Show Posts
1
Skyward Collapse / Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.906
« on: Yesterday at 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?
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?
But that's still super close compared to before.
