First Hard Victory!!

[zoutzakje]

Woohoo! After a few dozen failed runs, I finally did it. I played the very first mech, the average one with the high health (forgot it's name). The main reason I survived is because of that attachment module thing I picked up very early in the game. Forgot what it was called but it basically reduced enemy damage while shooting out tons of tiny little needles all around me whenever I fired (the spark effect I like to call it). The amount of damage I took from any hit almost made me feel like I was playing on normal, which helped immensely.

My main weapon ended up being that fragmenting cannon thing, which I got at floor 3 and kept the rest of the game. I was hoping for a turbo launcher but I never found one.
I forgot the name of my energy weapon, but I really liked it a lot. It fired a series of needles in a straight line at a long distance and it made enemies very poisoned. They'd leave a pink puddle of goo whenever they walked around which would even damage myself if I stepped in it. 30 energy per shot and I was carrying 176 energy with me (couldn't find any more energy upgrades near the end for some reason).

And then I had 4 different drones. I had the one that slowly circled around me and stopped some incoming bullets. I had the one that slows down enemy bullets near me. I had the one that releases that bullet clearing aoe burst and the last one just flew around and shot at stuff. Those 3 defensive drones also helped a lot in my survivability.

Then I had loads of base damage and damage boosts (though a somewhat slow-ish fire rate) and ended with about 30-35% crit. Also ended with 46 hp and 1 shield (sacrificed my hp only once).

NO Lady Staccato at floor 4 (thank god) which may have contributed in my victory. Though I was feeling very confident at that point so I might have been able to beat her this time.
After beating the Warden I was more confident then ever and I steamrolled nearly everything else. Even Flak Launchers could barely get a shot off. After reaching floor 7 I decided I was strong enough and just skipped most of the floor to go straight for the boss. Terminus was quite annoying on hard. He didn't stand a chance, but he still managed to bring down my health to 30. The Warden didn't even come close to doing that much damage to me (though Labyrinth did).

Either way, I'm happy with a great run. 1 mech down, 5 more to go. Only then will I switch to misery dif.

[Mánagarmr]

Congratulations! I'm still not there yet.

[Misery]

Misery mode isn't actually there yet, sorry.  What's there is... sort of a crappy placeholder.

There wasn't even remotely close to enough time to finish the horrid thing by the game's release; so the placeholder was put in.   The problem: with the rest of the game, it's been more of a team effort, numerous people working on it at any given time.  Hard mode was a little different, as all of the new stuff and balancing... with some exceptions... are my doing, BUT, there were also plenty of testers to try it.   But Misery mode?  Nope.  I'm the only one that can make it, and I'm the only one that can test it.  The difficulty is just too high.  So doing this is SLOW.  I think, though, that it should be ready to go... finally... within the next month.  It *might* come with the next update.  Maybe.

What I can do though is show a couple of videos, examples of some of the upgraded bosses:

Battleswarm:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q85cHF-v-0k

Crystal Mother:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dr0RsbxZgE

Mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkmF-t67uHE

Centrifuge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUKSXOOAe2Q

The Warden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cGOkBPd1ow


The Warden's third and fourth patterns probably need to be tougher, as does Crystal Mother's first one; I'll likely change those up a bit.  Also, Crystal Mother, that third pattern has this giant green wall thing constantly fired at you, but the bloody recording software, for no apparent reason, makes it nearly invisible.  You can BARELY see some flickering of the thing every now and then.  But if you're wondering what makes that pattern so bad and why I seem to be rushing through it, that's why. 

Misery mode will be a bit different than the other modes.  Normal, Hard, and those beneath them need to appeal to lots of different players, and feel balanced, fair, and fun above all else.

Misery mode though?  No such rules!  Oh, it'll be TECHNICALLY fair, as there wont be any genuinely undodgable attacks, but... you can say the same about the fight against Queen Larsa in Mushihime Futari's Ultra difficulty, and THAT nightmare is the single most difficult boss ever made.  This mode is inspired by stuff like that.  I was told to make it so hard that I could barely beat it myself.  Instead of "make it fun for the player" it's more like Cave's hardest stuff, where it's more like me actively trying to make sure the player does not win. 

