wait for some changes to be made before playing again.
The rate of oxygen depletion in this game is rediculous. It makes the game feel like one of those arcade games where each stage has a time limit to complete or you die. I hate those games.
The tiny gaps between asteroids punish you for improving your ship and compound the oxygen problem. You destroy an enemy ship, add on a few parts, and then realize your ship is too big to get through the gap that returns you to the oxygen station. Sure, you can reconfigure your ship, or strip off parts to get through the gap but while you’re doing that you’re still running out of oxygen. It also forces you to build a ship that conforms to the environment instead of allowing you to build the ship that you want. I understand that it adds an additional level of strategic depth, but does that depth come at the cost of fun and creativity? Aren’t there better ways to add depth to the game?
You should be able to set navigation coordinates from the navigations interface. Then you would have an arrow that shows you the vector and distance to those coordinates.
One more point to consider, what is the core design strength of Captain Forever? I may be wrong, but it seems to me that what makes the Captain Forever series special is the ship building. If that is indeed the case, then it seems to me that you would want to do everything in your power to build upon that strength and eleminate anything that serves as an obstacle to that strength.
Hey farbs, thanks for the alpha release. ill echo with the others and say oxy depletes way to fast. and the fire rate on your ship doesnt feel right.
I have only gotten some Bravo stations unlocked, but with regards to the oxy situation, here’s my thoughts.
The main reason i struggled at the beginning was a lack of enemies. They were just a little too far out. If some weak enemies hade been closer it would help with the learning curve, and enable you to take out the first stations.
The same goes for the first oxy station you take over. If it was just a bit closer you could learn something by taking it out, and get up and running quicker. Cause face it, after you take that one out, you are not going back to the starting area anyway, so it’s only going to affect the initial player-scaring hump.
After this start, finding a small oxy tank (haven’t seen any yet in A-C) would make it possible to have great distances, make you protect your tank, and all that good stuff.
With these changes in place, the current oxy limit wouldn’t bother me at all.
I actually quite like the initial low Oxy situation, it keeps a sense of urgency about proceedings; once you get some decent thrusters and start powering up your ship it’s not as much of a problem. It does seem to divide players in it’s current state of depletion however.
Maybe if Oxygen was only depleted during the “void”/dark bits of the map? It would keep a limit on your exploring, but you’d still have time to grab a breather on station/grid areas? It would also mean less filling up whilst scrapping/repairing etc? Just a thought!
Why not fuel rather than oxygen? i.e. it didn’t deplete when you weren’t firing your thrusters.
@ChrisGW – I decided to use oxy rather than fuel because I think trying to conserve fuel encourages dull gameplay. Trying to maximize your fuel efficiency usually means significantly reducing your speed, which isn’t much fun. I also like having to choose between finishing a battle for an oxy station or retreating to catch my breath. This wouldn’t happen so much with fuel as you could fight (in some scenarios) without much sustained movement.
You could change the oxy level for a radiation level that increases. Then there could be different clouds of radiation which increase it to varying degrees. This would give the player a certain control over the time limit aspect, and add an extra dimension to the flying expierience.
just a thought:)
An attachable oxygen storage sounds perfect. Do want.
+1 to comments that oxy is too opressive.
When it takes 20% odd oxy to get out of the starting area and to the nearest grid, that means that *at best* the player is going to have to spend 40% of their time travelling to or from an oxy station when they start.
I like the idea of the gameplay mechanic, but I think it should be lowered by around 50%.
Definitely needs an oxy module
I think oxygen modules would make fights a lot less predictable, though. You’d go into a fight thinking you had enough oxygen, the enemy would blast your modules (especially if it’s a module with lots of other modules attached) and suddenly you wouldn’t even be able to get back to a refill station in time (you would probably have to factor in the time needed to redesign the ship so it could fly straight too). Maybe if you had a counter for the base oxygen level and another counter for the additional modules, but that seems like it would go against the overall simplicity of the game’s design.
