No Prospects

I’ll start by saying that I really had fun with No Prospects, as did my colleague that played co-op with me. There is clearly still a lot of visual polish and content to come, but what is already there worked quite well, and we had fun during the playtest. The game was intuitive despite us deliberately going in without reading anything beforehand (bar the Steam description). The multiplayer experience was very technically solid in a sense that we didn't encounter any technical issues such as disconnections, missing items, proximity chat not working etc. We played for about 90 mins or so, and came away feeling that we would happily pay somewhere around £1-6 for the game on Steam.

I have some thoughts on the co-op itself, which I will touch on here and then elaborate on below. I will preface this by saying I suspect this will change deeper into the game, so do take this within the context of the first few levels. I enjoyed playing co-op, but for most of our session I felt like we were two people independently playing the same game rather than two people who actually needed to cooperate. That stood out to both of us quite early on. Other games of the same genre are quite guilty of this too, but I wanted to mention it regardless.

There are other areas I imagine you will iterate on over the coming months, particularly the amount of backtracking, the player experience after a teammate dies, visual consistency and giving us more interesting things to discover underground, at least early on. None of those stopped me enjoying the game, though. My overall impression was positive, and there is a solid foundation here that I would happily play more of as it develops.

The Steam page describes No Prospects as an “Online co-op proximity chat game where cooperation is necessary for survival.” We both agreed afterwards that there never felt like a moment where co-op was explicitly needed. We did agree that it's a game we would only play co-op, but that need for co-op play in the core game loop wasn't visible, at least within the first 90 minutes (which given Steam's two hour refund policy, is important to highlight).

Neil and I were playing together, obviously, but for the first couple of levels we weren't really cooperating in any meaningful sense. We were mostly two people doing the same job in the same mine. We didn't need to communicate particularly often. We didn't encounter situations where one person had to do something while the other person did something else. We could of course have one person hold a light while the other lays tracks, or one person do the tracks as the other focuses on ore, but there weren't really decisions that required coordination as such. There wasn't anything we encountered in those opening levels that made me think, “This is why I need Neil here.” In fact, I think either of us could have completed the first two levels alone, albeit a bit slower.

That doesn't mean playing together wasn't more entertaining, as it certainly was, but the co-op element felt more socially beneficial rather than creating much player interdependence within the core gameplay. I am almost certain that deeper in the game this is likely to change, but it wasn't the case early on, which could be a reason for some potential players to drop off/refund. I don't think a co-op game necessarily needs to constantly force players into paired mechanics, as plenty of games are simply better with friends. The point here is more that No Prospects specifically presents cooperation as necessary for survival, and I didn't yet see the mechanics demonstrating that claim in our playtest. I would have loved to see some scenarios in the early game that required both of us to do something as opposed to just one of us.

We purposely didn't use Discord, bar one or two bits of communication that were almost entirely unrelated to the game, as we wanted to play as intended. The proximity chat worked very well both technically and functionally. I can’t recall a single issue with the chat, such as poor quality playback, or any issue with it activating, and in terms of the sfx, I personally thought the echo effect suited it really well.

Neil commented that the range may be a bit too generous, and I agreed. There wasn't much tension around separating because we could continue communicating over quite a large distance. I remember my first time playing Lethal Company and feeling legitimately nervous about venturing away from my teammates. I remember opening a door and almost immediately noping out of there. I didn't get that same tension build-up here and I think that is in part at least, related to the voice chat distance.

It may be worth reducing the range slightly and making voices more directional. If Neil is somewhere to my left in a cave, hearing him from that direction would make locating each other feel more physical and make separation more meaningful.

You mention on the Steam page, that the levels are procedurally generated. I thought this was done really well. I don't want to over-reference Lethal Company, but your procedural generation felt much more fluid, with entrances and exits to chambers appearing in corners of rooms and connecting in what felt like unpredictable patterns. Forewarned, Lethal Company, and other games of this nature, can be a bit rigid in the right-angled-ness of their layouts, which can be a bit underwhelming in terms of level design. You did a good job at having parts of caves jutting out, passageways in corners etc. It made the track laying so much more interesting as a result. We died a few times at the start, and didnt encounter the same layout twice. I never really found myself thinking about where one generated section ended and another began, and the caves didn't feel like a series of obvious prefabs being stitched together, so again, from what I saw, you've done a good job here.

While I think you’ve done a really good job with the construction of the caves, I felt the game lacked a variety of interesting POIs, encounters and discoveries inside them. I will caveat this again with the fact that we played the first few levels, and could see that it was going to ramp up a bit, but that feedback still stands for that first handful of levels.

