Arcen Games
General Category => Skyward Collapse => Topic started by: Mick on May 08, 2013, 09:13:20 am
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I created a discussion thread because the rules for posting in the other thread (http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13028.0.html) sounded scary. I have no business posting in there because I can't speak for everyone.
This may go toward "feature complete", but I can sum up the improvement I think is most necessary as: Objectives, objectives, objectives!
There are lots of nice things you can do with the interface and tutorial and displaying information, but right now, I can figure out how to plop down buildings and create units just fine. However, I can't really test the game for "fun" because there is no direction at all in what I need to be doing, and there's so much different feedback on the "what you should be doing" should be, that I don't even know what to *pretend* the objectives are when I play.
Without a goal to the game, it feels like a tech demo more than anything else. It's like if I playing Carcassone in the middle of the game being designed, and the creator said to me "just place down tiles, make cities and roads and stuff, is it fun?" we'll work out the victory conditions later." I'd say, "the tiles are pretty, and I could see a cool game being made out of this, but I don't know what that game is yet."
That's exactly how I feel about Skyward Collapse right now.
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Thanks for this thread. By the way, in terms of god powers and objectives, you don't need to point those out to us since those are basically us pursuing "feature completion." So we're with you there. :)
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Indeed. The game is quite pointless right now.
But I think the UI needs quite a bit of work before a press release. I can't speak for the press, but I do think a major part of me tolerating the uncomfortable controls was my intense love for this company, which may not be shared by the press (for reasons unfathomable).
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I was about to post in the other thread about more explicit direction being needed. A list of objectives, along with a more helpful UI and tutorial. That's mainly it, other than polish.
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The biggest issue that everybody seems to talk about is how difficult it is to get an overview of the current resource situation.
Would prefer a separate resource flows page, bound to "Q" or something.
- Produced last turn (raw production per tile, simply a function of ownership)
- Deposited last turn (the step where chaps drop them into your global stash or converts them)
- Used last turn (all production and tile placements).
Some kind of overall separate resources screen would be good. With as much information on it was possible (within reason). Middle mouse button could be an optional way to access it.
-- myself
This is something that's really needed. A hotkey would work, a little box would work, but there should be some way to tell what's going on because otherwise it's pretty hard to plan.
I would definitely like this. Or even an end-of-turn, scrollable popup.
A page hotkey would indeed be great :)
There have been many other posts about it on the forum, too. Bit of a no-brainer this issue as I'm sure you're probably already ready to work in this, but it is definitely the biggest issue I've seen.
The general solution most people seem to like is a separately bound button to bring up a global resources page.
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I created a discussion thread because the rules for posting in the other thread (http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13028.0.html) sounded scary. I have no business posting in there because I can't speak for everyone.
This may go toward "feature complete", but I can sum up the improvement I think is most necessary as: Objectives, objectives, objectives!
There are lots of nice things you can do with the interface and tutorial and displaying information, but right now, I can figure out how to plop down buildings and create units just fine. However, I can't really test the game for "fun" because there is no direction at all in what I need to be doing, and there's so much different feedback on the "what you should be doing" should be, that I don't even know what to *pretend* the objectives are when I play.
Without a goal to the game, it feels like a tech demo more than anything else. It's like if I playing Carcassone in the middle of the game being designed, and the creator said to me "just place down tiles, make cities and roads and stuff, is it fun?" we'll work out the victory conditions later." I'd say, "the tiles are pretty, and I could see a cool game being made out of this, but I don't know what that game is yet."
That's exactly how I feel about Skyward Collapse right now.
This.
I'm still playing the game right now, but.... it feels less like playing a game, and more like I'm jamming things in random spots, and pursuing rather vague goals that I made up randomly myself simply to continue the testing process, searching for bugs and simple balance issues. Actual strategy I use is always related to situations that I set up myself for the testing, generally by firing off large powers arbitrarily. That part is still interesting and good, in that the large powers create those situations, but I'm not using the big powers for any real REASON. The chaos has no real point right now.
If I WERENT a tester though.... and was just a player, either coming into this, or watching/reading about it.... I'd be bloody lost. As best I could tell, the only goal is: "survive", and the method to do this is: "create stalemate". And that would appear to be the end of that. I'm not very clear on wether or not you guys have chosen to go forward with the VP idea or not (it SOUNDS like you are), but if that's the case.... having that in there before showing off the game too much would seem to me like a good idea, since it would be part of the major "framework" of the game, right? Same if you're going to add like, side-objectives or whatever people were calling those.