I was very pleased to find that the stations stay unjammed even if you die. Oxygen refilling feels natural enough at this point, and with plenty of oxygen stations unjammed, navigating is fairly straightforward. That is, provided that the oxygen stations stay there. The guardians and boot/jackers sometimes destroy station girders, but I haven’t seen the colored parts take damage yet. Can stations be destroyed completely?
Farbs is my hero.
Farbs, what if you made oxygen capacity a function of the quantity, size and level of girders your ship has? so like an alpha single unit girder provides +5% air to your base capacity where a bravo unit of the same size adds +6% or a delta 2 unit adds +10% i think that coupled with a slightly lower consumption rate would be a fantastic mechanic. players will be more careful with their attacks as not to lose oxy. it gives girders a bit more worth to the player (not credits, just usefulness as its not just a block to bolt more useful things to) and makes building different sized ships more rewarding. you can choose between small fast and lethal ships or exploring ships with large oxy capacity.
i was playing last night and i managed to find a delta ship with two chronogears, and i died right as i got within range of the oxy station on my way back, it was fairly disappointing.
Farbs, do you think that in the next build of Captain Jameson you could maybe change the gaurdian to grey station ratio from 100 percent to 75 percent. Every grey station, especially oxy, having their own gaurdian makes for a very tough game; and I know that that is what jameson is about to an extent, but it may make the game a little too hard for many poeple.
I find the screen shaking and such when fighting a guardian VERY disorienting. Makes it hard to tell what I am doing and a little sick :/
Could this please be changed?
Oxygen is a problem,dieing just before you get back to a Oxy station is just to frustrating, especially sense you loose your ship, maby the players wrecked derelict ship should stay around to be salvaged?
also a toggle for the screen shaking
Aye, the “screen shaking”, the mesh distortion, is very… disorientating sometimes. Should make a toggle.
My thoughts after about an hour of play: My primary complaint is that I can’t turn off the (initially endearing) pseudo modem noises when communicating. I like the occasional module connect noise as well as rocket and weapon sounds, but the constant screeching got on my nerves quickly.
The slight bit of repetition in connecting to the O2 station to refill was a little irritating as well. An automatic proximity-based refill might be nice.
The low oxygen reserve is constricting, but I don’t think it’s overly so as some others have. Also, contrary to other opinions, I liked the narrow spaces between some asteroids. At first I was low on O2 so I just made my ship skinnier, but then it pushed me to find better routes through the asteroid field.
I too would like it if the modules persisted in the scrap yard (or elsewhere) so I could keep a small cache. Maybe there is room for a storage station, perhaps later in the game as it’s not critical early on.
Thanks very much for the series and the alpha release. Keep up the good work.
Notes:
-The interface for repair stations are kind of annoying to navigate using the function or number keys; just let us use WASD. Also, there needs to be a “repair all of the modules in my ship which are repairable here” button.
-I find the oxy limit a bit overly restrictive, but I know that’s the point. What really bothers me about it is that I have to keep refilling even when I’m just hanging around a cluster of stations and dealing with scrap merchants. Could we have it so that if an oxy station generates a bubble of air (scaling with level, natch) around itself that automatically refills oxy tanks of ships in the vicinity? Or maybe just have it so that when you’re near a station, your oxy can’t go down any more? (Yes I know how incredibly difficult that would be to justify in story. But you’re an incredible game designer. You can figure it out.)
-It bothers me that we can permanently lose pilots to lack of oxy. Can we get it so that when a pilot runs out of air, they go into cryosleep and can be rescued by the next guy? Also, it’s weird that we have ‘pilots’ when it’s anonymous internet people doing all the flying; unlike all his predecessors, Jameson clearly has infrastructure and more than one ship, so he has no reason not to hole up in an oxy station with his fellow pilots while we make use of his fleet. If they were ‘navigators’ or something and had personalities then that would be cool.
-I’m okay with how banks work, but I was under the impression that I’d be able to access my creds anywhere. It would help if an explanation of their exact function was in the manual somewhere.
-I would like the ability to blow up or at least damage asteroids. I don’t care how late in the game it becomes available.
-This game is good. The correct tweaks, additions and story will make it fantastic.
