It's very early and there's already some feedback. What I can say is I did not feel that this is going nowhere. It's rough but from whatever bias I see the things connecting better and better as time goes. I like the idea of being able to terraform and climb stuff. It could lead up to interesting ways of winning at the game. The slow combat also did not bother me too much so far, it has to be put in a wider perspective I've seen it's going to be upgrabable.
The only thing I could possibly say at this point is I did not like the auto-teleportation when going near a door. I wanted to press an action button.
I'm sorry. I had a giant Wall of Text typed out, then accidentally closed the Tab.
I'll try to recollect in short what I wrote, but its not going to be as detailed, and probably sounds harsher then its ment to be.
Your Worldgeneration is trash, its just boring and empty. I flew around the whole Thing. Your World is also too big, I don't think you need that big of a World, you could easily quarter its size and instead fill it out with more Detail.
Combat works fine, but swinging etc. feels slow. I can go into negative SP.
Removing and adding Terrain is completely unnecessary, it adds nothing of Value.
Climbing is buggy, you sometimes clip a bit into terrain, can climb onto water and the ground, and when climbing on pillars it glitches out completely. Could also be contextual instead of via buttonpress.
Mask your generation by first generating and displaying some Lore, Character creation, a static introsequence that doesn't need to be generated, or can be generated seperately from the rest of the World etc.
Your Human Model needs work. Hand and Feet are bad, Shoulders are way too small compared to arm and Body thickness, Head is flat and bottom of it is too round. Texture doesn't look particularly good, needs more detail, better colortransitions and so on. What Style are you going for with this? If its supposed to be pixelated Megaman model-like, you have too much geometry on your Limbs i.e. If its more a lower resolution morrowind, you have too little on body and especially Face, and your Textures need to be a lot more painterly then pixelart-y. Not talking about nearestNeighbor/Linear/whatever interpolation, but how the texture itself is painted.
Smoothshade them, you're not trying to show hard Edges on a Organic Body.
Game lags out hard at maybe 30-40 NPCs at one Place, so currently your performance is too bad to generate any actual Villages or Cities. If your World were smaller you wouldn't need to generate big Cities, but at 100km³ I expect at least two reasonably sized Towns, which would have around that amount or more NPCs in a rather dense Area.
Hey, thanks for the criticism regardless! Unfortunately the game is very early, and I should have waited a bit more before submitting, but the feedback has been invaluable.
The World is indeed empty for now. I plan on filling it with as much stuff as I can, but I can easily adjust the world size (and probably make it an option) based on what people think later on.
Negative SP is intentional. It's only when it's at that value that you actually can't do things anymore. I didn't want an excessively punishing Stamina system, so I went the Dark Souls route. Combat is also intentionally slow, but will get faster with higher stats.
Terrain modification is one of those mechanics I added early just to see if I could. It's gonna be used later on for terraforming and to help with exploration (who am I kidding, I'm just gonna fill the world with buried treasure).
Climbing is based around a bad animaton for now. I'll change it drastically. I plan on making Stealth mode the same as Climbing mode. Let's see how that turns out.
I'll definitely add than later on in development.
Shoulders being small was a concession I had to do for animations to look decent. I'm going for a PS1/Morrowind style, but I'll consider changing the models or getting an artist to do all of them.
Shading styles and other artistic details will be ironed out later. I like the very harsh, polygonal shading but I can accept if people don't like it.
Lagging is also something I'll have to worry about later, when there's even more stuff on screen at once. Maybe just disabling shading is gonna be enough, huh?
>I'm just gonna fill the world with buried treasure
Then just put it on an actual Shovel. So I have to carry one around, and can only use it to slowly dig a bit of a Hole, not full on Terrain modification. That way you can mask it better with some hole-model, and avoid it becoming a cheese-able mechanic. Similarly to how in other Games the chest rises out of the floor instead of the floor sinking down, just accurately reversed. (so reversed Reversed kind of, hope its clear what I mean. You'll still need the system for that, but you won't be able to actually use/abuse it as a Player)
>Model/Graphic
You don't have connected Shoulders, there shouldn't be any Problems arising with shoulder size. If you mean that they don't appear in the Players Camera in first person, use a different Model for that then.
Depending on how long it takes you to get around to the Graphics, there might also be quite a few new ones around you could just download and use, I'm pretty much always trying to make Stuff around that Area of Style.
>Lag
It didn't happen with Trees or anything, and I doubt 30 Skeletal Meshes caused that, I'm pretty sure that it'd be your AI. Do you do Visionchecks etc. every frame or on slower intervalls maybe?
The shoulders need to look like a ball so rotating them around looks decent no matter the pose (without using low poly deformations). I'll study improving them regardless.
