Starward Rogue -- AuGMENTED testing feedback thread

[Pepisolo]

Alpha - The most "normal" of the new stuff. The ray, like the flamethrower has trouble in 1-tile wide areas and against reaper bosses.

Yeah. I'm not really sure what can be done about that without redesigning those weapons at this stage. Hopefully that's an acceptable or tolerable negative of using those weapons. If not, then more drastic measures need to be taken. 

Warhog - Strong start, on par with the Humble mech (perhaps even stronger in early levels). Both main and secondary weapons are still useful for the endgame. Not sure if it's a little OP due to the massive burst and damage reduction. 

Possibly, although I don't mind a mech being a little OP at least. It does have the disadvantage that it's a terrible resource gatherer, plus doesn't have shields, of course. So, I'm not sure at the moment.

Zephyr - Enjoyed the speedy playstyle and experimented with rushing the boss room. Agree with Logo that it's hard to tell when the boost is active. It would be nice to know the magnitude of the bonus at the selection screen.

Yeah, visuals should be improved in the next version. If I could think of a sufficiently succinct way to explain the boost, then we could probably add that. It has a mix of additive multipliers, multipliers, straight adds, though, so explaining it would be pretty tricky.

Paladin - The concept and theme are nice. I couldn't figure out how to use the main weapon properly -- the lunge attack makes kiting/evading difficult to control and Green Hunter killed me. Heh. Also, the missile launcher could use a slight cooldown increase as it's easy to inadvertently launch extra missiles when clearing blocks.

Adjusted the missile fire rate slightly, although I couldn't adjust it too much as I didn't want to lose the ability to do fast barrages with the launcher.

- How often do they appear? I had a full run without any gold floors appearing. They are quite fun! Difficulty feels about the same as regular floors and flamer turrets are beautiful.

Currently it's a 20% chance per floor apart from the 1st floor (which can't have Gold floors). That's definitely going to be upped to at least 25% as I've had a bit of feedback about the low chance of seeing the floors. Whether we up it further than that, I'm not sure, though.

- It is a little tricky to differentiate between the various floor buff/debuff pads. I never found the switch pads in the levels I played (or I just ran over them without noticing).

Yeah, those will be getting looked at, as they're not quite right at the moment.

- The puzzle boss rooms are a nice touch. Have run into two of them so far. Banshee trap + bounce laser module. Ouch.

Yeah, ouch! I'm glad to see you like those rooms.

- Tutorial explains the new mechanics pretty well.

Nice! Draco designed that. Thanks, Draco!

- Crimson death sniper rifle could use a recoil warning.

I may just be derping because I'm a bit ill at the moment, but recoil warning? Like some text in the description you mean?

- Question regarding the damage stats on items. Is that DPS or damage per shot/salvo?

DPS.

- I noticed something strange with the cryofreeze, energy shield, and inferno/flame? modules. If you get hit just as the module visual effect fires, you don't take damage. Has anyone else seen this?

Hmmm, not sure. I'll keep an eye out for it, though, thanks.

- Using the tactical advisor familiar the first time killed all other sound until the next room, after which it worked normally. Unfortunately I've only seen this bot once so I can't confirm this.

Hmm, that's another one I'll keep an eye out for. If that robot is indeed causing some audio problems I might be able to make tweaks.

I'll get to any more feedback tomorrow. Thanks!

[Draco18s]

Quote
- Tutorial explains the new mechanics pretty well.

Nice! Draco designed that. Thanks, Draco!

Yeah! I did a thing!
I was also responsible for the main tutorial update a while back.

[Pepisolo]

Those red pulsing floor tiles:  Those seem a little buggy?  They all begin their pulse at the same moment like they should, but some of them hold that pulse longer than others.  It's very random.

I haven't noticed any issues with those. Has anybody else?

Puzzle rooms are awesome.  I gotta try making a few myself.  This is a very fun concept.

The jetpack is hilarious.

I particularly love the Super Ultra Death Sniper or whatever it's called.  Really ruins bosses and heavy targets aside from certain unusually high HP ones (Terminus mainly) but has that wonderful risk-reward aspect to it.  Not so good for dealing with anything that moves fast, nope.  That turns out to be a bloody stupid move pretty quickly.

Acid Rain consumable is also awesome.

