• @j0hnbane thanks for your offer of advice! I will pm you if you don't mind. Your youtube videos are nicely put together by the way.

    Your game is the Circle of Sages one right? Chucking fireball spells around in VR sounds like a lot of fun; will you be doing some more progress videos at some point?

    The use of Store-purchased assets is an interesting debate I think. I don't begrudge anybody using them tbh, hell I'm using a ton of them for all sorts of things currently. They are great for building foundations, as long as we are clever with them. Did you check out the Project Wight demo shown at Unite recently? - its nearly all Asset Store stuff!
  • Yep, Circle of Sages is me. =) The fireball is a legitimate one loaded in ORK. I'm off for 11 days now.. woooo. So yes, I'll post some more soon. I'll move any other discussions to messages so I don't hijack your thread. I'm sorry to throw it off track to begin with.
    j0hnbane
    youtube.com/j0hnbane
  • greetings fellow ORKers!

    It's been a while since I updated my progress. I haven't really been focused on this too much lately, but I've been trying to tighten up the 'flow' around battles. I've added some simple UI elements to cater more for touchscreen interaction, and have added some more spell types.





    It looks kinda similar to before to be honest, although I feel that I've made a lot of back-end improvements. In terms of things I'd like to do next, there's a few irritating bugs I need to fix, and I want to add in another key mechanic with spell-countering.

    I've also decided to completely move away from the open world concept I initially had. I actually got it performing pretty well on my test platform, but the file size is gigantic. I'm now going more for dungeon instances, so I'd like to put together a prototype for this.
  • some more screenshots, I've moved things into a more enclosed environment. It mostly works much better, but I've got some work to do to improve the camera placement during battles; sometimes the combatants can be obscured from view.

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  • @stuart
    I love your outside world art, where did you get it? I have been looking for something of this nature.
  • Hi @inmysights thanks for the appreciation. The terrain itself? I generated it myself using an asset called Map Magic, and then passed it through a low poly mesh generator. I have tried a number of options for terrain in the past but I enjoy working with Map magic, I find I can get realistic and game-usable terrains quite easily.

    For the trees I think I used an asset from Broken Vector.

    The biggest problem I had with what I was doing was that I'm going further down the 'mobile devices' route, and I was struggling with file sizes.
  • new progress video up. I've put in some additional placeholders for main menus etc, and added some more spells. I think my random battle chance value is a bit too high though right now!



  • You've got a fun design style going, love the hard edges on your character's mesh.

    Now feedback: You sorta need to work on pacing for...everything.

    The random battles are too frequent, you should cut that down to like 1/10th of that at least.

    Those spell animations take way too long. I'm a patient man, but that is extreme.

    In the battle results, you don't need to show exp and gold in separate consecutive windows, you could save time and show them simultaneously.

    Always be thinking about how the player would react to your game. If you were the one playing, would you really want to wait that long for a skill to execute or a battle to begin/end? Pacing is integral to playability.
  • Hi, thanks for taking the time to offer up some feedback.

    Yeah, as I alluded to in my post I have the random battle chance turned up very high in the video. I was testing my enemy and camera placement scripts around walls and forgot to reset it for the vid; I thought it was an interesting post nevertheless.

    The observation on spell speeds is an interesting one; I've recently made them a lot slower on purpose. This video doesn't really illustrate my battle mechanics too well tbh, but cast speed is highly scalable based on equipment, level, abilities and the rarity/complexity of the spell itself. The cast delay offers the opponent the chance to 'counter' with an opposing spell. So a weak enemy casting a basic spell can be countered and defeated with relative ease, but combat becomes increasingly more difficult and frenetic at higher levels.

    BTW, your avatar hints that you are making a low poly game also. I'd be interested in seeing it sometime!
  • edited April 2017
    My game is still a bit away from me releasing any screenshots or gameplay that I'd be comfortable sharing. I've been reading up on the downside of sharing unfinished content and didn't like the results it would have on my overall marketing strategy...but I'll certainly share someday!

    The addition of wait times like that certainly can add a level of strategy, but often at the cost of player engagement.

    Online games can add in this type of spell waiting element because you're typically playing within a party functioning together, and there are many things going on, so it's able to distract you from that waiting portion.

    Grid based strategy games like Final Fantasy tactics make up for this by giving you many characters to control while other characters are waiting to cast their spells.

    An important distinction you might want to consider is whether the addition of strategy will effectively enhance the player experience, and if not, what can you do to make up for it.

    A simple example of bringing back engagement during wait times might be giving the player the option to power up the strength of the spell by, perhaps, mashing a button, or...I see that spells are cast gesturally? Perhaps the player could gesture even more shapes during the length of the spell to give an additional attack bonus or to effectively block oncoming enemy attacks. That would make the battle feel more exciting to the player because they would have a sense of presence, like what they're doing at any moment is constantly affecting the outcome of the battle.
    Post edited by braytendo on
  • That's an interesting perspective. Thanks for taking the time to share it. Everything I have at the moment is very conceptual, so I might take some time to play around with engagement concepts and see how things fit. Your idea of some sort of 'channelling' spell gestures seems pretty cool, I'll give it a go!

    Before I do that though I need to spend time working on some of the more mundane aspects of the game. Syncing with Apple Game Center etc...
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