Messages

16

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Lousy Update

« on: July 09, 2012, 11:49:38 AM »

I don't play multiplayer, but it sounds to me like the old system is preferable since it encourages synergy between the players. If you want to promote players playing in the same chunk, there should be a bonus for that.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: The case for slowing down.

« on: July 03, 2012, 12:14:17 PM »

If any slowing down is needed, I'd say it would be so that monsters could keep up with the player in the surface chunks.

To me, the issue isn't necessarily the speed of consuming content. Rather, it's the amount of importance attached to any piece of content.

In a regular 2d scroller, every area has maximal importance for your survival. All content is important because the devs push you in the direction of the content, and you have to deal with it. It's a challenge that needs to be overcome in order to progress.

In AVWW, the openness of the world, and especially the amount of similar avenues that are open to you, neutralizes a lot of that challenge. This has been said before (including by me), but if I'm in a difficult cave that forces me to kill a boss before I can get some gems, it's a challenge only as long as I don't think about the fact that I can go to another cave in another chunk and get the same gems. This is much worse with buildings: suppose I go through a building, crafting an interesting narrative of overcoming different challenges as I go. I then exit the building, and a couple of steps to the left see a building that's almost identical. That's a real downer.

Too many buildings are being generated too close together. And too many similar challenges are available at the same time, making any one challenge unimportant. So content is just there to fly by -- none of it impacts my ability to advance in any significant way. If one avenue is more difficult, I can just switch to another avenue out of many available that happens to be easier. Even if I'm too lazy to switch, my mind knows that my situation isn't unique.

What can be done to ameliorate the situation? Imagine that gems cannot be randomly found in any cave in any appropriate region. Instead, I use some scanning magic back at the settlement to locate the gems. The magic finds one instance of gems in one specific cave. The pathway to that gem now becomes critical. Everything on the way to the gem is important, and is something I need to pay careful attention to. Similarly, stashes could be extremely rare. A rumor could direct me to a particular region that has a stash, and only one building would have one (and it could be appropriately protected).

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: [FILLED] Looking for artist(s) to develop new style for A Valley Without Wind.

« on: July 03, 2012, 09:41:21 AM »

Very nice job Nanashi. I actually think that the game could really use a style like that ie. regions of flat colors, but it could also be punctuated here and there by the game's painterly filter.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: AVWW Post-Release 1.108 "Construction Sometimes Starts With Demolition" Released

« on: July 03, 2012, 09:38:09 AM »

My opinion is that darkness adds a lot to the game in terms of atmosphere. Basically what Penumbra said. However, I don't feel like darkness is tackled in the game in a meaningful way. It seems like there are too many ways to tackle darkness, to the point that they completely rob the system of any intent.

I'll give an example I'm familiar with. In Din's Curse, you delve into dungeons. The natural approach would have been to give the player torches, but that would have encumbered the player with too much micromanagement. Instead, the player is given a light radius. There are torches in the dungeons that can be turned on, but they have a limited light radius. If the player really wants to see better, he can get a +light radius modifier on some of his equipment, which comes at the cost of other modifiers (similar to the enchant system in AVWW). But if he doesn't use a light modifier, he has to rely on the torches in the dungeon. Additionally, some dungeons have extra darkness modifiers, making not using a light modifier even riskier.

In AVWW, I can't really say what the gameplay model for lighting is. You have light enchants, but you also have light snake, flash of light, ball of light, and more. It's just too dispersed. Taking out a lamp in a building has almost no consequence because you have so many replacements. Additionally, ball of light makes getting through dark areas a matter of tedium. It's cool to have your visibility limited. It's cool to have that visibility be a trade-off based on your enchants. But when it's just a matter of not spamming enough balls of light, it becomes annoying.

What I'd like to see is streamlining of the lighting mechanic to the point that tedium is reduced and the balance is made clear. Having background torches spawn randomly in caves would be a better way to do the ball of light mechanic. You'd light these with fire spells and have them blown out with water/air spells. Additionally, light spells (ie spells of the light element) could keep the area lit for a little while, much like 'flash of light' does now. Knocking out a lamp in a building would have real consequences -- it wouldn't be so easy to replace the light generated by a lamp. And when you go to deep, dark areas, a light enchant would be a really good idea. Deeper areas could be progressively darker to incentivize this more.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: [FILLED] Looking for artist(s) to develop new style for A Valley Without Wind.