The bosses may also get an additional line of defense too; preventing their patterns from being "bypassed" by overpowered builds on that specific difficulty.  I haven't decided on this bit yet.  It is cruel.


So yeah, it's not ready yet.  But that's fine... it's the sort of thing that'll take ALOT of practice to even get started with.  I said that Hard mode is "for those that have mastered normal mode".  Misery mode isn't like that: it's for those that have mastered the genre.  The bullet-hell genre, that is.  Or at least, that's how I intend on it being. 

So yeah, that's... that.



But anyway, congrats on the Hard mode win.  The mode is aptly named, and lots of players don't get all that far into it, getting stuck for quite awhile.  It's a good accomplishment to beat it.  The question is, can you CONSISTENTLY beat it?  It'll get harder with the update.

Good luck on future runs, and again, if you should run into any problems whatsoever, please let us know here.  I play this mode a lot myself, and I'm FAIRLY sure there's no major outstanding issues.... but I could have missed stuff.

[ptarth]

Congrats on your win!

The level difficulty is troublesome. Part of the problem is the variance inherent in allowing players to do full clears or skip straight to the boss. Because of this, a player could be going into a floor with 25% to 100% of the gear/money/items/gains from the previous level. Combined across the 7 floors this produces a large amount of variability in the power  of a player. If a player does full clears (with adequate luck) then they could be 500% more powerful than if they only do  minimal clears. Combine this behaviour with the tendency of people to skip parts of a floor if they are having difficulty on or to do full clears when it is easy (but they also find this tedious). This ends up with easy runs getting easier and harder runs getting harder. Offensive items probably still need a reduction in strength and defensive items need a bit of a boost, probably.

re:Misery on Misery
He talks big, but every time I mod the Invader to auto-spawn 10 baby invaders every 5 seconds (they come from around the back) he complains about it. ;p

[zoutzakje]

thanks for the congratz guys ^^

Keep trying Managarmr, you'll get there. Took me dozens of failed runs to even get close to The Warden. And somehow I made it through the rest in the same run. I expected floor 6 and 7 would at least kill me a bunch of times too (I'm sure they will in future runs). Don't buy anything from the sacrifice shops early game and Slow walking = life. Those are the two rules that ultimately got me through it somehow.

I knew Misery mode wasn't ready yet, but it's probably going to take me a while to beat hard with all mechs anyways. Then again, I only bought this game a few days ago so it might go faster than I expect.
I'm looking forward to the real misery mode when it comes out. Did I mention I like pain (gaming pain, not the real kind). It's probably one of the reasons why I love AI war so much.
I found a few of those vids on youtube earlier already. The Warden seems absolutely insane and so does that new boss Sunder. If the regular enemies are upgraded accordingly I'll have many hours of suffering ahead of me.

Crystal Mother's green wall flickering is not news to me. I encountered this today for the first time on hard. It would have been really annoying if I didn't know exactly where the wall was going to be (CM is THE boss I have the most experience with for some reason). I thought this was weird because I had never seen this happen before. No idea what might have caused that.

What I want to know now has to do with achievements. Being the achievement hunter that I am, I'm wondering why there aren't any difficulty related achievements and if there will be any in the future. If you think that Misery will be too hard and shouldn't have any achievements, I'll understand (though I'd like to see at least a few, AI War has a couple of dif 10 achievs too). But normal and hard should have them.

And lastly, what are your thoughts on a proper Boss Rush mode with the appropriate achievements and leaderboards for clearing time with each mech? Like, you have to fight all the existing bosses in a random order (or scaling in difficulty). And if you die you have to fight the same boss again, but the timer keeps going. Equipment would stay the mech's default and hp would change depending on your mech and the boss you're fighting. Something like that.
I've always been a fan of bosh rushes and this game seems perfect for it. Don't know how hard it would be to implement something like this. Would probably have to be part of a future expansion and I imagine it could be quite a lot of work.
Just wanted to know what thoughts you guys have about this.

