#12 Will Drop The Pre-Alpha Moniker, And Has Big Surprises -- Hits in 1-2 Weeks

[Teal_Blue]

  Looking forward to the new ideas!
AI War was very cool, though i think this title is probably more my cup of tea with all the exploration and crafting. 

But different gamers like different things, just glad you put in the rpg elements. 

-Teal

[tigersfan]

Is the FAQ the first place you said you're heading towards mouse (and keyboard) support or did I miss this previously??

Either way wooooop! Not that I had doubts about the game as keyboard/gamepad only, but this change promises good things to me

Yep, that's actually one of the changes coming up, actually.  The FAQ is the first place that was mentioned.

If the idea in my head of what this game is going to be is correct, and you guys are moving to more of a keyboard/mouse control scheme, then I'd recommend checking out Terraria's scheme. While I dont think the in-game stuff would work for you guys all that well (though maybe), I think the rest of the UI (the item use, the way crafting works, etc.) is a good UI, and adopting something similar would, IMO, be worth looking into for you guys.

[x4000]

We're definitely aware of Terraria, and it's something Keith has played a fair bit; he brought it to my attention when we were just getting started on AVWW and I made a certain suggestion, actually.  I haven't played it, but I've played loads of Minecraft, which I understand has something of a similar interface in some ways, and even in the past versions I think you can see a bit of a Minecraft influence in things like the ability bar, etc (though Neverwinter Nights, which I also enjoyed, plus a number of dungeon crawlers that Keith enjoyed, could just as easily be said to be the inspiration).

At any rate, one of the things coming up in the reveal is a revamped UI in a lot of ways, although I'm not sure if we'll actually have the menus at the point we want to show them, yet.  But we've gone through not one but two conceptual overhauls of our GUI in the last couple of weeks.  The result is something that is super, super streamlined but also really powerful; even moreso than Minecraft, in our opinion, although obviously the games are very different in focus in the first place, so that's not even a knock against MC.  Our inspirations for the final designs came from diverse places such as what we already had, Minecraft, Torchlight, Neverwinter Nights, and a few others. 

Our primary goal was to have the least-possible amount of clicking and fiddling with anything so that you can just play, and our second goal was to make it so that you wouldn't need to run back to settlements all the time to store your stuff because of super-limited inventory.

Anyway, that's a pretty safe topic, and it's one of the more minor things that is changing at the moment; minor mainly because we hadn't shown the existing version to anyone.  The new UI setup is aeons better than the old, although we're not done implementing it yet.

[keith.lamothe]

We've been looking at Terraria, yea, it does have some good interface things.  Not particualrly wild about the way mouse precision can be really important in a few places (chopping down trees), and definitely not about how the mouse is basically required to fight at all (iirc, maybe they do have a "swing weapon in front of you" button and I just missed it), but there's good stuff there.

[tigersfan]

We've been looking at Terraria, yea, it does have some good interface things.  Not particualrly wild about the way mouse precision can be really important in a few places (chopping down trees), and definitely not about how the mouse is basically required to fight at all (iirc, maybe they do have a "swing weapon in front of you" button and I just missed it), but there's good stuff there.

Yeah, I'm not actually a fan of the required mouse precision either, but, I was more talking about how easy it is to change the things in the action bar, how the crafting of items works, stuff like that.

(If there is a "swing weapon in front of you" button, I don't know about it, but I wish I did.)

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, we've been looking real close at the interface for putting something onto the action bar, etc, from both Terraria and Minecraft.  To be honest, we think we have an even better idea than either of them, but we'll see

And Terraria's crafting interface is pretty good, yea, but I think it could be less mouse-dependent, though having the mouse option there does have definite advantages.

[x4000]

In terms of crafting, though, I should note that we're not really doing it like Minecraft or I presume Terraria -- it's just selecting from recipes based on what you have in stock, not having to make little voodoo symbols with them.   I actually love the voodoo symbols in Minecraft, but we have way more recipes and I don't want players having to use an external reference for that stuff, etc.

[keith.lamothe]

Terraria doesn't do the arrangement thing, it just gives you a list of things you can craft with your current inventory and what workbench/furnace/whatevers you're standing near and you can pull them off the crafting menu onto your inventory (there's a few modifiers for pulling multiple copies at once), and it deducts the ingredients automatically.

