Is it fun? Help me test my game!

How do you operate a cannon?

Just tried it on my work laptop with "medium" settings.

From a control perspective there is no "feel" of propulsion forwards. The indicator moves in the bottom left, however the acceleration is very slow, and there is no visual cue that anything has happened. My brain was looking for something (fire/smoke from the stack and engines, a forward tilt of the airship as it's momentum changed, a shudder etc etc etc etc). I never really got a sense of what was movement I was initiating, and what the wind/drift was causing. I couldn't work out if turn speed was linked to forward speed or not...again, I felt it should be a faster turn at lower speeds, but if it was, I couldn't feel it. Perhaps some roll as a turn occurs would help?

Camera - Is there a way to lock it a chase position? Then have a free-look option (hold right mouse-button to enter "telescope mode" as a first person view from the deck?) which then returns to chase afterwards?

Fun - it's not really a game at the moment, as there are no goals or direction...so more of a tech toy. I can see it as the tech basis for having a game narrative added to it (thinking along the lines of Sid Meiers Pirates! as a sort of explorative/combat game, though perhaps without the dancing), or (with a small map) some kind of strategic combat game...though I think the controls would need to be more responsive for that sort of thing.

Without the actual "game" element there, it's very difficult to judge. In terms of control and feel (which is where you are right now) I think that some more visual and dynamic feedback to the Cloudship movement will really help the immersive feel to it.

Would you say that it could be fun with questing or the Cloudship control had more feel?

Massive question.

Putting aside the control/feel thing for a second, and focusing on the "questing" section. This really is the game element...I think there are a lot of "games" out there that completely fuck up the sort of model you are looking at (if I understand correctly). As an example I'll use Sea of Thieves. They implemented a quest-based game, however every.single.quest was "fetch this". It might add in "kill this, then fetch that", but ultimately the "game" was was a single mission cut/pasted across a technical sandbox toy.

The selection and implementation of the quests will define the "fun" element of the game. The 3 stereotype quests have been done to death;
a) Fetch this
b) Kill x of these (and bring me their skins/treasures)
c) Escort me to here
Bonus stereotype;
d) Defend this location for x number of waves

I'm not saying these don't work as quests, however if they are thrown at the player with no narrative, then it's simply no fun. I actually had a huge reminiscence for Desert Strike (mentioned a while back). This was a game that nailed quests in a sandbox environment really well...the missions were fairly generic, but were linked into the narrative in such a way as they didn't just feel like make-work. As an example of the first level, the missions were (with the category in brackets)

1) Destroy Radars (kill x of these)
2) Destroy Power Station (kill x of these)
3) Destroy Airfields (kill x of these)
4) Command Bunkers (fetch this)
5) Secret Agent (fetch this)

Absolutely simple, however linked via a narrative (and you could also do them out of order, only there were benefits to doing them as suggested, like not having the crap kicked out of you by anti-air if you take out the radar first) made them much more relevant to the player...rather than simply doing a quest because some guy with an exclamation mark over his head told you to.

This also added in the option for the player to "self-define" quests (for example, capture Commander from task 4 first...which I remember required some tricky flying to winch the prisoner on-board).

So, with this in mind, YES, I believe it could be fun with the right questing and a more immersive control feeling. For better or worse I now have a sort of Desert Strike vibe associated with it, but thats not a bad thing.

I gave it a go and here are my thoughts.

The ship feels very ponderous piloting it was less like I was in control of it more I was fighting it's controls picking up flotsam most of the time I sailed right past the thing missing it by a small amount as the ship oversteered or just got pushed off course by the wind and not having the power to correct for that. I liked the hook mechanic it worked pretty well but the control issues meant I often was circling the same bit of flotsam trying to line it up and missing over and over as I just skirt past it.

It didn't seem like adding more chimneys gave you increased power or improved control I tried 2 then 3 then 4 but it felt like it controlled basically the same. Maybe the difference is subtle.

The fixed camera (vertically) got a but annoying after a while to compensate for the ponderous handling I wanted to look further ahead but with a fixed pitch angle I couldn't really do that. Having a mouse wheel zoom on the camera would also be nice.

Maybe it's personal preference but the cloud layer being so close to the motion layer and ground layer made things feel small rather than big and occasionally got in the way or made things feel very claustrophobic.

The shooting was ok but complicated by the handling of the craft it also didn't have any weight to it the projectiles just fly off at a fixed speed like they are made of polystyrene. It wasn't very satisfying I just hammered the fire key and tried to keep my ship pointed at the enemy there was no feeling epic combat like firing broadsides into a enemy trying to out maneuver their firing arcs or position for ram, I had to try and get the thing in range and in line hammer the keys hoping to hit something sail past the enemy and then spend a while fighting to bring the ship back around it didn't feel like I had much control over the cannons and whether they hit or not.

Anyway it's a great achievement to get it this far but it still feels like it has a long way to go before it could be considered a game. The few things there are to do are not very satisfying at the moment. I know you wanted an indication of whether you should put more work into making it a full game or not based on if it is fun and I feel you've not yet at the point where you can make that judgement you basically have a system of three parts:

1) Building the ship with parts which works but it doesn't feel like there is enough in the way of options there to make a compelling sub game ie you make a basically functional ship you stop there is not much point in going beyond that.

2) Flotsam collection which is challenging because of the ship handling and since it's tied to the building mechanic it's something you don't need to spend much time on. Ie you get enough for a basically functional ship and you stop there is no benefit to proceeding beyond that.

3) Ship to ship combat which feels imprecise and unwieldy and at the moment not very useful you don't gain anything from it beyond not being harassed by the ai. Although it was pretty easy to just escape the ship and then it never comes after you.

It feels very circular you build the ship to collect the flotsam to build the ship to fight the other ships but to do that you need to collect the flotsam to build the ship.

Anyway some suggestions.

I assume you are going for the feeling that these are large vessels that can't turn on a penny and zip around at speed but it feels like you've overshot that. Tweaking it so the ships are more maneuverable but still feel heavy and with a lot of momentum would fix a lot of the problems I had.

The combat isn't currently very fun and feels disconnected from my control with the current system I might as well not have to hit the fire button at all just auto fire when in range as it's functionally equivalent. Maybe look at some naval type games to get some ideas there the recent assassin's creed games have had some fairly good naval combat with sailing ships broad sides you control adjustable sail speeds ramming different cannon shot for different effects and so on.

Since things are configurable it would be nice if that made more of a difference to the craft maybe you want to have the option for a fast lightly armed ship with a single cannon and a load of engines or a more heavily armed glass cannon which an enemy can rip to shreds if it gets in range or a broadside capable vessel with front/rear armor heavier less maneuverable but able to take a pounding and perform maneuvers like crossing the t.

If you could model some damage on the ships themselves instead of the health bar that would help a bit maybe a set of breakable hull pieces round the sides that gets blasted off as it takes damage. You could even make that part of the tactics making ships more vulnerable once the armor has gone and allow players to maneuver to present the more armored sides of their ship to the enemy guns.

The main problem is the lack of things to do the current game isn't really much of a game it's a set of mini games with no real purpose to them. You could make the combat the be all and end all but for that it would need to be a lot more fun on it's own and I think even then it would get old fast it needs some sort of purpose to it. What sort of game do you want it to be what sort of story do you want to tell with it. Something flexible with things like trading mining or combat as possible options or something fixed to a certain role combat or survival or somesuch.

It shows promise but I think it's not yet at the stage you can say if it's a fun game or not as it hasn't yet reached that point it's still a proof of concept a tech demo of sorts. I hope that helps