Rapid iteration of Free-Range Dragons at PAX
We’re a weird studio. When demoing a new game at PAX, most companies try to make the demo as good as they can before the show, then lock it down and live with whatever they’ve got until the show is finished. We, on the other hand, treated PAX Prime 2014 as a giant ongoing playtest, and iterated every evening on the demo/prototype of Free-Range Dragons. Each morning, we brought a new build of the game to PAX that was substantially different from the previous day’s build! 🙂
In case you’re curious to know more about this process, we’ve copied below the entirety of our Skype development log from that very intense time period — all 35 pages of it!
One thing to be aware of: Andrew Fray, one of the lead developers on the project, lives in the UK. That’s primarily how we were able to make this work: he did most of the iterating while the rest of us slept.
Skype Log, starting 8/27 (just before the start of PAX Prime):
[8/27/14, 7:03:31 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Built standalones with fewer, easier geese. Also the tutorial pacers were disappearing, fixed it so you can capture them.
[8/27/14, 7:04:10 PM] Brent K: Update fire sprite sheets in latest merge. also noticed the wolf still had crazy eye during his scared state that was fixed
[8/27/14, 7:05:20 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: They call him “Crazy-Eye Wolfie”
[8/27/14, 7:06:44 PM] Brent K: need a parody of crazy eye wolf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcDy8HEg1QY
[8/27/14, 7:06:59 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: It seems to grow slower as the player attacks; is that something you changed or something I just didn’t notice before.
[8/27/14, 7:07:17 PM] Brent K: unchanged aside from the ss
[8/27/14, 7:07:50 PM] Brent K: would like to speed up the fade out too if possible. not quite sure where thats set
[8/27/14, 7:08:58 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Now that I’ve played with it for like 2 minutes more it seems just as fast as before. Musta just been a time dilation bubble.
[8/27/14, 7:11:17 PM] djedery: Want to check out all Brent’s art changes; are they in the latest standalone?
[8/27/14, 7:11:31 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Hold on one sec while I put up another with the flames
[8/27/14, 7:11:40 PM] djedery: Muchas gracias, senor.
[8/27/14, 7:16:58 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Standalones are up
[8/27/14, 7:18:43 PM] Brent K: i also have that weird issue of dropbox date never changing. still thinks latest-prod-osx is from aug 21st but i think we may have done some work in the last week
[8/27/14, 7:21:07 PM] Brent K: terraforming in some way would be cool. whenever I’m in the key master room i have the urge to blow through the box
[8/27/14, 7:21:23 PM] djedery: Easy raptors seem completely ineffectual now Ryan. Maybe something in between where they used to be and where they are now?
[8/27/14, 7:21:55 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I do want to first test a new player against them. I am constantly amazed at how much I overestimate their skills.
[8/27/14, 7:22:10 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I’m putting up a web build now too so y’all can mess with the settings in your own tests.
[8/27/14, 7:22:27 PM] djedery: Is there someone around you at present that you can do a test on? If not, we can do usertesting.com
[8/27/14, 7:23:47 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I don’t think it needs that sort of immediacy; I am planning to meet up with folks later this evening.
[8/27/14, 7:24:31 PM] djedery: Another thing I was thinking is that maybe 10 loot is just a bit too low a threshold for the ‘hard’ mission, if we want it to be a reasonable amount of training for the high score mode. You said folks were flying through it (which in general seems good, but maybe they are flying too fast. It just takes a couple pieces of loot to hit the threshold)
[8/27/14, 7:25:10 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We previously decided 20 was too high, but things have changed since then. Maybe try 15?
[8/27/14, 7:25:50 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: (we could also reduce the value of the goose loot)
[8/27/14, 7:26:38 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: (really the values of all the loots need a balancing pass; the hard goose is way more than 30% harder than the easy goose)
[8/27/14, 7:28:28 PM] djedery: Yep, loot values haven’t been balanced in ages
[8/27/14, 7:28:39 PM] djedery: 15 seems reasonable btw
[8/27/14, 7:28:40 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Updated the web build too
[8/27/14, 7:29:21 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: 15 is in (the web build on dropbox)
[8/27/14, 7:29:43 PM] djedery: tweak tweak tweak tweak
[8/27/14, 7:30:38 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: If we find ourselves oscillating between “boring because too long” and “too short didn’t see it all”, we should consider that a signal to break it into two halves.
[8/27/14, 7:32:52 PM] djedery: we’ll keep an eye out for it
[8/27/14, 7:33:44 PM] djedery: Brent, the printed controller maps really are gorgeous. Feels like something you’d see at EA’s E3 booth 🙂
[8/27/14, 7:33:58 PM] djedery: (Helps that I had some glossy premium paper lying around)
[8/27/14, 7:36:34 PM] djedery: Ryan, is the web build available online, so we can do one usertesting test? I’d like to do it, given the number of changes that have been made in the past 48 hours.
[8/27/14, 7:37:46 PM] Brent K: Oh nice glad you had some decent paper for em!
[8/27/14, 7:38:17 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: It is, but it doesn’t have the latest config, one sec
[8/27/14, 7:39:41 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: *URL*
[8/27/14, 7:40:03 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Gonna head off to dinner now; text if shizz is broken.
[8/27/14, 7:40:20 PM] djedery: bon apetite
[8/27/14, 7:56:20 PM] djedery: Ordering the test now.
[8/27/14, 11:21:25 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Test results in?
[8/27/14, 11:24:36 PM] djedery: Yep! Watching and annotating now. This is with the latest nerfs to the goose, right?
[8/27/14, 11:25:00 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Believe so
[8/27/14, 11:25:32 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Thoughts on https://trello.com/for-pax-say-goodbye-to-player-after-submitting-high-score-in-endless-mode ?
Basically, right now dying == candidate for submitting high score. But players might want to continue after dying their first time.
[8/27/14, 11:26:07 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Maybe it should just be a debug option for us.
[8/27/14, 11:26:12 PM] djedery: Well, then it’s a good thing you nerfed them as much as you did! he had a few good battles with them and still managed to die once
[8/27/14, 11:27:58 PM] djedery: Oh, wait, didn’t you say you increased the loot on the hard mission to 15?
[8/27/14, 11:28:11 PM] djedery: Because in this video it’s 10. Which makes me wonder if they geese are not modified either.
[8/27/14, 11:31:39 PM] djedery: Just checked for myself. seems like the goose nerf made it in, but not the lock size change.
[8/27/14, 11:31:44 PM] djedery: not a big deal
[8/27/14, 11:36:46 PM] djedery: Woah, playtest turned up a nasty bug. After he unlocks high score mode and plays it and dies in it, he respawns in the tree as he should, but high score mode has disappeared so he is forced to unlock it again
[8/27/14, 11:36:58 PM] djedery: Ryan, that’s worth fixing as soon as you have the opportunity
[8/27/14, 11:38:02 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I already fixed it!
[8/27/14, 11:38:10 PM] djedery: nice 🙂
[8/27/14, 11:38:16 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Just did that tonight; that’s the reason I am bringing up that card just now.
[8/27/14, 11:38:37 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: https://trello.com/for-pax-say-goodbye-to-player-after-submitting-high-score-in-endless-mode
[8/27/14, 11:38:58 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: So currently the PAX plan is, after they die, to give them the “stop playing now” screen. Unless I’m misreading it
[8/27/14, 11:39:25 PM] djedery: Yeah, I think people are going to want to retry several times. I don’t think we need a goodbye screen. How about we just keep an eye on how long people are playing and if someone pops a squat for too long, we politely ask them to leave?
[8/27/14, 11:39:42 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: LOL at “pops a squat”
[8/27/14, 11:39:45 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I’m fine with this plan
[8/27/14, 11:39:56 PM] djedery: Alternatively, we could program the goodbye screen to kick in after 3 or 4 attempts at the high score mode
[8/27/14, 11:39:57 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I agree that folks are leaning towards replays.
[8/27/14, 11:40:09 PM] djedery: (counter is wiped if we press R or T)
[8/27/14, 11:40:47 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Also makes sense. I think ideally, we want to kick someone off before they feel like they’ve run out the content. That’s why it’s nice for it to be inbuilt.
[8/27/14, 11:41:22 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Feels more a part of the experience and less “awkwardly getting rid of you”
[8/27/14, 11:41:55 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: But I can see it going the other way, too.
[8/27/14, 11:41:59 PM] djedery: Yep. So what do you think: start with giving them 3 tries, then adjust friday night if that seemed like too little or too much?
[8/27/14, 11:42:12 PM] djedery: (3 tries at high score mode)
[8/27/14, 11:42:32 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Seems reasonable to me
[8/27/14, 11:42:41 PM] Daniel Cook: I like it.
[8/27/14, 11:46:33 PM] djedery: Oh cool, this playtester figured out that he could farm the easy mission for items to then use in the high score mode.
[8/27/14, 11:49:28 PM] djedery: Voluntarily chooses to play beyond the required time; always a nice thing to see. 🙂
[8/27/14, 11:52:05 PM] djedery: …and then he gets smashed by a hard goose!
[8/27/14, 11:53:34 PM] djedery: I feel like we might want to have one less Hare in high score mode (I think Andrew already removed one from the mission)
[8/28/14, 12:10:14 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I’m glad that the fixes we’re doing seem relatively small-impact. It means that we’re through many of the harder challenges. Or, more realistically, we’re ignoring them intentionally or unintentionally.
[8/28/14, 12:14:50 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: For me, the big-picture question is still, what’s the player doing in this game? My current best plan, that seems to resonate well with the folks I’ve told it to, is that it’s about adventuring to collect bigger, better, and rarer dragons. Your repeated acts of dragon taming are a small-scale allegory of the taming of the outback that your civilization represents.
[8/28/14, 12:23:07 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Gonna go to bed to be ready for tomorrow’s festivities
[8/28/14, 6:03:56 AM] Andrew Fray: let my brother play. he enjoyed it, but that might not be representative. most notable thing was that he used bombs heavily, and got constant attention from geese. he was killed once by them, but then was able to unlock some loot and the goose and took down a few himself. afterwards, he said he had no idea the bombs were causing aggro. not sure what if anything we can do about that in the time left.
[8/28/14, 6:04:28 AM] Andrew Fray: he was enjoying the combat and moving around the world well.
[8/28/14, 11:32:07 AM] Andrew Fray: anything pressing I could look at tonight?
[8/28/14, 11:32:41 AM] Andrew Fray: I thought I’d make the goose chase more robust. at the moment it’s a bit of a lottery when they stop chasing.
