Messages

1

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Magic general

« on: October 14, 2011, 01:18:35 PM »

Sounds like you need to vote up this issue!

 

Nice, upvoted!

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Magic general

« on: October 14, 2011, 11:40:19 AM »

I'd like to see your spell loadout separate from the action bar. The action bar right now fills a bunch of roles and it may in fact be too many. I'd like to, for example, be able to see how many magic potions I have at a glance by putting them on the action bar instead of having to open my inventory to check, but on the other hand, keeping them on the action bar uses valuable real estate for spells and hotkeys.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Share your boss ideas!

« on: October 13, 2011, 12:24:19 PM »

Instead of just BIG ROBOT or CRIPPED DRAGON that has a 1 in 6 chance of spawning or something, I'd like to see some sort of modifier system where there is not only a boss variant, but random modifiers that boss gets to make them more interesting. I know this is already sort of in place in that they have a chance to have more health than usual and whatnot, but I'm talking about expanding that and making the modifiers sort of entities unto themselves that have a visual effect. For example:

• Stone - The boss is made of stone. The boss is tinted gray; they move slower but have twice as much hp.
• Blood - The boss specializes in blood magic. Whenever the boss damages the player, the boss is healed for that amount.
• Big - The boss is big; they move slower but hit twice as hard
• Drones - The boss spawns with two drones who protect him and must be defeated before the boss can be damaged.

These are just a few ideas for modifiers off the top of my head but you get my drift.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: More choices in the strategic game that affect the tactical game

« on: October 11, 2011, 12:21:52 PM »

One more vote for more 4X elements. I love the idea of rebuilding an entire civilization from the ground up however I see fit. I can imagine all of these interlocking parts, like building a quarry on a region with iron, having a road to automatically transport it to a region where I've built a factory, with characters specialized in crafting create new and better items for me to use in my continued exploration of the world map. The possibilities are endless.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Why spell tiers at all ?

« on: October 09, 2011, 12:54:39 PM »

I like the tiers personally, and like it better now its to 10 levels, think its a good balance.  A few thoughts I had reading this.

The first issue I see with having gems/potions/ whatnot on every level (other than having level 1000 gems someday) is inventory clutter.  You'd end up with tons of slots of different level gems or potions, making both crafting a pain and force you to spend a bunch of time sorting and dropping junk, rolling over to see whats still useful.

s, that was long, so thanks if you actually read through it all.

You're absolutely right, inventory clutter would quickly become unbearable with my proposal.

I have a new idea: you could keep the current tier system as is, but introduce a new system to combine gems to get stronger ones.  You would have to be able to handle non integer levels (lvl 1.3 for instance), but that's not very difficult (except maybe from an UI pov, real numbers are not really user friendly. But it can be done).

I propose the following formula: when upgrading a gem of lvl A with a gem of lvl B, you get a gem of lvl Log(10^A + 10^B), where Log is the decimal logarithm. This can be extend in a natural way if you want to upgrade more than 2 gems: Log(10^A + 10^B + 10^C + ...).

This formula has very nice mathematical properties:

• The upgrade gain depends only on the difference between the levels, not on the levels themselves. For instance, combining two lvl N gems gives a gem of lvl N + ~ 0.3
• The gain is most effective when combining gems of approximately the same level. You quickly get diminishing returns for combining gems too far away. You always get a new gem stronger than the highest level one, but not by much if the other is just a few levels behind.
• You need to combine exactly 10 gems of level N to get one gem of level N+1, so this is far from overpowered.
• Actually, the exact level you get by combining K level N gems is N + Log(K).
• So, if you are foolish enough to want to get a gem of level N+2, you would have to find 100 gems of level N... not very practical...

I think this would provide a smooth progression, and give an incentive to go into caves between tiers. But you can also choose to not use this system, and then you'll get the current one without a single change. User choice FTW !

