Hi all, Matt here, I’m excited to announce the open beta for Anchorite’s second title, Interloper. We’re initially looking at a few months of beta before a store release, mainly to ensure the game is fun, and bug free. With the beta I’m looking for feedback on the control scheme, and the core gameplay loop! The game is available for both iOS and iPadOS and will be a premium title with no in app purchases, ever. Also, before anybody asks about Multiplayer, that’s not going to happen. Maybe in a sequel or something, but not for this game. Pitch: Interloper is the space combat simulator, designed for mobile, developed by Anchorite. Fight for your life against waves of COMMONWEALTH ships, ranging from fighters through to carriers and battleships. Build up your equipment and fleet with items salvaged from each battle. Defeat more waves to gain access to more powerful items. Risk losing those items by venturing further into the fray. Failure means losing every you take with you. Key features: • Do battle across a range of environments, including near orbit, ancient ruins and asteroid fields. • Use captured salvage to equip your ship with POWERFUL WEAPONS. • Call in fighter wings, bomber squadrons and massive frigates to support your cause. • Choose when to leave the battle: Leave early with meagre rewards or stay and risk losing it all. • 6 Degrees of Freedom using a single touch interface. • Stunning, immersive 3D visuals and haptics. • iCloud save sync • Controller support • Planned regular release cadence. • Play in portrait or landscape, one handed or two. Check out more screenshots and info here: http://anchoritegames.com/interloper.html Get it on Testflight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/k0AkDIB3 Feel free to say hi over on Twitter https://twitter.com/Physicalpariah Trailer:
Wow!!! Just downloaded! Gameplay is brilliant! One thing: the ship design doesn’t match the cockpit design. In cockpit view we have a round window but in external loadout screen cockpit window is squared... and, I don’t like external ship design, but it’s only my opinion. Anyway very good job, guys! I liked the game so much!
Sweet, I’ll keep that in mind. I generally play with the sensitivity a little above half, but I think I’ll drop the default quite a bit in the next version.
@physicalpariah I like your game. But let’s save the praise for a review once the game’s released and get to the business what to tweak while in beta. I agree with @Truncana about the sensitivity. I decreased it way lower. Not to the minimum, but close. But I assume it’s a matter of practice. There’s a slight inertia and “lag” which is understandable when controlling a big ship. Once the pilot gets familiar with it I’m sure the sensitivity will be adjusted again. I like the Tutorial although in some parts it rolls away too quickly. It’s possible to scroll back and forth manually, but there’s no indication to do so and I find out just by accident. Maybe adding a significant scrollbar on the side? I’m kinda confused about new weapons. I warped out and got introduced to 2 new weapons: some sort of railgun or rail cannon and homing missiles I think. But when I get back to adjust my loadout, they were nowhere to find. Also my storage capacity was showing just 3 items (the basic auto cannon). Last but not least, aside from modifying equipment, I can’t mount a new one by default? Do I have to unlock this ability by doing more waves? And finally, the UI. Playing in portrait is nice, but be forced to keep my finger in the center of the screen (on a joystick) is ridiculous, especially when I’m playing on a big ass iPad. Might work fine on a small phone, but I’m not gaming on my phone. For iPad it’s unacceptable. So I appreciate the option to fluently switch to landscape and adjusted position of the right stick. I still would prefer to rearrange it to my likings if it’s possible. If it’s too time consuming to implement, I’d suggest to make it symmetrical with thrusters on the left. Also the buttons for equipment like repair drones are way too low and getting in a way of thrusters which may cause their accidental triggering. See the screenshot below what I mean. And the last suggestion. I assume those arrows above the right joystick are just a notification I’ve chosen left/right control instead of roll. If it’s their only purpose, it’s pointless to have them there just taking up the space I guess. I apologize if I’m not using correct terminology, but I didn’t spend enough time with the game to remember every item’s title or description, hence the made-up stuff like rail-something and whatnot. Hope you’ll forgive me. So yeah. I’ll do some more proper testing to give you additional feedback if you’re not sick of my nitpicking yet.