[8/28/14, 12:48:59 PM] Andrew Fray: actually on testing, dumping the goose seems pretty reliable. ignore me!
[8/28/14, 1:06:50 PM] Andrew Fray: new build, no major newness:
– fixed lots of leaderboard text entry bugs, particularly on submitting the 2nd+ score of the session
– 15 to complete hub mission
– reduced sploders in endless mission again
[8/28/14, 1:06:59 PM] Andrew Fray: afk, will check in later.
[8/28/14, 1:15:19 PM] Brent K: Andrew, still there? If you see this, is there a way to spread out the tiles in a background layer in the game world?
[8/28/14, 1:15:48 PM] Brent K: Instead of baking in empty space in a sprite
[8/28/14, 3:13:51 PM] Andrew Fray: doesn’t look like there’s a number to tweak no,
[8/28/14, 3:14:05 PM] Andrew Fray: but it does look like empty space is trimmed out of texture memory, so you’re
[8/28/14, 3:14:24 PM] Andrew Fray: safe to bake the space into the bg sprites without wasting texture memory.
[8/28/14, 3:14:34 PM] Brent K: oh nice!
[8/28/14, 3:15:09 PM] Andrew Fray: check out the clouds in art/backgroudns/backgroundsprites data/atlas0.png – flush to the edge
[8/28/14, 3:16:53 PM] Andrew Fray: hitting the sack if there’s nothing vital to work on. tomorrow I’ll play with safe things like the mount breathing fire, and flashing the house marker when you have loot. unless I wake up to anything more vital.
[8/28/14, 3:42:51 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Thanks, Andrew!
[8/28/14, 3:43:17 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Brent, I was wondering whether it would be possible to have the female character be the default character in our PAX build.
[8/28/14, 3:44:21 PM] Brent K: it is a good time in history to make such a swap
[8/28/14, 4:21:07 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Glad we’re on the same page on this. 🙂
[8/28/14, 5:20:04 PM] Brent K: Please use latest to make a new build!
[8/28/14, 5:47:58 PM] Brent K: Actually before making a build, could one of you guys take a look at this? https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/frdinput.png
Might be an atlas conflict of some sort. The input field is using a tree asset or something
[8/28/14, 6:40:03 PM] Daniel Cook: Cowdragongirls forever. Good idea.
[8/28/14, 7:14:07 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Taking a look
[8/28/14, 7:35:33 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Brent, I fixed it by either opening the Basic sprite collection and hitting Commit, or by going into the 2D Toolkit menu and selecting “rebuild index”, not sure which of the two did it.
[8/28/14, 7:40:26 PM] Brent K: excellent thanks!
[8/28/14, 7:47:42 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Deployed to standalones and web player with the latest.
– Female character!
– Hare bombs damage halved.
– Goose damage doubled. This means hares and geese do the same damage now.
– Spider minions’ damage thirded.
– Spider attacks damage halved; now it’s the same as the minions.
– Foliage texture changes
– Slightly fewer hares in high score mode.
– Bug fixes for high score menu.
– Dying in endless doesn’t reset hub
[8/28/14, 7:49:49 PM] Brent K: oh damn would you take my latest stuff before we have tomorrows build? just pushed a couple small tweaks. hare’s scared face had misaligned eyes and added another cloud layer to the background that gives a little bit better sense of movement when you’re flying in open skies
[8/28/14, 7:50:05 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Yeah I’m gonna grab dinner but I plan to do a bit more shit tonight
[8/28/14, 7:50:10 PM] Brent K: sweet
[8/28/14, 11:39:36 PM] djedery: hola!
[8/28/14, 11:40:28 PM] djedery: Last message I see about builds is from 7:47pm. Is there another build about to hit dropbox or canI go ahead and check out the current one?
[8/28/14, 11:41:06 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I have some tweaks about to land, a few minutes
[8/28/14, 11:44:34 PM] djedery: cool
[8/28/14, 11:44:36 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Playtest notes:
– Tutorial dragons seem like they don’t die, should increase the amount of time they’re stunned after being killed. (done)
– Key dragon disappears after being hit (done)
– Goose gets into a kind of cycle where he pursues the player, the player attacks to get the goose off his back, which aggroes the goose more, etc.
– Temporarily reducing the goose’s health so that this cycle ends with the goose’s death sooner.
– While watching the playtester I thought of a better way to make the tutorials teach the lessons of the game without teaching useless/wrong stuff. Instead of locking the portal until a certain amount of loot is delivered, lock it until the player earns a particular item, which they of course get by delivering loot (and force it so they get that particular item first if any). That way we teach the loot->item loop in addition to the loot->house loop.
– Offscreen fireballs feel bad/random/cheap. Could probably address in a few ways: slow them down, make the guys not throw them from offscreen.
– Hare direct attacks really strong (done)
– Player expected monsters that lose aggro to return home
– Doesn’t like enemies hanging out by the house; we do want them to be a little less close for sure.
– Did not expect spider babies to blow up
– Charge icons are too small, and not where he’s looking (he’s looking at monsters), so he has trouble reading them
[8/28/14, 11:45:06 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I haven’t been able to reproduce the freeze after startup, by the way, it’s only happened to me once on this machine today.
[8/28/14, 11:48:58 PM] djedery: > Temporarily reducing the goose’s health so that this cycle ends
[8/28/14, 11:50:01 PM] djedery: What were you thinking the longer term change would be?
[8/28/14, 11:51:37 PM] djedery: Btw, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to simply make the aggro time on the goose much shorter? Making the health low will reinforce the notion that you can/should just attack any dragon that’s bothering you, when for some dragons, stealth/speed is supposed to be the correct option.
[8/28/14, 11:52:28 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I thought we’d already done that, but you’re right, it can be reduced more, that’s better.
[8/28/14, 11:53:00 PM] djedery: (y)
[8/28/14, 11:53:28 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: There is an argument to be made that having more, weaker, enemies, is a fun direction to go.
[8/28/14, 11:56:54 PM] djedery: @Andrew, would be good if you fixed the problem with the decorative ribbon around trees being white instead of green. It’s a very common bug – I see it all the time.
[8/28/14, 11:57:10 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I carded that by the way: https://trello.com/white-borders-on-tree-tops
[8/28/14, 11:57:18 PM] djedery: Gracias!
[8/28/14, 11:57:24 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We need to be better about carding shit that we have to do; my memory is hella weak in this hour.
[8/28/14, 11:58:01 PM] djedery: Also (and this may already have been carded or fixed by Ryan), today I discovered that autofocus on the leaderboard text entry field was broken, so it was impossible to enter a name into the highscore list with keyboard only.
[8/28/14, 11:58:20 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I believe Andrew fixed something related to that, will verify
[8/28/14, 11:58:40 PM] djedery: Good thing to address before tomorrow morning if hasn’t already, so we can avoid putting mice in people’s hands, since the latter can mess up the game.
[8/28/14, 11:58:55 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Yeah seems to be fixed.
[8/28/14, 11:59:03 PM] djedery: (sun)
[8/28/14, 11:59:32 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: So the biggest missing thing is that we actually don’t have a demo-over screen yet.
[8/28/14, 11:59:51 PM] Brent K: Fullscreen bitmap?
[8/29/14, 12:00:29 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Sure, that would be great. Also there needs to be codezz for it
[8/29/14, 12:00:30 AM] Brent K: like our end of demo screen we had for RNT at pax?
[8/29/14, 12:00:54 AM] Brent K: if we got time to put it in, i got time to make it
[8/29/14, 12:00:59 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Same shape/pattern as the loading screen would work great.
[8/29/14, 12:01:19 AM] Brent K: cool. anything sweet we wanna say on it about the future of the game?
[8/29/14, 12:07:47 AM] djedery: “We hope you enjoyed playing the Free-Range Dragons! In the near future, we’ll be adding more attacks and powerups, more dragons that you can tame and ride, and lassoing! If you want to keep up to date on development, just follow us on Twitter or Facebook @spryfox!”
[8/29/14, 12:08:50 AM] Brent K: perfect, thanks!
[8/29/14, 12:09:37 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Builds up, mostly tweaks changed from last time, and incorporating Brent’s cloud atlas.
[8/29/14, 12:10:00 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Oh shit actually no, that’s not in there, what have I done
[8/29/14, 12:10:47 AM] djedery: Because I live on the east side and because of rush hour traffic, I need to leave my house by 7:45am to get to the convention center on time tomorrow. So I need to get my ass to sleep in a few mins.
[8/29/14, 12:11:02 AM] djedery: So I shall talk to you dudes later.
[8/29/14, 12:11:09 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Salutations sir
[8/29/14, 12:11:29 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Anyway the build has gameplay changes; art is going in now
[8/29/14, 12:11:32 AM] Brent K: Gnight! See you in a couple
[8/29/14, 12:20:00 AM] Andrew Fray: On 29/08/2014, at 07:56, djedery wrote:
> @Andrew, would be good if you fixed the problem with the decorative ribbon around trees being white instead of green. It’s a very common bug – I see it all the time.
(y)
[8/29/14, 12:20:33 AM] Andrew Fray: did we decide on where the end-demo screen should appear? after X replays of the endless mision?
[8/29/14, 12:23:13 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Could I convince you to implement the end-demo screen, good sir? I would like to go to sleep soon.
[8/29/14, 12:23:45 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I think, yeah, we settled at “Goodbye screen kicks in after 3 attempts at the high score mode.
(counter is wiped if we press R or T)”
[8/29/14, 12:24:14 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I think an attempt counts as ending it by either going to the house or dying.
[8/29/14, 12:24:52 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: There’s actually not a lot of reason to return to the house, I’ve noticed, kinda puts aside the push-your-luck element, but that’s fine for the demo.
[8/29/14, 12:30:41 AM] Andrew Fray: yep. I’ll sort it.
[8/29/14, 12:33:00 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: You’re the best, sir
[8/29/14, 12:33:13 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: You can tell how grateful I am by how much I am sir-ing you
[8/29/14, 12:33:21 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: It’s really hard to code at PAX
[8/29/14, 12:34:21 AM] Andrew Fray: heh yeah. can imagine.
[8/29/14, 12:44:28 AM] Brent K: low low prio, but if you also have a minute, mind checking out why the player’s arms aren’t appearing in front (z) of the other body parts? i set the sorting order # high, shows up proper in playerrig player, but appears behind the body in the game
[8/29/14, 12:44:45 AM] Andrew Fray: yep
[8/29/14, 12:44:49 AM] Brent K: cheers!
