Status Report: Things are going Pretty Well.
I'm enjoying the alpha process. People tell me why things are bad. I will agree, think about solutions, then we try to find a way forward.
Each time something gets fixed, another something will pop up and get in the way of fun. Sometimes it's an exploit, sometimes it's just bad UX. We rinse, we repeat.
The biggest improvement over the past months has been to responsiveness. It took a lot of directed feedback and patience from our testers, but we seem to have reached a point where new people can join and mostly have a good experience.
I don't even want to recall all the different systems we had to touch to get this to happen; it was a lengthy process. We'll have to do more work in the future, but have hopefully earned some time away from responsiveness to focus on other things.
There's definitely a couple of macro issues with the design, like how much players want to engage with map objectives, or how the game closes out when one team is in a winning position. Those are trickier.
Today I will share some thoughts on one of those macro issues: equipment design!
Kill Life Leech
There is a Counsel called Bloodletter in the alpha. It is named after an item in my old game Rise of Winterchill, and provides a simple 6 + 6% life leech.
Early on, Bloodletter was picked up by almost everyone — which we expected because it's familiar and reliable. 'Familiar and reliable' is a really powerful combo.
However, in a previous post, we discussed how sometimes 'interesting' items can get lost in the crowd, and how one 'bad' item can poison a game. For us, 'interesting' items are ones which are biased towards any of three things:
- Teamwork
- Leadership
- Opportunities for Shared Creativity
Bloodletter connects with none of these. It has to go!
Making sure we don't have dud items is part of getting equipments right. Life leech will make its return, but not in its familiar and reliable form. And on that note...
Add and Adjust
We've had buffs and modifiers in the game for a while. Last week, we finished another pass on the system: giving them deeper integration and making the scripting tidier for actions which can be subject to many modifiers.
For example, it will be intuitive to write a modifier which causes abilities to have increased radius if the player targets a watery surface. Maybe that would be fun!
We're mentioning this because it's no secret that custom games will be encouraged on our platform. We want to be ready for player creativity!
Things have been a bit slower with the alpha itself over the past 2–3 weeks, as we've been working on business development, art direction, and on some of the earlier parts of the creation process for some new characters (before we get to their kits).
It's all good work, good collaboration and the game will be better for it. For now, it's back to improving alpha content and getting as close as we can to a clear representation of what the game will eventually become.
Softmints
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