« on: July 02, 2012, 03:02:27 PM »

I'll be really sad to see the current art style go away. An artist going over what you have now and making small changes could really make this work. Too bad.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: [FILLED] Looking for artist(s) to develop new style for A Valley Without Wind.

« on: July 01, 2012, 09:31:50 PM »

After playing again after not having played for a while, I'm of the opinion that the graphics need tweaking rather than a reboot. I also think it's unlikely that the Kickstarter idea will work (sorry -- don't want to discourage you).

Get an artist to render all the assets for midday, night, sunset, and sunrise. Limit the possible combinations of conflicting assets. Replace the bad indoor textures with good ones. Reduce the memory footprint of animations with the technique I outlined + make sure you're using compressed/16 bit textures and add some more animations. Other than these (relatively minor) things, the graphics are fine, and sometimes even beautiful.

As someone who does this I can assure you that at 128x128 resolution something rendered out without extensive post editing (ie, line tracing) would look incredibly bad, blurry, undefined. No strong contrasts or clear details. You can never beat drawn art in low resolutions

Not entirely sure which specific thing you're referring to. Animation art could be kept as it is. Animations would be squished together to use up textures effectively, and textures could be 16 bit to take up half the space.

22

Off Topic / Re: Drox Operative

« on: July 01, 2012, 01:12:30 PM »

eRaSeR (sorry your name is hard to reproduce without copy-paste. Hope you don't mind), I think your point detailing the problems with goals to safeguard a race is good. You'd have to come up with a good way of doing this without making instant loss a problem.

A lot of your points I find to be design decisions. Stat-based combat is more common in RPGs, for example.

I do agree that the combat is lacking. I think there's a way to improve it, but it'll take some work. I'm looking more for tweaks though, rather than complete redesign.

There are indeed way too many enemies. Rather than feeling like space, it feels like you're inside the body dealing with the immune system. In most sci-fi notions of space, space isn't packed with monster ships. You can't travel for 5 seconds without bumping into monsters. This is ok for a dungeon teeming with monsters, but not so much for space. Additionally, combat with enemy vessels should be slow and tactical. You should need to bring down their shields, or hack them, and then do structural damage. For this you need fewer, more powerful enemies -- just as you've described.

Other problems with combat involve the fact that you only really need one weapon to fight. This really feels underwhelming for space combat. Enemies should have different weaknesses, and your weapons should only be good for certain things. For example, shields could repel lasers but not projectile weapons. EMP would wreck shields etc. This would make a variety of weapons necessary, which would also require the ships to enable equipping more weapons.

Still more problems involve the fact that the range of beam weapons is too long. I've adjusted the range down in my game and the combat feels more orderly and somewhat more tactical. This is a big deal, because it makes the difference between every monster on screen attacking you, and only the closest monster attacking you.

Anyway, I agree that there are issues, but I think some tweaks could take care of most of them. Other things I see as valid design decisions. The other really big thing I want to see is inter-race political quests (go attack this planet; go defend this planet; spy on what race X is doing). I'm not sure if those will ever make it into the game, but IMO they would improve the game considerably.

23

Off Topic / Re: Drox Operative

« on: July 01, 2012, 09:54:28 AM »

I've been pushing for different victory conditions for a while.

My favorite is reputation gain. You'd only get the best quests (and reputation reward) from allying with a race and they'll demand that you declare war against their enemies to give you their best quests. This is really important to get you caring about what the quest system generates IMO. Betray that closely allied race and you lose reputation, which takes you further away from victory.

I don't have a vested interest anymore, but I would think that this would be called vendor lock-in. You would never be free to backstab or switch alliances without penalty. Also, grinding reputation has never been fun. Ever. Having multiple win conditions is a good thing, but I think it would be better if that condition was something the player set (or had a hand in setting). The way that Crusader Kings 2 does it is very satisfying in the sense that as a player you decide what you want to do. Your choice in starting country and year plays a big part, but as a player that makes you think, "I wonder how far I can take this?" The computer keeps score.

Right now, I don't think drox is well-defined as to what the game is supposed to be. Is it or is it not a 4x? Is it or is it not a Diablo themed adventure in space? Is it or is it not a mercenary sandbox? I don't know. Narrowing the win conditions would make that more clear, but it would also shut a lot of doors.