[8/29/14, 12:58:32 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: This is the scenario we’re replicating quite exactly, by the way: http://i.imgur.com/ysJOLLT.gif
[8/29/14, 12:59:56 AM] Andrew Fray: ha!
[8/29/14, 1:15:06 AM] Brent K: Pushed end demo screen https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/8padn5cgovu8yeh/FRD_Pax_End-Demo.jpg in its own sprite colection
[8/29/14, 1:17:11 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I want that skull mask thing
[8/29/14, 1:17:32 AM] Brent K: we totally need some bandito options
[8/29/14, 1:17:37 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: BTW I am loving the random trees emerging from the foliage
[8/29/14, 1:18:11 AM] Brent K: sweet! was playing around with those decos and some surface ones. the surface foliage ones were looking funky i never committed anything yet
[8/29/14, 1:44:19 AM] Brent K: another quick one if time permits. not super high value but decent polish https://trello.com/swap-ui-icons-for-loot-weight
[8/29/14, 3:58:55 AM] Andrew Fray: since the tutorial guard uses the same attack as the goose, I can now rush through the attack tutorial without hitting anyone.
[8/29/14, 3:59:22 AM] Andrew Fray: I don’t think this is an issue for PAX, as people’s impulses are to attack the monsters rather than try to avoid them.
[8/29/14, 4:00:35 AM] Brent K: yeah you can actually get through the whole tutorial without attacking anyone
[8/29/14, 4:34:01 AM] Andrew Fray: On 29/08/2014, at 08:44, Brent K wrote:
> low low prio, but if you also have a minute, mind checking out why the player’s arms aren’t appearing in front (z) of the other body parts? i set the sorting order # high, shows up proper in playerrig player, but appears behind the body in the game
turned out you had not hit apply on the player prefab in the demo scene to commit your layer changes. thanks unity!
[8/29/14, 4:34:34 AM] Brent K: geez!
[8/29/14, 4:35:14 AM] Brent K: apply this, save that, commit those, do nothing to these!
[8/29/14, 4:37:21 AM] Andrew Fray: don’t forget how unfriendly git is too 🙂
[8/29/14, 4:39:11 AM] Andrew Fray: it took ages for the artists on sonic dash to get used to unity (and git). unity’s new collaborative tools in 5.X will be greatly appreciated.
[8/29/14, 5:02:31 AM] Brent K: i bet!
[8/29/14, 5:03:17 AM] Brent K: just updated all the sound effects for fun. have a listen and see what you think!
[8/29/14, 7:28:09 AM] djedery: Guys, there is a decent chance we will not have reliable internet at PAX, so if there’s a new build in the works we really need it to materialize asap so we can download it outside the convention center and get it onto all the machines via flash drive if need be.
[8/29/14, 7:28:52 AM] djedery: I’m jumping into the car now to drive to center. TTYL
[8/29/14, 7:28:53 AM] Andrew Fray: I’m in the middle of two bugs. define ASAP?
[8/29/14, 7:29:05 AM] djedery: ASAP is probably 30 minutes at most?
[8/29/14, 7:29:10 AM] Andrew Fray: 30 min. got it.
[8/29/14, 7:29:12 AM] djedery: TY
[8/29/14, 7:29:32 AM] djedery: Let the convention insanity begin. 🙂
[8/29/14, 7:56:12 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I’m gonna be around for another 10-15 minutes
[8/29/14, 7:56:18 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Can I chip in during that time?
[8/29/14, 7:56:32 AM] Andrew Fray: new builds already uploading
[8/29/14, 7:57:50 AM] Andrew Fray: new standalone builds. in usual place, PLUS in dropbox/runner/pax demos, so I can continue development but people aren’t exposed to new builds unless blessed.
– tutorial dialog on taming monster for 1st time
– new hud score sprites, and hud elements anchored properly to corners
– fixed player arms behind back
– after three attempts at endless mode, show full-screen THANKS FOR PLAYING graphic
[8/29/14, 7:58:06 AM] Andrew Fray: once that graphic is up, you need to hit R to restart.
[8/29/14, 7:59:01 AM] Andrew Fray: known issue: the player is mid-attack when you hit R to restart from a thanks-for-playing screen. workaround: hit X on the pad, then R after the attack has finished.
[8/29/14, 8:00:21 AM] Andrew Fray: I’ve also seen the UI and hud (including portal buttons) spontaneously disappear several times today. I put in a workaround and haven’t seen it since, but never had a reliable repro. something to do with entering scores on the leaderboard? the game needs restarting if that happens.
[8/29/14, 8:01:14 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Thanks man, will look out for
[8/29/14, 8:03:10 AM] Andrew Fray: will be working for a bit longer.
[8/29/14, 8:05:16 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Good idea on the directories, btw
[8/29/14, 8:05:45 AM] Andrew Fray: last thing we want is for me to put up a duff build and it accidentally sync’s to everyone’s machine 🙂
[8/29/14, 8:11:49 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Packing up and GTFO
[8/29/14, 8:30:11 AM] Andrew Fray: remember you can wipe leaderboards with ` -> wipe_leaderboard -> RET -> `
[8/29/14, 8:30:18 AM] Andrew Fray: `=tilde key
[8/29/14, 9:28:40 AM] Andrew Fray: GOOD LUCK KNOCK ‘EM DEAD
[8/29/14, 10:03:41 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Oh that is good, thanks
[8/29/14, 10:04:31 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Only been press so far, people pretty much getting their asses beat
[8/29/14, 10:13:30 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: People really want I fly up and out, forever
[8/29/14, 10:13:46 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Press x to continue wants a backdrop, people don’t see it
[8/29/14, 10:19:04 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Very bimodal; some folks just pick it up and rock it
[8/29/14, 10:21:14 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Love for the art, brent
[8/29/14, 10:39:21 AM] Brent K: 🙂
[8/29/14, 10:42:13 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Pretty much every one is stopping at first high score display, would make sense to move the demo end screen to then
[8/29/14, 10:54:22 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Subtle point: you can be hurt by bombs while dashing, but that is not well signaled (both dashes and bombs are fire). Probably safe to make the player invulnerable to bomb damage in a dash, unless we think of something better.
[8/29/14, 10:58:25 AM] Andrew Fray: On 29/08/2014, at 18:13, Ryan Duane Williams wrote:
> Press x to continue wants a backdrop, people don’t see it
which press X is this?
[8/29/14, 11:05:08 AM] Andrew Fray: new sounds make me chuckle, brent
[8/29/14, 11:05:16 AM] Andrew Fray: “KER-CHING”
[8/29/14, 11:08:13 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: The press start doalg
[8/29/14, 11:08:17 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Dialog
[8/29/14, 11:10:18 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bug: after a while, x became attack and other input fuckery. Restarting process foxed
[8/29/14, 11:10:21 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Fixed
[8/29/14, 11:10:46 AM] Andrew Fray: press X has a backdrop – not sure I follow.
[8/29/14, 11:19:34 AM] Andrew Fray: you’ve fixed the input bug? I don’t see a commit. guessing no wifi?
[8/29/14, 11:22:03 AM] Andrew Fray: it’s only partly narcissism, but if you see any uk press feel free to push the “made in the uk” angle. ok, mostly narcissism.
[8/29/14, 11:24:48 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: It’s just not obvious that the press x screen is up, minor though.
[8/29/14, 11:25:01 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: No wifi, amazed 3G works
[8/29/14, 11:25:17 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: And we lost mains power for half an hour
[8/29/14, 11:25:59 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: An App Store manager came by and wanted to see the ipad build
[8/29/14, 11:31:10 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: We could do a better job introing the different monster behaviors, it feels a little bad to players to have to find out the hard way that the hares throw bombs
[8/29/14, 12:20:45 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Ray is standing behind the table with his rave gloves.
[8/29/14, 12:21:16 PM] Andrew Fray: o/
[8/29/14, 12:21:25 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Exactly
[8/29/14, 12:21:31 PM] Andrew Fray: to double-check – did you fix the input-swizzle bug or should I be looking at it?
[8/29/14, 12:21:56 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bug: sometimes blue ire balls don’t get cleaned up and just sit onscreen forever inert
[8/29/14, 12:24:51 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: The input swizzle bug doesn’t seem to have recurred, probably something we can deal with later, want to use a different input library
[8/29/14, 12:35:22 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bug: can move during end of mission screen and sometimes storage.
[8/29/14, 12:40:59 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bug: can’t submit high score with controller
[8/29/14, 12:44:56 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Have to explain carrying only one item all the time
[8/29/14, 1:02:42 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Ran into input mixup bug again
[8/29/14, 1:24:01 PM] Andrew Fray: new build, not promoted to pax folder yet:
– fixed attack on reload
– fixed monsters spawning on top of each other (think fixed pacers stealing geese loot too?)
– fixed white tree fringes
– press X to submit leaderboard name
[8/29/14, 1:26:37 PM] Andrew Fray: ah! input swizzle happens if you hit M. if you enter a name into the leaderboard with M, you get swizzled.
[8/29/14, 1:26:44 PM] Andrew Fray: hit M again to swizzle it back
[8/29/14, 1:26:54 PM] Andrew Fray: I’m doing a longterm fix
[8/29/14, 1:40:17 PM] Andrew Fray: afk
[8/29/14, 2:09:42 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Dope Andrew, that is amazing
[8/29/14, 2:15:48 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: The input bug was me, sorry yall
[8/29/14, 2:39:41 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Should have x to continue in really end mission dialog
[8/29/14, 3:13:58 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Player lost his trail? On this machine at least
[8/29/14, 3:15:42 PM] Ryan Duane Williams:
[8/29/14, 5:10:14 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Very common to overshoot portal at end of tut1 and fall out, maybe should seal that off, I think Jayne they think the small gap in the ice is the “tunnel”
[8/29/14, 5:20:03 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We might be better served by tutorial text that’s locked to the screen. If it moves relative to the screen it gets blurry and unreadable until they stop moving
[8/29/14, 5:20:41 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bug: player got shoved into the ice in tut2
[8/29/14, 5:25:05 PM] Brent K: The prospector style tut messages that locks on screen would be sweet
[8/29/14, 5:45:59 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bug: sometimes the player doesn’t fall even when hands off the controller
[8/29/14, 6:16:51 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bug: sometimes you teleport after entering tut3
[8/29/14, 7:48:54 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Should just make all debug keys require Carl because people are hitting them when entering their names
[8/29/14, 7:49:02 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Ctrl, iphone
[8/29/14, 8:08:10 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Task: key combo that restarts the entire application
[8/29/14, 9:42:00 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Task: 1.5x dash knockback, 2x fireball knockback
[8/29/14, 9:42:21 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bug: getting killed loses your goose mount
[8/29/14, 10:17:45 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Sorry for pooping random thoughts in the channel; gonna organize these into tasks, and prioritize them
[8/29/14, 10:53:54 PM] Daniel Cook: I’m puttting these into tasks in Trello and organizing.
