itch.io

Oh yeah, I forgot to talk about this in my last post: Positional audio! I think it could be dramatically improved, but I’m not sure if this is something that’s just planned for later or not. The current line of sight based audio is… extremely strange, and breaks immersion frequently. Shifting slightly to the right and suddenly being completely unable to hear a TV in the next room with an open door is completely absurd. I don’t expect cutting edge actual-sound-wave technology, but even a simple proximity-based audio system is significantly more realistic and immersive - even though this isn’t how it works in real life, we “expect” to be able to hear things closer, and not to be able to hear things farther. Real life sound is obviously much more complicated than this but it’s definitely out of scope to get this completely right.

I think just switching to a more natural proximity-based system for the time being, if a more substantial audio system is planned, would fix these issues easily.

I genuinely wish this game had a proper borderless windowed mode. I don’t know if the “remove borders” option is supposed to be that, but it does not work properly. It’s still fullscreen. It should act as if the game is in windowed mode, but with no borders… as obvious as it sounds. I also desperately wish this game had an option to play audio when alt+tabbed. Half the games I play don’t even have an option for it, but it’s really not too difficult to add. These two things are so consistently an issue for me that it makes me not want to play at all, but they should be very easy to implement. Please consider it.

I also think this game could really use some other AA implementations - I think it must use temporal AA right now and it honestly looks awful, especially on monitors. The way things blur and mix together is consistently immersion-breaking.

Two more bits of random feedback. Why are trash bag rolls so voluminous, lol? Is it for balance or something? Filled trash bags should be hard to carry around, not a roll. It’s a little bit silly. In fact a lot of items have pretty ridiculous and seemingly-arbitrary volumes - is this being calculated automatically or something? I’m not sure I understand…

I love that you can clean the window in the base, but it becomes dirty much too quickly, especially considering you clean it from the inside… by the way, I think it would be better if you had to clean it from the outside as well, which leaves you potentially vulnerable to anything out there. After all, it’s much more common for windows to become dirty from outside anyway.

Finally… do you want any help with the text in the game? I understand why, but the text often reads strangely and has a significant amount of general errors. Some of this is fine, especially in emails, but things like a lot of the help text can be improved. I’ve worked on copy editing for other small games/mods before (I think most recently Starstorm for Risk of Rain 1, but I currently do subtitle editing for an anime project as well), and I’m happy to help if it’s something you need. If it’s not a priority right now, it’s fairly minor.

Hi, I know probably no one will read this, and it’s likely no one will care, and it’s also way too late, but I’m not going to bother working on this modpack anymore. There’s a few reasons for this, but it’s largely because of the modding community itself. I have no interest in working with most of the major players in the mod space, and they have no interest in working with me, either.

The RoR2 modding community at large is relatively hostile to outsiders, and even more hostile to modpack developers. Features I’ve requested for r2modman have been ignored for over a year, even very simple changes like blocking update prompting. That’s fine and all; it’s a free mod manager maintained for free by volunteers who are under no obligation to implement my suggestions. But it makes developing the modpack more difficult.

I probably don’t need to say this, but just in case, don’t harass anyone about this. I already feel bad enough even mentioning this, but it’s just frustrating enough that I wanted to bring it up.

Working on the modpack is extremely strenuous, taking up tons of time on its own. Curating and testing take a lot of time, as does bug-fixing, balance design, documentation, and many other things. Plus, although mods are actually surprisingly stable, I still run into many instances where it is beyond my ability to diagnose a showstopper issue, and because of my distaste for the community, I am unable to get help for these issues.

If people are interested, I will go into detail in a reply about my process for updating the modpack. It genuinely is a lot more work than it seems to curate a modpack for public use; it’s much different from simply throwing together a bunch of mods into a kitchen sink pack for your friends and then mysteriously sharing it on the Thunderstore even though sharing a code is easier. Since I do this entirely by myself, the work is even harder to do.

Finally, there are many features I would rather design myself, but because of my very low programming skill, I am unable to do so. Although I’d like to work with someone in the community on this, it’s a bit difficult to convince anyone to just do all the work while the “ideas guy” kicks back and bosses them around. So I’ve been unable to make many changes that I would like to make myself, such as a planned MUL-T rework.

Overall, unless someone from the community offers to step up and assist me with some features of the pack, it seems unlikely that I will have the motivation to continue working on it. I’m sorry for anyone that is disappointed to hear this. I greatly appreciate the fact that my modpack seems to have become the most downloaded one on the Thunderstore (even beating out release-era modpacks!), and I have appreciated seeing a few people play the pack on YouTube and Twitch. Alright, maybe I’m bragging a little… but thank you anyway.

