Responses to alpha player questions.

[x4000]

Rather than respond to these in the main thread with all the other feedback and such, I figured I would pull things out here, in a new thread that can be just devoted to Q&A.  If you have further questions or followups, free free to also log those here.

Misery: Initial question upon entering mission:  Why can I fire through walls?  This is the part that makes the least sense so far.

We're using a permissive field of view, and saying that you can shoot anything you can see: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Permissive_Field_of_View

Why?  Because it felt awful when we used a system where we used a strict pessimistic line of sight.  There's not much in the middle, I'm afraid.

Misery: Is there some way to look at Exo stats during missions?  Or look at my inventory during missions?  Both would be useful.

Hovering over the exo itself button on the left tells you some of this, but clicking your character (or right-clicking the exo portrait) tells you more.

Misery: Music on the map/customization/shop screens would be nice.  They're too quiet, since nothing is exploding or shouting hilarious lines.

Music is not done yet!  There are over 100 minutes of music slated to be done, but it won't be ready until sometime in October.  Unlike in the past, most likely we will be adding this to the game as it is ready.

Tridus: but there was also no "clicking" noise when you click on icons or menus, and that absence was odd.

We felt like interface clicks were annoying, and a goodly number of games don't use them, so we figured we would not as well.  The only sound effects that are planned but missing at the moment (sound effects being distinct from music) are more voice prompts from robots.  We're open to suggestions of course, but I feel like it is super hard to get a good mouse click noise that doesn't make me really annoyed with the noise pretty fast.

Tridus: What's a "speciality unlock code"? Typing something in there ("1") doesn't appear to do anything, it just took me back to the main menu with no message about what it did. Also when the prompt to type it in appears after clicking the button, the keyboard cursor isn't in the box so typing does nothing.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.   As it notes on that screen, it's not required to play the game.  Shattered Haven and Skyward Collapse also have this, it's just part of our internal debugging stuff for the engine.

Tridus: A click-to-move option (ala XCOM and most overland TBS games like Age of Wonders) would be AWESOME. Using WASD overhead is really awkward and confusing to me. (Particularly since WASD is typically go forward/go backward/turn left/turn right, and here it's just the four directions to move in, like the arrow keys.)

Yep, we actually implemented this, and it was terrible.  It is just so easy to accidentally move to the wrong tile since there is not a visible grid, and a visible grid looks terrible.  And moving multiple tiles at once when near enemies is almost always stupid.  And there have to be all these secondary rules about when it should stop a move in progress based on new enemies coming into sight, and the list goes on and on.

In short, it felt incredibly bad to play with, and we couldn't see a way to make it work well, so we cut it.  I really don't plan on adding it back, as the basic gameplay just isn't supportive of it.  Nor is keyboard-only viable, come to that.  WASD + mouse is pretty common for a lot of games with ranged combat on the PC.  I'll grant you that most roguelikes are not about ranged combat, though.

[x4000]

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[x4000]

This space reserved.

[Tridus]

Tridus: A click-to-move option (ala XCOM and most overland TBS games like Age of Wonders) would be AWESOME. Using WASD overhead is really awkward and confusing to me. (Particularly since WASD is typically go forward/go backward/turn left/turn right, and here it's just the four directions to move in, like the arrow keys.)

Yep, we actually implemented this, and it was terrible.  It is just so easy to accidentally move to the wrong tile since there is not a visible grid, and a visible grid looks terrible.  And moving multiple tiles at once when near enemies is almost always stupid.  And there have to be all these secondary rules about when it should stop a move in progress based on new enemies coming into sight, and the list goes on and on.

In short, it felt incredibly bad to play with, and we couldn't see a way to make it work well, so we cut it.  I really don't plan on adding it back, as the basic gameplay just isn't supportive of it.  Nor is keyboard-only viable, come to that.  WASD + mouse is pretty common for a lot of games with ranged combat on the PC.  I'll grant you that most roguelikes are not about ranged combat, though.

