[Feedback Friday #7] - November 28, 2014

Want design feedback for your new game? Then you've found the right thread! Post it here to find out what others think. Discuss to your heart's content, until next Friday, when we'll lock the old and start anew.

How To Get Folks To Checkout Your Game?

• Show - Be Interesting! Pics, videos, or best of all, a playable game!
• Be Concise - Who's got time for Wall 'O Text? Less is more.
• Read This - More great guidance in @@superpig's post.

How To Give Good Feedback?

• Be Positive - Finding a few redeeming qualities in the worst of games, is in itself a game.
• Be Respectful - Whichever side you're on, play nice or don't play!
• Focus On The Design - Not the designer.
• Be Specific - "Your game sucks!" is for nubs.

Good luck!
Gigi

[PS - Feedback Friday #6 is here]

 

Well, this is probably a bit late since I won't be making many more changes before release, but I wouldn't mind feedback on my game, Raptor Combat.

Webplayer link

 

Good morning Game Design! I had posted this thread on it's own but realized it could be seen as self-advert/spam, I apologize for that and posting here instead.

City-Building game is a genre that doesn't get much love these days. I've seen a few projects on the forums here but they never seem to get done. If you're interested I'd like to brainstorm on the genre specifically in my current project. "Manor Lord" (working title).

I have to be honest here, I picked up Unity in May last year. I had never done any game design work before I just had a little experience in programming. I made a simple space invader clone following tutorials and then started working on a tower defense game. I wasn't into it so I abandoned the project. I always loved city-building games so I started slowly working on one.

One thing I overlooked was the whole Game Design thing. I just thought games were made by saying I want to make a game where the player builds a city and everything would work from there. It's been almost a year and a half (part time) now that I've been working on the project now that most of the systems are implemented and working I find myself realizing that you can't build a game on mechanics alone. So I'm trying to keep development in a straight path now by actually trying my hands at game design.

Ok, What this thread is about, I'd like to try an explain what the game is about, what my expectations are, a few ideas I have for the future. I'd like to discuss the general design of a city building game and see if the way I'm going about mine has potential for interest.

And what this thread isn't about, I know this is a very bad idea for a first project, I bit more than I can chew etc, etc. I get it. Keep in mind I do not intend to make a living out of this game I'm mainly building it for myself so even if it takes another 5 years to complete I don't mind. So if you want to read about my game go on, if not see the end of this post.

What is it?
At its core, the game is a sandbox city management game where you build structures and take care of your population. It's set in a fictive country in the early middle ages. It's heavily inspired by the British Middle Ages, right before the first Viking invasions. I wanted to take a look at a less popular side of the middle ages, where the world was split up into thousands of little hold each governed by someone. There was a king but it didn't really mean much unless he had the support of his lords. The game will explore the everyday activities and struggle of managing a village as well as the emergence of Market Towns. You play as a newly appointed Manor Lord, given a new piece of land after showing your talents in battle.

Your goal is to take that piece of land and turn it into a thriving Manor or Market town. (note I'm not sure about including combat in the game, see further down)

What makes it special?
If you ever played Crusader Kings 2 you should feel right at home with the AI system. People have 5 main attributes:

• Diplomacy: Defines the ability to deal with other people, gives satisfaction bonuses. As the Manor Lord it directly influences the way people will react to your decisions.
• Constitution: Defines the physical side of a character. It directly ties in with their strength, general health, and how much they can produce when working at a constitution based work place (i.e wood cutter)
• Craftsmanship: Defines someone's artistic or engineering ability, it defines how much people can produce when working at a craftsmanship based work place (i.e Blacksmith) and defines how much Renown your city gains.
• Stewardship: Defines someone's ability to handle resources. It directly affects the prices when someone buys or sell and will also influence the amount of money you make from taxes and trade.
• Ruse: Defines someone's ability to deal with intrigue and crime, there are no work places using this attribute but it will help people commit, notice and get away with crime. It can be used to check against special events.

On top of that people have traits that affects these stats. Traits can be gained or lost throughout a person's life. Traits are more than just modifiers, they will also trigger unique events and responses to other events. Note here Events refer to an actual Event Quest, a window opens up giving you a description of what's happening and what choices can be taken.

