Skyward Collapse Alpha 0.907

[x4000]

Now out: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Pre-Beta_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.907

Features of note:

1. Production of incense is now not so ridiculously low and difficulty.

2. Fish and rice have been removed from the game.

3. Fixed that overspending bug.

My questions to you (repeat from last thread):

1. Did we solve the problem of "not enough depth?"  Aka, is this sufficiently hard to win on a high difficulty in a way that is interesting and brain-involving?  It's sounding increasingly like the answer is yet.  And the score requirements, if you play with high ones of those, remove pretty much any chance of overt cheese of the style we'd been seeing before (new styles may of course arise, and probably will given enough time; players are so darn clever).

2. Does Easy difficulty feel sufficiently laid back, if anyone is playing that?  It shouldn't really require much strategy.  So long as you don't do anything egregiously silly, it should go pretty smoothly.

3. How about Medium difficulty?  That should be like playing on difficulty 7 of AI War, I think.  It's definitely quite possible to lose, and frequently, but it shouldn't feel unfair.

4. Continuing the AI War analogy, Hard would be more like diff 8, whereas Expert is more like diff 9.

5. As I mentioned in another thread, we're expected to deliver a press build today.  Waiting is bad because it hurts our ability to have pre-release buzz.  But giving a ridiculous build to the press in terms of it being way too hard -- or having mechanics that we shift on them a ton -- also is a bad idea.  So how are your feelings on the current mechanics?

My read on the situation from what folks have said so far (repeat from last thread).

1. It seems like we've solved the obvious cheese situations, as I noted.  So the game should be sufficiently interesting to the grognards here for a sufficiently long amount of time to survive a week or two of interest at worst; and if more cheese is uncovered, we can always deal with that on a case by case basis, as with AI War.

2. I'm a little worried that the bottom end of the difficulty levels are too hard now, but some recent adjustments may have brought that more in line with what is needed.

3. I feel like the current mechanics are -- knock on wood -- pretty stable.  The repair buildings option seems like a really obvious thing to have now, though it never occurred to me.  The scorched earth stuff really makes a ton of sense and I think is obvious to keep.  Score is great, and the score requirements, so on.  Tuning will be needed, naturally.  But I think in terms of a press build, we're not going to be yanking the rug out from under people too much with wildly changing mechanics between now and 1.0.  But I've been wrong before -- it all comes back to the cheese factor, which is why we went through this round of changes today and yesterday in the first place.

4. I think that, interface-wise, I need to get the ability to cycle through towns and an overlay for when you are placing town centers to be in there.  Both seem to be frustrating a lot of people.

So... thoughts?

[Pepisolo]

Looks good. Quick reminder about one issue, though, and this might be a post 1.00 thing, but I just thought I'd mention it in case it is not on your radar. Health bar pop-ups would be nice. Upon units or buildings engaging in combat if a overall green/red health bar would pop up to get an a-glance-view of the current health situation, that'd be great. There are quite a few reports on Mantis about health bars with slightly different solutions. I'm not saying that this needs to be done soon, as I say I'm ust offeringing a quick reminder in case you may have forgotten about it. The issue is fairly popular on Mantis, I think.

[x4000]

Thanks for the reminder.  Honestly it seems like what people are most interested for the game at this point is refinements of that sort of nature, versus more woes.  I'm becoming increasingly inclined to put more woes mostly on hold until post-1.0, and instead focus on that sort of thing.  What are people's reactions to that?  Are the current woes varied enough to not get stale for the time being?

[Pepisolo]

I think Woes could probably wait. Woes could be amazing, and I'd really like you to take as much time as possible on them. Maybe a quick review of the current Woes would be good and a bit of Woe polishing, but that's about it. Adding new Woes doesn't seem like it's imperative at the moment. It might not be too bad an idea to post another developers question regarding the current Woes. Which ones work, are the most fun etc. Hmmm, said Woe a lot there. "Whoa".

[x4000]

Good idea -- posted.

[Mick]

I agree with holding off Woes. Woes are great, but they are really the icing. Interface issues are what makes or breaks first impressions and are the difference between "the game is a pleasure to play, one more turn, one more turn!" and "I like the game concept but doing turns feels like a chore."

I won't name names, but I see other indie (or indieish) devs fall into the trap of ignoring the interface too much and promoting the strong gameplay. Well, if the game is not giving me the urge to play, I'm not going to get this deep and rich gameplay you are claiming.

And a lot of the time, it's usually fairly simple stuff. Not "must have unit animations!" or nonsense like that.

Jumping to the last town was a small improvement that had a huge impact. Showing units as they appear was another one. It severely reduced the need to scroll around every turn.