The AI is mostly a placeholder with several tests for different functions of it. I'll heavily modify it.
The Shoulders being disjointed and Ballshaped is fine. Morrowind does this aswell if I recall correctly. They're just too small compared to the Chest and the upper arm circumference. Simply scale the Ballshape up by maybe 20-50%.
Thanks a lot for recording with commentary, it helped me a lot! In general, I'm sorry I just dumped a prototype full of debug and placeholder stuff. A lot of what you criticed is one or the other, but a lot of valuable insight was gained from your video, so thanks again!
Oh, and Stamina is a sad concession to make climbing and blocking work (and have a sane reason for enemies to stop attacking), but I'll make sure that it's as unintrusive as possible, what's with actions only being stopped at negative values, and no "out of breath" states.
It's the sort of thing I will need to try out to see how it works. I imagine this is going to take some time to flesh out to the point where it's close to your idea. It seems like a big project for what I assume is a one man team.
It's safe to say that the game took longer to load than I did playing it, but I think it's an interesting thing. It's obviously very early, but I can see you're going for something akin to Oblivion with a Daggerfall sized world, with a touch of Minecraft thrown in. Crawling around on things is an interesting mechanic in the first person perspective.
My advice is to try and not get lost in the sheer scope of what you're trying to make here. Because it seems like you're doing a lot. Also, I played the demo for the first Devil Spire a while back and thought it was pretty neat, so I'm hoping this ends up in a similar place.
Thanks a lot! And don't worry, I'm doing stuff starting from the most difficult to implement, or important, so I won't get caught up in silly diversions or details and actually finish this.
Thanks! Directional attacks will be in in the form of special Power Attacks with unique effects. I'll avoid adding directional parrying because a lot of the enemies won't be humanoid, and I don't want to, like, "force" wolves to attack vertically. I'd rather focus on making the effects of weapons, stats and perks matter more. We'll see as development progresses and more mechanics are added.
Combat is a little slow but does feel ok, the parry mechanic was nice. I had a bug that kept spawning cubes under my feet and made me stuck any time I jumped, only way out of it was flying. Looking forward to the next iterations of the game.
Thanks for playing! The cubes are the NPC's detection markers, to show where they last saw you, they don't have collision. I'll improve on the movement mechanics, including jumping, later on.
I'll change the ESC quit asap to avoid heart attacks from people after waiting to generate a world.
Pushing NPCs was borken and I forgor to remove the debug option.
The little white pyramids are the NPC's detection spots, marking the last palce they saw you.
The buildings are intended to not spawn perfectly above ground, and sometimes dig a bit in or out. The big one in the middle of the map is just a loose test asset.
The button in the main menu for Continue is not greyed out, but of course I'll work on the menus afterwards.
The slowness is gonna be ironed out with stats, as Attack Speed is gonna be a thing, we'll see how people that both like and dislike it think of it then.
I don't want to be the guy that says "the unfinished parts are unfinished", but it looks pretty interesting so far. I don't know what you want to do with building/digging eventually, but one thing that could make it more usable is to make it affect four vertices at a time so that you build and dig square blocks instead of narrow 1-vertex spikes and holes.
Thanks! I'll consider several different digging patterns, including for stuff like explosions, but accepting the square holes seems like a good idea for the people that like landscaping.
This made me realize that I still have the first game's demo on my disk, and I never got around playing it.
Where do I even begin?
So it takes long ass time to start and the first thing I do after that is try to access a menu. Thank god I decided to take another look and loading was faster.
At the starting location I somehow managed to get myself stuck in the building thing geometry by jumping, and got out thanks to crouch.
Combat feels like constant bullet time. I dig the dodge.
Generally I feel like the combat is very slow. I get you're going for a oldschool feel but it feels like I'm playing Morrowind on 0.5 playback speed. All of the animations are generally extremely lethargic and don't any weight to them.
I'm also not really a fan of being able to cancel out of charged attacks with the dodge, I feel like it ruins the inherent risk that would usually be associated with charging up an attack.
Also sometimes when I climbed on top of buildings I would teleport inside them (I figure that's a worldgen problem where the boundary for the door isn't being placed right instead of a bug with the climbing itself).
I never played your last game so I don't really have a reference for what's different besides the billboard enemies getting swapped out for full 3d, but I think this is a pretty good start for your new project.
Comments
I like this game :3
It's very early and there's already some feedback. What I can say is I did not feel that this is going nowhere. It's rough but from whatever bias I see the things connecting better and better as time goes.
I like the idea of being able to terraform and climb stuff. It could lead up to interesting ways of winning at the game. The slow combat also did not bother me too much so far, it has to be put in a wider perspective I've seen it's going to be upgrabable.