P.S
Baby Invaders spawning from the back of the Invader boss sounds like fun, but 10 every 5 seconds seems a bit to much

[ptarth]

P.S
Baby Invaders spawning from the back of the Invader boss sounds like fun, but 10 every 5 seconds seems a bit to much

wuss

Boss Rush mode is on the list of things that are feasible and desirable. However, it is complicated by the limited adoption of SR. Sales haven't been very good and it has been difficult to justify spending more on the game. That's why most of the contact and changes have been performed by this plucky group of unlikely crusaders.

Part of the problem is the lack of exposure. There is also a strange vibe where people see it is being only weakly supported and then attribute it to a lack of game. Starward Rogue, even at release, was pretty good and has only gotten better since. I've spent way too many hours playing and working on this game, even prior to being drafted as a volunteer. The ease of modding and the level of accessibility of the content is miles above anything else.

It might also have to do with what people want in a game of this nature. SR is a hybrid of several different genres. People have mixed feelings about the hybrid mixture. The typical pattern seems to be great frustration and anger when it diverges from what they expect it should be.  So if someone wants it to be Issac-like, every time something happens differently from how Issac works, they get annoyed. Looking at the Steam reviews you can see a pattern where people have very different opinions on the same exact features (music/sound/controls/etc is good, bad, horrible, great).

This divergence is also apparent in the volunteer team. Misery and I have an ongoing feud where I want a more brawler like experience, with things like regenerating health and shields (I have them in my playing version, the mod is in the mod forum). He insists that is a travesty and that I should just add hamburgers (health regen) items everywhere and be done with it (I did that too). I fight back by making content like the Invader, who is very, very different from the Misery style bullet-storm bosses. I also wrote the [redacted] which should be [redacted] in the [redacted] which I think everyone will really love! [Redacted] drives Misery nuts, but I also noticed the Lumiflares are very similar to [redacted].

As a player, I'm in the minority in my playing style of the game. My favorite version of the game is actually the crafting version, where I go alter the xml and build things, e.g., its a building game (e.g., Minecraft), or a  puzzle game (e.g., SpaceChem), survival game (e.g., Don't Starve), for me. I frequently play the "oops, I forgot to remove that from my active version of the game" game.

[Misery]

Crystal Mother's green wall flickering is not news to me. I encountered this today for the first time on hard. It would have been really annoying if I didn't know exactly where the wall was going to be (CM is THE boss I have the most experience with for some reason). I thought this was weird because I had never seen this happen before. No idea what might have caused that.

Wait, what?  You're actually seeing that happen in-game?  That... shouldn't be happening.  Are you seeing this anywhere else?   The only other boss I can think of that uses that type of attack is Dark Aberration, but I *think* there's also a couple of enemies that do something like that. 

That's definitely a problem if that's happening though.

re:Misery on Misery
He talks big, but every time I mod the Invader to auto-spawn 10 baby invaders every 5 seconds (they come from around the back) he complains about it. ;p

On that note, I complain about my own stuff quite a bit too.

Screw hard-mode Centrifuge, really.  The bloody thing.  I've died... quite a few times to that stupid thing.   

I can say I've had many seriously idiotic deaths in this game.  I'm good at that.  Like what happens in shmups, where I'll dodge some big wave of bullets, and then smack directly into the boss, which is probably not moving.  I've done that in this, too.  It's embarrassing enough to lose to something like Battleswarm.  It's worse if the loss is because you ran into it.  So much worse.

It might also have to do with what people want in a game of this nature. SR is a hybrid of several different genres. People have mixed feelings about the hybrid mixture. The typical pattern seems to be great frustration and anger when it diverges from what they expect it should be.  So if someone wants it to be Issac-like, every time something happens differently from how Issac works, they get annoyed. Looking at the Steam reviews you can see a pattern where people have very different opinions on the same exact features (music/sound/controls/etc is good, bad, horrible, great).

Oh yeah, that bit can get a little frustrating.  Granted, people are often a little wonky on opinions of Arcen games in general, since most of them do the hybrid-genre thing.  The funny thing is, this game is one of the ones that doesn't do that all that much... since it's in a hybrid-genre that has existed for awhile now, and doesn't go all that far away from those ideas... and one set of complaints that's shown up every now and then is "This game doesn't do enough NEW stuff like Arcen usually does".  After other Arcen games get complained at for doing new stuff.