@macplash thanks so much for the detailed reports! Seriously really helpful. If I could ask which model iPad you’re using, that’d be great! There’s a graphical issue in the screenshot you posted that I’ve seen before and would like to track down asap. (it’s the beige glow on the skybox and the shields) As for the rest of your feedback: Tutorial: Currently the tutorial UI needs a bit of an overhaul. It’s in the state where it gets the absolute minimum it needs done, so that whole section can and will be improved. Making scrolling more obvious is a good start though! New Weapons (Loot screen): I’ll run an explainer here, though the tutorial really needs to do a better job of explaining all of this. For each wave you clear successfully (i.e. destroy a transport / defeat a capital ship) you gain a single loot point of varying rarity. When you leave the battle, these points become loot cards, swipe right on the card to accept it, swipe left to dismiss it. Accepted cards will appear in the relevant slots in the Loadout screen, (i.e. weapons in the weapon slot, utilities in the utility slots, and fleet beacons in the fleet slot) I’ve attached gifs below that hopefully clear some of this up. If not please let me know! iPad Portrait Touch Controls. Yep these are bad. I’ve not prioritised working on the control layouts for iPad (outside of landscape) for now as I generally test on my phone, but agreed, this definitely needs some work. I’ve got some ideas around a setting that can scale the UI to be smaller or bigger as needed, but yeah I think I’ll need to look into some kind of configure ui screen. That’ll be a rather large feature, so it might be a while before that happens. Arrows either side of the joystick: Yeah the tutorial just flat out doesnt cover these. They’re for dodge-rolling left and right. Honestly I’m not certain I’ll keep the feature (which is why it’s not in the tutorial yet) or if I’ll change it somehow. Essentially, if you see a wall of projectiles coming at you, mash those buttons. Also useful for setting up attack runs on larger ships No need to apologise for terminology! Thanks again for your detailed feedback
Got into the beta today! How do you prefer to receive the feedback and remarks? Here? on TestFlight bug report? On the integrated Bug report function of the app? For the moment, my only remarks are frequent crashes of the game when going in and out of the settings menu. Sometimes it happens just like that, sometimes it's because I have modified a setting. But every time, it happens at the end of the countdown timer. Also, I like playing with the Y axis not inverted and it seems that there is no way to do that now: when I uncheck the inversion setting, the controls stay the same (i.e. inverted no matter what). But cool game, I really enjoy it so far from my 20 minutes or so of testing
@Ringerill feel free to leave the feedback here, or via twitter. I’ve had trouble actually getting the testflight feedback in the past haha. Also thanks so much for playing the game! As for crashes, do you mean a crash to the home screen or does the screen go blue? There’s a persistent ongoing bug that occurs when pausing the game that causes the screen to go blue, (i.e. no controls, but sound still works) And as for Yaxis inversion... I’ll look into that, others have reported it worked fine? It could be that my UI suggests that Yaxis inversion is the “true” state..
Interloper Release Notes (Beta) 0.8.42 Thanks so much to everyone who’s tested so far, and to those joining now, thanks to you too. This is just a quick update to fix some of the more egregious issues that were occurring in the first build for beta-launch. Regular releases should occur every Monday night, Sydney time. Fixes: Maybe fixed the pause screen crash bug. Had to remove the timeout after resuming for the time being though Actually implemented Y-axis inversion. Sorry about that. Changed sensitivity range to be much lower. My play style is now at the highest range of sensitivity. Known issues: Dying whilst hunters sight is active might cause a crash. Uninstalling and re-installing the game forces a tutorial re-run, might override player data.
I was playing on iPad 6th gen 2018 but I might try it on other iPads as well. I finished 2 waves again. Got introduced to some shield or sonic something. But once again, my storage contains of 3 autocannons as before. Nothing new to equip despite the introduced card. So either I still don't get the mechanics or there's something wrong with it.
Hmm I’ve not been clear with the loadout screen. (And, admittedly the graphic design isnt clear either) There are five slots in total on the ship. The two at the top are for utilities, two in the middle are for weapons and the bottom one is for fleet beacons. Pressing the “modify” button will take you to a list of the relevant type of attachments Shields, repair drones, stasis, and interdictor attachments all go into the utilities category. I’ve added a marked up screen cap, hopefully that helps! If you’re definitely still not seeing utilities or fleet beacons, let me know.
To be clear, I’m going to improve the design and UX of that screen to make it more clear how it works.
@physicalpariah the thing is I don’t have an option to modify. It says Empty slot. That’s my point. All I can do is to modify two weapons, nothing else. I got stasis after warping out, but it was nowhere to find. I can’t tap on Empty slot to add anything. That’s why I asked previously if it works in a form of unlock, that I need to finish more waves to unlock these slots to be able to modify them further.
Hmmm very strange. @macplash , very strange indeed... There’s definitely no unlock system of any kind. If you get to the loot page and swipe right on an item then you should have it. I’m not really sure where the issue might be with this one.. If, after leaving a run, you see the loot page, and you swipe right on an item, then it should appear in both your full inventory (accessible from the loot page and loadout page) and in it’s relevant slot. If that’s not the case, then would you mind screen recording a play through so that I can see step by stem what’s happening? Sorry for the extended confusion here!