PS: I am not implying that my suggested tweaks, additions, and story are all the right ones. My ego is not quite that large.
Love the game. Been playing .2 for a few hours now. I think that I rather like the oxy – it makes things tense, keeps you on edge. I agree that the banks should take modules as well as currency, and that repair stations should have a “repair everything” function. One thing that I noticed is that stations are surprisingly wimpy. Several times now, I’ve seen them get pieces blasted off. That should not be possible unless you are TRYING to accomplish it, and even then, it should be difficult. I like the asteroids, and wish I could mine them. Maybe find mining stations attached to them? Maybe even find normal stations that happened to be built into asteroids for whatever reason.
Solar panels actually are very fragile things.
gahhhhhh, I had to make another leap of faith out into the void.
After scouting the area a while, I could not chain any more nav stations together…
with my delta class ship i set out…
The cold dark nothing rushed past me the occasional asteroid bouncing off my bow blurst sheild and along my nacelle bubble shields protecting my engines and main guns the bubble sheilds were in desperate need of an upgrade, they pretty much pop after the first salvos are exchanged but I have been able to out maneuver these symmetrist crazies with those massive mk II boosters I picked off of one of them. the fools when will they learn that a spiral pattern doesn’t a combat ship make… the thing practically exploded in front of me…
***DEERP***
I was brought back to present by the sound of the o2 halve-way mark… time to reverse course.. i noted my course had skewed a little and made a correction to get me closer to that oxy station I had passed a while back.
I saw that my absolute coordinates were close to -200, -200… hehh lets make a detour!
nearing my musing destination I began to tremble a little, no it was not me, it was the ship! it was the shear mass of the sation bending my ship as I approached… it was old, it looked pre-republic, but still un touched…
dare I try to use the automated o2 refill port… hells yeah there can’t be any security to speak off still here…
Hahaha, I love it.
I just got killed in the most idiotic way today…
The situation is I was having fun shooting at the BAN station shield generator. After some time, I finally managed to break the shield and was shooting at the generator itself. Suddenly the shield recharges, my ship was pushed back and my command module land EXACTLY on the laser of my rear-mounted gun. My ship sploded, and I lose my juliet destroyer with >160k credits :/
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Could you make a “Cruise control is now disabled on collision or damage” a preference so that I can disable it? This is because most of the time I use a scooping technique (http://i51.tinypic.com/11wgj80.jpg) to gather parts and that prohibits me from using cruise control. It’s really slow to fly back to nearest SCR station.
Shits fun yo.
Died when I was a chalie class missile ship, now I’m a Charlie/delta delta prismatic gun ship.
No extra oxy tanks. Had 2 when I died first time.
Are snipes in this game?
When do you expect version update to cone out?
How get more oxy tanks easyer?
Will you make an intrest system for bank?
Will you make a mid holding bank?
Any tips/hints for the game?
Also, anyone got a full map of this game?
Lol look more posts
2 posts ago mid was supposed to be mod
One more thinngggggg
Will you link all the banks together?
> Are snipes in this game?
Yep!
> When do you expect version update to cone out?
I’m not sure. I’d like to get it out before the weekend but I can’t promise that.
> How get more oxy tanks easyer?
Build a fast ship with a high rate of fire, and farm low level enemies. Low level oxy modules have the same capacity as higher level ones.
> Will you make an intrest system for bank?
Probably not, no. The banks are for holding cash in case you die.
> Will you make a module holding bank?
I’d like to, but no promises.
> Any tips/hints for the game?
1) Read the in-game FAQ (under the Help menu)
2) Visit the forums and discuss hints & tips there.
> Also, anyone got a full map of this game?
There’s a huge map coming together on the forum right now.
> Will you link all the banks together?
No, I probably won’t. I may however create a repeater station which would allow you to communicate with things like banks from a greater distance.
Thanks farbs, your games are the best dude.
I begged my mom to buy to when successor came out.
I looked on the fourms, but it’s hard to navigate on my iPod, and dads on the comp.
Link to the map?
Map:
http://cptforever.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=jameson&thread=18&page=1