I actually started to think about this after my post and it made me kind of excited. For indoor stuff, how I imagined it and it seems like what you are going to do is that you will enter a building from the outside and now are in, lets say, a house. Now lets say you are in a hallway and to your left is a living room are and to the right is some stairs. Now lets say in the background is another door, similar to the one you entered the house from, that you could enter in the same way to get to the kitchen area. If this is what you are planning to do then it does seem like something that hasn't really been done before and seems like it would make for some awesome exploration, especially in some large buildings.
Yep, exactly. If you think about how the mansion is constructed in Maniac Mansion, it's something along those lines.
Speaking of stairs, I'm curious to how you will do them inside buildings. My two ways of thinking about how they would work would be either having physical stairs you climb or background stairs you "enter." It seems the problem with having physical stairs in plane with your character would be that you couldn't have something behind them but in this type, it seems like the whole inside of the house would be loaded at once. The second type would to have the stairs be in the background that you could walk right past and then press a button in front of them to go up or down stairs, loading the next story of the house. I kind of prefer the second method but am curious to how you guys are going to tackle this part.
We aren't going to have a huge number of stairs, mainly it will be more interesting things like magical elevators and such. That said, for the main stairs I've been thinking about, they'll work like slopes outside, just with stair graphics instead. So, that means that they only get placed at the ends of rooms leading upwards, for instance. Doing background stairs that you press confirm to go into is a good idea as well, and we'll probably also do that. There's actually a couple of other stair models that I'd been thinking about, but most of them are Castlevania-ish and those just get frustrating. I'd rather do some more interesting stuff, and make the interiors of buildings feel more unique to this game. That doesn't mean no stairs, it just means that
everything isn't stairs.
Anyway, I actually think the idea of having these limited items become weaker later on will actually be a good reason to use them so you don't have tons of nearly useless weak spell scrolls sitting in your inventory.
Yeah, or at least that they were designed differently. I wind up never using things like Red Fang or similar, too, which cast limited-use spells. I just hate letting go of that stuff, and so never use it at all. I view this as my chance to Do It Right, because the idea of those things appealed to me but the implementation didn't. Have I mentioned that I have never liked a space-based RTS game before? That's why I did AI War, because I wanted a space RTS that would appeal to me, when other's didn't. The fact that other games have done something repeatedly that I feel is poor is actually a big motivator for me.
I have to say that the change really doesn't seem so bad anymore. Really excitied to see some more in the next diaries.
Awesome!
EDIT: You must also be glad you didn't do a public alpha release, I bet this change would have caused a lot more anger if people had been playing the game.
That's kind of a circular thing, honestly -- we didn't release it in alpha because we weren't yet happy enough with it to let others get their hands on it. And we made this change because we still weren't happy with it. If we'd already been in public alpha, that would have been because we were so happy with it we were ready to share it with others, and thus a change of that severity wouldn't have had reason to be contemplated.
That's also the reason we don't take preorders before people can try the game: if people had put down money on this game and then we made a change like this, they'd feel betrayed. As it stands, they can reevaluate and later try the demo and decide if they want to preorder or order or not. If not, that's no hard feelings, no game is for everyone.
Expansions are different because they're mainly for the hardcore fans of the base game anyhow, so with AI War we put those on preorder as soon as we start work at all. Hasn't ever been a problem. This would have definitely been, though, several times over!