The reason it wouldn't be lock-in is because together with this, non-allied races would offer you high rewards for betraying your chosen race. So you can choose to betray the race you're allied with, but you'd take an initial reputation hit. Also, another thing I'd like to be in the game is that larger races would give you less profitable quests than smaller races (they don't need you as much). Sticking with a race as it takes over the galaxy would become less and less profitable for you, which encourages you to switch to help the smaller races.

In terms of reputation grind, the idea here is that it's something similar to 'make X money from quests', except more easily quantifiable than money. The reputation I'm talking about here is NOT from grinding faction, trying to get races to like you. It's from accomplishing big things. The small quests - finding planets and such - would give you minor rewards. The big quests - defeating an enemy, defending a planet from invasion, espionage - will give you a lot of reputation. Really, by making it about reputation rather than what's there now (making sure one race takes over the sector and allying with that race), you allow the player to do whatever he wants to do. I agree that you don't want to force the player to force the space race to end in any particular way. What you want is to tell the player: do what you do as a mercenary. Become famous by doing cool stuff. Choose which faction you want to support, and how you want the sector to turn out (one race destroying everything, cold peace... whatever).

The basic idea is, a. let the player play given the backdrop of the 4x. b. Make the player feel invested, especially in the plight of small races. c. Don't force the player to wait until the 4x resolves itself -- just long enough to 'establish a reputation' for the Drox, at which point the player can move on. 

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: [FILLED] Looking for artist(s) to develop new style for A Valley Without Wind.

« on: July 01, 2012, 08:49:57 AM »

After playing again after not having played for a while, I'm of the opinion that the graphics need tweaking rather than a reboot. I also think it's unlikely that the Kickstarter idea will work (sorry -- don't want to discourage you).

Get an artist to render all the assets for midday, night, sunset, and sunrise. Limit the possible combinations of conflicting assets. Replace the bad indoor textures with good ones. Reduce the memory footprint of animations with the technique I outlined + make sure you're using compressed/16 bit textures and add some more animations. Other than these (relatively minor) things, the graphics are fine, and sometimes even beautiful.

25

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Open thread on combat balance. (Main focus on bosses)

« on: July 01, 2012, 06:54:41 AM »

Part of the problem with sniping is that it's not clear what resolution the game's supposed to be played at, and therefore what the range of projectiles is. Ideally, 90% of enemies would only be able to fire at you when they appear on your screen, and you'd only be able to fire back when they're on-screen. Variable resolutions without scaling really complicate this, though.

Homing projectiles also encourage sniping and should be toned down significantly. If an enemy fires homing projectiles at you, the only chance of dodging is if he fires them when he's really far away and you have time to shoot down/dodge the homing projectiles. BTW I really don't like homing projectiles.

Aye, I'm not too fond of the things either.

Though, I find that how dodgeable they are varies pretty wildly.

The crashed speeders for example:   even on TCO difficulty, I dont have too much trouble getting up close and pelting the thing with attacks.  It fires alot of those things, but their movement makes it easy for me to leap between them and dodge them in general.

Wheras the Green Fairies....  my central tactic against them is to absorb the smaller fairies with my shield (which often takes less than a second), and then pelt the larger fairy with some heavy melee attack.    If I DONT have the shield to absorb them, I end up running around like a moron, firing wildly at the main ones, and it's a pain in the rear.   The fire seekers used by dragons, too slow to be much threat, so I dont worry about them (kinda a boring fight though, that one).

If I remember correctly, you use tab-targeting, right Misery? That means that you should have a much easier time dodging than people who don't. So take all those reactions and multiply them by 2 for people who use keyboard+mouse (or by 3 for people who use keyboard-only, like me). I find it very hard to both dodge the crashed speeder's projectiles AND shoot the crashed speeder, for example. And the little fairies take too many hits -- anything that homes in on you should be easily destructible at the very least.

26

Off Topic / Re: Drox Operative

« on: July 01, 2012, 06:18:30 AM »

I've been pushing for different victory conditions for a while.

My favorite is reputation gain. You'd only get the best quests (and reputation reward) from allying with a race and they'll demand that you declare war against their enemies to give you their best quests. This is really important to get you caring about what the quest system generates IMO. Betray that closely allied race and you lose reputation, which takes you further away from victory.

This can then be combined with random victory conditions per sector to make things interesting and varied.

Just having the random victory conditions would be good too, though there isn't as much to get you to be emotionally involved about what's going on in the sector. I definitely agree that as the Drox, you shouldn't care who takes over the sector (unless it's a secret objective of yours).