Nevermind @physicalpariah - I’ll record a video after my next attempt and you’ll point out if there’s something wrong with what I’m doing or the game mechanics itself. Deal? ————————- EDIT: I don’t know what’s different but it works like a charm now. I tried twice. First time I got just new weapons, so modifying them was available right away, but for the second attempt I got shields and new stuff and the buttons changed their status from Empty slot to Modify automatically. Only think causing a problem before I can think of is the swiping left and right. It doesn’t work for the first swipe, sometimes not even for the second. It’s noticeable on the video. First swipe didn’t work for neither of the items. Anyway, eventually it works, so that’s the important outcome I guess. Sorry for the false alarm.
Mm yeah I noticed after posting that the swiping is not great on iPad, again another element i’ll need to work on! I’ll also set this up as a known bug all the same. It could have something to do with iCloud save sync, or it could just be that the swipe mechanism is not great on iPad. Either way, between that and the settings menu crashes, I’ll be busy for the next couple days! Thanks again for being patient with the game
Interloper Release Notes (Beta) 0.8.48 Another quick update to try and fix the annoying crash bug for the settings page. Fixes: • Maybe fixed the pause screen crash bug. Tracked down a divide by zero issue. Fingers crossed this is it! Known issues: • Dying whilst hunters sight is active might cause a crash. • Uninstalling and re-installing the game forces a tutorial re-run, might override player data.
I'm enjoying the game more and more. Especially since more fixes are being made. However, I am still having these crashes by using the pause menu. It is quite random: it can happen during the pause screen, it can happen after a resume or it can even happen when I exit the run. However, it doesn't seem to be happening all the time. It also doesn't seem to be related to the amount of things happening (I though at first it might come from the fact that when I resume, all the enemy ships would fire again, the missiles would have to be resumed too, etc.). I tried to reach the level 5 and played with the pause screen: it crashed after the 3rd attempt only. I also have a quick question about how missiles should work. I have right now the MX 22 - Swarm Launcher (and a Turret Mount in case it helps). And to be frank, it is truly OP... As the missiles are auto-guided, all I have to do it survive the enemy shots and let the missiles annihilate everything on their own. At the moment, I still cannot finish the run with only that but I can imagine the possibility to find better defence/repair equipment and just fly around from the enemy and wait for them to die form the missiles. This is my feeling from the first levels in a run however. Maybe later on enemy ships are less sensitive to missiles damage and you have to alternate between shield piercing and hull damaging weapons. Maybe they will be able to destroy missiles too, I haven't seen it yet. If this is the case, then the missiles might not be so OP in the end
Interloper Release Notes (Beta) 0.8.102 Unified Touch Controller Update. Due to a public holiday in Australia, this week's monday build has been delayed to Tuesday night. Sorry about that. Big updates today though: The default yaw control scheme has been changed so that small movements near the centre of the virtual joystick will yaw the ship, and major movements will roll it. Hopefully that gives everyone the best of both worlds, without sacrificing fidelity or accuracy. Setting the control mode to “yaw instead of roll" will simply invert this, with a slight rolling action happening near the centre of the joystick. This also applies to anybody using MFI controllers (or xbox / ps4 controllers) Along with that there’s an absolute ton of fixes and tweaks in todays build. If there’s any issues, feel free to let me know either via Twitter, Email or on the TouchArcade Forums. I’ve changed the feedback button to link directly to the forums as that’s a better public discussion than twitter for the beta. Features Improved (?) control system. New explosion graphics Added sun-shafts in certain environments Moved Warp Out Button to top right, added an icon. De cluttered targeting icons for enemies and friendlies Made early ships have directional shields as opposed to spherical Moved all the guns on Flak Frigates to the front. Severely nerfed Turret Mount Lance Beams now no longer soft-track targets, instead fire purely frorward Reworked UI Scaling between iOS and iPadOS Improved touch layout for iPad in portrait and Landscape. Improved Text and labels in Loadout screen Fixes: When yaw is enabled joystick now properly moves. Removed “Reset Player” option for the time being Soft Lock when player used hunters sight and died should be resolved now Fixed (a) slowdown in later levels Fixed the ability to start the round with low control sensitivity. Lance Beams no longer kill player projectiles Enemies now spawn at the correct entry points, not the middle of the map Known issues: Carrier and Battleship might be hard to target? Lance frigates have unfinished art for guns. Explosions sometimes leave behind solid objects? Uninstalling and re-installing the game forces a tutorial re-run, might override player data.
