Forums: Suggestions

Is there any way for the “average Joe player” to see what the devs are working on? I see this all the time at work, the devs are working on what they THINK the players want, but in actuality, the players want something else worked on first.

So we’ve implemented a “project priority” list that gets updated weekly (or whatever timeframe is appropriate) by the “players” at work to make sure we’re on track. So instead of us going “tada” check out this new, flashy widget and the “players” going "that was soooo yesterday – we want “this” more now – duh!", we now know what we should prioritize work on.

Or maybe this is already somewhere here and I don’t know where it is? If it isn’t, I’m not sure how you would organize it – does the site support polling? Forums seem like a difficult place to manage something like this…

Like the game so far (been playing a few days), but would like to know what’s “in the works” before writing my laundry list of suggestions (been playing RPGs since the Apple 2e was released – yes, I’m 40-something :P)

Here’s a couple I’ve noticed that would be noteable:

Are diagonals being worked on?
How about “line of sight”/cover? I’ve discovered I can easily cast spells through walls…

Also, a note on “high end combos” like 3 skill combos – could you make these available AFTER you reach a certain skill level (say 50ish). I think my Volcan had lava, but meteor storm didn’t pop up until later, so it seems like you’ve got some actions that are available after you reach a certain skill level. That way you don’t confuse the new players, but the veteran players can do them?

Is there any way for the “average Joe player” to see what the devs are working on? I see this all the time at work, the devs are working on what they THINK the players want, but in actuality, the players want something else worked on first.

I used to post more often in the Developer Talk forum, but haven’t done it lately. I just made a quick post about what’s coming up. Incidentally, do you work for a game developer, web developer, or other? My curiosity is piqued. :)

Or maybe this is already somewhere here and I don’t know where it is? If it isn’t, I’m not sure how you would organize it – does the site support polling? Forums seem like a difficult place to manage something like this…

No, I don’t have any place for that. Right now, we’re running pretty light – I’m the lead developer and I have one active content designer (Kranodor) and a few other content designers who have been very busy with real life lately. Kranodor and I have real life work as well, of course, which makes it difficult to open up the feature list to democracy. I tend to work on code in chunks that go in some kind of order. If I asked everyone what feature they’d like to see most, for example, I’d bet PvP would be pretty high up the list. There are other updates I need to make to the interface before PvP can even be imagined – so interface work gets priority over PvP.

Of course, there are other things that get developed at my whim – because it’s related to something I’m working on in my day job or one of my freelance jobs (no, I don’t sleep very much). Or it’s something I want to experiment with, for the learning experience. The iGoogle gadget, for example, was something I just wanted to try out. I could have spent that time working on some other feature, but honestly, being forced to develop a little gadget like that really changed my thinking on some things, which lead to the development of the “watch battle” interface, which in turn has helped me rethink the battle interface (which will be updated in the near future).

Like the game so far (been playing a few days), but would like to know what’s “in the works” before writing my laundry list of suggestions (been playing RPGs since the Apple 2e was released – yes, I’m 40-something :P)

Excellent, very glad to hear you’re enjoying it. I’m an old-school gamer myself (I got to play with Apple 2e’s when I was in elementary school, but the first computer I actually owned was a c64 – yes, I’m a 30-something :)

Are diagonals being worked on?

I’m not sure what you mean by that. You mean allowing Melee attacks to go diagonally? I don’t have any plans for that. If I heard a good argument, I’d consider it, but otherwise I don’t see a need for it.

How about “line of sight”/cover? I’ve discovered I can easily cast spells through walls…

The dev team had a huge discussion about LOS several months ago and we finally decided to axe the whole thing because it was too complicated to implement, complicated for players to understand, and would be a lot of work for very little benefit. Many strategy RPGs also ignore LOS – there are some strategy games that use “Fog of War”, but more SRPGs tend to stay away from it. When we were having the discussion, I dug out my Final Fantasy Tactics Advance cart and tried it out – on some maps I could stand facing a 3 story building and still somehow arc an arrow or gunshot at an enemy. Apparently their devs didn’t think it was important enough to spend extra time on it, and I think I agree with them.

