Got some little updates for you – if you played the alpha before, your content unlock progress and settings and such should still work with this new version.
Some of the stuff that’s new:
– Some new furniture and doodad models
– Amount of furniture placed in a room is much more consistent than before
– Each building selects a small set of furniture pieces and only uses those
– Sentries now only teleport furniture around when their red light is flashing
– Various other minor tweaks/bugfixes/clarifications
4 Responses
Aravind
Alright! Let me download it, I’ll leave a feedback later. Thanks
Ali
I played the game with hotline miami soundtracks and it was such a great experience.
Playing the game with this one specific track really put me in the mood: http://youtu.be/O0ILqWcd214
I beat building 5 and quit to leave some feedback before I forget them. The game is really fun. I must confess, I didn’t think that I will enjoy the game this much when I read your blog posts about it. There are some really good ideas and all of them are very well executed. First, I thought perma-death was not a good idea, then I saw that it’s what the game is about. And it’s not fake, the game really evolves, making the player want to play more…
I enjoyed activating sprint and running around, consuming all the furnitures but realized it’s not the most clever way to beat the levels
But I still went for it, since it’s more fun than just planning and waiting for robots to go away. I believe that you can “rush” players to the goal. (or award those who beat levels in shorter than some time)
I realized you’ve put a lot of thinking for designing levels. (I don’t know if they’re procedurally generated or not) But I liked how the levels vary, you can easily get the feeling that it’s getting harder to complete levels than previous ones. (When I encountered double walls, I threw my sprint away and get 2 wall destroyer ability instead.)
What I don’t like is the control scheme. I don’t know what else you can do about it but during my play session, I mis-hit wrong keys all the time. q,e,f,shift,space,left click… It should be a good idea to consume furniture with mouse left click, (since its the main interaction) and space / right click for ability. I believe you can also auto-cast abilities by hitting 1-2-3-4-5. (New abilities may override the oldest ability without you having to throw it by holding F key.)
I remember reading about furniture-eat effect on your blog. I don’t know if you are satisfied with that but I believe it can still be improved. Other than that, I’m pretty satisfied with all the graphics. I love how robots go crazy when they’re searching for you. (How about an upgrade to let us see their line of sight? Or is there an upgrade for it already?)
Final words: You are a great designer, I’m jealous
The game is awesome, I would definetly pay for it to play when it’s out. I will definetly support when it’s up for kickstarter. I’m also really curious about what you’ll be doing with the story.
Thanks for sharing the alpha. Take good care.
2DArray
Damn, Ali, thank so much for taking the time to write all that!
I’m fucking stoked to hear David’s music in this game…we’ve got some great ideas about how to make it change for each building, and also react to what’s currently happening. And good lord, the entire Hotline Miami soundtrack is just impossibly dope.
I thought about giving speed bonuses, but I want to allow players to take it slow without any extra penalty, so going fast is more of a personal metagame than a structured point-scoring goal.
I’m ludicrously pleased to hear that you couldn’t decide how much of the level design is procedural – the short answer is “everything.” I went to great lengths to avoid the “chunking” method of randomized content, where you hand-make a set of rooms and then randomly place those rooms into your map. These levels are generated tile-by-tile and piece-by-piece.
The control scheme is definitely a rough spot, but it’s way better if you can set up a gamepad. The 1-5 buttons will definitely be used in the final release, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I was happy with the eating effect, but now that someone’s mentioned it I’ll probably have to make some revisions. Hurr durr
Oh, and the lack of indication of the enemy’s line of sight is intentional – getting a feel for it and knowing when you’re safe is one of the skills the player learns.
Thanks again!
Ali
Great answers, I’m so convinced about rush thing being a personal achievement and lack of line of sight. You know, at this point most of the feedback you get will be trash anyway since you’ve put a lot of thinking to them already.
By the way, I have 2 monitor setup and I experienced that when the game is not on fullscreen, the game window positions itself right on the middle of both screens. (Half of the game goes on the left screen, other half goes on the right screen) You can drag the window wherever you want but it repositions after every level. No problem when you go fullscreen.