I think some of the UI things and such are important too, but I think the "basics" of the UI, like it's overall look and such, are what people reading about the game and seeing screenshots or whatever are mostly going to notice, and that's already there; extra tweaks, basically quality/polish stuff with the UI, can possibly wait a bit. Maybe.
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For me, the biggest gripe right now is the lack of (implemented - not discussed) mechanics to make the game "interesting" by making the player tip balance out of its (boring) equilibrium by the use of god powers, random events that have to be handled etc. - and preferably have fun during the process ;).
That's the biggest issue I can think of right now. Without anything like this players will strife to mimic one side with the other and create a boring tech demo in the process...
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I created a discussion thread because the rules for posting in the other thread (http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13028.0.html) sounded scary. I have no business posting in there because I can't speak for everyone.
This may go toward "feature complete", but I can sum up the improvement I think is most necessary as: Objectives, objectives, objectives!
There are lots of nice things you can do with the interface and tutorial and displaying information, but right now, I can figure out how to plop down buildings and create units just fine. However, I can't really test the game for "fun" because there is no direction at all in what I need to be doing, and there's so much different feedback on the "what you should be doing" should be, that I don't even know what to *pretend* the objectives are when I play.
Without a goal to the game, it feels like a tech demo more than anything else. It's like if I playing Carcassone in the middle of the game being designed, and the creator said to me "just place down tiles, make cities and roads and stuff, is it fun?" we'll work out the victory conditions later." I'd say, "the tiles are pretty, and I could see a cool game being made out of this, but I don't know what that game is yet."
That's exactly how I feel about Skyward Collapse right now.
This.
I'm still playing the game right now, but.... it feels less like playing a game, and more like I'm jamming things in random spots, and pursuing rather vague goals that I made up randomly myself simply to continue the testing process, searching for bugs and simple balance issues. Actual strategy I use is always related to situations that I set up myself for the testing, generally by firing off large powers arbitrarily. That part is still interesting and good, in that the large powers create those situations, but I'm not using the big powers for any real REASON. The chaos has no real point right now.
If I WERENT a tester though.... and was just a player, either coming into this, or watching/reading about it.... I'd be bloody lost. As best I could tell, the only goal is: "survive", and the method to do this is: "create stalemate". And that would appear to be the end of that. I'm not very clear on wether or not you guys have chosen to go forward with the VP idea or not (it SOUNDS like you are), but if that's the case.... having that in there before showing off the game too much would seem to me like a good idea, since it would be part of the major "framework" of the game, right? Same if you're going to add like, side-objectives or whatever people were calling those.
I think some of the UI things and such are important too, but I think the "basics" of the UI, like it's overall look and such, are what people reading about the game and seeing screenshots or whatever are mostly going to notice, and that's already there; extra tweaks, basically quality/polish stuff with the UI, can possibly wait a bit. Maybe.
Wholeheartedly seconded (specific points in bold)!
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I don't think I want a hot key to bring up a resources page, I pretty much want to see them all the time.
Like a bar along the top or bottom that has each resource icon with a number next to it, and when a unit gets produced or you plop down a building, the little red "-4" floats over the wood number (or whatever) and disappears after it decremented the value.
When you highlight a building and see you need 8 log icons to build it, and you quickly see on the bottom, oh I only have 6 log icons at the moment, I need more. And the tooltip for the building says under log icons that log icons are produced by the whatever.
On-demand resources are a bit funky, but I suppose the global bar could just show the maximum number you have based on the feeder resources. So when you built something that requires say bacon 4 bacon, that that really represents the loss of 16 pigs (or whatever, I don't remember the ratios), then you represent that by having -4 float above the bacon, and -16 float above the pigs.
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I don't think I want a hot key to bring up a resources page, I pretty much want to see them all the time.
Like a bar along the top or bottom that has each resource icon with a number next to it, and when a unit gets produced or you plop down a building, the little red "-4" floats over the wood number (or whatever) and disappears after it decremented the value.
When you highlight a building and see you need 8 log icons to build it, and you quickly see on the bottom, oh I only have 6 log icons at the moment, I need more. And the tooltip for the building says under log icons that log icons are produced by the whatever.
On-demand resources are a bit funky, but I suppose the global bar could just show the maximum number you have based on the feeder resources. So when you built something that requires say bacon 4 bacon, that that really represents the loss of 16 pigs (or whatever, I don't remember the ratios), then you represent that by having -4 float above the bacon, and -16 float above the pigs.