I do have a semi-updated version of the pack on GitHub, although I should warn you that it is not currently feature-complete, and I think the latest commit is broken. I also won’t provide any support for installing it yourself, sorry. Thanks for all your support. I’ll try to answer any questions if they pop up.

Interesting. Not entirely sure of the best way to fix this, but I will look into it. For now, you can always use CheatUnlocks to get the achievement and unlock Timely Execution. Thank you for the report.

You can indeed disabled the Accretion “mod” if you would like to further customize the pack. It has to be done this way due to Thunderstore limitations, sorry. Alternatively, if that doesn’t work, the most important thing is the configuration files included in the .zip, so you can just copy that folder into a fresh install with all the proper mods.

Incidentally, thank you for the feedback on those mods. I am experimenting with the Railgunner nerfs and Loader tweaks but haven’t had a lot of time to actually playtest them.

actually I might update it a bit more now that the mod scene is calming down, I pushed a small update to Github until I can actually test things

Probably not, sorry. The Risk of Rain 2 modding community is disappointing and killed my motivation to participate. I may end up randomly updating the pack with bugfixes but the project is probably not going to continue anytime soon.

• Wirehack Wrench
  • Item amount reduced to 1, down from 2.
  • Cooldown increased to 60 seconds, up from 45.
    • This item is way stronger than I initially thought, and the fact that you can use it multiple times per stage doesn't help matters. I am considering increasing the cooldown even further (maybe bringing back 2 items), in order to make it more like a "get a free chest once per level" kind of item.

Doesn't obey ShareSuite's forced player scaling; e.g. will drop 2 items for 2 players, even with ShareSuite enabled. This is with the item blacklisted from sharing as well.

Some further feedback after the latest two patches:

First of all, it seems like a few of my changes were used in the latest patches. Thanks! I'm not sure whether they were directly inspired by me or not, but I'm glad I could help. I have a few more points of feedback to make after even further testing.

DISABLED

• Choc Chip
  • Re-enabled after fixes.
• Mystic Sword
  • Re-enabled to try out the nerfed version.

• Treasure Map
  • Re-enabled after fixes.

CHANGED

I changed a few items to fit with RiskyMod's balance philosophy of removing area scaling and proc coefficients, so I won't list those changes here, since they are outside of the default scope of the mod. (Thank you for the granular config options, by the way!)

• Nuclear Accelerator
  • Damage% per 1% of speed decreased to 0.4, down from 0.5.
  • Damage% per 1% of speed per stack decreased to 0.2, down from 0.25.
    • I actually think the balance of this item is a lot better now, but I'm going to keep trying it at this balance point for a while and see if it needs a bump back

• Treasure Map
  • Had a chance to try this out on a run. It's definitely powerful, but I think at this balance point it feels about right. Your design notes from the patches were about where I was at with the balance, and I like the reduced range (I was considering it myself).
• Contraband Gunpowder
  • Damage reduced to 250%, down from 500%.
  • Damage per stack reduced to 200%, down from 400%.
  • Radius stacking and proc coefficient removed (these are RiskyMod compatibility changes, not balance notes).
    • This item actually ends up being furiously powerful with just a couple extra pickup items, especially on melee survivors. While it's actually fine for an item to be especially good on certain survivors, especially when it requires other items to make it that way, this damage point should still allow the it em to be exceptional in these situations. Another idea I had was to bump the damage back up a bit and just severely reduce the drop chance of the item's flasks, but I'm going to try this out first.
• Thought Processor
  • Attack Speed increase per 1% missing health increased to 2%, up from 1% (max 200%).
  • Attack Speed increase per stack increased to 1%, up from 0.5%.
    • This item is good, don't get me wrong, but even at this value it was just "pretty good" in my testing. In the early game you can hover at lower health values for longer, but you also have fewer supporting items. In the later game, it's rare to be below max health for very long (you'll either heal or die) unless you're Rex, who the item is an obvious natural synergy on. Still, this change should help the item feel more like a proper red item, transforming the way you play and giving you a big power spike.

By the way, my favorite item is the Cutesy Bow because I love how it looks on Acrid... my second is Marwan's because it's a really unique and interesting scaling item that works well on survivors I tend to play!

So I've been testing this mod out a lot with the extensive modpack I'm working on, which includes a lot of other balance changes and additions. I wanted to give some feedback on some of the items as I've experienced them through playtesting, with the obvious caveat that some of them may have a different-than-intended feel as a result of my other changes. Let me know if you'd like my full changelog and/or mod loadout code.