[x4000]

Neat.

[tigersfan]

Yeah, the Terraria crafting mechanism is pretty neat. Keith, if you think yours is better, I'm willing to reserve judgement. I mostly wanted to point out Terraria, to make you aware of one type that does work well. Looking forward to seeing the game. Hurry up and get a beta released already! :-)

[realcoolguy]

That's what's happened here: we've had our big ties-everything-together idea...

So the AI is born in AVWW and it likes puzzle games (update Tidalis coming too, to reflect this) but our hero needs to stop it before it's too late.    

[x4000]

That's what's happened here: we've had our big ties-everything-together idea...

So the AI is born in AVWW and it likes puzzle games (update Tidalis coming too, to reflect this) but our hero needs to stop it before it's too late.    

Haha -- well, ties all the parts of AVWW together, not all the parts of all our games.   But, that's pretty funny.

[Echo35]

That's what's happened here: we've had our big ties-everything-together idea...

So the AI is born in AVWW and it likes puzzle games (update Tidalis coming too, to reflect this) but our hero needs to stop it before it's too late.    

Haha -- well, ties all the parts of AVWW together, not all the parts of all our games.   But, that's pretty funny.

Please at least have some references

[x4000]

That's what's happened here: we've had our big ties-everything-together idea...

So the AI is born in AVWW and it likes puzzle games (update Tidalis coming too, to reflect this) but our hero needs to stop it before it's too late.    

Haha -- well, ties all the parts of AVWW together, not all the parts of all our games.   But, that's pretty funny.

Please at least have some references

Oh, you bet we will.

[Nalgas]

Our inspirations for the final designs came from diverse places such as what we already had, Minecraft, Torchlight, Neverwinter Nights, and a few others.

That's sort of funny, because there are things about all of those that bug me, and Terraria, too.

Minecraft is pretty good aside from the crafting, which is a complete undiscoverable nightmare without a guide of some sort, even though it's a really neat idea in theory.

Torchlight...I guess it mostly worked because I never actually had to use it, but I honestly thought the UI was pretty ugly/gaudy/over-decorated (although the 3D in-game stuff itself looked great) and trying too hard to reference Diablo in some places rather than do things that are actually a good idea, like the absurdly large health/mana meters that were just in the way.  I pretty much never had to interact with the skill bar or assign anything to it, because as a Vanquisher, once you have the exploding shot, that is your only skill you ever use, and you win the game just by holding the button for it down until the end of the game, even on Very Hard.  I think if I had ended up having to interact with the UI more, I probably would've found more specific things that bugged me about it more than Titan Quest (which itself is far, far from perfect, but remapping the keys helps...).  The inventory system for it (and TQ, and Diablo, and almost every other ARPG ever) can die in a fire, though.  People who make games that focus around collecting large amounts of rare/unique items and give you not just a finite amount of storage space but a very small amount of storage space are jerks.

I don't even remember what I hated about NWN, but I do remember that I hated the interface so much that I couldn't even finish playing the demo.  Hate hate hate.  Zero recollection of why, because it's been so many years, but my friends who all loved the game and generally have similar taste to me all still remember vividly how irritable trying to play it made me.  Heh.

It's kind of funny how people mention the crafting in Terraria as being particularly, because I've been playing a lot of it lately with my AI War group, and it's one of our gripes with the game.  It's a lot more straightforward than Minecraft, but I definitely wouldn't call it good.  Maybe adequate would be more accurate.  Having a gigantic list that you can only see a tiny piece of that's fairly arbitrarily sorted that you can't re-sort that changes as you walk around and depends on what you currently have in your inventory and what you're standing near and gives no indication of that is weird at best and a little frustrating at other times.  People have only complained about the mouse targeting a couple times.  The inventory management is actually a much bigger issue in our group, and it's particularly bad when your inventory is full and so are your chests and piggy bank and you're trying to rearrange things.  You are in for a massive amount of clicking and shuffling stuff around when that happens.  Also, variable stack size limits for different types of items (instead of only 1 or 256 like Minecraft) just confuses everyone when they can't remember them all.