Topics

1

Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.953

« on: Yesterday at 07:58:49 PM »

Another small one: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.953

This one has the score multipliers for after game victory based on your difficulty level, which basically lets your score reflect what difficulty level(s) you were playing on.  There are some reviewers who have made it very well known to me in the past that they love this sort of thing.   Not that they ever held it against me for not having it per se, but there's been some lively debate between me and them on podcasts, heh.

Anyway.  So that's in, and then there are also some notable AP cost changes for barracks and archery range units, to bring those into more balance.  Not that I want the OLD balance back -- this is supposed to be faster and more violent with the AP model after all -- but I also don't want the archers to completely obsolete the military guys.  The current approach is more balanced, but still more violent than it was before.  Further tuning in this area to come, I have no doubt.

Enjoy!

2

Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.952

« on: Yesterday at 05:15:40 PM »

Not much in this one: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.952

A couple of balance things that might prove significant, naturally -- resource costs shifting tends to have that effect.  Things that cost diamonds should get some more play now.

The main reason for releasing this release so quickly is that stupid bug with the music tracks only ever playing ONE of the 11 awesome in-game music tracks that Pablo composed.  Facepalm.  Glad that was caught before the general release, although we've done a limited release to press with the 0.951 build and so naturally that bug was in there.  Sigh.

My afternoon has pretty much been shot getting the website all set up for the page about the game, and getting assets to Steam, and getting the trailer on youtube, and taking a bunch of screenshots to be what get used on our site and all the stores, etc.  You may recognize some of your savegames in those screenies!

Whew.  And I still have more distributor-related stuff to do, but hopefully it won't take up more than another half day or so of my time.  This sort of thing is always super time consuming, but I really want to be able to get at least the undo feature into the game prior to 1.0, and ideally some more features than just that, too.

Cheers!

[Game Features]

3

Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Official Trailer

« on: Yesterday at 05:02:52 PM »

Original: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2013/05/skyward-collapse-official-trailer.html



How do you balance -- and indeed encourage -- a war between factions without letting either side obliterate the other?  How do you rule over gods, creatures, and men who refuse to obey you?  How do you build a landscape of villages when bandits and mythology are conspiring to tear it down?  Skyward Collapse places you into the role of The Creator, and frees you to tackle these problems your own way.  Brought to you by the developer of the modern strategy classic AI War: Fleet Command, Arcen's second full strategy title is equally unique (but far easier to learn): a turn-based 4x strategic god-game.

Your task is to build and populate the floating continent of Luminith.  You create -- but cannot control -- gods, creatures, and artifacts from both Greek and Norse mythology.  The power you wield with these is immense: Heimdall's horn causes everyone outdoors to drop dead, for crying out loud.  Your task is to keep both factions alive and fighting until The Master calls you home -- but this is harder than it sounds.  Bandit Keeps pop up periodically, as do Woes such as floods, serial killers, guild strikes, and vegetarian uprisings.  Every game plays out differently, and you'll need even the craziest of your powers in order to survive what lies in store for you.

Game Features
* A turn-based strategic god-game where you control neither faction, but instead strive to maintain the balance of power.
* Make towns and war as the boardgame-like floating continent continues to construct itself around you.
* Persuade your minions into doing what you want by controlling the circumstances of their (brief) lives.
* 16 gods, each with unique passive abilities and three active powers, help you further your goals as you pass into the Age of Monsters.
* Level up your player profile by winning games. Twelve unlockable buildings in all!
* Straightforward controls paired with an intuitive and helpful interface make this an easy title to pick up... but the strategy runs deep.
* Multiple difficulty levels let you play a very relaxed game up to a nail-bitingly difficult one.  There's no one best way to win!
* Co-op multiplayer for up to 8 players.

More Stuff!
Official Game Page, With Screenshots
Free wallpaper
Lengthy Q&A
Nick Trujillo Presents (comic)

Available May 23rd on Steam, our site, and other distributors!

4

Skyward Collapse / What to do for demo mode...

« on: Yesterday at 12:41:57 PM »

I'm thinking:

1. Let players do the tutorial as many times as they want.
2. Disallow sandbox mode.
3. Let them play up until the age of monsters, but no further, in regular games outside the tutorial.

Thoughts?

5

Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.951

« on: Yesterday at 11:40:43 AM »

The latest!  http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.951

1. Score has been toned down for round 1 in general, and been made more sane in a few other ways.

2. Some minor AI improvements and then also switching to an "action points" model rather than just one attack per turn.  Balances the combat a lot better in terms of the ratio of combat to the number of actions you're directly taking.