Here in Aethora, we like to pretend you can sense someone on the other side of a wall through the ather – and most range attacks are about conjuring something out of the ather(or air/ground/sky/plant-life/etc) surrounding the target, not really about lobbing something from A to B.

Also, a note on “high end combos” like 3 skill combos – could you make these available AFTER you reach a certain skill level (say 50ish). I think my Volcan had lava, but meteor storm didn’t pop up until later, so it seems like you’ve got some actions that are available after you reach a certain skill level. That way you don’t confuse the new players, but the veteran players can do them?

Yes, if we put any 3 skill combos in, they will have minimum level requirements. Right now the only thing keeping them from going in is balance. We don’t want any skill combination to have an advantage over any other skill combination. The really difficult bits:

1. it’s easy to come up with ideas for actions based on 3 Metatherical skills – but you’d need to get one skill from one weapon and two from another – and weapons that pack 2 metatheric skills are extremely rare (only acquirable via a mission that’s not even in the game yet)
2. you could do 2 Meta+1 Melee, or even 2 Melee+1Meta pretty easily – but straight Melee PCs will feel left out. There are a handful of weapons that combine two melee skills already, making 3 melee skills not hard to acquire, but combining them for an action don’t make a whole lot of sense
3. we still need to add more 2-skill combos to the actions we have now, to further balance them out
4. we have new skills in the works – probably even new skill trees – which means we’re going to be adding boatloads of new combos anyway, and balancing anything new by coming up with more 3-skill combos is going to be next to impossible (talking thousands of possible combos)

Okay, so I guess it’s my turn to tell a small bit about content creation, although it’s not quite the matter of this discussion (because content is content, it doesn’t really matter what or where it is exactly, important is that it gets created)…

I’m pretty busy these days, so I don’t get to do as much for aethora as I’d like to. What I do depends on how much time I perceive to have. If I know I’ll have lots of time, I’ll write on a mission. That’s the job I’ll need most uninterrupted free time for. If I have little time, in small bits of less than an hour, I’ll write location texts and/or enter them into the database. If I know I’ll have some hours of time over the course of two or three days, I may create an NPC group and/or enter it into the database. I’ll add a post about what I’m currently working on to the what’s coming up thread. Although the way I work with stuff, it’s usually a matter of what I plan to do – because once I start, I’m almost done. (Before that, a creative process has to happen that’s more or less completely in my head…)

So what I do, content-wise, depends on what ideas I have and what time (how much and in what type of chunks) I have to write them down or draw an outline. I don’t really have a priority list. And then, different types of content require different methods of data-entry and testing. I can enter location texts myself, but I’m a perfectionist, so you won’t see any of the new Xinoloux locations until all of them are finished and NPC groups to populate them have been made. I can enter items myself, but Sheck will still have to do the NPC groups. And missions… well, let’s say they take the longest for their way here.

Hello

I’m a “jack of all trades” at my work. I know SQL, C#, .net and a variety of old school codes (VB, etc.) as well as a code unique to the software we maintain called Dexterity – although it’s not very dextrous :) I’m originally a hardware guy though, so my coding isn’t hardcore.

I’ve always toyed with writing a game application – but I would lean toward something that allows people to play “pen n paper” RPGs over the internet… I’ve had an idea for almost 10 years now, but just never had the resources to put it together :(

Diagonals – I’m OK with them not being available for melee, but it would be nice for range. Seeing we’re ignoring terrain for the purposes of targeting, it seems “natural” to use diagonals. But there are arguments for both sides. The new DnD 4e for example went the simple route and says diagonals count the same, whereas 3.5 tried to do a every other one costs 2. I have to say I like the 4e version. Not super realistic, but adequate and easy. While it would also be nice to do this for movement, terrain becomes the challenge – especially from a coding standpoint. So I guess I can see your reason for just counting simple cardinals vs. cards and diags.