The only thing I could possibly say at this point is I did not like the auto-teleportation when going near a door. I wanted to press an action button.
Thanks for your feedback! I believe most of the issues you fear with the game are gonna be sorted out soon, so stay tuned!
I'm sorry. I had a giant Wall of Text typed out, then accidentally closed the Tab.
I'll try to recollect in short what I wrote, but its not going to be as detailed, and probably sounds harsher then its ment to be.
Your Worldgeneration is trash, its just boring and empty. I flew around the whole Thing. Your World is also too big, I don't think you need that big of a World, you could easily quarter its size and instead fill it out with more Detail.
Combat works fine, but swinging etc. feels slow. I can go into negative SP.
Removing and adding Terrain is completely unnecessary, it adds nothing of Value.
Climbing is buggy, you sometimes clip a bit into terrain, can climb onto water and the ground, and when climbing on pillars it glitches out completely. Could also be contextual instead of via buttonpress.
Mask your generation by first generating and displaying some Lore, Character creation, a static introsequence that doesn't need to be generated, or can be generated seperately from the rest of the World etc.
Your Human Model needs work. Hand and Feet are bad, Shoulders are way too small compared to arm and Body thickness, Head is flat and bottom of it is too round. Texture doesn't look particularly good, needs more detail, better colortransitions and so on. What Style are you going for with this? If its supposed to be pixelated Megaman model-like, you have too much geometry on your Limbs i.e. If its more a lower resolution morrowind, you have too little on body and especially Face, and your Textures need to be a lot more painterly then pixelart-y. Not talking about nearestNeighbor/Linear/whatever interpolation, but how the texture itself is painted.
Smoothshade them, you're not trying to show hard Edges on a Organic Body.
Game lags out hard at maybe 30-40 NPCs at one Place, so currently your performance is too bad to generate any actual Villages or Cities. If your World were smaller you wouldn't need to generate big Cities, but at 100km³ I expect at least two reasonably sized Towns, which would have around that amount or more NPCs in a rather dense Area.
Hey, thanks for the criticism regardless! Unfortunately the game is very early, and I should have waited a bit more before submitting, but the feedback has been invaluable.
>I'm just gonna fill the world with buried treasure
Then just put it on an actual Shovel. So I have to carry one around, and can only use it to slowly dig a bit of a Hole, not full on Terrain modification. That way you can mask it better with some hole-model, and avoid it becoming a cheese-able mechanic. Similarly to how in other Games the chest rises out of the floor instead of the floor sinking down, just accurately reversed. (so reversed Reversed kind of, hope its clear what I mean. You'll still need the system for that, but you won't be able to actually use/abuse it as a Player)
>Model/Graphic
You don't have connected Shoulders, there shouldn't be any Problems arising with shoulder size. If you mean that they don't appear in the Players Camera in first person, use a different Model for that then.
Depending on how long it takes you to get around to the Graphics, there might also be quite a few new ones around you could just download and use, I'm pretty much always trying to make Stuff around that Area of Style.
>Lag
It didn't happen with Trees or anything, and I doubt 30 Skeletal Meshes caused that, I'm pretty sure that it'd be your AI. Do you do Visionchecks etc. every frame or on slower intervalls maybe?
Using a shovel, or a fireball, would be the idea.
The shoulders need to look like a ball so rotating them around looks decent no matter the pose (without using low poly deformations). I'll study improving them regardless.
The AI is mostly a placeholder with several tests for different functions of it. I'll heavily modify it.
The Shoulders being disjointed and Ballshaped is fine. Morrowind does this aswell if I recall correctly. They're just too small compared to the Chest and the upper arm circumference. Simply scale the Ballshape up by maybe 20-50%.
Could work... I'll try it out, thanks for the tip!
I recorded playing games with commentary, and your game is one of them.
Here's the link to the whole DD50 folder:
https://mega.nz/folder/GclCXISL#gwE9S1kRTbe6amYLH2RiYA
The characters are the best part.
Thanks a lot for recording with commentary, it helped me a lot!
In general, I'm sorry I just dumped a prototype full of debug and placeholder stuff. A lot of what you criticed is one or the other, but a lot of valuable insight was gained from your video, so thanks again!
Good to hear the short recording was of use to you.
Oh, and Stamina is a sad concession to make climbing and blocking work (and have a sane reason for enemies to stop attacking), but I'll make sure that it's as unintrusive as possible, what's with actions only being stopped at negative values, and no "out of breath" states.
It's the sort of thing I will need to try out to see how it works. I imagine this is going to take some time to flesh out to the point where it's close to your idea. It seems like a big project for what I assume is a one man team.
