Flower (Hiatus)

[Necrile]

I agree. One of the major feedbacks I was looking for through this version was to test how well the player could pick up the game and learn what he was supposed to do. Please, though...don't give up on the game because you got confused at the garden. I put the skip in there for a reason. I will try and change the tutorial for the next version.

Edit: Also, if I may ask, what part was confusing for you?

 

[Necrile]

Flower Quick Guide
I will organize this and make this look pretty later.

Spoiler: Garden

Goal: Get to 100 resources.
Plant Stage
Pollenate during rain, grow during dry.
Bushes give pollen over time, flowers give immediate pollen.
Food Stage
Make seed plants to get seeds for food.
Keep hydration level close to 5 for all plants until they grow fully.
Human Stage
Keep humans well fed.
After they have been teenager for a while, give them a job.
Resourcers will get you resource over time which you need for your 100.
Military will start you off with more military than usual.
The other two are luxury jobs to help growing other humans easier while in the garden.

Spoiler: Build Stage

Goal: Get your town as upgraded as possible, at least upgraded twice.
Keep workers alive by feeding them.
Brothels give souls, boot camps drain souls and give military souls, barracks are military hubs.
Lumberjacks give resource, chefs give food, traders help get you loot.

Spoiler: Loot Stage

Goal: Get ready for bosses.
Early Stage
Use workshop to get greens; shop for blues.
Traders recommended for this stage.
Late Stage
Kill commanders for epics.

Spoiler: Boss Stage

NOT YET IMPLEMENTED

Spoiler: End Game Stage

NOT YET IMPLEMENTED

The noob's guide to combat

Spoiler: Basic Information

Hearts indicate unit's health.
Blue jars indicate unit's mana.
Fist=STR, Goggles=DEX, Fireball=INT.
Arrow keys select unit, shift selects action.

Spoiler: Advanced Information

If current STR>Enemy STR, attack will be faster.
If current INT>Enemy INT, skill will be faster.
DEX increases output of any action except defend and wait.
Attacking drains STR+DEX, Skill drains INT+DEX.
Waiting is based on agility, the higher the agility, less wait times.
Waiting regenerates all stats except for health.
If Pandora is healing, she will heal whatever unit is currently being selected.
Enemy will face whichever unit they are attacking currently.

Spoiler: Class Info

Knights are tanks, use them to taunt and then defend.
Assassins are damage dealers, use their skill on long fights.
Marksman are damage dealers, use their skill on short fights.
Mages are damage dealers, use their skill always.

Spoiler: Advanced Class Info

Knights
Knights should have higher INT for more taunts, higher DEX for bigger taunts.
Defend whenever knight has threat.
Assassins
Assassin's skill is to poison, causing damage over time. Focus on high dex and enough int to trump opponent.
Otherwise, regular attacks are effective. Use STR to trump opponent.
Both damage comes from weapon damage + dex.
Marksman
Marksman is indentical to Assassins, except skill does immediate damage. Use same stat focus as Assassin.
Mage
Mages are risky due to low defence and skill reliability. Stack INT to trump opponent, otherwise use DEX.

 

[Ace of Spades]

Nice ŊŒRIJ∑. Those descriptions give me a much better idea of what the hell is going on. I'd still suggest making it easier for the player to understand just by playing the game, with tutorial levels, but it's a start. I'll try your game out again in just a couple minutes. Also I'm PMing you a download for my demo if you wouldn't mind checking it out for me. I'll post again with impressions of Flower.

 

[Necrile]

Awesome! I've been looking forward to playing Odyssey for a while now :D

 

[Necrile]

The lava dungeon will be the biggest of the three agility dungeons, and rightfully so. This is where you will spend the last 10-14 levels of your agility leveling experience, and thus should be the most entertaining right? Most of it is references for myself, but you can probably figure out some of the pathways. Just figure I'd keep you guys updated!

Edit: Also, I changed a little bit of information in the notes section, to better even out the patches. Essentially, v0.8 will include all the core content of the game (at this point, I'll ask a mod to put the game in Completed Games, and I will post the game on other sites). V0.9 Will include different areas (snow and desert) to make the experience a bit more varied per user, and also will let endgame be accessable. v1.0 will include a few superbosses, and at that point there may or may not be anymore updates following it (hence final release, and the such).

 

[Perihelion]

Necrile, I can't talk to the girl in the tutorial. I tried pressing space and enter and whatever else on her, and no dice.

 

[Ace of Spades]

Necrile, I can't talk to the girl in the tutorial. I tried pressing space and enter and whatever else on her, and no dice.

She's gotta be one space in front of you, it won't work if you're on top of her.

 

[Necrile]

^This. Thanks, Ace. See my post about explaining the things in Flower if you are still confused about the game after the tutorial.

 

[Perihelion]

Okay, you should make that clear somewhere. Will continue playing the game in a bit.

 

[Necrile]

I appreciate it :D I hope you have fun! Also, did you get back into playing it, Ace?

 

[Necrile]

Figured I'd update since no-one's been playing Flower :<

I have finished the Lava Agility Dungeon (the final one), unfortunately, this time I cannot post a screenshot of the whole thing as that would sort of give away some of it's secrets! I'm going to have my friend from before beta test the new content and I will film some of it to give you guys an idea of what's going on in this game of mine! I wish people here would be more interested, but I guess that's why I bumped universal release up to v0.8!