And overall, this is the most well-balanced version of the game yet, and easily the most fun it's ever been.  Sure is a heck of a long way from what it was when it first released, where everything was constantly broken and you could become OP super easy every time. 

Nice! Yeah, the current build does seem good. It also seems like the most stable version of the game, too.

After victory rewards: When the issue arise I don't even have a pedestal, as if the room didn't even finish generating. Kinda like those shops that spawn with only 1 or 2 items despite the original file having 3.

I always thought that there was only a chance of those pedestals appearing, so the current behaviour seemed to be working as expected. Whether this is actually just a bug or not, though, I'm not sure.

Flux Capacitor: It's mostly for consistency. If it cannot be changed easily, I wouldn't worry about it. Good call on the "new room only" rule though. That'll prevent some future cha cha in the door frame.

Yeah, I think we'll just have to leave that one as is for now.

Shop for energy upgrades: I would go for Defensive Shop. Energy isn't really offense or defense oriented per say, but the weapon shop already has a lot going on, contrary to the defense shop which is a bit lacking.

Defensive shop it is then!

Robot Shop: I did see the new Stinkbot drone and others on regular floors, but I've never seen a crystalline Beamer outside of a gold floor (including the dozen devmode runs I did a few minutes ago). If they are supposed to be all globally available, then everything is good. On the other hand, if you can only get some of them on the rare gold floor shops and you lose your chance because it's filled with regular drones, then it's kinda annoying. As for the shop's global pool vs separate pools, I would personally prefer a global one because the drone selection is not vast enough to support 2 separate shops and still be satisfyingly varied. Speaking of variety... Could I convince you to re-add the Beaming Drone to the pool? The "BeamingMinibot" version seems ready to go.

Actually the Crystal Beamers are only set to appear on Gold floors. I did this because that familiar really has the look of fitting in on the Gold Floors. I could go either way on that to be honest. Set those to appear globally as well? As for the beaming minibot, I think that's just a repeat of the Deep Blue's familiar, so I don't really find that super interesting to add myself. Plus, there are problems with those beam style shot in that the shot visual doesn't go through walls. We do actually have a new system for doing those beam shots, though, but since switching to that is going to be extra work, and since I'm not really sure on the Beamer anyway, I think we'll leave that for the moment. At least for this next expansion patch. I might take another look at it for a future build.

Travelporters: I was leaning toward removing the miniboss pads, but you make a good point about them being well placed. Especially on later floors, there's often one per branch, offering a good coverage. The occasional random one might be good if made less common, so I would probably recommend just reducing their amount per room category.

I'm not sure myself. Removing the randomly appearing ones seems cleaner to me, as those can't really be relied upon anyway. Having them in miniboss/condemned/challenge rooms should provide a reasonable amount of coverage of the middles of the floors. I'm happy to leave this to you to tinker with, if you want.

Zephyr: Multi-colored gradual indication? That's even better! I was worried additional perks would make it harder to tell, but that takes care of that. I'm on board with the Yellow-Orange-Red implementation. Not to mention, the colors look good on the mech.

I think it works, yeah. It's in the latest SVN if you want to test that.

Green Crystal Beamer: Here's an attached screenshot of the very pale Green Beamer.

Ah, right. That was just misnamed actually. Fixed!

The best thing we could do as far as the travel system goes would actually be pretty simple:  Find a less awful way of displaying where the next warp will be on the map itself.  I find that much of the time spent using the system is repeatedly passing by the room I wanted to go to, because it's bloody impossible to see where I'm headed on the map.  That little glowing effect.... not enough.

A new visual there that makes it really stand out and says "here, THIS is where you'll go if you click that next" would be super.

The actual number of warps is fine by me as is.  It's just the bloody visual on the map.  It'd be so much easier to use if that could get fixed.  Has needed fixing for a bloody long time now.

Yep, I completely agree although I fear that this change might have to wait for a future build (beyond the expansion one). Chris, Keith, and Blue are just too busy at the moment to be bothered with issues that are just kind of niceties. I say kind of because having clarity on these warps would be a bit more than a nicety, but it'll probably keep.

Speaking of minibosses:  I"ve been wondering, do we maybe have a bit too many of these?  Well, not just minibosses, I mean those plus condemned or challenge rooms, all the same to me.  They seem a bit oddly frequent to me.  But I'm not sure, what do you guys think?