Things like health bars address a different type of concern. Having information in tooltips is great, but a tooltip should be something you really only look at to:
* learn how something works
* remind yourself how something works
* (very rarely) look at detailed information about something

Knowing how much health your units and buildings have is something you generally are going to want to know a lot (unless you're playing on easy and more or less just throwing down random tiles).

Social decay is dead (and should stay that way), but it had one huge plus over the crime implementation, which was that you showed it right on the map and I didn't need to hover over the town to see it. There were other reasons to reject crime, but I remember the think I hated the MOST about it was that it was effectively hidden unless I decided to go look at it.

[x4000]

Silly as this may sound, my main reluctance on health bars is performance.  The number of draw calls really hits the framerate hard on older machines.  This is mainly a worry when very zoomed out.

That said, 60fps is hardly required for this game since most of the time you're looking at something that isn't moving, so there's nothing there to tell if it's 1fps or 1000fps.  And when you're watching battles, presumably you're zoomed in enough to be able to see what is going on, and then the health bars are not too much of an issue.

And I can always make an option to turn this off for people with older machines.  Any machine with a midrange GPU is going to laugh at the load this game puts on it, but you'd be surprised (or maybe not) just how lower-range most laptop GPUs are, even on nice laptops.  And a lot of people play on laptops.

Anyhow, I agree with everything you said in principle.

[Pepisolo]

Silly as this may sound, my main reluctance on health bars is performance.  The number of draw calls really hits the framerate hard on older machines.  This is mainly a worry when very zoomed out.

This presumably wouldn't be a problem if you only popped the health bar up during the currently camera focussed attack scene? Or would it? Seems like you're thinking of more of a global view of health bars. Something like which was suggested on one of the Mantis reports, a hotkey to toggle healthbars on/off? Or even healthbars visible at all times?

[x4000]

I think what I'm going to do is add health bars that are on all the time WHEN A UNIT/BUILDING IS DAMAGED ONLY, and only when you're zoomed in a certain amount.  That would really make this a lot less of an issue.

And also the option to completely disable these.

[Mick]

I think what I'm going to do is add health bars that are on all the time WHEN A UNIT/BUILDING IS DAMAGED ONLY, and only when you're zoomed in a certain amount.  That would really make this a lot less of an issue.

And also the option to completely disable these.

Makes sense to me!

[orzelek]

For me one thing I really miss is average resource consumption per turn. You know how much you produce but average spending is kind of difficult to figure out.

I'm all for health bars - limit them to damaged units/buildings only and give option to disable them. My GPU complains about being asleep while in game....

Some GUI improvement to show where you can place town center would also go a long way towards making their placement easier.

[Pepisolo]

I think what I'm going to do is add health bars that are on all the time WHEN A UNIT/BUILDING IS DAMAGED ONLY, and only when you're zoomed in a certain amount.  That would really make this a lot less of an issue.

And also the option to completely disable these.

Yep, sounds just about perfect.

[x4000]

For me one thing I really miss is average resource consumption per turn. You know how much you produce but average spending is kind of difficult to figure out.

Can you describe what you're looking for, specifically?  Some averages over the last few turns?  Say, last 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 turns?  Or something like that?  I can't do projections into the future without really going crazy (and even then it wouldn't be that useful), but I can certainly do historical averages.  The question is what people would find useful in terms of timescales, though.

Some GUI improvement to show where you can place town center would also go a long way towards making their placement easier.

Yep, that's in the cards as noted I think in 0.906's thread, though of course it's easy to have missed that!

[Mick]

For me one thing I really miss is average resource consumption per turn. You know how much you produce but average spending is kind of difficult to figure out.

Can you describe what you're looking for, specifically?  Some averages over the last few turns?  Say, last 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 turns?  Or something like that?  I can't do projections into the future without really going crazy (and even then it wouldn't be that useful), but I can certainly do historical averages.  The question is what people would find useful in terms of timescales, though.

To me personally, I wouldn't really care about long time historical averages. The game doesn't lend itself well to that kind of thinking.

What I do think would be useful, was just a simple indicator next to the resources that showed how much you gained (and only show gains) last turn. So if your wheat farms produced 30 wheat, you'd see:

[Wheat] 120 (+30)

Does that mean you'll get 30 next turn? No, but it's a pretty good eyeball estimate of how much wheat is being produced.

But honestly, I don't find this stuff to be game breaking if you don't change what's there now. It's very simple to say "Hey I'm low on wood and I need a lot more." <build three woodcutters>

If you are playing at a high level where you need a razor focus on your resources, then you should have a pretty good feel for what the ratios all are at that point. I don't think it's a problem if the expert level difficulty requires competence in 4th-grade math.

[Penumbra]

I know I'm probably an outlier in playing this game with a net book, but I would really love more keyboard shortcuts. Just the bindings, even. I'll come up with the mapping. I actually already started with Auto Hotkey.