Finding the heart was interesting as it was the first new item we encountered within a cave. We also encountered the Half-Life Barnacles (the ceiling enemies that grab you), and the green eels, which were certainly interesting, but they didn't provide that same sense of fear and intrigue as in some other games. The ceiling barnacles gave us a good fright initially, and I did enjoy our first encounter with them. It's always funny to see your teammate be stupid enough to walk into them once, or twice, or in Neil's case, seven hundred times. As for the green eels, I couldn't really make out what was happening with my encounter with them. I was getting attacked but couldn't really understand where or why though I think this was potentially due to a lack of a lantern. I’m sure that the deeper we go, we are more likely to encounter roaming enemies, and ones that are more of a challenge, but we didn't experience them here.

In those first few levels, I didn't really come across much by way of memorable locations, or things I could now go speak to someone else about, which may be a somewhat unfair criticism of the early game. If I were to speak to a friend right now and pick that one thing that would hook them on this, I'm not sure what that specific thing would be.The Steam page talks about footsteps, whispering, shapes moving beyond the lamplight, monsters, traps and paranormal disturbances, and so I would have liked to have gotten a taste of that a bit more in the playtest.

You did a pretty good job with guiding the player from what we saw. It's fairly easy to understand how to enter the mine, and what the overall goal is. The giant exclamation marks for points of interest are hard to miss as a guide, but they did their job effectively, and we learned how to enter the mine, gather ore, guide the cart, make tracks, and purchase items, all pretty easily without much friction. The choice to use progressive disclosure of those mechanics worked well as we learned the core loop without feeling like we were being explicitly put through a tutorial.

Visually, No Prospects currently looks a bit unfinished to me in a number of places, which I'm sure is probably the case. It looks like it has a couple of more development phases to go through before being finished. At the moment, it has the feel of something made with a series of unrelated assets as opposed to something where every asset has been carefully made/modified to form that specific cohesive look. It currently has that recognisable Unity-project stage where the underlying game is there, but it hasn't yet had the visual polish pass that pulls everything together, such as more deliberate shaders, VFX, particle effects, lighting work and a stronger consistent art direction.

There isn't anything we want to specifically single out as being bad, as opposed to it it feels like a collection of assets and WIPs at the moment rather than having a fully established visual cohesion across the environments, characters, UI and VFX .

The quartz/portal room is a good example of this. The crystals looked like they had a flat-shaded and outlined shader that was visually quite different from the surrounding environment. The white cracks in that room also looked unfinished rather than like a deliberate visual effect.

Neil: I had a similar reaction to the portal crystal caves. Considering how important they appear to be, I thought they were visually one of the weaker areas. The crystals and portal look quite cartoony compared with the rest of the game, and the white crack textures look quite odd. It was difficult to parse what they were meant to be. There also wasn't an obvious reason why the portal was there, which added some unnecessary confusion for me. We were asking ourselves: Do we use it? Does something come out of it? What happens if we go through it? If it has no purpose at that point, its prominence makes it feel more important than it actually is. From a design perspective, that visual prominence gives it a strong affordance as something we should interact with, despite us not understanding what that interaction was supposed to be.

The player characters have a similar style clash problem for me. Their style doesn't quite sit naturally against the environments, though in its own way, it almost just works, besides being a bit of a mismatch. I would also add that the characters are not the most memorable looking, which may be neither here nor there.

The UI is another example of the visual identity not being quite there just yet. It's very clean, which I liked. It isn't cluttered with information I don't need and generally only shows me what is relevant. Stylistically, though, it doesn't fit the rest of the game for me. It reminded me more of the UI from a Flash survival game I might have played in a browser a few years back.

The stamina display could also be positioned more centrally within the player's visual hierarchy. At the moment it sits far enough away from my main area of focus that I have to deliberately move my gaze towards it. Stamina is something I'm likely to care about intermittently, while sprinting or attacking, so I think it could afford to sit closer to the player's natural eye path, and only appear when needed.

On the lighting, we both agree that the lighting down in the caves is pretty nice. The lanterns give just the right amount of light to let you see just enough but not too much. The actual light quality seems pretty good too. The echo on the proximity chat mixed with the dim lights of the lanterns is well done, and creates an atmosphere well suited to the game.

