AVWW Beta 0.926 "Things You Might Like To Know" Released!

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Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2012/04/avww-beta-0926-things-you-might-like-to.html

This one is our first release since getting back from PAX East, and it's a big one.  Not only does it have all the stuff that Keith and Josh were working on while the rest of us were at the convention, it also has a first round of improvements based on our observations of players playing the game at the convention.

Observations From PAX East
Turns out that if you get five staff watching about three hundred players playing the game cold for the first time, you notice certain things.  People, by and large, make the exact same decisions when given the same stimuli; and consequently they also run into exactly the same trouble spots.  There are always outliers on any given issue, sure, and people in general obviously aren't carbon copies of one another.

But when all five of us were able to identify pretty much the same exact trouble spots after having independently watching different groups of players, the results were pretty clear.  That alone was probably worth the cost of going to PAX, I'm coming to realize; the game was already really polished, but this helps us really grind down the last of the sharp edges off the start of the game.

PAX East went great for us, by the way -- I'll write more about it later when there is more time, but we met a lot of awesome folks in terms of both press and attendees.  It was really cool to meet several AI War fans in person (first time that's ever happened for me, actually), and I was really jazzed to be able to show off this new game to a lot of people who had never even heard of it.  From the sounds of things, people in turn went away pretty excited about the game, which was rewarding to see.

Anyway, in terms of this particular release, there are a whole bunch of changes in there that I think you'll really like, and which are a direct result of our PAX East experience.  For the sake of organization I went ahead and just stuck them under their own category in the release notes, because there were so many of them.

So far we've hit roughly half of our list from PAX, but we hit the most critical items first.  The hope is that we'll be able to knock out the rest of them tomorrow, along with some other stuff.

What Keith's Been Up To
Keith has been a busy guy while the rest of us were gone, too.  His work mostly centered on three areas: multiplayer, achievements, and guardian powers.

Multiplayer
Multiplayer has jumped forward quite a lot in terms of polish with this version, as Keith finally nailed a mega-bug that was underpinning a wide variety of bug reports.  This was a bug that had been eluding both of us for a while, so that was nice to see.  At the moment we're not aware of any serious bugs in multiplayer, so we definitely want your feedback: any bugs at all that you're running into, we definitely want to know!  Only a little over a week left to go prior to 1.0!

There's also a number of new admin commands for multiplayer, targeted for anti-griefing purposes.  We strongly suspect we'll see an explosion of such admin commands shortly after 1.0 when more people get their hands on the game and actually start griefing each other; to some extent the exact griefing vectors are hard to predict.  But we're definitely trying to hit the obvious ones in advance, at least, just to make things smoother right from the start.

Achievements
Achievements are coming to the game, and will integrate with Steam in the same manner that we did with AI War and Tidalis.  These achievements will be more individual-focused and are cross-world, rather than being cross-player and per-world like the unlockables are.  So it's a completely different set of achievements compared to unlockables.

The set of achievements that we're going to start with is only something like 20ish achievements for 1.0, but we'll likely grow that in post-release content.  It just doesn't seem like the most pressing need to be doing a ton of those prior to 1.0 at the moment, although we certainly want to have a healthy number of then.

Continent-Wide Buffs From Guardian Powers
This is something Keith has been planning for a while, and they're really cool.  They finally bring a purpose to the skill level 4 and 5 of NPC professions, and they also bring a lot more variety to guardian powers in general.

All in all 51 new guardian powers were added, although 20 of them are currently disabled pending proper unlockables that are pending some new enemies that will be added in the next week for continents 2 and 3.

The cool thing about these continent-wide buffs is that they provide a completely new way to focus on the community and thus help the self by extension.  These can provide a much-needed vector for overcoming a challenging mission or an overlord or whatever, and they really should expand the decision space for the game.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

[zebramatt]

All really good stuff except:

Removed the "One Line" chat log mode since it didn't seem to serve much purpose.