It's safe to say that the game took longer to load than I did playing it, but I think it's an interesting thing. It's obviously very early, but I can see you're going for something akin to Oblivion with a Daggerfall sized world, with a touch of Minecraft thrown in. Crawling around on things is an interesting mechanic in the first person perspective.
My advice is to try and not get lost in the sheer scope of what you're trying to make here. Because it seems like you're doing a lot. Also, I played the demo for the first Devil Spire a while back and thought it was pretty neat, so I'm hoping this ends up in a similar place.
Thanks a lot! And don't worry, I'm doing stuff starting from the most difficult to implement, or important, so I won't get caught up in silly diversions or details and actually finish this.
STOP STARING AT ME
This has huge potential, maybe combat could use directional attacks/blocks to make it a bit more interesting, or holding up block draining stamina.
Thanks! Directional attacks will be in in the form of special Power Attacks with unique effects. I'll avoid adding directional parrying because a lot of the enemies won't be humanoid, and I don't want to, like, "force" wolves to attack vertically. I'd rather focus on making the effects of weapons, stats and perks matter more. We'll see as development progresses and more mechanics are added.
Combat is a little slow but does feel ok, the parry mechanic was nice. I had a bug that kept spawning cubes under my feet and made me stuck any time I jumped, only way out of it was flying. Looking forward to the next iterations of the game.
Thanks for playing! The cubes are the NPC's detection markers, to show where they last saw you, they don't have collision. I'll improve on the movement mechanics, including jumping, later on.
I don't think "esc" should completely close the game, I thought it'd bring up the main menu.
Pushing NPCs doesn't seem to work?
What's the stuff that drops when I fight people?
Some buildings didn't spawn on the ground.
It would be good if you showed when I have a loaded world ready to go.
Combat is slow but that's fine with me, I like slow gameplay because it's more chill.
Can't think of anything else to say. Interesting prototype, curious to see where it goes.
I'll change the ESC quit asap to avoid heart attacks from people after waiting to generate a world.
Pushing NPCs was borken and I forgor to remove the debug option.
The little white pyramids are the NPC's detection spots, marking the last palce they saw you.
The buildings are intended to not spawn perfectly above ground, and sometimes dig a bit in or out. The big one in the middle of the map is just a loose test asset.
The button in the main menu for Continue is not greyed out, but of course I'll work on the menus afterwards.
The slowness is gonna be ironed out with stats, as Attack Speed is gonna be a thing, we'll see how people that both like and dislike it think of it then.
Thanks for playing and the review!
I don't want to be the guy that says "the unfinished parts are unfinished", but it looks pretty interesting so far. I don't know what you want to do with building/digging eventually, but one thing that could make it more usable is to make it affect four vertices at a time so that you build and dig square blocks instead of narrow 1-vertex spikes and holes.
Thanks! I'll consider several different digging patterns, including for stuff like explosions, but accepting the square holes seems like a good idea for the people that like landscaping.
This made me realize that I still have the first game's demo on my disk, and I never got around playing it.
Where do I even begin?
So it takes long ass time to start and the first thing I do after that is try to access a menu. Thank god I decided to take another look and loading was faster.
At the starting location I somehow managed to get myself stuck in the building thing geometry by jumping, and got out thanks to crouch.
Combat feels like constant bullet time. I dig the dodge.
Is there anything else I should test?
it's fine, thanks for trying it out!
King’s Field combat with blocks and dodges? Cool. Climbing is hilarious and awesome.
and thanks for playing!
Nice Morrowind music and sound effects lol.
Generally I feel like the combat is very slow. I get you're going for a oldschool feel but it feels like I'm playing Morrowind on 0.5 playback speed. All of the animations are generally extremely lethargic and don't any weight to them.
I'm also not really a fan of being able to cancel out of charged attacks with the dodge, I feel like it ruins the inherent risk that would usually be associated with charging up an attack.
Also sometimes when I climbed on top of buildings I would teleport inside them (I figure that's a worldgen problem where the boundary for the door isn't being placed right instead of a bug with the climbing itself).
I never played your last game so I don't really have a reference for what's different besides the billboard enemies getting swapped out for full 3d, but I think this is a pretty good start for your new project.
Thanks for the review!
The speed of combat is gonna vary wildly with stats, so I'll fine tune it better once I implement them.
Wasn't the huge waste of Stamina when dodging out of attacks enough of a deterrent?
When you say teleport, do you mean you get put in the Inside version of the building? Or just fall through the roof?
By teleport I mean that I go inside the building as if I had gone through the door normally.
I see. I'll investigate, thanks!