Every character will also have these stats:

• Gold : actual money, used to pay taxes, employees if you own a business, improve your buildings and some events require gold to complete
• Renown: akin to CK2's prestige. Renown can be earned by owning specific buildings, as a reward for some events and a few traits. Renown is required for certain actions such as increasing your city's power level.
• Piety: I added this mainly because I thought I had to. This part has not been fleshed out yet but I thought making a game set in the middle ages without religion doesn't really make sense, it's still an if

How the game plays:

The game evolves in real-time, but takes some mechanics from turned based games. Each year is broken down in 4 seasons (3 months each). Each season lasts 10 minutes (you can scale time x2, x5 or x10). At the beginning of a season you can collect taxes, pay your workers, gain renown, piety. Pay maintenance on buildings you own, etc.

You never have direct control of the villagers, not even yourself. Everyone is autonomous and will deal with their surroundings according to their social ranks. When you build a new work place you can assign someone to work there in exchange for a salary (which can come back in your pockets as taxes or by exercising your judicial rights). The core of the game is managing villager's satisfaction rating and resources productions and consumption.

People in the game age in real time, now the only way to get more villagers is for your people to have kids, and waiting for those kids to grow up. Which makes it very long, say someone can become a worker at 10 years old, you need to wait 6 hours (if you play at 1x speed) for your newborns to become workers. I might have to rely on immigration to increase your population.

You'll get some events every once in a while that will help define your character and his relationship with other characters.

Each building has the following:

• Hide Value, this is the gold value of this property, this is what taxes are based on (10% of hide, 30% of hide, etc)
• Desirability (affects health of nearby residents and possible crimes)
• Fire Risk
• Building Health and repair costs (every season)
• Modifiers: Water Access, on guard patrol route, mason nearby, fire station nearby (in order to be -upgraded some of those modifiers are required)

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So this is pretty much what I have so far, I think it's a solid base but there are somethings I need to iron out. For example what's the end game?

I thought about possible victory conditions but I want to keep the sandbox feel. For example here are the three possible victories I thought about:

• Gain enough support from the villagers and surrounding cities to gain the title of Duke.
• Trade 100 000 worth of resources in a single year to be granted a Market Town liscence.
• Build a great cathedral and become a pilgrimage site

Being a sandbox game I also think you should be able to set your own goals, or set yourself a certain Renown you want to attain.

I'm thinking about combat, because no matter what angle you look at the middle ages, war was a part of daily life. I think that this is something the player could select at the beginning of the game so deciding where to setup your fief you might decide to go into a province that's very civilized so that war chance is fairly low. Or go to a more remote place where there are barbarians or where there's a lot of tension between neighboring villages so that combat is more likely to happen.

But I can't think of a way to properly design combat so it doesn't take too much away from the city building vibe. I though about having turned based battles, but the game is set in a "realistic" setting (no magic, no fantastic creatures) so turn based combat of melee units with fairly low hp would be boring.

I also thought about a real time combat like in stronghold, but contrary to stronghold people do not spawn every 30 seconds to replace your dead villagers. Say Vikings land on your shores and wipe out 80% of your male adults, and kidnaps 50% of your female adults, it's kind of a game breaker.

If you've made it this far I'm really grateful for your time.

Here are the actual questions:

Here's the kind of discussion I'm looking to spark:

• After reading the above, do you think a game like this has potential?
• Do you think it's a good idea to mix City-building with other genres? RPG and RTS or turned-based tactical strategy?
• What do you think is the main motivator for players who like city-building games?
• Do you like the fact that people are well defined in this kind of game? Name, family, traits, ambitions, etc. Or does it detract from the large scope that a city-builder usually offers?
• If you think combat should be in the game, would you favor real time or turned based combat?

Thank you very much for your input, I'm looking forward to reading your ideas.

Hugo

Edit: Screenshots available upon request

 

Link?

 

Orientation - Since most of the action happens vertically it's a much better choice to orient the gameplay vertically. Might as well go with the golden ratio since why choose something random?

Controls - You should never have to take your hand off of the movement controls in order to fire weapons. Also, why not use the mouse? You get three button presses and the ability to scroll, for example, to select your current missiles, etc.