3. Bunch of new player clarity improvements.

4. Some flipping around of siege unit availability and stats to make those feel a bit better.


I have a lot of store/business stuff to do this afternoon, so I won't be doing as many updates as usual.  Looks like we're getting low in terms of things that need to happen prior to 1.0 anyhow, but the undo button in particular is something I want to hit before then.

Enjoy!

6

Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.950

« on: May 20, 2013, 08:31:22 PM »

Who loves you: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.950

This one is some awesomesauce, I have to say.  The game is sooo much more fun all of a sudden, even for me.  And the game itself didn't really change at all.  It's almost all interface work, aside from some multiplayer polish and a few odds and ends that were reported.

Big deal stuff:

1. Placing town centers and really all buildings in general is a lot clearer and way more fun, just from an interface standpoint (no underlying rules changes).

2. Holy moly the new filters are the bee's knees.  I love these things; they help me find stuff, and they look cool.

3. Oh man was I tired of walls of popup text that I couldn't read.  That's now disabled by default, though you can turn it back on.  Now there are "battle sites" that get logged everywhere there's a fight, and which last until the next turn.  You can review everything that happened on that tile, in proper sequence, and it's way easier to understand and see.

4. Health bars!  I was skeptical -- very skeptical -- about this.  But man oh man now I'm wondering how this went so long without them.  Performance seems fine so I didn't even make them optional.  I can if someone wants/needs it.

5. Zoom!  You can get way further out now, which is useful on so many levels.

There's still more stuff I'd like to do, like the hotkeys for cycling through towns and battle sites and such, but those are comparably minor after all these other changes, I think.  Looks like we're looking good for a press build, and of course I'll be further refining things as the week progresses, anyhow.  I'm very excited about this one, if you can't tell.

7

Skyward Collapse / Nick Trujillo Presents: Skyward Collapse Comic Page 3

« on: May 20, 2013, 11:55:15 AM »

Original: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2013/05/nick-trujillo-presents-skyward-collapse_20.html

The third page of Nick Trujillo's comic is now up!  Here are page one and page two if you missed them.  Two more pages are in the works, which will be released periodically leading up to the release of Skyward Collapse on the 23rd -- that's this Thursday.  Enjoy!

8

Skyward Collapse / Developers requesting feedback: Which Woes are too woe-inducing?

« on: May 20, 2013, 09:53:43 AM »

Hello there!  From this:

Honestly it seems like what people are most interested for the game at this point is refinements of that sort of nature, versus more woes.  I'm becoming increasingly inclined to put more woes mostly on hold until post-1.0, and instead focus on that sort of thing.  What are people's reactions to that?  Are the current woes varied enough to not get stale for the time being?

And this:

I think Woes could probably wait. Woes could be amazing, and I'd really like you to take as much time as possible on them. Maybe a quick review of the current Woes would be good and a bit of Woe polishing, but that's about it. Adding new Woes doesn't seem like it's imperative at the moment. It might not be too bad an idea to post another developers question regarding the current Woes. Which ones work, are the most fun etc. Hmmm, said Woe a lot there. "Whoa".

We get this thread.  Thoughts?

9

Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.907

« on: May 20, 2013, 09:19:48 AM »

Now out: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.907

Features of note:

1. Production of incense is now not so ridiculously low and difficulty.

2. Fish and rice have been removed from the game.

3. Fixed that overspending bug.

My questions to you (repeat from last thread):

1. Did we solve the problem of "not enough depth?"  Aka, is this sufficiently hard to win on a high difficulty in a way that is interesting and brain-involving?  It's sounding increasingly like the answer is yet.  And the score requirements, if you play with high ones of those, remove pretty much any chance of overt cheese of the style we'd been seeing before (new styles may of course arise, and probably will given enough time; players are so darn clever).

2. Does Easy difficulty feel sufficiently laid back, if anyone is playing that?  It shouldn't really require much strategy.  So long as you don't do anything egregiously silly, it should go pretty smoothly.

3. How about Medium difficulty?  That should be like playing on difficulty 7 of AI War, I think.  It's definitely quite possible to lose, and frequently, but it shouldn't feel unfair.

4. Continuing the AI War analogy, Hard would be more like diff 8, whereas Expert is more like diff 9.

5. As I mentioned in another thread, we're expected to deliver a press build today.  Waiting is bad because it hurts our ability to have pre-release buzz.  But giving a ridiculous build to the press in terms of it being way too hard -- or having mechanics that we shift on them a ton -- also is a bad idea.  So how are your feelings on the current mechanics?