[8/29/14, 10:54:38 PM] Daniel Cook: Whatever we can get by tomorrow or Sunday, we will run against the PAX hordes. We are in rapid playtest and experiment mode.
[8/29/14, 10:54:44 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: All debug keys, I believe, now require Carl, so that’s done.
[8/29/14, 10:55:14 PM] Daniel Cook: I’m putting these in Doing for the moment. Will sort and give a summary once I’m done typing.
[8/29/14, 10:55:23 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Thanks, man
[8/29/14, 11:06:07 PM] Daniel Cook: Thoughts on the simple level progression. Tweaks very welcome
https://trello.com/single-enemy-missions-separate-build
[8/29/14, 11:07:56 PM] djedery: Looks good to me Danc. I just added “High score mode unlocks at the same time as Mission #5” (i.e. after they get first mount)
[8/29/14, 11:09:00 PM] djedery: Sorry if I missed a card or discussion on this but I don’t see it: we discussed during dinner that we would elminate parts 1 and 3 of the tutorial (that’s the starting part, and the part with the golden key)
[8/29/14, 11:09:20 PM] Daniel Cook: Added all the tasks to Doing from playtesting today:
– Restart game from keyboard:
https://trello.com/ability-to-restart-the-game-from-a-keyboard-shortcut
– Highlight Bank Offscreen indicator
https://trello.com/highlight-bank
– Tutorial updates
https://trello.com/tutorial-updates
– More knockback on player attacks
https://trello.com/more-knock-back-on-fireball-and-dash
– Goose awarded earlier and doesn’t go away
https://trello.com/award-goose-earlier
– Zoom out camera 20%
https://trello.com/zoom-out-camera-20-seperate-build
[8/29/14, 11:12:54 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We didn’t discuss at dinner the issue of not carrying multiple items. At first I didn’t see the value in carrying a buncha shit all at once, but if we can solve the interface issues, it could wind up being an interesting push-your-luck mechanic, where you can stay out and get more things but you risk a single monster stealing them all back.
[8/29/14, 11:14:38 PM] Daniel Cook: I’d be super willing to try the hold multiple objects at once if we can fit it in. The single enemy missions are higher priority as an experiment.
[8/29/14, 11:14:47 PM] Daniel Cook: I’ll add a task.
[8/29/14, 11:15:04 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Yeah, let’s save multiple items for tomorrow; seems lower priority. I just wanted to start discussion of what that would look like.
[8/29/14, 11:15:40 PM] djedery: The more items you carry the slower you get; everyone I spoke to seemed to expect a tradeoff of that sort (if there were to be any tradeoff, which is not a given)
[8/29/14, 11:15:54 PM] Andrew Fray: if we’re shoving all the items in Doing(!), please remember to assign yourself to cards so people don’t dupe work.
[8/29/14, 11:16:02 PM] Daniel Cook: Something like this? https://trello.com/hold-multiple-objects
[8/29/14, 11:16:21 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Hm, in the past we’ve felt that slowing the player sucks regardless of utility.
[8/29/14, 11:16:26 PM] djedery: true
[8/29/14, 11:16:38 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I think the issues are more around “what happens when you throw 10 items, where do they go”
[8/29/14, 11:16:47 PM] Daniel Cook: I figure, we keep it simple for now. Mostly just eliminating a suck rather than introducing any real tradeoffs.
[8/29/14, 11:16:48 PM] Andrew Fray: they already slow when carrying monsters, if anyone’s noticed.
[8/29/14, 11:16:56 PM] Daniel Cook: People do notice that.
[8/29/14, 11:16:58 PM] djedery: nobody noticed
[8/29/14, 11:17:02 PM] Andrew Fray: lol
[8/29/14, 11:17:04 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Hm really? None of mine did
[8/29/14, 11:17:05 PM] djedery: hah!
[8/29/14, 11:17:14 PM] Daniel Cook: I had about 3 folks comment on it.
[8/29/14, 11:17:20 PM] djedery: yeah, i ddin’t hear a single comment about it. is it possible you heard it from desginers danc?
[8/29/14, 11:17:20 PM] Daniel Cook: Didn’t seem good or bad.
[8/29/14, 11:18:20 PM] Daniel Cook: Could be. Hmm…no, the first two were random people. 3rd one I’m fuzzy on.
[8/29/14, 11:18:42 PM] Daniel Cook: My pax memories “There was a random guy that played our game.” 🙂
[8/29/14, 11:19:37 PM] djedery: Not sure if anyone spelled it out explicitly for Andrew: some of the ideas we discussed in person are wild-ass experiments we’d like to try (potentially for just short period of time, if they seem to be bad experiments) at PAX. Like this one: https://trello.com/zoom-out-camera-20-seperate-build
[8/29/14, 11:20:08 PM] djedery: So the idea would be: fix all the bugs, make the changes to the tutorial, then once all that is done, create separate builds for each of these nutty experiments
[8/29/14, 11:20:14 PM] Daniel Cook: We have a stream of people going by. If we have multiple builds, we can try them out relatively quickly.
[8/29/14, 11:20:32 PM] djedery: Yep. Trying to maximize what we can learn from this experiment.
[8/29/14, 11:21:55 PM] Andrew Fray: awesome, just make sure they’re tagged “separate build” or seomthing
[8/29/14, 11:23:27 PM] Andrew Fray: this award-goose-on-exit https://trello.com/ seems to depend on the separate mission card; true? or would you like goose-on-exit either way?
[8/29/14, 11:23:52 PM] Andrew Fray: separate missions card: https://trello.com/single-enemy-missions-separate-build
[8/29/14, 11:24:17 PM] Daniel Cook: I’ll merge those and split out the persistence bit.
[8/29/14, 11:24:26 PM] Andrew Fray: just what I was going to suggest
[8/29/14, 11:25:52 PM] Daniel Cook: https://trello.com/persist-goose-and-items
Something like that.
[8/29/14, 11:26:49 PM] djedery: @Andrew – we’re doing booth setup at 9:30am PST tomorrow. Assume that the latest we (i.e Ryan) can get a build from you without too much craziness is 9am PST.
[8/29/14, 11:26:58 PM] Andrew Fray: (y)
[8/29/14, 11:28:26 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Yeah, I don’t think we spelled it out for Andrew. Let me take a stab:
The game is doing well. We have a mostly-full booth, folks are waiting in line on occasion to play the game, people almost always say they enjoyed playing it, play for about 10-20 minutes each, and we had some competition for the leaderboard. We’d like to hear more people say they *love* it, though. We are kinda inclined to respond to this by honing in on what are the great parts of the game; we think this is movement in general, and good chasing in particular, but I don’t think we’re fully confident in our judgement of this. But there are a bunch of ideas for experiments that might either illuminate things, or prove to be useful on their own.
[8/29/14, 11:30:20 PM] djedery: Yeah, like the zoom thing. Anyone who comments on the zoom level says they wish it was more zoomed out. We’ve tried that in the past and decided it feels bad but fuck it, maybe we’ve just been playing this for too long and it’s easy to test. So an experiment build that is 20% more zoomed out is something we can run for a few hours and see how people like it.
[8/29/14, 11:32:25 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Geese (and all others) still kicking people’s asses, but if we explain to them how they work, they have much better success, so maybe it’s good to try and introduce each dragon without distractors in a more tutorial-type environment.
[8/29/14, 11:35:13 PM] Daniel Cook: We don’t have a ton of text listed for the current single enemy missions. Mostly it is trial by fire still, but without as much noise around.
We could put some text on the ground next to the bank for each level.
Or a dialog…but that is likely to be skipped. I figured with the text on the ground and single enemy people might stop to read it, especially if they fail.
[8/29/14, 11:40:56 PM] djedery: Danc, are you thinking something like this?
[8/29/14, 11:40:57 PM] djedery: Tutorial-style text immediately below home base in each mission explains the goal of the mission (i.e. “Bring 2 loot to home base to unlock next mission”)
[8/29/14, 11:41:26 PM] djedery: (i just added that to https://trello.com/single-enemy-missions-separate-build – feel free to change it if I misinterpreted)
[8/29/14, 11:42:40 PM] Daniel Cook: That works!
[8/29/14, 11:46:03 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Tried the 5 minute thing for restarting the process, it failed hard, I’m giving up after like 20 minutes here. https://trello.com/ability-to-restart-the-game-from-a-keyboard-shortcut
[8/29/14, 11:48:37 PM] djedery: all good. hopefully not much need to restart if we fix all the nastiest bugs
[8/29/14, 11:50:13 PM] Daniel Cook: Archiving. (that’s as close as we’ve got to ‘not doing’)
[8/29/14, 11:51:29 PM] Andrew Fray: I only see one “bug” in the Doing list – fireballs sticking around.
[8/29/14, 11:53:01 PM] Daniel Cook: Some of the others may be fixed. The shortcut keys triggering in Highscores was a couple.
[8/29/14, 11:54:30 PM] Andrew Fray: which shortcut key? M to swizzle controls?
[8/29/14, 11:54:43 PM] Andrew Fray: yes that’s fixed in latest but not in a build yet.
[8/29/14, 11:54:51 PM] djedery: Inability to make it past the “end of demo” screen was another, though we decide over dinner to simply eliminate the end of demo screen, so that bug will be irrelevant.
[8/29/14, 11:55:25 PM] djedery: the shortcut key that makes your HP and attack icons disappear was also being triggered by high score entries
[8/29/14, 11:55:38 PM] Andrew Fray: ah! let me find that.
[8/29/14, 11:56:07 PM] Daniel Cook: We don’t have a bug for removing the end of demo screen. Is that done? If not, I’ll add a task.
[8/29/14, 11:56:23 PM] Andrew Fray: I haven’t done it
[8/29/14, 11:57:07 PM] Daniel Cook: https://trello.com/remove-end-of-demo-screen
[8/29/14, 11:58:09 PM] Andrew Fray: the end-of-demo screen only responds to R by design. was there something else locking it up?