Glad to see you're interested in this sort of thing as well, Stephen!

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Open thread on combat balance. (Main focus on bosses)

« on: July 01, 2012, 06:11:25 AM »

Part of the problem with sniping is that it's not clear what resolution the game's supposed to be played at, and therefore what the range of projectiles is. Ideally, 90% of enemies would only be able to fire at you when they appear on your screen, and you'd only be able to fire back when they're on-screen. Variable resolutions without scaling really complicate this, though.

Homing projectiles also encourage sniping and should be toned down significantly. If an enemy fires homing projectiles at you, the only chance of dodging is if he fires them when he's really far away and you have time to shoot down/dodge the homing projectiles. BTW I really don't like homing projectiles.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: More Variety In Exploration (IBrainstorming And Discussion)

« on: July 01, 2012, 06:06:36 AM »

I'd really like to see objects with effects implemented. This has been talked about for a while.

Mossy barrels are fun. There are just too many of them in the junkyard -- they become predictable rather than an interesting change. Objects need to be rare enough to be special, yet have fun effects.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Thoughts on New Crafting/Spells

« on: June 29, 2012, 01:01:16 PM »

In addition, I'd argue that exploration has the same problem when you're trying for a particular thing; if you want arcane ingredients, you are pretty much going to have to run through stash room after stash room until you have what you want.

Except a) stash rooms are within buildings which are part of the randomly generated world so you encounter different things and b) you go from one random situation to another as you explore through the world looking for the right stash. Right now buildings aren't immensely interesting, but caves are pretty good ie. I want to get to the resources but there's a boss in my way or there are traps in my way etc.

I would personally like to see fewer buildings per area so areas are more memorable, but the point is that when you're out in the world, you get to sample the persistent randomness of the game's universe. In missions, you're confined to the predesigned bubble that is the mission.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Thoughts on New Crafting/Spells

« on: June 29, 2012, 11:42:14 AM »

Huh. For me, missions remain entertaining since they change up the gameplay; I like the variety they provide. Conversely, I can't really see how they hurt your enjoyment of the game, since they're pretty easy to ignore to go do other things when you want to go do other things.

In the old model you couldn't avoid missions if you wanted ingredients. Common ingredients were easy to get and they were also available from missions. So after you explored a little to build up your commons, you spent the rest of the time on the continent just doing missions. There was no need to explore at all.

I do like the fact that they're little distractions when you're tired of the main gameplay -- kinda like the police missions in GTA3+. My problem with them is that they're in their own bubble. They don't affect/are barely affected by the rest of the world. As such, they're repetitive -- most of the factors that would make them more interesting are removed. They're also too directed. Once I'm in the bubble, I have to do the specific goal they give me -- there's no room to be flexible or to try new ideas. Because they're discrete, they become boring very quickly for me. Also, choosing to do a specific activity at the map level is nowhere near as interesting as exploring, and finding some chunk that's affected by something, at which point I can choose to fix that thing (or just play around with it). There's a subtle difference there.

A thought has come to me, actually; I'd argue that part of the reason I prefer large numbers of missions is that the missions hang around for so very, very long, meaning that if there isn't plenty I'll run out too early and have to wait around for more. Tying into making meaningful decisions as well, what if missions had much shorter timers (say, about 15 minutes), but also all missions disappeared once a mission was complete and new ones were placed? (The exception to this would be power-granted missions, since it's unfair to not let you get a chance to do the missions you've effectively "paid" for.) I'd combine this with the game trying not to have a mission appear in the same region twice in a row so expanding still gives you a decent chance of seeing different region missions when the RNG is feeling unfriendly. The end result would be that fewer missions wouldn't make those who want to do missions feel they're stuck with 7 or so they don't want to do, and would mean that when the RNG drops a glut of a particular mission you can't go round doing them all. It'd also mean you'd need to pick and choose your mission rewards, rather than being able to go round hoovering up everything, since the next mission batch wouldn't necessarily give you the same things (espescially with procedural spells.)

I think it makes sense to have a constant number of missions -- finish one, and you immediately get another.

I do, however, like the idea of giving each spell a specific set of regions it appears on. (It's a limit of the power of a mission to grant rewards that keeps player control, since I'll know that if I want a particular spell I want to look for missions in particular regions (and remove the storms from that region.)

I like it too.