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We do plan on having online leaderboards through Steam sometime soon and we're talking over a Daily Challenge mode which will have the same set of levels for every player each day for a more focused and competitive leaderboard.
Maybe in the next one, eh? :D
I'll be quite honest. I'm sick and tired of all of these local-coop-only games coming to Steam in the last year or so. This is Steam. A majority of PC gamers play with their friends and family online. It would make more sense to have both local and online in all fairness. Me and 3 of my other online friends were ready to purchase this game until we found out it was local only.
Worst of all, although some Devs are honest and say that they can't add Online MP, some of them are thickheaded and quite out there: "COUCH GAMING IS THE BEST WAY" or "YOU'RE JUST LOSERS WITH NO FRIENDS".
As I always say, Local is a nice feature. Online should be core.
If you can't make Online, it's unfortunate. Good luck with your next game and let's hope that the "natural selection" of the video game world won't hurt you too much.
But if you can but don't *want* to?
Please...
The main reason that Arclight wouldn't be an easy one to get online is that it just has so many moving parts and physics and syncronising those matters both to the gameplay and the appearance. If we could do it and just have it so the physics elements weren't synced visually, we would give it a shot but the fact that it ties so closely with gameplay means it's impossible on our budget.
Our next project is a step towards us building a game that would be simpler to get working online though as we've certainly noticed people really want it! Looking into turn based game systems though so it may not appeal the same way this does. The sad thing is that the part making Arclight kinda unique, its hectic nature, also makes it really tough to work over networks.
I think it's also why there's been a boom of local games, especially in the indie field. It's cheaper to do on the limited budgets most of us work on. Arclight Cascade and the studio set up cost us almost £30K over the past 8 months and we only just got our own office this week! (Thanks to our local university giving us cheap rent.)
I'd love to revisit the game in the future and we still have patches and content ideas for this game too, but we'll only get a chance to do more if we can sustain ourselves on our projects or get publisher interest. A publisher funded sequel with a larger team (There's 4 of us, currently!) developing the game would be awesome to work on in a few years!
As I implied earlier, I 100% understand the troubles an indie studio can go through, as well as the notion that some games are more difficult to design Online for than others.
So, if you ever *do* manage to add Online to this - or include it in your next project - then great.
I was just focused on the notion that not including it on purpose is... Annoying, to say the least.
We're actually hoping to talk to some of the guys from Unity tomorrow to consider feasability of adding it into this so late, no promises or gaurantees but it's something we're seriously looking into if we can establish a good relationship with a publisher and a deal to get us some more funds!
I'm stun that you didn't have any reviews on your Store Page.
Because, your game seems very enjoyable !
Local coop/versus is a MUST-HAVE.
Online is (from my viewpoint) for that game very bad: one LAG and the gameplay will be affected!
Like also the fluid-gameplay: It's quick and smooth if this is like on the video !
Did the game feature some A.I bots (or in a future version) ?
(since I haven't friends that love that kind of game)
We were working on an idea based around a gem type enemy with a sword but it was scrapped as it just wasn't fun to fight against! I built the 23 single player levels myself to make sure there was something to do for those playing alone but I'm not sure we could stretch it to bots, it's something to think about though!
I am however thinking about adding more levels for multiplayer and single player in a later update. It depends if we have time while we're also doing other work to keep the company going! We'd really like to keep coming back to Arclight and adding new stuff but we're not sure how sustainable that is.
We'll only do online if we manage to get it working and working smoothly! I wouldn't be happy releasing a patch for that with shoddy physics or bad data transfer just to get it online.
Certainly, it will be! But yes.. Smart bots in a game like that is a challenge.
I have perhaps some ideas (in addition to that) to tell at the end of this post.
Yeah, bots are tied to a pattern and pathfinding (if not IA given), but that also not natural to fight against an ennemy that make always same action. So the fun is generally affected and it go to create boring gameplay.
I understand, but glad you thing always to adding some special bots.
More levels is always welcomed!
Just not retain you to do that :) Add them :D
And it is a GOOD and SOLID vision of the gameplay, thumbs up, Yay!
In past years I played to a game named Perfect Dark. (on N64)
A great and solid FPS game in SOLO and MULTIPLAYER against bots mode!
I just loved how we was able to add bots with a defined pattern or a random one.
There was:
...
So.. I know that the game you developped is not a FPS (hehe), but if you can add a "Pattern feature choosable mode" to bots, this will be perhaps more fun against fighting to a precise pattern (fixed one) bot behavior !
Also, I have an another suggestion:
Add a mirror mode:
a 2 Player mode that where players have a DOUBLE of them that react like a mirror (inversed one).
-- If you move to the left, then the Mirrored version of the player move to the right
-- If you hit the ball to the left, then the Mirrored version of the player hit the ball (when it has) to the right side !
You follow what I mean?
Waiting for answers!
I can think of a few states we could use to get a Bot working but I'd also still worry a bit about how it was targeting other things to hit. Those state suggestions are a lot like how we designed our base enemies though! Simple systems that are easy to learn and respond to while the screen gets filled with complications all at once! It's designed more around having lots of simple things to tackle than one complex thing.
We mostly settled on enemies that were satisfying to kill more than a distinct challenge. It's based around making players feel great for all kills to keep the energy high than to provide a challenge. It should lend itself to replayability, hopefully anyway! Especially if I can pump out a few more levels with more time to relax as the single player stuff that is there was actually only built in 3 days! >__> (Pre-launch week was a rush!)
Thanks for playing and your responses! We're thinking about streaming development on and off in the future, we'd love this sort of stuff to go on in the comments sometimes! :D Our hope is to make Hexdragonal an open and communicative studio that tries to involve players in what we're up to as early as we can, but that's been hard to get going this early in our lifetime.