So I'm downloading that demo...

[x4000]

For the guys coming up the hill, that's one of those things where they can't trap you, so just be wary and make sure you can run back up to higher ground.  Or quickly place a platform over your head and jump out of reach, if there is headroom.  As long as there are about six tiles of height, those white walking skelebots are no danger at all because you can just put a platform right above them and get away.  Platforms tend to be my go-to right-mouse click function (I have a 5 button mouse).

For the zooming out and panning around, no there's not a zoom out.  However, you can pan around by enabling mouse-directed aiming in the settings menu if you want; but that makes me dizzy, personally.  Most of the time you just want to make sure that you have a quick escape in mind: if something comes up on you suddenly, what is your plan?  If the hall is low, your plan is to run in the opposite direction of the enemy, firing at them and then trying to get where they can't reach you.  If the ceiling isn't low, then your plan is probably just to go upwards wherever you are, using wooden platforms or even just jumping over them and firing down, etc.

It's a pretty fast-paced game, or can be, but there should be combat difficulties that are comfortable for any level of twitch gamer.  But the higher the difficulty, the faster you have to be, like in an FPS game rather than like in an RPG or similar.

[Volatar]

Thanks for the tips!

[KDR_11k]

100%ing a dungeon (I assume you mean a cave with that, if you mean a building then you should have piles upon piles of consumables and enchant containers) should have gotten you a boatload of gems which are valuable crafting resources. Gems alone won't give you that much stuff but they are a mandatory component for all spells.

My spell config is fireball on the LMB (cheap attack), a medium attack on the RMB (ball lightning or launch rock depending on what I have at hand), melee on the MMB (pretty much always miasma whip), crates on the 4th button (been switching that for flares since they're more commonly needed) and a heavy attack on the 5th button (energy pulse currently). Also I bound plenty of keys to stuff, shift triggers storm dash (disabled double-tap to prevent accidents), Q drops a ball of light, Y a platform and F uses whatever spell I'm currently experimenting with. The only spell in my bar that doesn't have an easily reachable key is miniature because it's so rarely needed.

[chemical_art]

chemical_art:

Check your planning menu, it gives you ideas for what to explore to find.  Also gives you specific spells to get, etc.

To some extent, this is what the game is: it's big, it's open, you have to set your own goals to help you reach your long term goal of killing the overlord.  If you wander through every room in every random building, that's going to be boring as heck.  It sounds like you just went into some sort of random office building or something and wandered around scavenging.  To some extent you need to meet the game halfway and learn to scout effectively by using the maps, etc.  Which is mostly just about observation and looking at the tooltips, etc.  But also the intro mission kind of covered that, too.

There are, literally, thousands of random buildings in the world.  You could spend 10-30 minutes completely exploring each one.  It would be boring and pointless.  But there are stashes in each one, and you can quickly locate those, get the goods, and get out.  But that's not really the main thrust of the game either, because that's not helping you to actually get more spells.  It's just helping you to get prepared for missions (get more platforms, upgrade stones, etc).

When it turns you loose in the world map for the first time, it pretty well says most of that.  It also suggests you check your planning menu and decide which long-range spells to pursue.  If you just wandered off into buildings instead of doing that... well, that's valid to do, but if you don't enjoy it I suggest something else.

I'm not trying to be flippant, but I'm pretty tired and it sounds like you are as well.  At any rate, it's kind of like AI War: you just looted some random mark I planet that had nothing on it, simply because you saw it.  Not very useful!  I mean, sure, some use -- but not as much as the effort you put into it.  AI War galaxies are miniscule compared to the world in AVWW, so you have to pick and choose your targets even more carefully.  Not because the AI will Get You if you don't, but because you won't get much done if you don't.


Volatar: Combat difficulty adjusts the speed of enemy attacks, as well as damage dealt.  Sounds like it's a bit high for now.

Sorry if I sounded rude. But you must remember I've not kept track of how the game has developed at all. I'm a player virgin. If you aren't supposed to fully explore buildings, you really need to say it ingame. You need to say it in the tutorial building. You need to say it again in the map. I don't remember anywhere in game that says (don't fully explore buildings). It probably was said, but it was stuffed in a load of other unrelated things, so I skimmed over it and didn't realize its importance. It is important enough to say multiple times in multiple ways because 1) It is not something you want to pick up by intuition. If you do, it comes not as a positive thought, but as a negative one in frustration 2) With the intro in its current form, buildings come across as opposite of this game wide philosophy.