Projectiles - Right now there are just gray streams, which do not indicate where the projectiles are. So, basically the only way to avoid enemy shots is to never be in front of enemies, but since that's the only way to kill them... basically the only way to play is suicide. Slow projectiles aren't as realistic but in vertical shmups realism is irrelevant, anyway.

The "you died" text taunts me, which doesn't make me want to play again. Which, when you think about it, is a bad idea. XD

 

Thanks for the feedback.

Yes, I know. If I was targeting mobile screens I would do that. But as it stands, it doesn't make sense to change it. When someone plays on their monitor, this is closer to the aspect ratio they'll have. So if I changed the aspect ratio I would be essentially cropping off the side edges, which doesn't improve the game at all.

You never have to take your hand off the movement controls to fire weapons. I was careful about this. A lot of arcade games use mouse control but I wanted some more interesting navigation.

The "gray streams" weapons don't have projectiles. Those are on a raycast system. It's not suicide to move in front of the enemies, it's all about timing. If the enemies couldn't shoot you, it wouldn't be fun.

Correction - when you think about it, it's a bad idea. I know, I'm mean.

 

I'm sorry I do not have a playable build right now, well I do but I'm in the progress of converting all my UI from the old OnGUI to the new 4.6 uGUI so a lot of things do not work yet. If you're really interested I can probably put something together by the end of the week!

 

Two mistakes:
1) Don't ask for feedback if you're going to argue with it and...
2) Don't argue with me.

*takes off kid gloves*

So you'd rather have 50% of the game going on in areas where the player isn't going to be? That means the majority of enemies have no reason to be engaged in combat. If you are concerned about making a game compatible with the common resolution of a computer monitor, you should look into the exciting world of horizontal shooters. Too bad there are no good examples of successful games in this genre to look into. Have you never noticed that the majority of shooters are vertical and when ported to a wide display device, they crop the screen sides?

It's not like I can prove it with a screenshot from the most beloved, widely regarded as the best SHMUP game ever made OH WAIT WHAT'S THAT!!!




That's their email address, you should tell them that they're doing it wrong.

EDIT: There is one popular, successful SHMUP that uses wide* screen:



However, this game allows you to shoot just as much sideways and diagonally as forward, as well has having a very unique sword-type weapon. It isn't all about shooting straight in front of you.

*still not that wide.

You need to be even more careful, because apparently it never occurred to you that I use my pinky on the "a" key when using "wasd" and I'm willing to bet that out of 6.5 billion people on planet earth, I'm not the only one. I mean, if I am not allowed to go left while shooting missiles in your game, you should say that straight out. In fact, you should tell people who play that way not to play your game at all.

EDIT: Here's a poll about finger placement on WASD. It's not authoritative, but it does show that there is about 2% of people who use my finger placement (and therefore your game is unplayable for them). Here's another that shows it's actually as much as 20% depending on the demographic I guess.

So whatever way you do it, if you ask them to do anything with their left hand other than movement you're excluding somebody.

Whoa raycasts? What are those? Sounds high tech. Hey, while you're making your game hyper realistic and removing any ability to dodge enemy shots from your game, you should make it more realistic and make enemies turn and shoot you instead of just aiming straight and, while you're deconstructing the shmup genre make the enemies turn around and follow you. That would really make it "fun" right?

You may be mean, but I am correct. And at the end of the day... I think that's what matters most.

 

Well, if you want feedback on your game you need to have a game to play. There should be another friday in about 7 days.

 

Duly noted, but if we're not allowed to discuss our own games in the forum, and we need a playable to post in this thread where exactly can I go to get feedback on my design notes above?

 

The right place to go is probably collaboration, get some people together. Everybody is working on something, for the most part, already and some people are working on multiple things at the same time. We can discuss general things that affect everybody for the edification of the whole on the forum or we can offer games here for feedback, again for the edification of the group as a whole (and with the added benefit of helping you make your game better if you heed the feedback) but I don't think there is a place where you can go where people are going to take time out of their day to discuss a game you're working on, review your notes, help you improve your design, etc. That's your job.

You're welcome to ask specific questions about anything you like, though I wouldn't recommend posting a design document for review.

 

Hi guys,

I'm here with the next build.