A lot like that, yeah. 

What I want to know now has to do with achievements. Being the achievement hunter that I am, I'm wondering why there aren't any difficulty related achievements and if there will be any in the future. If you think that Misery will be too hard and shouldn't have any achievements, I'll understand (though I'd like to see at least a few, AI War has a couple of dif 10 achievs too). But normal and hard should have them.

Aye, no achievements for the misery mode.  It wouldn't really be fair to achievement hunters / completionists in a general sense.  I've seen actual bullet-hell shmups do this before, and it only causes frustration.  The worst being Mushihime-Futari on the 360 actually having an achievement for beating Ultra mode.  You know, the single most bloody difficult thing in gaming.  Yeah.  I'm sure that went over well; even, well, pretty much all fans of the genre, experts or not, will never get that one, period.   Certainly beyond my ability.

This was all discussed with Chris early on in development, he ended up agreeing with it, so yeah, nothing for that.   However, doing some Hard Mode stuff, sure, that sounds like a good idea to me.   We would just need to think up what they might be, and then have the chance to actually add them.  I, personally, have no idea how to do that.  Not something I could do on my own.  For all I know it might be the sort of thing that Chris or Keith would have to do, and they're always busy.


Oh, and as for a boss rush, yes, I've thought that was a good idea from the start, but there's just never been a chance to do it.   Too much of the limited resources.

I also wrote the [redacted] which should be [redacted] in the [redacted] which I think everyone will really love! [Redacted] drives Misery nuts, but I also noticed the Lumiflares are very similar to [redacted].

....what

[ptarth]

re: Crystal Mother Flickering
I think that's due to the frequency of the bullet generation and their movement changes. If you slow it down a bit you should be fine. If you just want the massive wave, you don't have to generate them in a continuous wave, just generate them once and then tell them to head off in direction X.

re: [redacted]
You know, [redacted].

[zoutzakje]

Just beat hard mode for the second time, this time with the flame mech. I was a lot less powerful than with my previous victory so this definitely felt like more of a challenge. I met Centrifuge who was an absolute pain in the bum. I had massive energy upgrades so spamming my energy weapon while using a crapload of missiles to clear all the waves of shit flying at me was the only reason I lived through it.
The Warden nearly took me out as well, but Terminus was an absolute disaster. Or rather his guardians were. They literally left me with 1 hp before the main fight. I somehow made it through that, mostly thanks to my missiles. 33 hp definitely seems too low to start Terminus with, at least until I can dodge his patterns better. Next up is the Indigo Dipole.

Crystal Mother is the only one that has the nearly invisible flickering attack for me. All enemies seem to be working fine and I haven't the honor of meeting Dark Aberration yet. I'm sure I will soon.

I personally don't like all of the Arcen games, but I like AI War of course, SR and Bionic Dues too. Haven't tried Skyward Collapse yet so it's still undetermined. TLF looks like something I might enjoy too but I haven't bought it yet.
I am aware of the limited resources atm. I really hope Arcens financial status will improve again in time. I'm generally a patient man, so I don't mind if we won't get to see bosh rush mode or new achievements for a couple of years. Even if we never get to see them it's fine, I just enjoy posting whatever ideas I might have.

As for dying by running into enemies.... I've had that happen to me a couple of times with regular enemies, but never with bosses. Though the few moving ones came close a few times to doing that to me. I usually try to stay at the edge of the range of my weapon, gives me the most time to react to all those nasty patterns. Except when I got one of those short ranged weapons, then I might try to close in a bit (and often fail).

I'm on the team that says regeneration is a no go, at least for this game. I've played a lot of different games over the years and I've seen health regen a lot. Usually I'm fine with it and in some games I think it's necessary, but I just don't see it being right for games like SR or Isaac.

[Misery]

Yeah, agreed on the regeneration thing.