I've thought about that map you were talking about, and I have been using it. I know where the doors are yes. The tutorial went over that, yes. But when in an area with 20 rooms and one exit I frankly don't see any method other then guessing to get out. That is frustrating. The intro sets a poor standard for building exploration, from what you are telling me. The intro building was small and filled with goodies in most of the rooms. I thought the intro was trying to introduce me to the game, so I thought that was how all buildings were. The gravestones didn't tell me no, you don't want to fully explore buildings, they will be three times as big and complex and have a third of the goodies.

I'm sorry if I'm sounding rude, but I am treating the game a lot like the "casual" player will treat it. Meaning I will read those gravestones because they are short reads. But walls of text I will skim. You may not think hand holding should be used at all, but if you don't at the very least hand hold a little to each, you will cause frustration to the majority of players.

I think you have a great game here. The problem right now is that you have a difficulty curve. Not a curve in that "monsters are always killing me! (although the tutorial does set that somewhat high actually)." But in a "how do I accomplish my goals!" kind of thing.

Like I just tried to do as you suggested and try again to read that planning menu. But it loaded me up super low health in a middle of the dungeon, and if I had remembered the way out before the dungeon I don't know now.  There are 3 doors and each lead to 3 more doors and there are level numbers but they get mixed up so don't help that much...I JUST WANT TO GET OUT!

I know I'm sounding whiney here. But I'm being honest, if you think I'm whining, then you must make a choice. You will keep the game really, really, small, for the dedicated fans of this genre. Or you can do some tweaks for those players jumping in and wanting their hand held a little for, say, the first lieutenant (are there those?), and then give the player the current setup of no hand holding.

When time is precious and I'm trying a demo, I need to learn by doing, and not be backround reading, as much as possible, so that I can give my precious time to decide if the game is fun. Everyone I know who tries demos says the same thing.

Right now I feel like I keep jumping into the game and drowning. I'm looking for a lifeguard to help teach me to swim, or at least direct me to the shallow end, or at the very least get me out of the water so I can try again (see below) and there is none in game.

At the very least, please please please. Give me a spell to return to the surface. I'm lost.

[tigersfan]

You don't sound whiney or rude. We really do appreciate your feedback. There is a tombstone in the dungeons that says you don't need to explore everything, but perhaps we need to make it more prominent.

Have you used the dungeon map on the bottom right corner to try to help you get out? Maybe we need to do a better job explaining it in-game, though, I'm not sure how best to do that. If you need help understanding it, this wiki page might help you for now: http://www.arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AVWW_-_What_are_all_these_maps_for%3F .

[chemical_art]

That wiki page helps a lot, actually. Thank you.

If it were possible, I would suggest that when you hover you mouse over that level map, you provide a new key function. By clicking this key over the menu, you can pause the game and show an image like on the wiki on the left hand side, and on the right hand side you provide the info provided on the wiki.

That way, you always have a reference sheet to get out. I do remember the tutorial trying to explain it. But what they said? Lost between the rest of the gravestones and fighting those skelebots. That's a challenge, actually. You are trying to teach non combat things between uber intense combat, and just biological instincts say "focus on fighting!"

[zebramatt]

I think you made a good point about the size of the intro building, actually: if the first building you came to was big but held your hand on how to find the useful bits (the tutorial aspect), it would gel with the game proper a great deal more.

[Bluddy]

I think a '?' button on every screen with the wiki info would be good too. It's something to click when you have no idea what's going on.

Also, gravestones should keep spawning with tips just like in the tutorial as you move around (there should be an option in the menu to turn them off). At least in the first continent. If you're going methodically through a building and over-exploring, gravestones should keep spawning of people who 'died of boredom' because they didn't head for the stash.

This last one is really a huge point, as chemical_art mentioned. Every other game wants you to explore every nook and cranny, so AVWW really goes against the collective teaching of just about every game out there. You need to make sure that it's clearly explained to the player over and over. Most players have been taught to be completionists and OCD in games, and it'll be very hard for them to adjust to this different approach.

[Professor Paul1290]

That does bring up good point. Whenever players are typically trained in a certain behavior by most games your genre and it doesn't make sense in your game, you sometimes have to put some extra effort into counter-acting the said behavior.

If you have an FPS game where red barrels do not explode(*gasp*) and they're just barrels that just so happen to be red (or red-ish), many players are going to waste considerable amounts of ammo trying to blow them up before finally realizing that they do not explode.