My read on the situation from what folks have said so far (repeat from last thread).

1. It seems like we've solved the obvious cheese situations, as I noted.  So the game should be sufficiently interesting to the grognards here for a sufficiently long amount of time to survive a week or two of interest at worst; and if more cheese is uncovered, we can always deal with that on a case by case basis, as with AI War.

2. I'm a little worried that the bottom end of the difficulty levels are too hard now, but some recent adjustments may have brought that more in line with what is needed.

3. I feel like the current mechanics are -- knock on wood -- pretty stable.  The repair buildings option seems like a really obvious thing to have now, though it never occurred to me.  The scorched earth stuff really makes a ton of sense and I think is obvious to keep.  Score is great, and the score requirements, so on.  Tuning will be needed, naturally.  But I think in terms of a press build, we're not going to be yanking the rug out from under people too much with wildly changing mechanics between now and 1.0.  But I've been wrong before -- it all comes back to the cheese factor, which is why we went through this round of changes today and yesterday in the first place.

4. I think that, interface-wise, I need to get the ability to cycle through towns and an overlay for when you are placing town centers to be in there.  Both seem to be frustrating a lot of people.

So... thoughts?

10

Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.906

« on: May 19, 2013, 09:57:01 PM »

Now out: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.906

Features of note:

1. Bandit spawns are not so brutal with the mythological creatures.  Aka, the difficulty fluctuations based on die rolls are a lot less severe.

2. Holy moly the difficulty systems.  I hope I didn't break anything much, because this was major surgery on the internals of the game.  But better now than closer to release, I guess.  Anyway, this also introduces the new "score requirements" option that a lot of folks had wanted.  I think that provides a pretty compelling secondary goal, and so it defaults to Easy on that now (though you can turn it to Off if you like, which makes it work like the prior build did).

My questions to you (repeat from last thread):

1. Did we solve the problem of "not enough depth?"  Aka, is this sufficiently hard to win on a high difficulty in a way that is interesting and brain-involving?  It's sounding increasingly like the answer is yet.  And the score requirements, if you play with high ones of those, remove pretty much any chance of overt cheese of the style we'd been seeing before (new styles may of course arise, and probably will given enough time; players are so darn clever).

2. Does Easy difficulty feel sufficiently laid back, if anyone is playing that?  It shouldn't really require much strategy.  So long as you don't do anything egregiously silly, it should go pretty smoothly.

3. How about Medium difficulty?  That should be like playing on difficulty 7 of AI War, I think.  It's definitely quite possible to lose, and frequently, but it shouldn't feel unfair.

4. Continuing the AI War analogy, Hard would be more like diff 8, whereas Expert is more like diff 9.

5. As I mentioned in another thread, we're expected to deliver a press build tomorrow.  Waiting is bad because it hurts our ability to have pre-release buzz.  But giving a ridiculous build to the press in terms of it being way too hard -- or having mechanics that we shift on them a ton -- also is a bad idea.  So how are your feelings on the current mechanics?

My read on the situation from what folks have said so far.

1. It seems like we've solved the obvious cheese situations, as I noted.  So the game should be sufficiently interesting to the grognards here for a sufficiently long amount of time to survive a week or two of interest at worst; and if more cheese is uncovered, we can always deal with that on a case by case basis, as with AI War.

2. I'm a little worried that the bottom end of the difficulty levels are too hard now, but some recent adjustments may have brought that more in line with what is needed.

3. I feel like the current mechanics are -- knock on wood -- pretty stable.  The repair buildings option seems like a really obvious thing to have now, though it never occurred to me.  The scorched earth stuff really makes a ton of sense and I think is obvious to keep.  Score is great, and the score requirements, so on.  Tuning will be needed, naturally.  But I think in terms of a press build, we're not going to be yanking the rug out from under people too much with wildly changing mechanics between now and 1.0.  But I've been wrong before -- it all comes back to the cheese factor, which is why we went through this round of changes today and yesterday in the first place.

So... thoughts?

11

Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.905

« on: May 19, 2013, 05:50:44 PM »

Now out: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.905

Features of note:

1. Siege weapons are no longer so ridiculous in the hands of bandits, and your guys will prioritize killing siege weapons better since they are such a big threat.

2. Your guys will go after bandit keeps with a prejudice, too (or at least they should; have not adequately tested that, so let me know if you have a save where that's not working).