[8/29/14, 11:59:22 PM] Daniel Cook: We may have been missing the R. Or it wasn’t working.
[8/29/14, 11:59:32 PM] djedery: Pretty sure we tried everything, including R
[8/29/14, 11:59:34 PM] djedery: no joy
[8/30/14, 12:00:01 AM] djedery: anyway, doesn’t matter, we just want to get rid of the end of demo screen.
[8/30/14, 12:00:06 AM] Andrew Fray: k
[8/30/14, 12:00:13 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Andrew I got the H button thing
[8/30/14, 12:00:20 AM] Andrew Fray: k!
[8/30/14, 12:00:34 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I also got rid of the end of demo screen, I think, but you should probably verify.
[8/30/14, 12:00:47 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I increased the shove of both player dash and fireball.
[8/30/14, 12:11:16 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: And, and, by the way Andrew, we’re all really impressed with the stability and lack of bugs in the build; it basically ran all day, and though we certainly encountered some weirdass bugs on occasion, they were pretty rare and almost always cured by hitting R.
Also, having a single button to reset the game is a friggin godsend at this event.
[8/30/14, 12:11:41 AM] djedery: > Also, having a single button to reset the game is a friggin godsend at this event.
[8/30/14, 12:11:43 AM] djedery: This.
[8/30/14, 12:12:15 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: https://trello.com/highlight-bank Where’s the term bank coming from? I’ve been telling everyone it’s their “base”.
[8/30/14, 12:15:16 AM] Daniel Cook: Base works as well. Bank is just more themed, but I’m okay with either.
[8/30/14, 12:19:10 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: We should be consistent for whatever it is
[8/30/14, 12:19:54 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I’m cool with bank
[8/30/14, 12:20:29 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Speaking of which, I’m changing all “tunnel” text to “door”. People seem to have difficulty recognizing that structure as a thing to go through.
[8/30/14, 12:25:00 AM] djedery: Oh yeah, we were meaning to ask Brent if we could replace the treehouse graphic with something much more recognizeable as home base, yes? (I guess “bank”, if that’s what we want…)
[8/30/14, 12:25:58 AM] Andrew Fray: so at the end of a tutorial you enter a bank?
[8/30/14, 12:26:03 AM] Andrew Fray: or do you mean the house graphic in missions?
[8/30/14, 12:27:19 AM] djedery: Sorry, I’m tired and mixing issues. We wanted a new graphic for the tunnel that was something more likely to be noticed and recognized as “the place I’m supposed to be going.”
[8/30/14, 12:27:30 AM] djedery: Separately, if we’re calling home base “bank”, it should probably look like a bank.
[8/30/14, 12:47:29 AM] Brent K: Any ideas on what the object that people enter at the end of tutorial should be?
[8/30/14, 12:55:10 AM] Brent K: House with a big door?
[8/30/14, 12:58:56 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Big door seems good.
[8/30/14, 12:59:29 AM] Brent K: Cool. Will alter the loot house with a BANK sign too. (Drawing from bed! :D)
[8/30/14, 1:00:12 AM] Andrew Fray: I woke up, reached for laptop, have been working for an hour. yet to stand up. 🙂
[8/30/14, 1:01:49 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Indie lyfe.
[8/30/14, 1:02:23 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I’m kind of the opposite position, I’m just kinda staring, I think I need to sleep. Andrew, how are you feeling about your time today?
[8/30/14, 1:05:50 AM] Andrew Fray: I’m heading home to birmingham today, *and* I have to see my grandmother before I head back. but I have another three odd hours. should get all the non-separate-build things. and then I could do the zoom easily. separate missions should be straightforward but time-consuming.
[8/30/14, 1:06:24 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: It is turning out to be convenient that you’re not emburdened by all the PAX work.
[8/30/14, 1:06:40 AM] Andrew Fray: timezones paying off for once
[8/30/14, 1:08:07 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: OK awesome, that is about what I hoped. The single missions are pretty time consuming to do them all, but it might be helpful to do a separate build with just 1 or 2 more monster specific levels.
[8/30/14, 1:08:47 AM] Andrew Fray: I can get more done after I travel home, but that’s after the 9am deadline
[8/30/14, 1:10:20 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: We will be in a hermetically sealed chamber
[8/30/14, 1:10:27 AM] Andrew Fray: figured.
[8/30/14, 1:11:01 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Appreciate you making time on your weekend amidst all the travel; for serious
[8/30/14, 1:11:10 AM] Brent K: Do you guys want me to bring you food or anything when I come by?
[8/30/14, 1:22:15 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I think we’re good, unless there’s something in particular you have in mind. There’s enough folks that we can just run out and buy sammiches.
[8/30/14, 1:22:20 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Thank you for the offer!
[8/30/14, 1:25:58 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bed now!
[8/30/14, 2:27:52 AM] Andrew Fray: new standalone builds, NOT promoted to PAX demo folder yet:
– stopped accidental swizzling of controls
– every debug key now requires CTRL too
– disabled end-of-demo screen
– increased player’s fireball and attack shove
– speculative fix for static fizzing blue fireballs
– bank now has off-screen marker similar to monster radar. flashes when holding cargo.
– revamped tutorials as requested
– no more permadeath. keep items & mount on death. lose everything on R.
[8/30/14, 2:28:36 AM] Brent K: gonna be around the next half hour or so to throw in a few new arts?
[8/30/14, 2:28:43 AM] Andrew Fray: definitely.
[8/30/14, 2:28:48 AM] Brent K: super
[8/30/14, 2:47:32 AM] Brent K: pushed new tutorial door and bank assets https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/8lw5krf0dee4tr8/FRD_portal-bank.jpg
[8/30/14, 2:48:14 AM] Brent K: if its possible to move those “tutorial #” labels down a bit that’d be great. no biggie if not
[8/30/14, 3:02:40 AM] Andrew Fray: yep i can do that
[8/30/14, 3:02:59 AM] Andrew Fray: new standalone builds, dropbox/runner/pax-experiments/camera-zoom
[8/30/14, 4:20:20 AM] Andrew Fray: new new build:
– new portal graphics
– new bank graphics
[8/30/14, 4:21:23 AM] Andrew Fray: also removed off-screen indicator from tutorial portal. the (only) tutorial level is now very directed, with roofs etc, and you don’t even know what a portal is yet, so an off-screen marker isn’t going to help much. you still have the off-screen marker in the hub.
[8/30/14, 5:10:52 AM] Andrew Fray: got no where near completing the multimission build. making new worlds is very time consuming.
[8/30/14, 8:18:04 AM] djedery: What about it is time consuming? Is there some workaround that might be useful here? In principle, what we’re looking for is extremely minor variations to what we already have.
[8/30/14, 8:19:33 AM] djedery: Second question: do we have the separate 20% zoomed out test build?
[8/30/14, 8:43:14 AM] Daniel Cook: I was hoping that the multi-mission work was as simple as: New seed + New spawn list.
[8/30/14, 8:43:33 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Lemme see if I got this right — there’s a camera-zoom build, and all of the changes are in that? It looks like the tutorial changes are in there. (and presumably the camera is zoomed out but it’s too early in the morning for me to tell)
Is there a build which has tutorial changes but no zoom out?
[8/30/14, 8:53:01 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: OK looking at commits I think I see the setup
[8/30/14, 9:07:17 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Swapped hard pacers and spiders’ locations in the endless world, just remembered that
[8/30/14, 9:13:00 AM] Daniel Cook: Nice.
[8/30/14, 9:19:16 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I am gonna depart for the convention center, but Brent, if you see this, I realized it might come in handy to be able to swap a laptop out of constant circulation in order to update the builds.
[8/30/14, 9:19:39 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Could even make that part of the booth. LIVE CODING AT PAX
[8/30/14, 9:42:00 AM] djedery: Ryan and I discussed the mission thing; we think its possible there’s just a communication disconnect happening here. Let’s discuss via voice tonight. Will try to stay awake till midnight so you don’t have to get up crazy early, Andrew.
[8/30/14, 11:23:11 AM] Andrew Fray: cool. the standard standalone builds have tutorial changes + fixes, the experiments folder has the zoom + other fixes.
[8/30/14, 11:26:47 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: The new tutorial is working well.
[8/30/14, 11:27:33 AM] Andrew Fray: the mission problems just come from the fact there’s lots of things to change and I ran out of time. setting up a new mission means:
– new entry in worlds, with good-looking small world (I was having trouble finding a small world that wasn’t a third or more of air for the sploder mission)
– correct exit conditions (we don’t have a mount-based lock yet, or supporting UI)
– new overlord entry with matching name and balanced monster setup
– new hub portal (with bigger tree to fit all these extra portals in?)
– plus i just had to go
[8/30/14, 11:28:13 AM] Andrew Fray: On 30/08/2014, at 19:26, Ryan Duane Williams wrote:
> The new tutorial is working well.
good to hear. was a bit worried about lack of grinding in the tutorial but deferred to you guys
[8/30/14, 11:29:07 AM] Andrew Fray: but am bashing through more missions tonight, will maybe have something in a few hours
[8/30/14, 11:44:55 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Unlocking the goose is a really positive experience for everyone, new mission ramp will hopefully make that more accessible
[8/30/14, 11:50:21 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: X is a really hard button to press for some reason, want to think of a button layout that doesn’t have that problem
[8/30/14, 12:21:55 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: People seem really upset when they discover there’s no health pickups.
[8/30/14, 12:23:50 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We’re experimenting with just skipping the npc for pax, it seems this type of player doesn’t need story and x is the devil
[8/30/14, 12:25:10 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Btw Andrew people just seem to pick up grinding, that was true before too; they would literally flow laboriously around the grind pillar
[8/30/14, 12:25:21 PM] Andrew Fray: there’s no (X) on the next button of the NPC tutorial, could that be it?
[8/30/14, 12:25:33 PM] Andrew Fray: re grinding: awesome
[8/30/14, 12:25:51 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I added x in an unpushed build but not camera-zoom
[8/30/14, 12:26:08 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We are mostly camera zoom btw, seems slightly better overall
[8/30/14, 12:26:17 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: “Not worse”
[8/30/14, 12:28:17 PM] Andrew Fray: there’s a CPU cost to it but it was performing fine on my ’11 macbook
[8/30/14, 12:36:11 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Better signaling about terrain movement would be good; I think the air animations seem kinda “faster” or at least not distinct enough from the tree animation so they treat air and foliage equivalently
[8/30/14, 12:37:53 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Feedback I get a lot is some variant of “I couldn’t figure out how to reliably do ” which is often “run away” or “unlock a better dragon”
[8/30/14, 12:42:14 PM] Andrew Fray: mission 5 returns 2x sploder bodies, but we have no mount to reward you with. and you won’t collect loot because we ask for bodies. problem?