The bit about seeing the base resources all the time, yeah, I second that one, big time. I think that one's very important, as the UI stuff goes. Alot of time is wasted just moving the screen to a city and checking it there.... and even MORE is wasted when I then realize, I'm looking at the wrong color city for what turn it is. A nice bar along the side or bottom of the screen displaying each resource and how many are there would help a TON.
As for the on-demand stuff.... hmmm. I do think that having the city center buildings give a list of what production structures are and arent active within them is important.... because that'd be a nice, quick, easy way to check which production buildings I have, and thus decide on what else I think I need in such and such city.
But, there's ALSO things like mythological creatures or whatever that want the production items.... yet are NOT bound to cities (which is a good thing), and thus only need one production building somewhere in the world, and particularly in the early bit of the game, it's very easy to NOT have such and such building, but not be aware of it. There are plenty of times when I'll go to place an ice giant or something down and am like, "Wait a minute.... I *dont* have a smelter anywhere?".
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But, there's ALSO things like mythological creatures or whatever that want the production items.... yet are NOT bound to cities (which is a good thing), and thus only need one production building somewhere in the world, and particularly in the early bit of the game, it's very easy to NOT have such and such building, but not be aware of it. There are plenty of times when I'll go to place an ice giant or something down and am like, "Wait a minute.... I *dont* have a smelter anywhere?".
On that note, I think the "global resource bar" should not show a zero for those icons, but instead have like an X or something whose tooltip tells you which building will make that resource start being available.
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I don't think I want a hot key to bring up a resources page, I pretty much want to see them all the time.
Like a bar along the top or bottom that has each resource icon with a number next to it, and when a unit gets produced or you plop down a building, the little red "-4" floats over the wood number (or whatever) and disappears after it decremented the value.
Sounds good to me. Not sure how big this bar would be, though. Hopefully it would work.
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Definetly agree that UI is one of the bigger changes needed. Being able to tell the state of things, what's needed, etc without having to mouse over every village and building (in case you forget how buildings look) and then mentally calculate gain/losses should be streamlined. There's a balancing point between an info dump and not enough however you don't want to throw up everything, but it does need some change.
Likewise the resource building groupings could use some rearrangement to be a little more intuitive, and it should be easier to tell what a village has/needs - being able to toggle on/off building names on tiles for instance.
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I've read though almost all the threads / mantises and compiled a couple of solutions for each critical problem that I think represents the community view here (http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13019.msg146000.html#msg146000).
Please tell me if something important, or another good solution is missing! I have definite observer bias.
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I've read though almost all the threads / mantises and compiled a couple of solutions for each critical problem that I think represents the community view here (http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13019.msg146000.html#msg146000).
Please tell me if something important, or another good solution is missing! I have definite observer bias.
Assuming they are working on the objectives/fun issue already/anyway I think you nailed things down fairly well...
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I haven't played 0.805...does it snap to the Faction's Town Center when you switch End Turn? (The oldest Town Center in the case of multiples) That was the biggest aggravation for me, and made it very hard to keep playing.
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What do you all think of visually and textually distinguishing manufactured resources from global resources, everywhere they are mentioned?
(1) I mean a separate terminology. Every-time the game refers to a manufactured resource it says that it is made/produced/manufactured, whereas all primary resources are referred to as available/bred/grown/mined.
(2) In particular, all texts that refer to resource availability are currently green or red. I would suggest to keep this only for global resources. All manufactured resources are instead yellow/red or light blue/red.
This is the expected outcome for a greek horseman: "14 bacon (28 manu.)" "4 horses (6 avail.)"
= = =
The Bakery: On Demand: Makes 1 Bread (icon) from 3 wheat (icon).
The Smelter: On Demand: Makes 1 Steel (icon) from 4 iron (no iron-mine) (icon).
The wheat-farm: Grows 4 wheat (icon) per turn.
The sheep-farm: Breeds 3 sheep (icon) per turn.
And when smelter is missing for the Norse thrower:
"14 mutton (15 manu.)" "7 steel (no smelter)"
..versus when there isn't enough iron:
"14 mutton (15 manu.)" "7 steel (4 manu.)"
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I haven't played 0.805...does it snap to the Faction's Town Center when you switch End Turn? (The oldest Town Center in the case of multiples) That was the biggest aggravation for me, and made it very hard to keep playing.