You would only be able to combine gems, not spells. So you would always have to decide if you use your upgraded gem to make a more powerfull spell, or if you keep it to upgrade it further. Again, a tough choice for the player.

You would always have something to do between tiers, which is a good thing.

This could also be easily combined with zebramax proposition (chance to get a upgraded gem the higher the level approaching next tier).

I actually put something like this in Mantis the other day. My idea was much simpler: allow the player to combine 5 of the same item in tier N to yield 1 of that same item in tier N+1. Of course this would only be allowable once the player reaches tier N+1 themself. But I do like your idea of a smooth progression system.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Why spell tiers at all ?

« on: October 08, 2011, 10:16:50 AM »

I like that tiers motivate exploration, but I do think they need some tweaking. Balancing spell damage for the middle of a tier (level 5, 15, 25, etc.) would help that. So if you were to find a tier 2 gem at level 10, you'd have a bit of an easier time than normal until it balances out at level 15, with it getting weaker as you get closer to 20. Maybe this is already the case, but it does feel a bit punishing right now because if you're working on your settlement at all, you're leveling very quickly due to simply defending your settlement from rampaging monsters and that's time not spent out in the field collecting replacement gems. I understand it's meant to be a balancing act between building your settlement and going for objectives out in the field, but at the moment I feel a bit punished for working on my settlement at all (especially building up 200 Time Units at a time for some buildings because that translates into 3 or 4 groups of rampaging monsters).

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Feedback: Shields

« on: October 08, 2011, 12:49:10 AM »

I put this in Mantis, but I'd like to see shields taken off the global spell cooldown. Against bosses where you're using all your offensive spells as often as you can, I almost always run up against the global cooldown when I want to shield, and projectiles are usually moving too fast for me to be able to shield myself before I get hit.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Some Reflections After Two Weeks Of A Valley Without Wind's Beta

« on: October 07, 2011, 12:02:53 PM »

I could never play AVWW again and feel like I've gotten my money's worth. But of course I'll keep playing it because I think it's a great game already and the pieces are in place for it to become something really amazing.

Personally I'm very interested in the design process of games and allowing the community to have such an involvement is, to me, one of the things that make Arcen a developer whose games I will always support. You guys not only make great games, you allow the members of the community to have a personal stake in their creation. I was very vocal about the particle effects, and not only were my posts fairly assessed (i.e. taken under advisement, with some of the complaints/suggestions used and others discarded as you guys see fit), but it's something I can now point to and say, "I had a hand in this," if indirectly. I might agree or disagree with the direction things are taken, but that level of community back-and-forth is something special, and in the end I think it results in a better product. So thank you for that, and keep up the great work.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: AVWW Beta 0.513-0514, "Previously Pernicious Particles," Released!

« on: October 04, 2011, 07:51:33 AM »

Can't wait to fire it up tonight! Thanks for all your hard work.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: The particle effects do this game a disservice

« on: October 03, 2011, 10:47:18 AM »

As a programmer it's clear that the damaging part of a spell is the particle spawner, not the trail but intuitively it looks like the part where the particles get large is the main body of the spell. Most players aren't programmers and are likely used to seeing projectiles that have the biggest and brightest effects around their hitbox.

I'm going to reserve proper comment on the following until my in-game field of view improves but it occurs to me that (in at least some cases) enemies don't telegraph their different attacks particularly far in advance either. Fast-moving, wide-spread attacks with such little warning mean I take rather a lot of damage in even relatively easy engagements with projectile-firing enemies.

The giant skelebots are actually an exception because their timing is relatively easy to learn and dodge around.

Lightning Espers and Amoebas, on the other hand...

I haven't fought any recently but the giant skelebot's melee attack range seemed very hard to estimate since it expands pretty far beyond any visible part of the sprite and even the one frame used for the attack doesn't extend as far as the range.

If it's assumed that the emitter is the only thing that does the damage, then we run into a few problems right away:

1) Right now emitters aren't even drawn for the spells we've talked about in this thread.