[8/30/14, 12:42:30 PM] Andrew Fray: 6 also asks for bodies.
[8/30/14, 12:42:32 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Folks seem to age trouble aiming fireballs accurately
[8/30/14, 12:46:02 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I don’t like doubling down on the lock mechanic but it is understandable
[8/30/14, 12:46:16 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Lemme talk with danc
[8/30/14, 12:53:41 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bank flashing really helped, no more confusion on that fromt
[8/30/14, 12:54:04 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Basically running itself
[8/30/14, 12:58:28 PM] Andrew Fray: in the vein of limiting tutorial, I’m cool with cutting things off after the goose mission, mission 4. I’ll block them all out and we can decide later.
[8/30/14, 12:58:39 PM] Andrew Fray: …cutting things off and opening up the endless mission.
[8/30/14, 1:00:48 PM] Andrew Fray: OT: I understand how hard and tiring running a booth at a thing like PAX must be. I Oh wow, game.bytes is really readable
yeah I was pleased with that. like a little DSL.
[8/31/14, 12:19:58 AM] Andrew Fray: I think keep it at two for the curlyhorns + wolf mission, because otherwise on the third run your house will be swamped with idle curlyhorns.
[8/31/14, 12:25:48 AM] djedery: Seems reasonable. Btw, is there more than 1 wolf in that mission?
[8/31/14, 12:26:33 AM] Andrew Fray: 3-5 I think. it’s a bigger level than the previous ones, so needs a good spread.
[8/31/14, 12:29:08 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: It might be a bit hard to tame 2 hares; especially if there’s a third in the level. People find them more difficult than we do.
[8/31/14, 12:30:40 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: The current level is tame 2/3, I think it should be tame 2/2
[8/31/14, 12:30:44 AM] djedery: that sounds good
[8/31/14, 12:31:03 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: While tinkering with the items I’m realizing they’re time-consuming to balance both for the setpiece missions and also for the “main game”. What do you think about hardcoding items given out after each mission? A huge pain to implement or pretty easy?
[8/31/14, 12:31:28 AM] djedery: yeah i mentioned that earlier this evenign to danc i think
[8/31/14, 12:31:37 AM] djedery: I think hardcoding loot rewards in the missions is the way to go
[8/31/14, 12:32:02 AM] djedery: so we can eliminate some of the variables that make it hard to balance this for new players.
[8/31/14, 12:32:06 AM] djedery: if easy
[8/31/14, 12:32:23 AM] djedery: > 3-5 I think. it’s a bigger level than the previous ones, so needs a good spread.
[8/31/14, 12:32:45 AM] Andrew Fray: hardcoded loot should be straightforward but a bit fiddley. easier than the missions were.
[8/31/14, 12:33:32 AM] djedery: Andrew, I’d need to watch some new players to know, but fwiw, for me, the map size seems to be irrelevant here. I see a curlyhorn to m yleft, i chase it, i steal its loot, i return it. I see another curlyhorn direclty to my left, i chase it, i steal its loot, i return it. Done it 3 times now. Never seen more than 1 wolf.
[8/31/14, 12:33:41 AM] djedery: That’s probably OK though?
[8/31/14, 12:34:19 AM] Andrew Fray: that’s cool. but if you *did* go up, and find a curlyhorn there, there’d be a wolf nearby to chase you too.
[8/31/14, 12:35:17 AM] djedery: Question for you is simply: did you want me to be in situations where two wolves come after me? If so, I don’t think that will happen.
[8/31/14, 12:35:26 AM] djedery: (But I also don’t think that’s necessary.)
[8/31/14, 12:35:29 AM] Andrew Fray: no I don’t. so that’s good.
[8/31/14, 12:35:38 AM] djedery: cool
[8/31/14, 12:39:38 AM] Andrew Fray: On 31/08/2014, at 08:03, djedery wrote:
> Unrelated issue: I was momentarily confused when I unlocked the final hare mission and high score mission at the same time; wasn’t sure what to do next. Perhaps best to simply keep it linear and only unlock high score mode after the final “campaign” (i.e. hare) mission is unlocked.
my gut is this. but it seems obvious enough that danc must have had reasoning behind not doing it this way in the first place?
[8/31/14, 12:39:43 AM] djedery: one thing I’ve noticed is that curlyhorns are pretty easy to steal from, even with cow mount and no items (and have been for at least a little while now.) Did we make some change during or immediately before PAX that reduced their fleeing speed or increased the player’s default speed?
[8/31/14, 12:40:29 AM] Andrew Fray: no we haven’t changed that. think they’ve just been that way for a while. I find their chase *really* fierce, so I don’t mind so much.
[8/31/14, 12:40:32 AM] djedery: > danc must have had reasoning behind not doing it this way
[8/31/14, 12:40:51 AM] djedery: I’m the one who wrote that checklist item. 🙂
[8/31/14, 12:41:21 AM] djedery: I think I did it when there were only 5 missions.
[8/31/14, 12:41:25 AM] Andrew Fray: ha! 🙂
[8/31/14, 12:41:30 AM] Andrew Fray: I’ll move it to the end then
[8/31/14, 12:41:56 AM] djedery: > I find their chase *really* fierce, so I don’t mind so much.
[8/31/14, 12:42:13 AM] djedery: Yeah, their chase feels good. avoidable with not too much skill, but not zero skill
[8/31/14, 12:42:30 AM] djedery: what do you guys think about upping their flee speed just a tad?
[8/31/14, 12:43:07 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I’m OK with it
[8/31/14, 12:43:16 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Players don’t seem to have had a lot of difficulty with them
[8/31/14, 12:43:25 AM] djedery: That’s what’ i was about to ask you
[8/31/14, 12:43:26 AM] Andrew Fray: ok
[8/31/14, 12:43:31 AM] djedery: I haven’t seen much struggle there either
[8/31/14, 12:44:22 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: (there’s not much interaction with them period, which is a shame)
[8/31/14, 12:51:25 AM] djedery: yeah, because they’re on the outside edge of the high score map, and people get distracted with other things closer in. I’m glad the new mission build will change that!
[8/31/14, 12:51:39 AM] djedery: hard pacers were always my favorite dragon
[8/31/14, 12:53:41 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Bed for me! Thanks you guys! New missions feeling good to me in general yo, really curious how they playtest.
[8/31/14, 12:57:36 AM] djedery: me too 🙂
[8/31/14, 7:56:11 AM] Andrew Fray: copied yesterday’s standalones to Pax Demos (as backups), and made new standalones in the root dir:
– camera zoomed out
– can’t shove curlyhorns as far, they do less damage, they’re harder to catch
– fixed player being able to move while in some screens
– storage screen highlights new item first
– mounts have new star badge, just like items
[8/31/14, 7:56:18 AM] Andrew Fray: new mission builds in experiments folder:
– lots more items to award
– fixed item award schedule for missions
– endless mission unlocks after final mission
– only two hares present in hare-tame mission
– hare loot mission requires three successes
[8/31/14, 7:56:23 AM] Andrew Fray: the item reward schedule is designed to give a range of emotions: instantly useful, a useless item, an item that’s useful later, stuff to build up the weak aspects of the goose, etc. players should have to do a tiny bit of minmaxing as they go through the missions.
[8/31/14, 7:56:30 AM] Andrew Fray: known issues: sometimes, storage UI highlights correct item, and the marker moves, but the highlighted background doesn’t. haven’t got to the bottom of it yet.
[8/31/14, 7:56:37 AM] Andrew Fray: had a quick look at bumbercars, didn’t commit anything, info here: https://trello.com/
[8/31/14, 8:17:05 AM] djedery: Thanks Andrew!
[8/31/14, 8:18:54 AM] djedery: Quick thing to fix: in the PAX experiments build, the first mission (with easy deer pacers) requires 4 loot. We’d discussed dropping that to 3 because the easy pacers are somewhat slow and boring.
[8/31/14, 8:19:25 AM] Andrew Fray: new standalone standard builds with some storage UI tidy up:
– fixed inconsistent naming of attack recovery/recharge stat
– stats now flash red or green when you equip something that changed your stats
[8/31/14, 8:19:46 AM] Andrew Fray: there’s one loot right next to the house, so it’s really three chases anyway.
[8/31/14, 8:23:15 AM] djedery: were curlyhorns sped up in the missions build? they feel as slow as always.
[8/31/14, 8:23:38 AM] djedery: (hard to explain exactly when it happens, but there are lots of moments when they slow way down and are trivial to steal from)
[8/31/14, 8:24:01 AM] Andrew Fray: they don’t interact well with the edge of the world, and the 1st curlyhorns mission is quite small.
[8/31/14, 8:24:11 AM] Andrew Fray: they’re much better in the later curlyhorns mission.
[8/31/14, 8:24:48 AM] djedery: Just checked – they are still trivial to steal from in the later mission
[8/31/14, 8:25:11 AM] djedery: I just pointed straight at them and flew. No dashing. No maneuvering.
[8/31/14, 8:25:18 AM] djedery: Got loot immediately.
[8/31/14, 8:26:39 AM] djedery: Wish I knew what the difference was between them and the hard pacers of old. I need to jump in the shower now, but what I would suggest Andrew is bumping up their speed until it takes, at least, a single dash attack to catch up to them. That’s still pretty darn easy, but at least it’s better than “I can just walk up to this thing and take it’s loot.”
[8/31/14, 8:26:46 AM] djedery: Need to jump into the shower now.
[8/31/14, 8:29:14 AM] Andrew Fray: I’ll take another look, but the root problem isn’t stats. I’m afraid jacking things up too high will make them inconsistent instead of fun.
[8/31/14, 8:30:24 AM] djedery: Play around with it and see what you can come up with it. Right now they aren’t presenting a challenge. I don’t think people will feel clever when catching them. Too many moments when they just dumbly coast or stall out.
[8/31/14, 8:31:34 AM] Andrew Fray: at least there’s still a good challenge when they chase you. noticeably harder than the standard pacers.
[8/31/14, 8:31:39 AM] Andrew Fray: but I’ll keep looking
[8/31/14, 8:32:55 AM] djedery: TY. And you have the right instincts for PAX: if we can’t fix them, better that they should be too easy than too hard.