No it doesn't...and to me I think that's a big issue.
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I haven't played 0.805...does it snap to the Faction's Town Center when you switch End Turn? (The oldest Town Center in the case of multiples) That was the biggest aggravation for me, and made it very hard to keep playing.
No it doesn't...and to me I think that's a big issue.
Can anyone think of a reason this SHOULDN'T be put on the Mutual Improvements board? I don't think it will take long to implement consider the action playback already has a "snap-to" feature.
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I haven't played 0.805...does it snap to the Faction's Town Center when you switch End Turn? (The oldest Town Center in the case of multiples) That was the biggest aggravation for me, and made it very hard to keep playing.
No it doesn't...and to me I think that's a big issue.
Can anyone think of a reason this SHOULDN'T be put on the Mutual Improvements board? I don't think it will take long to implement consider the action playback already has a "snap-to" feature.
Moderately for. I'll add it to the list then.
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snap to the Faction's Town Center when you switch End Turn? (The oldest Town Center in the case of multiples) That was the biggest aggravation for me, and made it very hard to keep playing.
Please support the related issue:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11376: [UI] Start of Turn: jumping to a Town Center of the civ would be helpful
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Your link is broken
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Well, the whole snap-to-town thing doesn't look to me to be terribly urgent or major. It's annoying, yes, but it doesn't make the game frustrating/unbearable.
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Your link is broken
sorry, it works for me, at least with Chrome under Windows and Android
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It's annoying, yes, but it doesn't make the game frustrating/unbearable.
Yes, exactly, annoying, but not unbearable.
=> But not good for press release, because so obvious, I think!
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As I'm now building more towns and getting farther in the game, scrolling between the towns each turn is becoming my biggest annoyance.
I've written a mantis ticket to suggest a mini-map, and I think that would solve this for me. It doesn't need to be fancy, just something I can click on to quick-jump to the area of the landmass that I want to work on.
A non-minimap option that I think is elegant is to jump to where you last placed a building/tile/whatever for the faction whose current turn it is. In the vast majority of the time, that's going to be where I want to build next, or at least very close to it.
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Yes, good Idea, I added some cross links between related issues!
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One that I wanted to point out:
THis seems to be an overall issue, which is with the AI, how pretty much any kind of unit will occaisionally do really weird crap like bounce back and forth between two tiles, or go in circles, or wander past enemies in a random direction without attacking, or strange things like that. On very rare occaisions I'll get one that simply stands perfectly still for a number of turns and doesnt do anything.
Aside from some remaining UI things, this is the only problem I'm aware of right now, but it really does seem to affect EVERY unit type.
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Definitely are some AI issues. I have arsonists making a beeline to enemy units and killing themselves rather than buildings. My barracks/archery units seem to ignore ruins while my siege engines always seem to go after them. Units with that multiple attack ability will attack one guy then start to move around it rather than attacking it again.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that fixing AI issues like this is going to be doable considering how many factors I'm sure weighs into their actions.
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I dropped few mantis issues about AI today.
It seems silly sometimes to the point when you look at the unit and think.. how it could be so stupid ;)
Stuff like ranged units moving instead of shooting and running out of move points to shoot at all.
Or infantry moving past enemy units to attack something else...
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Stuff like ranged units moving instead of shooting and running out of move points to shoot at all.
Or infantry moving past enemy units to attack something else...
I don't think the second thing is necessarily bad. Maybe that "something else" is something it can do more damage to? I don't think the logic should just be "attack the closest unit".
However, I think the general rule is that if a military unit CAN attack something, and doesn't attack ANYTHING, it should be considered a flaw.
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And when you cavalry moves past infantry to suicide on pikeman?
That also happens :D
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Okay, we have several things that are currently on the list and are being talked about:
- Further UI improvements
- AI issues
- Navigation between town centers by minimap and/or hotkeys.
- Action replay.
Do you guys think the replay system is now workable? Can I cross that off on my list, or is there something more to be done for it?
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Hmm, I can't really think of any issue with the replay system as it is now. It does what I want it to do. I can press X to move through my units, set the speed really fast, and internally process what happened between each one.
I guess the only minor nitpick is I'd get rid of that 500 or so millisecond delay before the unit moves and just start moving the unit immediately when I hit X.
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I think the .5 sec is because other people have suggested that the older system before this current set flickered too rapidly thus producing headaches. At the moment, I think the current replay system is a good enough set for media release.