Just looking into this, I believe that some of Ptarth's testing settings for floor 1 have made it into the code. I'm going to reset these, and hopefully that should do the trick. Other floors than 1 shouldn't be affected.

[Whistler]

I may just be derping because I'm a bit ill at the moment, but recoil warning? Like some text in the description you mean?

Yeah, I meant in the description. On reflection, I don't think it's necessary. I was just surprised by the recoil compared to other shotgun and sniper weapons the first time I fired it.

[steelwing]

No clue what's going on now, but the game freezes solid during loading, and the screen gets covered in graphical artifacts.

[Whistler]

I tried a few runs rushing the boss with Zephyr (possible due to the map-reveal perk). It was hilarious ! The most successful hard run ended in 12 minutes.

Was curious and looked through the xml (see what you've made me do, heh ). If I understood it correctly, the buff is
base damage*(1 + 0.1*max(5-t,0))/(0.9)^max(5-t,0)
with the subsequent perks adding more.

Without considering stacking between floors, I think the rate of fire increase causes most of the OPness at higher levels. At the 15 minute version, if it stacks with the original bonus + 10 minute version, there is a 23x increase in rate of fire (unless there's a cap), compared to +3x base damage. If they don't stack it's about 5x and +1.5x.

My thoughts on a first pass at balancing it: remove the fire rate bonus and increase the base damage to compensate. Since the lower floors feel ok, I think increasing it to +0.3x per minute would keep the dps about the same. At the highest level, it would be 10x damage (if the earlier perks stack), which is still quite powerful but better than 23x(1+3) = 92.

Some other things to consider:
- Getting the SuperSpeed and SuperDuperSpeed perks are not guaranteed.
- If the perks stack with the earlier versions, changing them to just add duration could be enough with the current setup. (but with stacking between floors, rate of fire could still become huge)
- The mech is still really fun to play without using this trick so keeping the feel of the lower floors should be good.

[x4000]

No clue what's going on now, but the game freezes solid during loading, and the screen gets covered in graphical artifacts.

Hmm, my best guess is a driver incompatibility.  Are you using the latest Mesa drivers, or what have you got?  I'm no expert on all the various driver variants on linux by any stretch, but that tends to be the culprit.  Generally the newer the better in terms of those.  In works on my box, but I've just got a pretty vanilla install of uBuntu with an nVidia GTX 1060, so it's pretty much in the most-supported class.

[steelwing]

Hmm, my best guess is a driver incompatibility.  Are you using the latest Mesa drivers, or what have you got?

That's a good guess, actually.  I'm using an ATI Radeon R7 240, which is supported by the still-experimental AMDGPU driver.  Sounds like I need to check whether any of that has updated recently.  I know I've had an update to Mesa within the past few days.

[x4000]

Ah, okay -- that might be the issue, then.

[Pepisolo]

I tried a few runs rushing the boss with Zephyr (possible due to the map-reveal perk). It was hilarious ! The most successful hard run ended in 12 minutes.

Was curious and looked through the xml (see what you've made me do, heh ). If I understood it correctly, the buff is
base damage*(1 + 0.1*max(5-t,0))/(0.9)^max(5-t,0)
with the subsequent perks adding more.

Without considering stacking between floors, I think the rate of fire increase causes most of the OPness at higher levels. At the 15 minute version, if it stacks with the original bonus + 10 minute version, there is a 23x increase in rate of fire (unless there's a cap), compared to +3x base damage. If they don't stack it's about 5x and +1.5x.

My thoughts on a first pass at balancing it: remove the fire rate bonus and increase the base damage to compensate. Since the lower floors feel ok, I think increasing it to +0.3x per minute would keep the dps about the same. At the highest level, it would be 10x damage (if the earlier perks stack), which is still quite powerful but better than 23x(1+3) = 92.

Some other things to consider:
- Getting the SuperSpeed and SuperDuperSpeed perks are not guaranteed.
- If the perks stack with the earlier versions, changing them to just add duration could be enough with the current setup. (but with stacking between floors, rate of fire could still become huge)
- The mech is still really fun to play without using this trick so keeping the feel of the lower floors should be good.