[8/31/14, 8:33:02 AM] djedery: (but i hope you can fix ’em.)
[8/31/14, 8:45:00 AM] djedery: Out of shower. It occured to me that by the first curlyhorn mission I already had +4 speed worth of items, I think? It is possible that Curlyhorn base fleeing speed is simply too low, given the loot reward schedule (though I was noticing issues with this before this morning.) I would really try just increasing their flee speed by 40% or whatever and seeing how that feels.
[8/31/14, 8:45:16 AM] djedery: Jumping into the car now.
[8/31/14, 8:45:44 AM] Andrew Fray: I doubled it overnight. I can have moments where they’re very hard to catch (normally after they’re isolated from friends), but first encounters are often easy.
[8/31/14, 8:46:58 AM] djedery: what is causing first encounters to be easy?
[8/31/14, 8:47:06 AM] Andrew Fray: well if I knew that…
[8/31/14, 8:47:13 AM] djedery: slow acceleration?
[8/31/14, 8:47:22 AM] Andrew Fray: I’ve ripped out flocking and states.
[8/31/14, 8:47:41 AM] Andrew Fray: iirc their acceleration doesn’t really work like that? maybe.
[8/31/14, 8:47:52 AM] djedery: Dunno. If nothing else has helped, check that.
[8/31/14, 8:48:15 AM] djedery: ok, really gotta go. if you figure it out, ryan can get us a build as he’s probably not leaving his apt for another 25 minutes at least
[8/31/14, 8:57:32 AM] Andrew Fray: ah so it’s actually simple:
– you start, and follow the marker to the nearest ch
– he starts fleeing sometime between then and him coming on to your screen
– your movements are quite slick because we’re good at the game *and* far from the monster moving in a relatively fixed direction. your momentum is through the roof.
– he slows down to let you close in
[8/31/14, 8:58:04 AM] Andrew Fray: later on, you may have stopped or turned, momentum is lower, and he flees like a bastard.
[8/31/14, 8:59:03 AM] Andrew Fray: so we need a fix like, ignore player momentum changes when player is far from monster? so chase gets to start fairly once near?
[8/31/14, 9:00:06 AM] Andrew Fray: unfortunately that sounds fairly risky as it would have affects across all monsters.
[8/31/14, 9:03:34 AM] Andrew Fray: tried playing with making their vision radius low, so they don’t start chases until later. has the side effect that they will find it hard to see loot.
[8/31/14, 9:10:14 AM] Andrew Fray: new mission experiments builds:
– storage UI changes from earlier
– hard pacer tentative vision hack to make them faster
[8/31/14, 9:14:10 AM] Andrew Fray: shit shit shit deployed windows missions build to dopbox regular builds. rolling back…
[8/31/14, 9:17:53 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Cool man I have to head out soon, plan is to update the missions folder?
[8/31/14, 9:18:14 AM] Andrew Fray: missions folder is up to date, just making new standard win build
[8/31/14, 9:20:18 AM] Andrew Fray: kay dropbox all up to date
[8/31/14, 9:20:43 AM] Andrew Fray: sync sync sync
[8/31/14, 9:29:35 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Thanks, Andrew, entering the desert of wifi now
[8/31/14, 9:29:35 AM] Andrew Fray: good luck for today folks. I’m assuming there’ll be no more chance to get you changes, so I’ll be sloping off to collapse in a heap. Ping me on email if you want me back on the laptop.
I worked a national holiday last week, so unless anyone objects I’ll retrospectively take that tomorrow and do things that are no where near a keyboard. debrief on tuesday?
[8/31/14, 9:44:51 AM] djedery: The build in the experiments folder appears to be starting from the wolf mission instead of tutorial
[8/31/14, 9:45:11 AM] djedery: Pressing r takes me to start of wolf mission as well. Help!
[8/31/14, 9:53:00 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: A rebuild may have fixed it
[8/31/14, 10:01:20 AM] Andrew Fray: fuckfuckfuck windows standard build will have the same problem.
[8/31/14, 10:09:58 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Yeah we’re good
[8/31/14, 10:10:24 AM] Andrew Fray: *phew*
[8/31/14, 10:10:32 AM] Andrew Fray: collapsing again
[8/31/14, 10:11:43 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Two changes, cut hare health in half, no drag when carrying monsters
[8/31/14, 10:12:21 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Would be nice to apply strength to fireballs
[8/31/14, 10:13:14 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: 2 hares in loot mission
[8/31/14, 10:58:36 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Did those
[8/31/14, 11:01:14 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Inventory default seems rad, curly horns seem rad
[8/31/14, 11:12:57 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: People seem to complain about maneuverability in mission2. Main reason is the hares are spending a lot of time fleeing into the air. Secondary reason is that level has few trees and feels a bit small
[8/31/14, 11:13:58 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Easy pacers too
[8/31/14, 11:18:10 AM] Andrew Fray: we could try using the bigger world from the last curlyhorns mission
[8/31/14, 11:43:31 AM] Andrew Fray: If you play with mission worlds, remember the overlord.bytes file is tightly coupled.
[8/31/14, 12:07:51 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Ok I’m declaring the dragons flying into the air the biggest problem today. Several people in a row have left feedback that the game feels sluggish and hard to move, and I can see its because they’re spending most of their time following a dude up and out of the trews
[8/31/14, 12:10:32 PM] Andrew Fray: In both builds or just missions build? Is there any way for me to get improvements to you at all?
[8/31/14, 12:20:14 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Also sometimes they hang out in the water
[8/31/14, 12:23:50 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We’re only running missions. If you can paste a fix her I can apply it. I might take my laptop out of rotation and look into it myself in a bit, the problem seems to come and go
[8/31/14, 12:26:03 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Should add mount weight to loot score at end of high score mode (no 50% there)
[8/31/14, 12:32:38 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Think there are a few too many missions for this event, could probs cut last 2
[8/31/14, 12:33:14 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Those feel a little redundant
[8/31/14, 12:41:14 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We agreed to cut the second hares one
[8/31/14, 12:55:47 PM] Andrew Fray: all you should need to do is trim the hub definition in worlds.bytes
[8/31/14, 1:18:15 PM] Andrew Fray: possible fix: resources/config/monsterpathfinding.bytes, change FleeingNodeLimit to 1000
[8/31/14, 1:18:22 PM] Andrew Fray: …for flying into air
[8/31/14, 1:19:08 PM] Andrew Fray: beware extra CPU cost.
[8/31/14, 1:42:21 PM] Andrew Fray: having fixed that, this is now valid again:
On 31/08/2014, at 17:29, Andrew Fray wrote:
> good luck for today folks. I’m assuming there’ll be no more chance to get you changes, so I’ll be sloping off to collapse in a heap. Ping me on email if you want me back on the laptop.
>
> I worked a national holiday last week, so unless anyone objects I’ll retrospectively take that tomorrow and do things that are no where near a keyboard. debrief on tuesday?
[8/31/14, 1:43:35 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Yeah Andrew you should collapse. I’m just going t
[8/31/14, 1:43:50 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: To continue to poop ideas here
[8/31/14, 1:44:18 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Thanks for the thing, will look ino
[8/31/14, 1:45:52 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: The other thing I hear pretty often is self-blame, ie “I have bad xbox hands” or “I don’t play controller games”. I am starting to realize those folks are spending a lot of time in the air
[8/31/14, 3:18:22 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Should remove confirm dialog for mission end during early missions
[8/31/14, 3:39:37 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Should make speed lines only show up at like 70% of max speed
[8/31/14, 5:22:03 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Got feedback that magnitude of damage is hard to see; corroborated by many folks being surprised at quickly they died
[8/31/14, 6:03:29 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Red/green flashing in inventory screen works well btw
[8/31/14, 10:54:53 PM] Andrew Fray: Wait is pax on Monday as well? I assumed it finished Sunday!
[8/31/14, 11:47:43 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: There is another day, yes.
[8/31/14, 11:48:14 PM] Andrew Fray: what do you need for tomorrow?
[8/31/14, 11:48:55 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Not that much, I was planning on doing it myself really. Just want to increase the size of the tutorial missions but not change the monster starting positions.
[8/31/14, 11:49:07 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Oh and eliminated the second hare one.
[8/31/14, 11:49:29 PM] Andrew Fray: the monster start positions are procedural. did the higher node count help? I found it much better with that.
[8/31/14, 11:50:42 PM] Andrew Fray: if you hadn’t noticed the worlds also repeat, but alternate. I could put everything in the same world as the last, large triangular, curlyhorns mission, but move the bank around each time.
[8/31/14, 11:51:01 PM] Andrew Fray: let me do that for you, you must need rest. and it won’t take long, I can still have most of the day off.
[8/31/14, 11:52:14 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: The higher node count helps, yeah. They still sometimes dart out into empty air and loop back, but it’s not so bad.
[8/31/14, 11:53:48 PM] Andrew Fray: is everyone rolling with the missions demo, should I promote that? or keep updating the standard builds?
[8/31/14, 11:55:53 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We’re planning on using it tomorrow too; but we’re so tired we’re not sure that it’s actually better.
[8/31/14, 11:56:09 PM] Andrew Fray: I’ll keep both updated then.
[8/31/14, 11:56:42 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Well, it’s likely better for PAX, but is that representative enough of the game? Who knows. We’ll probably want to pull over the balance changes though, those seem legit.
[8/31/14, 11:56:53 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Anyway, yeah, staying the course.
[8/31/14, 11:57:04 PM] Andrew Fray: which balance changes do you mean?
[8/31/14, 11:57:18 PM] Andrew Fray: the monster HP/strength etc?
[8/31/14, 11:57:25 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Yeah
[8/31/14, 11:57:46 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: And all the new items! So critical. 🙂
[8/31/14, 11:58:30 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I believe our plan is: after we’re done, we want to have a wrapup, and then we all want to collapse and take off or at least work on other things.
[8/31/14, 11:59:11 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I really want to kinda braindump with you though; it feels like you’re not privy to all the details of the new shit.
[9/1/14, 12:00:37 AM] Andrew Fray: yep it’s been intense. you mean a wrap-up out there, or something on Skype tuesday or later?
[9/1/14, 12:01:16 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I think Skype, not sure best time.