Major changes :
1. The game now incorporates a mix of TD and RTS for moving your towers. Thanks to @Asvarduil You can relocate your soldier to a different position using the relocate button (running sign) and drag on the position. While they are on the move they are vulnerable.
2. I've merged the attack and take cover button into a single toggable (hide/unhide) button.
3. The camera is now not always orbitable (noticed that in a battle people seldom moves the camera and it sometimes gets in the way). You can of course orbit the camera by click dragging the orbitable button.
4. Removed the regroup option.
5. There are three new inventory buttons (health, ammo and barricade) you can drag/drop health on your soldier to add health, ammo to add ammo, and barricade on the map to slow down your enemy.
6. There's a help button for a quick reference of the buttons for playtesting.

Screens :


Please play and let me know if the new mechanics are adding up.

Link :
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38338116/WarfrontDefenders/Webplayer.html

Once again, eagerly waiting for your feedback.

 

Controls - It took me 2-3 minutes to figure out the controls, which consist of:
- Click command that you want to use.
- Click and drag the correct thing.
- Drop the correct thing on the correct thing.

There's no feedback for clicking the UI commands, like nothing lights up to show you have anything selected, no tooltip to let you know what you're currently doing. I don't understand why I don't left click units to select them and right click on locations and enemies to move to them and right click on enemies to attack them. I thought this was fairly standard? Also I instinctively click and hold either right-click or middle-mouse to rotate but that doesn't work, either. I have to click the button... I'm starting to think this is specifically designed for a mobile platform?

Mechanics - Seems fine to me, I can't really play the game though so I can't critique it properly.

??? - The guys aren't shooting the enemies. Or they are and the enemies aren't dying. What's the purpose of the cover? Decoration? Because I lost one soldier with 3 guys focus firing on one enemy. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I can't kill a single enemy soldier even with 3 guys aiming at one guy and this is after 5 minutes of figuring out how to get them on the yellow arrows and aiming.

I can't even take a shot at the other UI elements, I have no idea. So, that's pretty much an about average first impression you're going to get from the general public. Good luck!

 

Thanks for playing the game. Yes, its primarily for touch devices and hence button hovers and tooltips are missing. Also right/middle click is not implemented.

I got your point that the game rules and UI is not well explained through tutorials and if its released like this, its going to have similar confused reaction. Will work on the tut before any public beta release.

Another valuable observation you made is that when soldiers are firing at enemies which are out of range players will wonder what's going wrong. Why isn't the enemy dying. Some pointers should notify the player that they are out of range.

Thanks for the valuable observations. Really appreciate the help.
Looking for more.

 

Rock on, dude.

 

Might want to double check that, because I wasn't seeing my units do anything at all. The enemies would be at point blank and my units weren't doing anything.

 

It doesn't make sense that they don't shoot automatically and having range also doesn't make any sense in my mind we're talking about soldiers with rifles I think they should shoot automatically at the nearest enemy

 

Yes, there's a problem. Units sometimes doesn't responds even if the enemies are within range. Thanks for spotting. Let me work on it.

Another thing, do you like the character style?

 

I like the visual style of the little guys, personally.

 

From a distance, they look pretty cute, but then I zoomed in. So now I'm mixed on it. It's lacking a little consistency in how it's presented.

 

Can you please elaborate on this?

 

It's the face. They've got a face perfect for quoting "war. war never changes..." and the rest of the fallout intro, but they've got chibi proportions and a duck wattle. Right now it's in a freakish middle ground between Apocalypse Now and Beetle Bailey, and I'm not sure which it's trying to portray.

 

They do look a little too serious for the cuteness level they immediately seem to suggest. In fact, that's one of the first things I thought of. Is this a cute phone game or hardcore war themed game? Also, while investigating the faces I noticed that the guys often do not stop when they reach the yellow arrows.

 

Okay I finally got what to do and what was going on but it took a while, you need to have some tutorial level because the first few times i played i had no idea ( I pressed the soldier button and thought it was my units spawning when it was the enemy). I also didnt know you could have more then 4 units.

It was annoying that the soldiers dont auto attack (maybe you could make them always auto attack by default and allow them to also select a different target).

Make the start screen start with something other then 0 minutes -- default to 2 or something (so i dont need to change it every time).

 

Another week comes to a close. The new discussion is here.

Gigi