We assume you’re using real time lighting in the main HUB area as opposed to baked lighting, as there is a distinct lack of bounce light. The main room was very dark in places for me which made it quite hard to see initially. From what I can tell, there isn't really any reason to have this area so dark. I get it's a mine, but I really struggled to see due to how dark the dark areas were. I think No Prospects could look really good if it leaned harder into a deliberate PS1-style aesthetic. That's not a suggestion, as opposed to a thought I had while playing.

Related to visual presentation, but on the Steam page itself, the glass textures on the bus look particularly rough to me, and the bus itself appears quite low-poly compared with the characters.

As those assets are being used to sell the game before somebody ever plays it, it's worth updating those images to best represent your game.

The amount of backtracking became one of the less enjoyable parts of the session. Some of this was admittedly self-inflicted because we were idiots and didn't initially realise we should be bringing the minecart with us, and filling it with ore as we progressed deeper. Instead, we would explore the cave, collect ore, bring it back to the cart, and then re-enter the mine without the cart. That is on us, but I’ll still make the points around backtracking given it was our experience.

That was obviously not the efficient way to play, and once we realised it would be better for the cart to travel with us, the intended loop made considerably more sense. I think we ended our playtest right about the time we could purchase a minecart light extension, so it is entirely possible our gameplay approach would have changed from that point.

Neil made a comparison to Unrailed that I thought was quite useful. In Unrailed, you're constantly collecting resources and returning them to the train, but the train itself is moving through the level with you. It becomes the central point that everything revolves around.

I suspect the minecart is meant to become the heart of the team here in a similar way, but it didn't really feel that important to us in those first few levels beyond being the thing we make reach the portal room, as we called it.

This is more of a minor point, but the flow for smelting ore and crafting tracks felt like it was a step for the sake of a step. Even though I understand why its in there, it still felt a bit unnecessary. We can sell ore underground, but we need to leave the mine to smelt it, then effectively turn around and re-enter. I wasn't really sure what that additional transition was adding. I understand that in a mine you bring the ore up, then we make the item, and we go back down, but in the context of this game, I sell the ore down in the mine, I turn around and exit the mine, walk in a mostly straight line to reach the crafting table, left click to get tracks, turn around, walk back, and re-enter the mine. It almost feels unnecessary.

Speaking solely from a two player co-op POV, when you don’t have a res crystal, or have zero ore because you had just bought tracks, the death of a team mate feels like a slog. I decided to just jump to my death on (I think) two occasions early on as it felt like less of a slog than working to revive my teammate. That said, if I were to go into the game for a second play now, I would actively look to keep a certain amount of ore for res purposes, or obviously, focus on buying a res crystal early on (or maybe get a teammate that doesn’t keep walking into enemies), so its a good thing that this presented itself in such a way that as a player, I can learn from a session, and take that with me into another.

At one point it took me more than ten minutes to revive Neil. For me, that meant spending a long time dragging ore backwards through the level so that I could eventually get a res stone. For Neil, it meant over ten minutes of essentially doing nothing, stuck in the graveyard. That's a very long time in a co-op session. I think a lot of games get this wrong. Its not fun to be dead in a game. I get that there has to be a punishment, but the fun does diminish pretty fast when you’re unable to really do anything of note. I suspect that this is why you added the ability to spectate the other player, which while useful, didnt remove that boredom element Neil began to feel.

So again, I understand fully why you put a player in the graveyard upon death, but when that happens in a two player game, you suddenly remove the exact thing that had been making the repetitive work enjoyable, the other person. The mining and travelling that had been reasonably entertaining while we were chatting became much more of a slog for me because I was now doing it alone. Meanwhile Neil was sitting in the graveyard in silence waiting for me to finish. I think this was one of the first times we unmuted on Discord, as the game wasn’t fun to play during that period.

I don't think the problem is necessarily that resurrection needs to be easy. Death having consequences is good, and immediately respawning somebody would undermine a lot of the tension, but I do think there is a slight issue in that the amount of player downtime being imposed after death isn’t very fun. I’ve had times in the past where a game of Warzone, or some similar game, basically ends because one person gets fed up with being out of action. Ten minutes is enough time for somebody to stop paying attention, look at their phone, alt-tab or simply become disengaged from the session. In a co-op game, that's especially dangerous because one player's death is now making the game less enjoyable for both players.Had we not unmuted on Discord, I may have considered bailing at this stage as a player (as I had zero ore and didnt want the slog of collecting it all alone, moving a lantern bit by bit). That was the only point in the session where the game became properly unengaging for us.

On a related note, I think 200 ore is a fair price to pay to revive someone, particularly when ore is quite deep in the cave.