DISABLED

• Mechanical Arm
  • This item ended up feeling like it either didn't do much, or was a way to just one-click delete a boss whenever you felt like it. If possible, I think an interesting change might be to make you activate the item, and build up damage for a certain amount of time, then swing in front for some percentage of the damage dealt.
• Ratio Equalizer
  • I actually quite like the idea of the item, but it's very easy to troll with this in multiplayer lobbies, so I had to disable it by default. I'm not sure it needs to actually set the health of allies around you to yours, as you are already taking a risk by using it at low HP, and it also becomes an incredibly powerful turtle tool if you use it to heal instead.
• Vendetta
  • I have no idea when this is a useful item. Even in vanilla, allies die rarely, so this item procs infrequently and feels like a dead pickup most of the time. Additionally, in this modpack (which includes RiskyMod), drones are much tougher to kill, making this even more difficult to use.
• Choc Chip
  • I actually disabled this one since it's buggy/not working correctly with the SotV buff/debuff changes.
• Mystic Sword
  • Extremely powerful even at just one stack. Had to disable. Not sure how to fix, but there were some suggestions in another thread already.

• Metronome

  • Feels sort of weird/strange to use, plus it seems to be broken in SotV.
• Scratch Ticket
  • Way too overpowered in certain situations, way too useless in others. I quite like the idea of a mini Clover, but it just felt bad to use in my testing, sadly.
• Treasure Map
  • Disabled due to being broken currently.

CHANGED

I changed a few items to fit with RiskyMod's balance philosophy of removing area scaling and proc coefficients, so I won't list those changes here, since they are outside of the default scope of the mod. (Thank you for the granular config options, by the way!)

• Cutesy Bow
  • Armor decreased to 30, down from 60.
    • This item tended to last a lot longer than I thought it would, so having it at 60 armor was a huge bonus. I debated between this and halving the number of stacks, but I am trying out lower armor first.
• Faulty Spotter
  • Duration lowered to 7 seconds, down from 10.
    • Minor nerf since it ended up being extremely powerful in MP lobbies. Not sure if it was warranted though.
• Hiker's Backpack
  • Removed built-in cooldown reduction.
    • I honestly don't know why it has 8% CDR on it. It does little for most survivors, and a bonus stock to EVERY skill is already insane enough.
• Nuclear Accelerator
  • Damage% per 1% of speed decreased to 0.1, down from 1.
  • Damage% per 1% of speed per stack decreased to 0.1, down from 0.5.
  • Sprinting no longer further increases damage.
    • This item spirals out of control super quickly in most games, making Goat Hooves more than twice as good as they already are. My nerf is probably a little bit too harsh (I can probably bump it up a few decimals), but it was incredibly strong in testing. The sprint change is due to some sprinting changes in the pack, but it does seem very good even in vanilla.
• Puzzle of Chronos
  • Health regen increased to 6/s, up from 3/s.
    • This item is abysmal. Cautious Slug has the same effect while only requiring you to be out of combat. The fact that it stacks on all allies is fine in a full MP lobby, but worthless in single player. I'm still not sure it's worth taking at this value, but I'd rather not push it too high to start.

• Spare Wiring
  • Ok, this one isn't actually a change but I don't know where to put it. I'm not even sure if this item is working or not. If it is, there seems to be very little obvious visual or audible feedback that it is.
• Timely Execution
  • Duration reduced to 5 seconds, down from 9 seconds.
    • This one I made before most other changes; 9 seconds is a very long time, and 5 is already plenty to get away. It's basically a Dio's that regenerates, which is insanely good. However, this change is probably only necessary in my modpack specifically.
• Treasure Map
  • Unearth time reduced to 60 seconds, down from 120 seconds.
  • Unearth time reduction per stack reduced to 25%, down from 50%.
    • This item (if it worked) feels sort of like a second teleporter event with a smaller range and an (on average) better reward. However, you have to find it in the first place, and then stand still for two entire minutes to get your reward. It didn't feel very compelling.

That being said, I genuinely really love this mod and almost all of the items. They feel very much in line with the base game, the models are great, and they all work well for the most part. I could also be totally off on some of these, they're just the changes I made for the pack. 

Also confirming that it doesn't seem to be working.

This book is a wonderful little idea. When I saw the map of Pommeland, I was immediately filled with a powerful sense of nostalgia and longing for a game that doesn't exist. I'd love to see something even more extensive like this from you in the future. A really wonderful book. Thank you.