That's the one I use! Admittedly, it was never quite perfect - and perhaps the effort required to fix it up to work a little more robustly is too much for too little gain - but I'm saddened to see it go!

[x4000]

Sorry about that! But it's a pretty useless mode with how we do scrolling anyhow; very frequently multiple lines get logged at once, and so at best you're missing huge amounts of information that goes in there. At worst the scrolling is just completely messed up; the new format of scrolling areas really wasn't designed with that small of an area in mind, unfortunately. Sorry!

[zebramatt]

Yeah, I thought you might say that. It really needs a system of message queuing to work properly!

[tigersfan]

Would adding a "One-Message" mode be feasible? So that it always shows the most recent message and only that message? That might be a decent compromise, if it can be worked out.

[zebramatt]

Well originally the shorter length of messages made it operate in pretty much that way, yeah - so in essence, that's the original concept right there.

Aside from that change, however, it's still not terribly useful unless each message has a minimum lifespan - remaining as the current 'active' message for x seconds before the next is shown, in order, until you get to the most recent. It's a concept which would work with the normal log mode too, on those occasions when there are enough lines of text to overfill that - but it's superfluous to the scrolling in all modes but One Message.

[mrhanman]

I'm really glad to see achievements going in.  I was a little worried they might not make it for 1.0.  I'm not an achievement whore by any means, but they can add a lot to a game if done properly. 

Anyway, I'm glad PAX went well, and good luck with the looming release!

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New one!  http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10241.0.html


And mrhanman, you'll be pleased with the... volume... of achievements.  Keith has already implemented 71, and it looks like that will grow by another 10-20 before we push that out hopefully tonight.  That'll be the roster for 1.0.

[TechSY730]

Just as an interesting thought. Have you thought about a "public play-test" for AI War similar to what you had at PAX for AVWW?
It might be trickier, as AI War takes more time to learn and is a slower game. However, it would do wonders for isolating common intuitiveness failures that we long-time players barely notice anymore but can serve as a real stumbling block. There have been several such posts about these types of issues on the AI War forums, but the problem is that one person can only cover so much, and it is only a few people, rather than a huge consensus of common issues like a public play-testing can give you.
This way you can isolate true "usability/intuitiveness hotspots" rather than trying to filter through the suggestions of only a few players.

[x4000]

Just as an interesting thought. Have you thought about a "public play-test" for AI War similar to what you had at PAX for AVWW?
It might be trickier, as AI War takes more time to learn and is a slower game. However, it would do wonders for isolating common intuitiveness failures that we long-time players barely notice anymore but can serve as a real stumbling block. There have been several such posts about these types of issues on the AI War forums, but the problem is that one person can only cover so much, and it is only a few people, rather than a huge consensus of common issues like a public play-testing can give you.
This way you can isolate true "usability/intuitiveness hotspots" rather than trying to filter through the suggestions of only a few players.

Definitely not -- AI War is such that it would take 3+ hours of watching each person to find that kind of data.  I'm not exaggerating for effect.  It just takes a long time before people are at all competent at AI War.

And to some extent, that's just AI War.  In a lot of respects it's the Dwarf Fortress of strategy games (whereas Dwarf Fortress is the Dwarf Fortress of simulation games).  You kinda have to want it to get into those, simply by their very nature.  That's not something that is based on their first 15 minutes, or even their first 3 hours; it's an intensive investment of your mental energy in both cases for as long as you play it.

With these games we try to basically match the first experience to the rest of the game, so that people aren't misled and can quickly decide if they like it or not.  In AVWW it's important to get them into things smoothly because once you have the basics down the game does proceed really smoothly.  With AI War there's a ton of stuff to learn at the start, and lots of tricky things to figure out, and that never really lets up.

[keith.lamothe]

Dwarf Fortress is the Dwarf Fortress of simulation games

That is possibly the best concise description of that game I've yet seen

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