Besides, if it works, don’t fix it right? We say that at work a lot too :)

Diagonals revisited.

I’m in a battle now thought that defies my thoughts above. I like to use Heavy Boots and it’s a RNG 6. My guy is standing 8 cardinal squares away, but 4 diagonals away – so are you using DnD 3.5 style diagonals after all?

That reminds me of another thing – the idea of being “engaged” in melee combat. A lot of systems put restrictions on entering and leaving melee, while this one doesn’t. So my current tactic is my characters have “fine hide” and they dart in and out of melee seeing they move at 5/6MP a square. While complicated (both from an understanding concept as well as a coding concept) it might be worth visiting at some point – ya know, when you get some “extra” time ;)

Another work joke – we always say we’ll work on this or that when we get “extra” time. i.e. “keep dreaming buddy” lol

I’ve always toyed with writing a game application – but I would lean toward something that allows people to play “pen n paper” RPGs over the internet… I’ve had an idea for almost 10 years now, but just never had the resources to put it together :(

Have you heard of OpenRPG? I was going to try it at one point, but just never got around to it.

I’m in a battle now thought that defies my thoughts above. I like to use Heavy Boots and it’s a RNG 6. My guy is standing 8 cardinal squares away, but 4 diagonals away – so are you using DnD 3.5 style diagonals after all?

I’m not that familiar with the 3.5 rules (I played most of my D&D during the 1st and 2nd eds), but in any case – I’m just using the good ol’ Pythagorean theorem. So if you’re 4 diagonals away – 4 on the x axis, 4 on the y, that’s the square root of 4^2 + 4^2 which comes out somewhere between 5 and 6.

That reminds me of another thing – the idea of being “engaged” in melee combat. A lot of systems put restrictions on entering and leaving melee, while this one doesn’t. So my current tactic is my characters have “fine hide” and they dart in and out of melee seeing they move at 5/6MP a square. While complicated (both from an understanding concept as well as a coding concept) it might be worth visiting at some point – ya know, when you get some “extra” time ;)

I know what you mean – early on I considered doing it that way. One difference between this and most other strategy games is that Aethora has several actions that can sap movement points to varying degrees. In other strategy games, the use of “melee engagement” is there to keep players from constantly doing a stick-and-move. In Aethora, that’s a perfectly valid strategy – but many NPCs like to try to root you in place with MP-sapping attacks. If we had “engagement”, then the MP-sapping stuff would be only half as useful (I see those attacks as having two main uses – keeping an enemy at a distance and keeping an enemy from backing away).

One of my plans for AI improvements is adding a stick-and-move strategy to the NPC AI – it’s a popular strategy among players, but if the NPCs start doing it, it may introduce some interesting challenges. Also, your comments gave me an idea – we’ve been wanting to come up with more defensive actions, and most counter-attacks thus far target the attacker’s AP, Health, or Defense – we should be able to come up with several that sap MP. That would be the equivalent of engaging, because it’d mean someone comes up and attacks, loses MP to a counter-attack, then finds it harder to pull back. This would be nice for NPCs getting toyed with, but also might be important to players once we put in those NPC AI improvements…

MP-sapping counter-attack actions? Sounds good, we should do that. And… we do have some other ideas… I won’t disclose any more information this time.

Yes, the MP sapping counter-attacks sounds like a good idea. Honestly, I have my rooter with fine hide on and he spends most of his time running around at 5MP per tile casting Heavy Boots and Blowdown so the rest of the crew can beat the snot out of the guys that I’ve allowed to engage. Works well so far, plus I use it for healing – root the guy, beat down his defenses, then send in the flesher to theft his health and pass to my guys :)

I do have to say the game has many different tactical possibilities outside “normal” tactics – one of the perks that I’m enjoying. That and I don’t have to can a character because he doesn’t have skill in my new tactic – I just send him out to learn the new one in some moderately difficult battles…

Glad I could help encourage ideas…I’ll keep posting as they occur to me.