 

[Ace of Spades]

Okay, so I just got around to giving Flower another solid try. Sorry, I've been busy with my own project the past couple days. Anyways, unfortunately a lot of my original impressions still stand. I reread the entire tutorial section, this time I had a better idea of what to do in the garden, but still not completely clear. One recommendation I'd make is that during pollinating, instead of hitting enter to pollinate it once, try using the input number command. It was frustrating having to jab enter a bunch of time to pollinate a bush 40 times, not to mention the intermissions where it wasn't raining. It's all very time consuming, you should let the player enter the amount of pollen to dump.

So after playing the garden portion, I decided to skip to the part where the game feels more like an RTS. One big complaint I had about this area of the game was there was no indication of what resources I had. Nowhere on screen did it mention how much food I have left, how many resources I have, etc., which is essential to playing the game properly I'd assume. I'd also like to mention battles aren't very clearly explained. At first I didn't realize I was supposed to raise troops, which I never could successfully do because I wasn't sure what the heck the prerequisites were.

Overall I can tell this game is deep and has a lot of potential, but the complete lack of clarity leaves players in the dark. Like I mentioned before, try cooking up some tutorial levels (not tutorial phone books of explanations), and I think overall it would have been a much more satisfying experience.

 

[Necrile]

1. Pressing shift changes how much you pollenate everytime you click in the garden.
2. Q and W changes the opacity on your hud, which shows how much food, resources, souls, and military souls.
3. How can I make the objective more clear? Can you give me specific advice, rather than just "needs to be more clear"?

But thanks for playing, and I share your frustration!

 

[Ace of Spades]

1. Pressing shift changes how much you pollenate everytime you click in the garden.
2. Q and W changes the opacity on your hud, which shows how much food, resources, souls, and military souls.
3. How can I make the objective more clear? Can you give me specific advice, rather than just "needs to be more clear"?

But thanks for playing, and I share your frustration!

Don't get too frustrated. You have 9 other pages of posts here, it could just be me.
1. Was the shift thing in the tutorial anywhere or did I just miss it?
2. Ah, I forgot that. By default shouldn't the HUD at least be somewhat visible?
3. My best advice to you as a game maker is assume your audience knows nothing. (It sounds awful but it's true). You have to think about your game objectively. If a new player were to pick up your game, would they be able to grasp all the concepts you're throwing at them right away? To start even simpler, why have a tutorial section that explains everything all at once? Maybe a tutorial section for the garden right before you start the garden section, then a tutorial section explaining other concepts as they arrive. The way it's setup right now, there's so much dialogue in the tutorial that by the time I'm getting to the third round of explanations, I'm like screw this I just wanna play, and at that point you're starting to lose me.

 

[Necrile]

Thanks for the advice! I'll be sure to work on it. Also, just a slight update...my friend played what I have of version 0.8 so far, and has 11 hours of gameplay to have maxed out gear, and nearly maxed out agility. According to him, while the game is slow to start, once you get into the complexity and understanding what's going on, it really gets addicting. I know a lot of game developers say this, but until I get into making more advanced tutorials, I would recommend spending sometime learning the game...because it does it get really fun once you know what you are doing.

 

[Necrile]

Why hasn't Necrile updated in 4 days?! OH GOD THE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US. Not really. I've been playing pokemon black. So much so that I have 30 hours in the game and it came out sunday. Not to worry though, while I have been playing pokemon black I have been thinking of ways to implement tutorials, because I have noticed the biggest turn off for this game seems to be people not understanding how to play. If anyone has ideas, please post them.

 

[Necrile]

I do apologize for the lack of updates recently. Still playing pokemon. Quite avidly, by the way. Just thought I'd update saying that I've come up with some really good new ideas to implement to get the player into the game with full knowledge of how to play, and will be releasing in the new version soon.

 

[seven]

It seems like the biggest bar to entry at this point is the tutorial. :x

At this point the player is forced to read a wall of text, but the game doesn't make any attempt to interact with the player. Even splitting up the text with basic concept checking- for example, not explaining a mechanic or feature until it becomes available and relevant to the player -could go a long way. Or explaining how to plant a bush or flower, then waiting until the player succeeds in doing so before moving on.

I think this video summarizes other people's criticism pretty well. In short, it would really help if the player learned more from playing the game than from reading.

I hope that helped somehow.

 

[Necrile]

That video is perfect. Somehow I knew most of that information, but it was good to hear it. I just needed a good idea for making the tutorial more interesting.

 

[Necrile]

Before I start developing it, I would like to hear some feedback for this idea for a tutorial. You start out as a group of cartographers, looking for the Flower of Immortality. You land on the island it is believed to be at, and you get a person specializing in the main segments of the game (a marksman for hunting food (combat), a herbalist for growing medicinal herbs (gardens), and an architect to build camp sites along the journey to the flower (building). Essentially the tutorial would be a game in itself, as a watered down and easy version of the actual game in a different format. What do you think? Would this be a good way of explaining the game, while adding some backstory?