I have nothing against regenerating health as a mechanic in an overall sense.  For some games it really does work.  But not for one in this genre.  The issue is, if you give the players an opportunity to do something that in some way makes things easier, most of them absolutely will do it... even if it screws up the rest of the game experience.  In this case... well, in this genre as a whole actually... the regen mechanic never gets used because it encourages a "hide & snipe" approach, which drastically slows down and completely wrecks the game's pacing.  Then you end up with players complaining about the game, saying that it takes too long, it's so very slow, there's too many dull moments... never once stopping to think that they don't HAVE to do things that way.

Even Isaac, a game with utterly berserk synergies, avoids time-based regeneration for the most part.   There is one, and ONLY one, way to gain time-based regeneration, with an extremely specific item, but the reason it doesn't encourage that behavior is because it's so freakishly slow that nobody is going to sit and wait for it.   If I recall, it takes an entire three minutes (or it might be more) just to regenerate ONE half heart with it.  It's a very low-tier item, typically considered to be worth nothing.  And that's about the extent of it in this genre with that idea.

Now, other types of regen that aren't time-based, that's different.  We have plenty of room-based regen in the game, and kill-based regen also that can be gained from some items.  Those things don't screw with the pacing or encourage behaviors other than... well, the normal way the game is played. 

But time-based stuff.... nope.  I shoot that idea down every time it shows up.  It is available as a mod though, for those that want it badly enough, I think that's the one Ptarth made.  With extra burgers.

Crystal Mother I'll have a look at.  I'm baffled that you're seeing that effect though... I seriously thought this was just my recording software being bizarre, since I've never seen it in-game.  I might actually bring this up with Chris or Keith, in case they have any thoughts on what exactly causes it, so that the effect can be avoided in the future.   I'm aware there's other ways of producing the flying green wall, but there are some cases (mostly upcoming concepts) that will be using hyper-fast bullets to create other effects where there is no way around that particular technique.  So that could be an issue later.


As for Arcen's other games, I personally generally do recommend Skyward Collapse, it's not for everyone but I just loved it myself.  Though since it's so unique in how everything works, it's best to see some videos on it or whatever to get an idea of the mechanics before jumping in.  TLF in particular also got a ton of effort and content put into it... there's a lot to do there.  And the turn-based shmup combat is very unique.  I've quite enjoyed that one (and it was my first time working with Arcen, did bullet patterns there too, was both fun and really irritating to design at the same time, heh).  My own favorites though, other than Starward, are Bionic Dues, AI War, and Valley Without Wind.  Sooo many hours into those.  I've played a kersquillion indie games at this point, but those are still among my favorites.


Also yes, Centrifuge on Hard is a total pain, aint it?  Sometimes (usually when I die to it) I wonder why I made the irritating thing.  Like a mad science experiment gone horribly wrong.  If I recall correctly, the thing was actually a design accident.  Bullets that were supposed to do something else instead did.... that... and it was neat, so I tweaked it into an actual pattern.  A mistake?  It just may have been.

[Draco18s]

I've done things like that. I was making a 3D model once, did the math for where I wanted the various points for a particular shape, only I got some of them transposed. Ended up with a different shape, but one that was still usable.

Various other things that are less definable as well, but I like referring to such creation as "intentionally programming Mandelbugs."

[zoutzakje]

Third win, this time with the Indigo Dipole. Won in a single attempt so I have a win streak of 2 now Going to break that with the treasure hunter most likely. The Dipole is great, especially with those special missiles. Got a perfect run on most bosses, mainly because of them.
Had a couple of nasty rooms though. Flak launchers, side shots and some others galore. Had a room with a double Demesne right next to each other, which was a pain and I even had a room with 3 blaze cannons. Nasty stuff.

[ptarth]

re:Green Mother Wave
You can achieve a similar effect with having a nonSim pattern do the sparkly visual effect, but underneath it have invisible bullets with the actual hitboxes. By splitting them into to, you remove the system cost of having to care about all the extra fast moving bullets, while still having the same visuals.

[Draco18s]

special missiles. Got a perfect run on most bosses, mainly because of them.

You shouldn't get perfect runs if you use missiles.

[Mánagarmr]

special missiles. Got a perfect run on most bosses, mainly because of them.

You shouldn't get perfect runs if you use missiles.

Indeed. If you do, that's a bug.