In my second map (when I understood more how movement and turns work), it felt more natural to use WASD. So you made the right call I think, it just took a bit to understand it.

[x4000]

Cool.

[Cyborg]

New question about mines. How do I turn the direction of my robot to place the mines without spending a turn? Also, they seem kind of exploitable. My enemy doesn't run into them, but they sure like to waste all of their ammunition on them.

Also having trouble throwing grenades. What's the trick here?

[x4000]

New question about mines. How do I turn the direction of my robot to place the mines without spending a turn? Also, they seem kind of exploitable. My enemy doesn't run into them, but they sure like to waste all of their ammunition on them.

You can use the arrow keys (not WASD) to turn your bot -- it now says that in the tooltip, although you may have been playing (or still be playing) on the version prior to us putting that in.

In terms of the enemies wasting ammo on the mines, I've not seen that; they're supposed to truck on over them and die stupidly, not attack them!  Do you have a save with that happening?

Also having trouble throwing grenades. What's the trick here?

Those just get fired like anything else -- am I missing something?  If you want to ground fire, hold shift.  Maybe there's some sort of new bug here's that's affecting you or something.

[orzelek]

Grenades work for me - they have a bit strange explosion pattern tho.
They explode in X pattern and are quite hard to use. Also damage is not so great.

 I'm heavily disappointed by being unable to blow up enemy mines by firing at them - didn't try grenades or rockets yet.

[x4000]

I need to look at the mines thing, that's actually a bug.

[madcow]

Yeah, the mines thing bugged me.

I also agree that grenades are basically not worth it, could use a bit of a damage buff (maybe 100?) - wouldn't mind seeing ammo on it go down in exchange to keep the assault exo from being too OP while still having grenades as a panic/crowd control button.

[orzelek]

Also grenade explosion pattern could use an upgrade. Or maybe it's bugged.
Description states it's radius 2. For me it's always an X centered on hit place.

[x4000]

The grenades I shifted up to make it so that they would actually be different from the rocket launcher, which is a radial pattern.  The X pattern is really useful for hitting some forms of bots, but is less blanket-force than a radial, so you can use it closer to yourself.  But you also can't carpet bomb an entire room.  So I felt justified giving it higher ammo (much so) but much less damage.  When you need to kill a lot of smaller guys with just a couple of shots to them in general.

That was the thinking, anyhow.

[Coppermantis]

Understandable, but its damage is so low that the only time I use it is if my Siege Exo is low on rocket ammo or otherwise unavailable. The pattern is fine, but I'd rather have it do more damage with less ammo.

[x4000]

Okay, fair enough.  I've upped them for now to 400, from 300.

[Cyborg]

New question about mines. How do I turn the direction of my robot to place the mines without spending a turn? Also, they seem kind of exploitable. My enemy doesn't run into them, but they sure like to waste all of their ammunition on them.

You can use the arrow keys (not WASD) to turn your bot -- it now says that in the tooltip, although you may have been playing (or still be playing) on the version prior to us putting that in.

In terms of the enemies wasting ammo on the mines, I've not seen that; they're supposed to truck on over them and die stupidly, not attack them!  Do you have a save with that happening?

Also having trouble throwing grenades. What's the trick here?

Those just get fired like anything else -- am I missing something?  If you want to ground fire, hold shift.  Maybe there's some sort of new bug here's that's affecting you or something.

Upon further play through, when I laid those mines, those aren't actually mines. Those are hacking terminals graphics! I had never laid a mine before, so I didn't really recognize it, but that's what it is.


I can't reproduce it, but I am laying mines everywhere in the hopes that I can get this to come up again. That is bizarre!


In other news, this game is freaking fun. Now that I know what I'm doing, it's all good. Takeaway point, we need to make sure people have an idea on what this game is about when they are starting to play. And I think the marketing needs to be on target for this as well. You have a lot of depth here that is not readily apparent, but the more I play the more I realize what I can do as a "pilot"or whatever you are calling it. So, bravo, this is one that's a keeper. Good job.