3. Black Death is no longer an automatic loss (come on, I'd never intentionally have a feature like that; that was an unintended confluence of events with recent changes).

4. Bunch of changes to some mythological and god tokens to make them more attractive and useful.  Midgard Serpent is particularly exciting.

5. All the "things that generate score" are now properly in place, and your profile shows your high score now.

6. You can repair buildings by using a direct action now (though not if they've been destroyed).

7. Tutorial has been updated to reflect recent changes.

Big things still to come:

Splitting out the difficulty based on Pepisolo's suggestions into three parts rather than one.  One of those three parts would be score-gating (with attendant boosts to max score), again at Pepisolo's suggestion.  If anyone can report on what their average scores are in games started in .905, that could help me set some reasonable gates.  Right now I don't really have any idea, since I've been coding instead of playing.

My questions to you:

1. Did we solve the problem of "not enough depth?"  Aka, is this sufficiently hard to win on a high difficulty in a way that is interesting and brain-involving?  My read seems to be "yes" in the main, although obviously time will tell if some cheesy strategies pop up in the future.  But it seems like we may have squashed the obvious ones.  With the (OPTIONAL!) score gates, that should help even more if you play with those on.

2. Does Easy difficulty feel sufficiently laid back, if anyone is playing that?  It shouldn't really require much strategy.  So long as you don't do anything egregiously silly, it should go pretty smoothly.

3. How about Medium difficulty?  That should be like playing on difficulty 7 of AI War, I think.  It's definitely quite possible to lose, and frequently, but it shouldn't feel unfair.

4. Continuing the AI War analogy, Hard would be more like diff 8, whereas Expert is more like diff 9.

5. As I mentioned in another thread, we're expected to deliver a press build tomorrow.  Waiting is bad because it hurts our ability to have pre-release buzz.  But giving a ridiculous build to the press in terms of it being way too hard -- or having mechanics that we shift on them a ton -- also is a bad idea.  So how are your feelings on the current mechanics?

My read on the situation from what folks have said so far.

1. It seems like we've solved the obvious cheese situations, as I noted.  So the game should be sufficiently interesting to the grognards here for a sufficiently long amount of time to survive a week or two of interest at worst; and if more cheese is uncovered, we can always deal with that on a case by case basis, as with AI War.

2. I'm a little worried that the bottom end of the difficulty levels are too hard now, but I think some of that might have been because of the siege weapons being out of control last version.

3. It sounds like the score and score gating will keep a lot of you interested in a much more direct way, and keep you away from even trying anything cheesy since the score implicitly encourages you to take non-cheesy risks.  So even if we're borderline on #1, I think this #3 does good by the game.

4. I feel like the current mechanics are -- knock on wood -- pretty stable.  The repair buildings option seems like a really obvious thing to have now, though it never occurred to me.  The scorched earth stuff really makes a ton of sense and I think is obvious to keep.  Score is great, and so on.  So I think in terms of a press build, we're not going to be yanking the rug out from under people too much with wildly changing mechanics between now and 1.0.  But I've been wrong before -- it all comes back to the cheese factor, which is why we went through this round of changes today and yesterday in the first place.

So... thoughts?

12

Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.904

« on: May 19, 2013, 12:58:24 PM »

Okay, this should be a goodie: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.904

This really changes the flow in a way that I think makes a lot of sense.  A lot of the thinking behind it is here: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13121.0.html

Not much to add beyond that this time!  Except that this definitely seems to be a stalemate-breaker in savegames that I've tested thus far.  Hoo boy is it.

13

Skyward Collapse / Developer question: What god powers or mythological tokens don't you use?

« on: May 19, 2013, 11:24:49 AM »

For reference, check out the god tokens and mythological tokens tabs here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsfZzm_H0G2RdEJGY2lBZHhaVlhscDk4dV9oa3Y5U1E&usp=sharing

Which ones have you been avoiding?  I need to come up with compelling reasons for you not to avoid them.  The warfare points cap isn't a great idea, so instead:
- Either some secondary benefit to using this crazy power on yourself (score used to be the benefit, but that no longer works except as a cosmetic).
- Or some sort of woe that is only showing up when you have access to this item, which this item counters.

14

Skyward Collapse / My new design for warfare points and town stuff.

