New Demo Feedback

[Techbane #FreeHK]

Since much of my last thread no longer applies, I guess I may as well start here. :B

In brief, excellent update. Let's go with the base assumption that almost everything is an improvement, but here's a running tally of new issues off the top of my head:

• Main menu music defaulting to 100% just about blew my ears out on first startup. Cranked it down to match ingame music and Overall to 80%. And it's STILL kinda loud.
  
• Despite opting for the nonconfrontational opening (or maybe because I did?), upon building the starting tower all of my units are still permanently marked as Watched By Criminals and cannot pass unnoticed. Took a bit of trial and error to figure out that units hijacked AFTER building the tower are unaffected, and that doing a Murder Android for Registration also works to clear an affected unit (but is less efficient as long as you can still hijack more).
  
• Hijacked too many units early on. Was told to scrap a unit to be able to move them again, picked one from the list, and was under the impression I'd just been switched to the unit; ended up manually scrapping one more unit than necessary. At a suggestion, there should be an "Are you sure?" after picking a unit from the list, and SOME kind of audio feedback befitting a unit being scrapped since the visual cue is quite easily missable.
  
• Lessening the density of tutorials isn't entirely a good thing. Accidentally killed the first non-hostile target before figuring out how the new Force Conversation works, and I don't think Battle Recharge is actually explicitly explained at any point now, nor Take Cover, for how critically important they can be to use. I feel like the differentiation and relation between AP and Mental Energy was also kinda glossed over?
  
• I unlocked Use Consumable Item without even realizing it this time, and already have 3 different consumables I can use! Abilities in general definitely feel like they're being glossed over by the instructions now.
  
• Unlocked Investigations. Got blown up investigating a water treatment facility. Got the New Style of Investigation objective to get blown up investigating a water treatment facility several turns AFTER doing that.
  
• Borderline impossible to get a Technician to interact with a small enough structure (i.e. Scanner) if it ended its previous turn on said structure. Example: Tech exhausts all AP boosting construction of a Scanner. Next turn begins, Scanner can still receive further boosts, but after selecting the Tech, selecting the Scanner is next to impossible unless I waste an AP moving the Tech elsewhere first.

So, still a handful of gripes with onboarding, but what exists to be onboarded is definitely more interesting and intuitive.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

Hey, thanks a lot for taking a look again and giving updated thoughts.

Just as an up-front aside, there's a lock on adding or changing text until the 19th, because the last round of localization and then LQA needs to happen. So in this interim, I'm working on non-onboarding issues.

With that said, onboarding is still a huge focus, and I have a laundry list of things from FTUE testers that I need to implement after the 19th, and more is always good. The things that you mentioned are, in a lot of cases, I think new. I've added bugtracker entries as appropriate

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Re music: What sort of speaker setup do you have? I specifically bought some nicer headphones for mixing better, and things seem pretty balanced to me. I am trying to figure out what the differing factor is. I may just need to err on the side of making things to quiet, since that's less annoying than being too loud. Do you have like a sound bar and dedicated bass setup?

Re being watched by criminals: that's intended, there's no way around that. But you don't have to kill anyone. You will be followed no matter what you do, though. It just depends on by who.

Re hacking too many units: that's a result of a change from literally the last week, and it's an unintended consequence. I need to put up guard rails in the prologue. I've added a note to do that sooner than later: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=29974 Having a confirmation popup in general is not desirable there, since after you get further in, typically the workflow is to build your new unit that you want, and then figure out which unit(s) to scrap to make way. The lack of sound on scrapping is on my todo list for pre-the-19th, as well; others have also commented on that.

Re tutorial density: the general thing is that there are periods where players were running into a state of mental overload and getting angry. Certain things like taking cover are not strictly necessary, and people missing that is okay. The AP/ME note is something that others have also mentioned, it needs looking at. Battle recharge I'm not sure if that was mentioned by others, but it's important to fix, I agree. I've made some notes to look at these after the 19th: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=29973 In general, there is a really fine line to walk here with things.