The fundamentals of the controls felt pretty good. Movement was responsive. Animations responded properly. Picking up and using objects worked. I didn't encounter items clipping through the world or any of the physics/networking weirdness I often expect to see in an early multiplayer build. I don't think I would suggest any change related to character movement.

Laying track was the main interaction that didn't quite reach the same level of fluidness, though I did find myself adapting to it pretty fast, so it clearly is at least somewhat intuitive.I could do what I wanted to do, but it sat in a strange middle ground where it sometimes felt smooth and sometimes slightly awkward. If I'm going to perform that interaction hundreds of times, even small amounts of friction can build up for a player. I think I would describe it as fine, though I don't think the control scheme is optimal. If I were to play this again, I would want to re-map track placement buttons to not use keys and to instead use my mouse primarily.

Neil: There were a few places where I wanted more feedback from interactions. Swinging the pickaxe at empty space or something other than ore doesn't seem to produce a sound. This may also be true of other tools, but I noticed it most with the pickaxe because it was the tool we used the most.

Neil: When I was watching Stephen build a track, there was no animation of him using the sledgehammer. I expected to see the hammer swing, hear the hammer hit something and then see the track appear. It would make the action feel much more physical from the other player's perspective.

Neil: I'd also like some visual feedback on the ore itself while mining. Something as simple as progressively adding cracks with each hit would make it clearer that the ore is reacting to what I'm doing. Minecraft is the obvious example that came to mind.

There were also a few places where I wasn't sure whether a jump was actually possible. If I'm not supposed to be able to make a particular jump, I think the environment could communicate that more clearly. Otherwise I end up repeatedly attempting something because I'm unsure whether I'm failing the jump or whether the game simply doesn't allow it.

I liked the vast majority of the audio. As mentioned earlier, I particularly liked the echo in the environment and thought it suited the caves well. A lot of smaller sounds were more subconsciously consumed rather than ones that caught my focus. For example, the sound of selling ore, picking up an item, calling the elevator etc. The only sound I would say I actively disliked was this one recurring sound that gets triggered in the caves that sounds like a big long drone thats meant to scare the player. It felt out of place, but in a this doesnt fit here kind of way as opposed to a that really scared me type of way. The aussie accent guy commentating feels a very small bit like a caricature type voice, which had a bit of a start contrast to the supposedly eerie caves.

Neil: I think the caves could benefit from more ambient sound. Loose rocks tumbling, dripping water, a low hum of wind blowing through the caverns or similar subtle background sounds would help add some life to the space.

There were places where individual sounds became repetitive, though. The most noticeable was the loud sound that seemed intended to scare us. Once I'd heard it enough times, it stopped being particularly scary because I knew the sound itself wasn't necessarily telling me anything important. For horror audio to stay effective, a certain level of uncertainty is needed. If the same dramatic sound repeats regularly without meaningful consequences, I gradually learn to ignore it. A larger pool of sounds, less predictable timing and occasionally tying those sounds to an actual threat could help preserve the tension.

The networking implementation was very good throughout our session. Over the past month, as a player and as a play tester, I have encountered so many games that had a very janky networking implementation, but this was very smooth. We didn't experience any obvious connection problems, desync or multiplayer issues that interfered with play.

Animations were responsive and I didn't have any problems with items clipping through the level or behaving strangely. For an early multiplayer game, the fact that neither of us spent the session talking about networking problems is a positive in itself.

I didn't see a VSync option in the settings. I suspect VSync seemed to already have been enabled (which is not always the case), but I couldn't confirm or change it. Either way, no screen-tearing, so that was a positive from my POV.

The loading is pretty instant going between the HUB area and the mine too. I really liked how smooth that transition felt.

I’m really sure what the purpose of needing to add a fuse to the elevator was. Every other item had a purpose. Eg we couldnt see without lanterns, get ore without a pickaxe, or place tracks without a hammer, but the fuse felt like a step for no real reason.

There is a fair jump in size of level between level one and level two.

You can escape the graveyard by jumping on the gravestone.

There were a few times where scale feels wrong. Quite noticeably, in the bus. In the image below, that bus is bigger than most peoples houses. I would also say this of the table in the shop where you buy items.

I enjoyed No Prospects, and I would play it again. I’m not sitting here absolutely itching to see more, but I could see myself playing it again. Your core gameplay loop works, and what I would want to see next is more reason to need the person standing next to me, more reason to be afraid of losing them, and more reason to wonder what the hell we're going to find if we go deeper. With a bit more time to tidy up some of the above, to build on what you have, and to give it that final visual polish, I think you’ll end up with a fun game that fans of this genre would enjoy.