[x4000]

I don't think you sound whiney, but here is what I wonder: are you the intended audience for the game?  This is a valid question, and I don't mean this in a rude way if that's how it comes off.  But, at core, this game is about going out into the wild yonder, finding stuff on your own, and seeing what you come up with.  The longer the game hand-holds you with telling you every last thing to do, the longer it's misleading you about its true nature.

Now, that's only a half-truth, of course.  Unlike a lot of games, the game goes out of its way to make it so that you can find out where to go to accomplish various goals.  There are some specific areas where this breaks down (the mission descriptions are particularly something people are missing these days, even amongst experienced players), but I think overall the start is solid.  I wouldn't want to change the intro mission to be any less focused than it is, because it's teaching some specific things.

In terms of the monsters being easier after the intro mission, that's not true anymore; the skelebot guards were an anomaly in how they were working for a few versions there.

I'm short on time and a bit overwhelmed at the moment, to be honest.  This has been about the worst three workdays I can remember in... a long time.  Not to wallow or be melodramatic, but it makes this a bit difficult for me to parse with a clear head at the moment.

So I guess my thought process, muddled as it is, boils down to:

1. I understand that you're getting lost in buildings.  A way to warp to the surface is out of the question, though, because that defeats the whole purpose of exploring buildings and having any sense of the world being a world place.  That's a "press to win" sort of tool.

2. A lot of people don't seem to be getting lost in dungeons.  I wonder if you're just in a hurry and not that interested, even after the intro mission.  To some extent if there's someone who's not that interested, I'd love to tip them over the edge into actually wanting the game... but on the other hand I can't chase those edge cases at the expense of the larger game.  It's tricky.

3. I remember that we wanted to explain the maps better in the intro mission, but never did.  Oops.

4. Point taken on the other-games-in-the-genre-train-you-in-the-opposite-OCD-approach.  I'm not sure what to do about that.  Muddled thinking at the moment.

5. When you exit the intro mission, your guidance-if-you-need-it is supposed to be coming from the "Things You Should Probably Be Doing" section of the planning menu.  I guess that needs to be made more prominent, but I don't really know how at the moment.  Muddled.

6. We can't do wiki-style formatting of text mixed with images very well.  Folks are thinking of HTML, and that's incredibly difficult and time consuming to put together here.

7. Putting a little ? button on every page is one of those things that sounds good, but I know from experience that people don't use them.  Even business users who are sitting there to do their job, less than 1% of them click those stupid things.  That's why most companies stopped putting them in.  Instead the companies rely on training and customer liasons or team leads at the customer site to answer the questions for them.  There's a reason for that; another human can answer it quickly, whereas your average business user just skips past it.

8. My fear, based on my own past experience with #7 above (8 years' worth) is that we'll do a bunch of work trying to put in yet more explanations, and people still won't read it.  "People Don't Read" was our mantra at my old company, and it was always tough to work around.  It's even more true in games.  To some extent that means that people need to be carried through either by their own excitement (and thus willingness to experiment) or by someone else telling them the information.

9. To some extent, you're just playing the game with this stuff, right?  Does the game need to explain every optimal strategy?  I had a lot of internal waffling about explaining gate raiding in the tutorial of AI War back when I was making that, but ultimately decided to.  That was a good decision, because it's such a key mechanic.  But a lot of the more subtle and advanced strategies I left out.  There's a line somewhere, but it's hard from my vantage to always judge where the line is.  Past some point it goes from tutorial to strategy guide.  You know how to get around the world, the map is right there and you can figure it out if you look at it a bit (it has tooltips and everything, for most of it).  It's possible to "get it" completely by just fiddling with it; but there's also the wiki if you aren't the sort that likes to fiddle in that way with a game you're not sure about.  Which is... most of us? 

10. Sigh.  The maps definitely need more instruction attached to them, for sure.  I'm not sure about exactly what to do with them, though.  Perhaps every time you enter a new building it needs to start giving you one of those popups saying "find the stash and then get out, etc" and it's an opt-out thing.  And that could tell you about the maps a little more, too.

[chemical_art]

Consider it like this:

I want to learn the game and get into this genre. But I'm completely blind. I need to be taught how to see. Walls of text will not teach me how to see since I'm in a rush. I'm in a rush since I'm blind, and I'm not sure if I like what I will see.

I need explanations, but I also need references. You WILL have players who will not read the texts but maybe skim. But almost anyone will read those tombstones. But they may not remember all of it.