With the whole conversation piece, and the fact that you can talk to people, if people miss that and just shoot their pursuers, I'm fine with that to an extent; I would rather they feel that they are in the game, and that the "talk to them" is an invisible choice (in game design lingo), rather than tutorializing that at that time. Talking to them gets backstory, but changes nothing (aside from getting some mechanical buffs) during the prologue. The first time that talking changes things is during early chapter one, and that mechanic is more highlighted then. Again, this is one of those super tricky lines to ride, based on a lot of feedback from a lot of people; tying to make sure that people don't hit information overload, while getting the important things. Which things can be touched on later, and which are critical for the first 5 minutes, is always tricky. Battle recharge, ME, and AP definitely are. Speaking can wait, if the player isn't motivated to figure it out on their own, I think; anything else risks too much mental overload. But it is something that will be revisited repeatedly by myself and Hooded Horse up through mid January, so that decision isn't final. It's just where my head is at at the moment.

Re consumables being kind of invisibly unlocked: Yep, there's a few things that are like that, based on the pendulum swinging a bit the wrong way there. That and a couple of other pieces in that section of the game need to be highlighted better, for sure. Added a note to return to this: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=29976

Re the water thing: that definitely doesn't sound right. I'm not 100% following what you're saying, but I've passed your note to the QA testers so that they can see about a repro and recommend fixes: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=29977

Re structural engineering issue -- yeah. I improved that a lot compared to what it was a few months ago, but I am going to have to look into this more and see what is going on there. It drives me a bit nuts as well. I've added a note: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=29978 That's one of those mechanical QoL things that just needs looking at sooner than later.

Anyhow, thanks a lot for the kind words and the notes. The sound thing is the trickiest one at the moment. I will probably just need to make things quieter all around as the default. The variance in everyone's sound setup is quite challenging. Headphones of various sorts, versus laptop speakers, versus really nice standalone speakers with bass boost give such different experiences for folks. I never really had this issue with any of my prior 12 games, which is odd, but maybe there are just more people with nicer speakers now. It's been 6 years since I was last launching a new game, so a fair bit has changed.

Thanks again!

[Techbane #FreeHK]

Just using an old pair of Bose headphones. I wouldn't call them fancy but they're well-balanced. I keep my system audio at 70% and it makes just about everything comfortably listenable; the new HOTM demo is one of, if not the first game that's actually been pronouncedly, blaringly loud for me out of the box. The old demo was loud-ish but not enough so that I felt the need to adjust it, much less jump straight into the audio settings before touching anything else.

My issue with the introduction of Force Conversation is more that it is something that the intro explicitly points out as a thing you can do, but then neglects to really explain how. Figured it out quickly enough, at least.

Investigations unlocking out of order I don't fully understand myself, but I think I had the function made available at the same time as the option to build wells, before I'd actually built them; then I did my initial probing while I was waiting a couple turns for resources to accumulate, got distracted with other stuff, and when I finally got around to building the wells it gave me the goal to do what I'd already done? Something like that.

Thanks for being so responsive to all this, it's a rarity to have this kind of line to someone involved with the game.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

First thing for the next build. We'll see how people react to this, and I may adjust further:

* Adjusted all of the volume mixing defaults, after ongoing notes from players. I think that having the audio be too quiet is a lot less likely to anger people than having it be blaringly too loud.
** Please note, I have also done this in a way that it will overwrite your existing settings if you're loading from an older version, so that you get the default intended experience no matter what. Feel free to then readjust to taste, and feedback is welcome.
** Specific changes:
*** Overall volume (which changes everything) is now defaulting to 80% instead of 100%
*** Main menu music volume now defaults to 90% instead of 100% (this is a double nerf to its volume because of the above).
*** In-game music volume now defaults to 85% rather than 88% (just a slight tuning, but as a whole it is nerfed a lot more because of the overall volume change. This may be too far, please le me know if so).
*** Ambient sound effects now defaults to 95% rather than 90%, increasing its overall presence in the now-quieter mix. If some of this is too annoying, then after the 19th, I may need to split out things like the rain and wind from the birds and vehicles in the background.