2) Particles go from a visual tip-off to just plain unnecessary, or worse, they obfuscate what's happening while communicating nothing relevant to the player.

3) Having the emitter ALWAYS be the only damaging part of the spell nullifies a whole slew of valid gameplay possibilities. There wouldn't be opportunies where, say, all the particles do damage (toxic gas, for example).

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: The particle effects do this game a disservice

« on: October 03, 2011, 10:18:00 AM »

Has there been any though given to allowing the player to customize spells, or contruct their own from a set of options? Allowing fireball to ricochet, for example, or even something as simple as letting the player change the color of spells. This is obviously a big of a tangent from the topic of the thread but I think that could be pretty interesting (and probably a nightmare to balance).

12

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: The particle effects do this game a disservice

« on: October 02, 2011, 07:38:14 PM »

I strongly agree with all of this: characters are oversized and clumsy, projectiles are overlarge and combat & dodging consequently feel imprecise.

I do agree with this. I think the bats are the most fun boss (when they don't get stuck in a wall of course), they do in no way feel like an attrition battle.

I agree, bats bosses are very fun because you have to actively use the terrain to your advantage. I also love the giant skelebot bosses, they can feel pretty epic at times.

For example: The Lightning Esper
They shoot 3 projectlies, not hard to dodge at all, as long as you dodge the whole cluster of (3) projectiles. By running in in the opposite direction or jumping over them. However, it would be much more fun if you could run and then dodge between the bullets. You can do that at the moment but only if you are at a fair distance.

The few times you actually do succeed with this is when you stand directly underneath them, beacuse your character is very thin.

The Espers bug me for exactly the reasons you talk about. Dodging between the 3 projectiles at close or medium range isn't really viable, so your options are sniping them from afar or just taking the hit. It doesn't make for very dynamic or exciting gameplay.

Another way to make it easier to dodge, especially the bosses, is by having a camera that focus between your character and the mouse. This way you will be able to see where you want to see. Check http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=4313

I like this idea. Bloodline Champions, for anyone who's played it, has a camera that follows the mouse so that you can "scout" ahead of you. BLC is a completely different type of game than AVWW but I think it would be a good fit.

13

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: The particle effects do this game a disservice

« on: October 01, 2011, 03:56:23 PM »

Perhaps melee range spells like Death Touch and Fire Touch should destroy projectiles.

This would be very hard to pull off consistently with projectiles generally as fast as they are now.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / The particle effects do this game a disservice

« on: October 01, 2011, 10:34:00 AM »

I'm really loving AVWW so far, and it's gotten noticeably more fun in just a week. But I have to say that the particle effects in this game nearly ruin the whole package for me. I thought it was just Fireball and sniper shots at first (since the two are practically identical), but the more I play the more I realize that anything shooting a particle effect just acts as annoyance. The visual effects themselves are nebulous, making it difficult to gauge the actual hit boxes of projectiles. There are also a lot of cases where multiple projectiles are spaced too closely together, which wouldn't be an issue if my character were small and agile, but this is not the case. Now, many of the games I played in my younger years were platformers, and in my later years I've played a lot of bullet hell and shoot 'em up games. AVWW has elements of both in its sidescrolling segments, but the problem here is a combination of 1) the player characters are too big and slow to adequately dodge the projectiles, and 2) the aforementioned issues with the particle effects being too big, scattered, and nebulous, plus they're oftentimes too close for my big and slow character to squeeze past while jumping. I honestly think the game would be a lot more fun if all of the projectiles were replaced with plain squares or circles. It wouldn't be pretty but at least I'd be able to know where a projectile begins and ends.

I'd like to hear other people's experiences with this aspect of the game because it's starting to deter me from actually playing.

15

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Amoeba boss + Evergreen Forest = Awesome.

« on: October 01, 2011, 10:23:06 AM »

Tossing in my support for this suggestion. Spamming wooden platforms doesn't make for exciting play and I find myself dreading amoebas.