In terms of discussing the game here while it's still in alpha... I don't inherently have a problem with that, but I do want to avoid poisoning the first impressions of new alpha testers that will be coming tonight and so forth. I'm worried that my video, which I'm sure many of them watched, already did that though.
What I mean by "poisoning" is that they know more than somebody coming to it blind would, and thus don't stumble where someone later will. If someone is going to stumble or be confused later, we want you alpha testers to stumble and be confused now, so that we can fix it and those that come after have a better experience.
That's my
only reservation about talking about alpha at the moment. So what I suggest is maybe creating a separate thread with a header that says something like ***IF YOU'VE SIGNED UP TO ALPHA TEST BUT ARE NOT YET, DON'T READ THIS PLEASE*** and then talk freely in there.
To the question about mouse support for the menus, we've explicitly removed that. The reasoning: we can't have half-baked mouse support in there (although we do in a few sections at the start of the game, which we're going to fix with time). If there's mouse support for menus, then mouse support is expected for tooltips and a host of other things. If we add tooltips and other things like that for the mouse, then we wind up gimping the gamepad experience and keyboard-only experience by comparison. Suddenly you never know if you're missing something by not hovering with the mouse, etc. It's a lot clearer for all concerned to focus on one control style, namely the one that matches the gameplay, and to simply work on making sure that flows as smoothly and quickly as possible at all times.
The one thing I am interested in, which we may not find out until Post-Beta, is how long the game takes to be beaten.
That's something we're interested in, too. We've not played a full game session yet, though Keith has come close. Our best guess is about 12 hours on a normal sized map, but that's one of the things that we are collecting data on from alpha. Generally speaking, we're expecting it to take 80-140 turns to complete the game on a normal map, depending on how quickly and expertly you move around, how the luck of the mapgen was, what the overlord chooses to do, etc. Overall most turns should be taking in the neighborhood of around 5 minutes at most, although many will take more like 2. However, there are some special things that happen at various points in the game that take you into an extended bit of adventuring for 15-20 minutes before you get back to regular turns.
And besides adding game-length, is there any advantage to playing on a bigger map?
Yes, it affects the balance of how fast the aggression of enemies scales up. So each turn "matters less" in a lot of senses. Of course, you'll be taking more of them, so the cumulative effect is similar, but it gives you more decision points per point in time. I suspect with each map size the experience is pretty different, but right now we've been focusing exclusively on Normal. On larger maps you also have more room to kite the overlord.
And replay value. In writing, the replay value seems decent with different classes and that, but I wonder how that holds up in actual play-through.
It's a strategy game at core, with Metroidvania stuff on top. I think the replay value comes from the strategic side more than anything else, although the adventuring bits do have lots of "let's try it this way this time" sort of decisions. I think the replay value here is higher than AVWW1. Once you get past three continents and have "seen it all" in AVWW1, there's no real incentive to keep playing anymore. Here the game definitively ends earlier than that, but there is a much more interesting incentive to play again, in the same sense there is with AI War or any other strategy game.