Will respond to the other points in a bit.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

Re: Force Conversation -- this is a tough issue. You are 100% correct. For me, I'm really kind of caught between two spots design-wise on this. On the one hand, I could handhold every player through absolutely everything in the prologue and chapter one, but then there's no room for anyone to figure anything out. And they don't feel like there is any aspect of them "actually figuring stuff out."

I look at Portal 1 as kind of an example, to some extent. The test chambers are all just the tutorial. Each one is a bounded set of things that teaches you some mechanic or concept. Then, just when you think the game is ending, the actual "real game" begins. This is kind of how I approached the prologue and chapter one for this game. These are "the portal test chambers." Chapter 2+ is "the game, now that you know all the basic bits."

The key thing about the portal 1 test chambers is that they are actually engaging, and don't FEEL like a tutorial, even though that's what they are. A big part of that is giving players a chance to miss some things, or figure out some shortcuts, and overall giving them puzzles to solve that make them internalize the logic of the game rather than just being spoonfed "do this, now do this," which is how for example Age of Empires as a series tends to treat its camapigns.

For a citybuilder series that really does this amazingly, Pharaoh and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom both do the same sort of thing, with a campaign that introduces mechanics over time, and it's a tutorial, but doesn't feel like it. But with those, the game just kind of ends when you finish the campaign, unless you want to play skirmish, IIRC. To me, that was the point where it should have instead switched into "okay, now you do it on your own, with all you learned."

So for something like force conversation, in the prologue, yeah it mentions you can do it -- that's the key to this puzzle. As a player, you can decide that you don't care at all, and that's valid to begin with. This is in no way required to progress. But if you do want to do the dialog thing, then you need to acclimate with the interface a bit. I think that this is a pretty good flow, because this is not me making you do a tutorial, but you being presented with a small puzzle (of sorts) and then figuring it out. The task in the upper right does say how to do it, but not a huge number of details.

Possibly the wording there or on Force Conversation itself just needs a tiny bit of tweaking, to lower the friction, and all my blathering about game design philosophy is pointless. Edit: I've gone ahead and made a ticket to remind myself to review this after the 19th: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=29982

But anyway, knowing that something is possible, but feeling like you can't be bothered and you're ready to move on, is empowering in its own way. And the game presents more options for you to get into conversations or debates later, or in fact just lets you miss it entirely, if you want. If someone spends 20 hours playing the game before they ever try that mechanic, I'm not going to be upset. The game is robust enough that they can ignore some content and be fine.

But -- possibly just a bit of extra words in one of those two spaces makes all of this redundant. In a broader sense, I'm explaining where I'm coming from with the onboarding. There are things that you really need to know, and things that would be really nice to know, and I'm only really forcing you to learn the former. It gives you more agency as a player, and helps reduce mental overload. BUT that said, I know in a few places I went too far with this, and you identified a few in your first post.

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On the investigations thing, I've added your notes to the ticket, and we'll see what QA says. We'll get that sorted out one way or another, and I appreciate the notes.

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Originally posted by Techbane #FreeHK:

Thanks for being so responsive to all this, it's a rarity to have this kind of line to someone involved with the game.

Cheers, my pleasure. It is my job. :) I am actually a solo developer at the moment (since May 2023), so aside from (quite a lot of) support from Hooded Horse as the publisher, it's just me. So I won't always be able to be this responsive to everything, especially as volume of posts increase again, but onboarding is really important to me.

I'm really grateful that Hooded Horse is providing QA services and a lot of FTUE and other services to help out with making it as smooth as possible, but ultimately I still have to synthesize the information that people give me, and turn that into some sort of change for the game.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

If you or anyone else seeing this wind up being interested in being a playtester, I should mention that you can sign up for that here: https://forms.gle/nNwEnzRyVPMS7bYg6

Because this is coordinated through discord, you do need to also join the game's discord server, but that's about it.

Having more people running through chapter two and onward is always a good thing.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

Several fixes related to your reports: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2001070/view/4454718637923632635

Cheers!