So I go off intuition. I do that a lot in games. It allowed me to succeed in AI wars. Stay cautious, don't attangoize, etc. Some of that intuition works here. Stay away from melee units. Avoid attacks. But other parts don't. Don't explore nooks and crannys. Don't fight every enemy you see. These things are briefly mentioned in a tutorial that throws everything at you once, then doesn't mention it again it seems.

Most players will not do a ton of research before they get into a game. They jump in and get their feet wet. If they like the pool, they practice in the shallow end for a while. It is during this team they do some research. But they don't do all the reading before swimming.

Are you saying I need to do this? Because with that attitude you are right, I might not be the target audience. That makes me sad. Because I'm really rooting for you here at Arcen to succeed. I want you to. But if you choose to isolate yourselves like this, you won't have as much success.

Remember, I'm not asking you to change the core game. I'm asking for some help. Teach me, and I will learn. But to say it ALL must be learned on my own after a brief, choatic, and confusing and not entirely accurate tutorial seems like a steep challenge.

[chemical_art]

A few things to consider:

Make it explict that you NEED that planning menu to understand what is going on. You need to convey that need more urgently. After taking a boring but necessarily ten minutes, I understand what the various rescources do, sort of. Force players to read that planning menu (in that you can read this to understand rescources, and this before you wander) before letting them wander, if need be. It would only take 3 minutes to explain through a series of images and arrows, but it will go a LONG way.

You NEED a refernce key for that map in the bottom. You have a very helpful guide using "." in order to describe gates. I have used it a dozen times because I forget how they work, because I'm still learning. If it wasn't for that "." I'd be frustrated and asking here how to use them. But I don't. Because there is a in game description as to how it works. The map needs something similar. It NEEDS a reference sheet that can be accessed, so that if a player forgets, needs a refresher, or needs to learn it for the first time they can get an idea on how to use it. It is easy to use, yes, but only if you either study throughly the intro or read the wiki. If you are lost, when you need the info most, it cannot be found.

Have you considered a "tips of the day" menu that you can stash in a corner of the UI, somewhere, that will scroll needed knowledge for new players? It can  flash important things like "Look for the stash, not each nook and cranny" and "only mini-bosses and above give exp" ? every 5 minutes or so. It can be disabled so as to not annoy experienced players, but if unlocked for new players it will beat down things that are essential and easy to follow but not necessarily intuitive.

That's what I've discovered I'm fighting, intuition. Once I break that intuition things gel nicely, but to break that intuition I need to first be guided in the right direction.

[chemical_art]

Just to give you an idea of how important these things are:

Now that I understand how to use the map, and I vaguely understand how resources work sort of, the game has meshed a lot better. The problem is that I had  need to learn these things on this forum, not in the game. The map description of the forum for the map, and the telling of the planning menu on this forum for the resources. I'm still very iffy on the resources though, because its meant as a general guide and not in a more beginner friendly fashion.

Saying "If you want a fire spell, which will let you do ________ at the cost of _________, you need to find _____,  which you can find ______" would be more intuitive.




EDIT: OK, those resources can be lumped entirely on my fault, because I didn't do homework. I'm just saying it could be made clearer by forcing the player to understand "Yes, this is a planning menu. It tells you everything. No, its not just a little thing like that journal you were forced to use at school. It tells you EVERYTHING that the game will tell you."

But the map? If you are lost, there is currently no resource to assist you getting out.

[Bluddy]

I still think a ? button is useful. The most useful thing you can do with it is have an overlay with arrows and text on the screen. Pressing the ? when you're in the main screen will show you:

- An arrow pointing to the map in the top right, with a blurb saying "Are you lost? Use this map. Orange rooms are X, blue rooms are Y...
- An arrow pointing to the top left map saying "Can't find something in this area? Look over here. Orange is X..."
- An arrow pointing to the planning menu saying "You really really want to use this. Don't over-explore: find what you need by consulting your planning menu"

The cool thing is that this overlay is momentary, but it gives you most of the tips you need, and you could bring it up any time.
You could have a separate overlay for the map screen, and make it as context sensitive as you want.

[Hyfrydle]

I'm planning on doing a let's play/tutorial on You Tube shortly. I did one earlier in the beta and after a view of it things are way out of date so it gives a wrong sense of the game. If you fancy a look check out my channel on You Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/user/Hyfrydle32?feature=guide

My run through will start right from the beginning of the current build and hopefully cover the whole of the first continent with plenty of explanations and strategy tips.

I hope to get started soon and get an episode uploaded.