[9/1/14, 12:01:32 AM] Andrew Fray: cool
[9/1/14, 12:02:04 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: We all have wads of notes to reconcile with each other (well I just took notes into Skype so I guess I can skip that step)
[9/1/14, 12:24:48 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: On 8/31/14, at 12:26 PM, Ryan Duane Williams wrote:
> Should add mount weight to loot score at end of high score mode (no 50% there)
Decided that this is a bad idea; too easy to farm easy pacers (for whatever reason farming them by taking their loot is just obviously boring enough that players don’t really do it but it is a long-term trap). We would come up with anti-farming strategies later. One idea is to “extinct” the type of dragon after a certain number of deaths, replacing it with nothing, or an upgraded one.
[9/1/14, 12:25:23 AM] Andrew Fray: I like that. evolving the world in one session.
[9/1/14, 12:26:10 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Another idea about changing the world is to have the biomes affect generation, e.g. vertical rocks, horizontal rocks, maze-like dense rocks, rock variations because rocks are the core.
[9/1/14, 12:31:11 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I’m gonna go to bed, probably the earliest of any night
[9/1/14, 12:31:27 AM] Andrew Fray: sleep the sleep of the rightous
[9/1/14, 12:41:45 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Leftous
[9/1/14, 12:55:01 AM] djedery: Only things that I have to add to Ryan’s notes are:
[9/1/14, 12:55:59 AM] djedery: 1) I saw lots of situations where a dragon with loot just sat in one place, not moving, until the player walked up and took their loot. This happened wtih hares and with hard pacers. Not sure why it happens, but very reproducible. In general, unless a dragon is designed to sit in a spot, like the spider dragon, this should never happen.
[9/1/14, 12:58:18 AM] djedery: 2) On very rare occassion, a dragon is brought to zero health but does not die – it becomes an undead aggressor that cannot be killed and will even be present when you reset the state of the world using “R”, next time you reach the same missoin. Does not happen often so it’s not a big deal; I saw it twice in the whole day.
[9/1/14, 12:58:44 AM] djedery: 3) Would be good to eliminate the hare taming mission from the pax demo, as ryan suggested earlier.
[9/1/14, 1:00:15 AM] djedery: 4) Per previous discussion, easy pacer mission goal should be reduced to 3 loot (so, they’ll only need to chase 2 easy pacers, since 1 loot appears near the house.) That mission is boring for many new users.
[9/1/14, 3:45:44 AM] Andrew Fray: re: 1, just can’t repro. most be something about the characteristic playtester style I’m missing when testing. have tried letting hares steal loot back, have have given loot back, flown away, come back, etc. even just left the game running.
[9/1/14, 3:50:23 AM] Andrew Fray: ah as I sent that I found it – fireballing! when aggro’d with loot, the hares can’t flee, because the player-flee behaviour expects to be not aggro’d, and they can’t chase the player, because the player-chase behaviour expects to not carry loot. hence, idle.
[9/1/14, 3:50:37 AM] Andrew Fray: I fixed a similar bug with geese just before PAX.
[9/1/14, 3:51:09 AM] Andrew Fray: I don’t see any reason why fleeing needs to be not aggro, so I’ll remove that and playtest.
[9/1/14, 4:12:02 AM] Andrew Fray: new standard standalones:
[9/1/14, 4:13:12 AM] Andrew Fray: – loot and balance tweaks from ryan
– speed lines above 70% of top speed
– fixed idling hares/curlyhorns, see above
[9/1/14, 4:14:39 AM] Andrew Fray: – reduced running into air
[9/1/14, 4:35:37 AM] Andrew Fray: new missions builds:
– all of the above
– moved all missions to larger world. everything shares same world, but moved around start to make it less obvious.
– removed second hare mission
– reduced mission1 goal to 2 pacer chases
– on complete mission, popup has just one button, can’t go back to world (I tried removing it altogether, but the jump back to the hub and the popup of the mission result screen was jarring)
[9/1/14, 8:37:27 AM] djedery: Thanks Andrew!
[9/1/14, 8:37:45 AM] djedery: sounds great
[9/1/14, 8:40:16 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Sweet
[9/1/14, 9:39:00 AM] Andrew Fray: Go get ’em, fellas. You are the James Sullivans to my Mike Wazowski.
[9/1/14, 11:05:19 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Seen a bug, twice at pax, where the terrain is just not generated in an area. Fixes itself after a bit so not a big deal now
[9/1/14, 11:05:45 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: The build seems to be going well so far today.
[9/1/14, 11:05:55 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: We want to swa
[9/1/14, 11:06:27 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: We want to swap “ice” for regular rock in the first tutorial
[9/1/14, 11:08:43 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: I think the confirm dialog isn’t active; several people have played the easy pacer mission for super long today
[9/1/14, 11:32:19 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: People are playing super long today in all cases. Line is really long too
[9/1/14, 11:59:59 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Small bug: sometimes at start of mission1, player gets teleported after pressing x to start
[9/1/14, 12:25:51 PM] Andrew Fray: Easy pacer from mission branch? Or from the standard build? Which are you playing?
[9/1/14, 12:34:05 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Missions
[9/1/14, 12:34:27 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: I might have fucked up the build, so don’t worry about the dialog
[9/1/14, 12:40:27 PM] Andrew Fray: Ha ok 🙂
[9/1/14, 2:15:08 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Many people all days play by taking the loot then beating up the former owner in situ. I’ve been thinking this is degenerate, but we should consider the possibility that that’s a valid fun activity. Could design some monsters that we expect to work that way.
[9/1/14, 2:18:46 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Another monster idea: one that tries to hide behind bigger badder monsters. We saw a hare unintentionally do this and it was a fun puzzle to get the hare out from behind the spider
[9/1/14, 2:27:40 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: http://t.joystiq.com/all/2014-08-31-spry-fox-explores-the-joy-of-flight-in-free-range-dragons
[9/1/14, 2:31:44 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: The bug where the spider babies don’t blow up actually lasts indefinitely, they only blow up when some condition changes, not sure what
[9/1/14, 2:37:25 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Experts have decided that killing dragons is the least dangerous strategy because that way they don’t cluster around the house
[9/1/14, 2:53:57 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We concluded that the reason people are playing longer today is just cause a lot of people structured their days with Monday as the long-play day
[9/1/14, 4:20:43 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Even though rock grinding is frequently self-taught, I’ve gotten enough feedback today that I think we should be a bit more explicit about teaching it. What about an only-rocks level?
[9/1/14, 4:46:22 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: People seem to want to default to moving through the air. What if we swapped the terrain properties of air and foliage? So foliage was kinda choking and air was fast and free?
[9/1/14, 4:51:57 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Dave’s passive ability idea: when you spend enough time on rocks and then leap off you leave an explosion behind.
[9/1/14, 4:54:52 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: We are bandying about all sorts of shader distortion shock wave effect for the player wake and explosions
[9/1/14, 5:47:07 PM] Ryan Duane Williams: Today’s high score: 382
[9/2/14, 11:16:31 AM] Andrew Fray: 382 is immense.
[9/2/14, 11:16:44 AM] Andrew Fray: Was that guy just able to farm infinitely?
[9/2/14, 11:18:12 AM] Andrew Fray: Shall we meet on Wednesday at normal runchat time? Or shall we make it 1.30-2pm spry fox time so everyone has a lie in?
[9/2/14, 11:48:38 AM] djedery: Yeah, he farmed curlyhorns. They’re still a little too easy to chase for someone skilled with a fast mount. We can talk about what we want to do about farming (if anything?) tomorrow. Not super worried about it.
[9/2/14, 11:54:26 AM] djedery: Had this idea while at PAX and wanted to share it: one thing we can do to bring FRD a bit closer to “edgy cute” **and** make movement more satisfying is to really get extreme with movement related animations. For example, when you’re diving downwards through air (which already feels good, because it’s fast) it might be cool if when you hit max speed you get that “space shuttle entering the atmosphere” visual effect of heat radiating off the front of the dragon and much more dramatic energy/speedlines off the tail. Comet-like. http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53661000/jpg/_53661738_jex_1086558_de34-1.jpg. And/or perhaps when you’re flying at max speed on a fast mount, the dragon should tremble slightly (i.e. shaking from being at its limit) and we could have shockwaves off the trail. I mean, really over the top stuff.
[9/2/14, 11:55:31 AM] djedery: Similarly, the “jam on the screen” (screen shake / color flash / etc) that Ryan recommended a while back when the player dashes into a dragon and successfully knocks it way back.
[9/2/14, 11:55:56 AM] djedery: That stuff will make the game feel more exciting even if all else remains the same
[9/2/14, 11:57:49 AM] djedery: Confusion with the basic premise (trees make you fast, air makes you slow) is still an issue but I’m hoping we can solve for that in large part by trying Andrew’s earlier suggestion: wings are tipped with claws, and dragons visibly (and very energetically) propel themselves forward in trees by grabbiing and pulling.. and when they exit the tree, they visibly launch themselves out of the it with a shake of the tail and thrust of the wings, etc.
[9/2/14, 11:58:24 AM] djedery: If that doesn’t work, seems reasonable to revisit the metaphor of trees; maybe they are wind vortexes or clouds instead of trees.
[9/2/14, 11:58:45 AM] djedery: Anyway, all good things (among many other that came up at PAX!) to discuss via voice tomorrow.
[9/3/14, 8:47:47 AM] Andrew Fray: real sound design will also make a huge difference to “extreme”.
[9/3/14, 9:10:27 AM] Andrew Fray: back to web builds in the post-pax era. here’s a new one:
– speculative fix for spider babies rubbing against you instead of exploding
– proper fix for curlyhorns not fleeing fast enough. this has made the game a bit more difficult across the board (see the easy pacers properly accelerate in mission 1), but we can tune it down again now it’s working.
– increased idle patrol speed
– fixed idle monsters sometimes stopping near rocks and not moving until you interact with them
– fixed idle monsters jittering about in first few moments of idle.
[9/3/14, 9:11:40 AM] Andrew Fray: the last fix may have an effect on how easily a monster can see you after you steal from them. if you make a steal at high speed, and the monster doesn’t seem to chase you back, let me know.
[9/3/14, 10:07:32 AM] Andrew Fray: dragons, assemble?
[9/3/14, 10:08:29 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Yeah, hold on one sec
[9/3/14, 10:08:31 AM] Daniel Cook: I am here.
[9/3/14, 10:08:37 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Call started
[9/3/14, 10:42:12 AM] Daniel Cook: https://docs.google.com/document/
[9/3/14, 10:42:54 AM] Daniel Cook: Some notes about PAX
[9/3/14, 11:17:01 AM] Ryan Duane Williams: Call ended 1 hour 8 minutes 22 seconds
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