« on: May 19, 2013, 10:29:26 AM »

Okay, after seeing feedback on a variety of things, and considering both the original design and how things are balanced, here's the design I'm going with for .904:

Warfare
Warfare system as described here: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13118.0.html  Aka:

- In the top bar, there will be a count next to "Warfare."  So it says something like "Warfare: 500" or whatever.
- Red or blue dues killing red or blue dudes through combat leads to 1 warfare point.
- Red or blue dues killing red or blue buildings through combat leads to 10 warfare points.
- A town flipping sides from red or blue to red or blue through combat leads to 50 warfare points.
- The less-savory mythological tokens and god tokens would have a certain nontrivial number of warfare points associated with their use, again leading those to helping you win.
- Depending on your chosen difficulty, you would have to reach a certain warfare count before the game ends or else you lose.

Split Out Some Difficulty Options
Based on the notes here: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13117.0.html

- Drop difficulty settings to just the board categories, and lose the "Easy 1, 2, 3, 4" etc distinctions.
- Have a new "advanced settings" section, which contains:
-- A separate slider for "woe frequency."
-- Actually I think that's it for now.
- Make the warfare points requirements be just part of the broad difficulty settings.

No Crime System
As noted here: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13116.0.html
But not doing any of that.

Keep, But Relax, The "Max Distance From Enemy Town" Thing
SRombauts pointed out that the range is too tough right now, and on reflection I now agree.  His suggestion of a range of 16 seems about right to me.  We'll tweak as needed.

Scorched Earth With Buildings, No More Building Repair
This is new, and is really important.  It may be controversial, but I think it's really what this game needs to have a proper flow.  Especially when combined with the warfare points thing.  The design is thus:

- When a building is destroyed, it turns into grassy ruins.
-- Recall that grassy ruins cannot be smited or built over.
- When a town center is destroyed, same deal with it turning into grassy ruins.
-- Thus towns can't be taken over by warfare (just by woes).
-- Thus a single town can't be a source of an ongoing blockage that protects further-back towns (all sorts of cheese possible with this).
-- Thus as a town takes damage, it gets increasingly crippled and harder to defend, and thus falls.
-- Thus more towns and more expansion is encouraged.
-- Note that since the town ceases to exist after it is leveled, another town can be rebuilt nearby it depending on exactly how you've placed your other towns.  So it's unlikely that you'll have a huge hole in the center of the map where all your old leveled towns are unless you really build very tightly in the first pass.
-- Note also that this sort of scorched earth warfare makes sense primarily because these games are of limited duration.

What's this in response to?
1. Even with a warfare points system, it would be possible just to be cheesy and have the same town flip back and forth in control, while the outlying towns are completely uninvolved in the war.
2. Crime feels artificial and again makes towns to homogenous.  If you want to have some resource-only towns off to the side for a while... well, that should be allowed.  But when the front towns fall, you should then have to deal with that.

Possible needed addition.
- Inability to smite buildings that are damaged.  Being able to do this is potentially a source of big cheese.  Though simply making smite take a lot of action points (I think it already does for buildings) may already be enough of a deterrent, so this may not be a thing that is really an issue.

Thoughts are welcome, although I'm going to get started on implementing this right away.

15

Skyward Collapse / Developers requesting feedback: Warfare Points (Return of Points)?

« on: May 19, 2013, 08:28:14 AM »

Okay, so I've been hearing some rumblings from some folks about how it's still not possible to see "how well you did" in a game.  That clearly bugs them, and it bugs me that it bugs them, because if it bugs them it will bug other people, and in general I don't like people being bugged because it bugs me.

Points were bad because:
- They were super unbalanced, and all sorts of things gave you points in kind of an unbalanceable way.
- I think there was something else, but I forget.

Points were good because:
- High point-value crazy god tokens would actually make you use them to help you win the game.  This was why the god tokens were so crazy to begin with; score was central to the game.
- They helped you tell if you were "winning well."
- In theory we could have made it so that you could win the game before the clock ran out, although I'm not sure that I want to do that.
- In general they gave you a secondary goal other than just "do whatever it takes to survive," which I think is interesting.

My proposal:
- In the top bar, there will be a count next to "Warfare."  So it says something like "Warfare: 500" or whatever.
- Red or blue dues killing red or blue dudes through combat leads to 1 warfare point.
- Red or blue dues killing red or blue buildings through combat leads to 10 warfare points.
- A town flipping sides from red or blue to red or blue through combat leads to 50 warfare points.
- The less-savory mythological tokens and god tokens would have a certain nontrivial number of warfare points associated with their use, again leading those to helping you win.
- Depending on your chosen difficulty, you would have to reach a certain warfare count before the game ends or else you lose.

Thoughts?