Interesting thoughts thanks -- I could probably do with any help I can get on the balance math of this. Perks don't stack with earlier versions, they just swap out and replace the old version. I think I'd really rather not remove the fire rate boost entirely as that's quite important to the style of the mech. I'd much prefer to remove the damage bonus rather then the fire rate bonus, if that's necessary. This mech does have a lot more room to potentially become OP than any other mech, depending on how fast you go and how lucky you are in terms of map generation. The idea is that if you can ride the bonus well, then runs are going to be a bit steamrollery, but if you get slowed down, things can start becoming difficult until another wave of boosts kicks in.  So, having OP runs is desired, but of course we can't go too overboard, which makes this quite tricky to balance.

A 12 minute Hard run does sound a bit short, but I guess that kind of depends on how rare a 12 minute run is. If it's quite rare then it might be fine -- this is the speedrun mech after all!

[Whistler]

Interesting thoughts thanks -- I could probably do with any help I can get on the balance math of this. Perks don't stack with earlier versions, they just swap out and replace the old version. I think I'd really rather not remove the fire rate boost entirely as that's quite important to the style of the mech. I'd much prefer to remove the damage bonus rather then the fire rate bonus, if that's necessary. This mech does have a lot more room to potentially become OP than any other mech, depending on how fast you go and how lucky you are in terms of map generation. The idea is that if you can ride the bonus well, then runs are going to be a bit steamrollery, but if you get slowed down, things can start becoming difficult until another wave of boosts kicks in.  So, having OP runs is desired, but of course we can't go too overboard, which makes this quite tricky to balance.

A 12 minute Hard run does sound a bit short, but I guess that kind of depends on how rare a 12 minute run is. If it's quite rare then it might be fine -- this is the speedrun mech after all!

Good to know that it doesn't stack, and that it's intended to be a little OP! I think that the starting bonus is well balanced; it's only when the 10 minute version appears that things start to get crazy because of the huge bonus makes clearing floors very quick, and things snowball to the point of Terminus not getting a shot off.   

I tried a version with .3 additive and .97 rate of fire, but the rate of fire felt wrong and I agree that the style is important (though Terminus actually got to use all its phases!). I'm not really sure how to balance it unless there's a way to cap the rate of fire since the buff grows exponentially.

[TheVampire100]

As far as I understood Zephyr, he is really powerful if you speed-run through each floor but you will miss a lot of loot and xp that way, so he is all about finding the ideal line between farming a floor and rushing through it.

[Logorouge]

As far as I understood Zephyr, he is really powerful if you speed-run through each floor but you will miss a lot of loot and xp that way, so he is all about finding the ideal line between farming a floor and rushing through it.

The problem with it currently, is that you don't need to find that line between the two. As long as you get the second or third perk of Need for Speed, you can 100% rush to stack bonuses and win every time. Floors 5, 6 and 7 might as well not exist.

The two ways I see to prevent that would be:

1- Like Whistler mentioned, converting the stacking of intensity to a duration bonus instead. (The solution I like the most.)
2- Keep it like it is, but drastically cut down the upper tier perks duration. Something like 5-10-15min -> 5-7-10min. But is that enough to still be as fun?

[Pepisolo]

I tried a version with .3 additive and .97 rate of fire, but the rate of fire felt wrong and I agree that the style is important (though Terminus actually got to use all its phases!). I'm not really sure how to balance it unless there's a way to cap the rate of fire since the buff grows exponentially.

There might be a way to cap the fire rate...possibly! I'll look into it, thanks.

1- Like Whistler mentioned, converting the stacking of intensity to a duration bonus instead. (The solution I like the most.)
2- Keep it like it is, but drastically cut down the upper tier perks duration. Something like 5-10-15min -> 5-7-10min. But is that enough to still be as fun?

For 1), I think that the way the perk is implemented requires that the stacking happens. I think, although it's been a while since I looked at the code.

2) is easily possible of course. Perhaps just straight up removing the perks would also be another option. Or perhaps just removing the 15 minute version one.

[Logorouge]

2) is easily possible of course. Perhaps just straight up removing the perks would also be another option. Or perhaps just removing the 15 minute version one.

Hm, based on that here's a 3rd idea:

3- Replace the lv11 perk with the lv6 perk, removing the old lv11 perk altogether. Since the best perk always overwrites the previous versions anyway, it wouldn't be a huge loss. Level 6 could instead provide a different kind of rush-oriented perk, like increasing the mech's energy reserve for the first 5 minutes of the floor. That would provide a nice bonus in power without touching the damages or the firerate directly. I'm thinking of something like a temporary stable flux capacitor style thing.