So what's the easiest way to kill enemies

[Holodeck Janitor]

I stopped using weapons because they turn into a worthless toothpicks after a couple of swings, but even punching enemies takes 20 years because they all have 4000 HP. What's an easy strat to cheese enemies to death?

[William Shakesman]

You eventually get stronger weapons on the loot tables if you keep playing. In addition, getting upgrades that give bonus damage to backstabs help a lot. You can kill some of these dudes pretty quick with those.

But the most effective ways? Arrows and in-fighting, especially with the headshot arrow upgrades. In fighting just gives incredible results.

[Flare]

^William is right! I normally try to scope out areas first to figure out how to turn any hostiles on each other, or use the environment to my advantage. Skeletons in particular tend to be quite vengeful, and will even fight braziers if they're damaged by fire.

Aside from using your environment, pooling skills into damage from melee or stealth is pretty useful. Magic is always in that grey area where it's not meant to be directly combative, but adds to your environment, so if you play it smart, any playstyle can work well.

..and yes, this includes setting flaming crates around for skeletons to run into.

[DeLastOne]

Originally posted by William Shakesman:

You eventually get stronger weapons on the loot tables if you keep playing. In addition, getting upgrades that give bonus damage to backstabs help a lot. You can kill some of these dudes pretty quick with those.

But the most effective ways? Arrows and in-fighting, especially with the headshot arrow upgrades. In fighting just gives incredible results.

But how ? when you could shoot your 100 arrows the game won't let you...

[Flare]

Originally posted by DeLastOne:

Originally posted by William Shakesman:

You eventually get stronger weapons on the loot tables if you keep playing. In addition, getting upgrades that give bonus damage to backstabs help a lot. You can kill some of these dudes pretty quick with those.

But the most effective ways? Arrows and in-fighting, especially with the headshot arrow upgrades. In fighting just gives incredible results.

But how ? when you could shoot your 100 arrows the game won't let you...

Arrow firing is unfortunately inconsistent right now. This is on our to-do list for the next update.

[Cat of Darkness]

Originally posted by Flarechess:

Originally posted by DeLastOne:

But how ? when you could shoot your 100 arrows the game won't let you...

Arrow firing is unfortunately inconsistent right now. This is on our to-do list for the next update.

I don't know if I'd use "inconsistent" to describe arrow firing currently. They're pretty consistently not working.

[Holodeck Janitor]

Originally posted by Flarechess:

Originally posted by DeLastOne:

But how ? when you could shoot your 100 arrows the game won't let you...

Arrow firing is unfortunately inconsistent right now. This is on our to-do list for the next update.

I really hope performance and consistent framerate are at the top of that list. I just got to that titan abyssal key mission and the game became unplayable because of bad framerate there. Also the switch didn't work when I put a mana core in it and I discovered a room where I could walk up stairs and suddenly i was underwater.

[Flare]

The arrows are tricky because sometimes they work, and sometimes they entirely disappear. Our engineers are tracking this pretty extensively this week since we'd like to fix it for our next hotfix planned for this week.

The performance issues are also being looked at, especially since the later levels tend to chug. They need at least the same amount of polish as the first few levels, which were heavily optimized because they were some of the earlier levels completed and had the most actionable QA time.

[DeLastOne]

Originally posted by Flarechess:

The arrows are tricky because sometimes they work, and sometimes they entirely disappear. Our engineers are tracking this pretty extensively this week since we'd like to fix it for our next hotfix planned for this week.

The performance issues are also being looked at, especially since the later levels tend to chug. They need at least the same amount of polish as the first few levels, which were heavily optimized because they were some of the earlier levels completed and had the most actionable QA time.

I can relate to the arrow. It is a real new concept on video games. It is not like it is something you learn day one at dev school. Those RPG gamers are so annoying with their habit to throw stuff at ennemies...

[Cat of Darkness]

Originally posted by DeLastOne:

Originally posted by Flarechess:

The arrows are tricky because sometimes they work, and sometimes they entirely disappear. Our engineers are tracking this pretty extensively this week since we'd like to fix it for our next hotfix planned for this week.

The performance issues are also being looked at, especially since the later levels tend to chug. They need at least the same amount of polish as the first few levels, which were heavily optimized because they were some of the earlier levels completed and had the most actionable QA time.

I can relate to the arrow. It is a real new concept on video games. It is not like it is something you learn day one at dev school. Those RPG gamers are so annoying with their habit to throw stuff at ennemies...

To be fair, I'm almost done with my minor in game development, and its not something taught in school. Can't speak for other schools, but we were taught the bair bone basics in terms of programming: object oriented programming and scripting revolving around creating and removing game objects as needed including enemy and player spawning/despawning, UI implementation and design, and all the math/coding we'd need to manipulate those objects as needed (rotations, position transformations, hitboxes.) It really was just the basics of those, with demonstrations using only a few examples, after that we were expected to learn hands-on by creating a game as the final for each class. If we wanted to have enemies spawn from different locations we had to use what we were taught to expand upon the basic spawning method we were taught...

That all being said, especially in unity, a functioning arrow doesn't seem too hard to make: When bow is equipped and on left click input, create game object with a physics colider and apply X acceleration horizontally. If object collides with another object with the "enemy" tag, deal damage via a function call you have somewhere, and destroy that arrow object. This doesnt cover "charging"/drawing your bow string but it should be enough for a working arrow.

If I had to guess on why arrows currently aren't working, it probably has something to do with colliders. Maybe the collider for arrows are too big or theres a non-clippable game object (like a checkpoint that tells the game to load something) inapropriately tagged as an enemy, so the destroy trigger on arrows are inapropriately invoked. Or it could be that the trigger is not properly coded and arrows are destroying themselves when colliding with something that shouldnt be destroying them.

[Ryan Fenton]

In Unity specifically, there's a standard practice of using fixed collections of pre-allocated object that rotate, replacing the oldest when a new one is created - so you only have say, 20 arrows active in a scene at any one time.

The problem is if something is either scripted to consume an arrow on occasion, or else programmed to not 'give up' its slot in the set - then it's possible this bug is just the arrow object being used somewhere else after a lot of shooting arrows randomly resulting in no new arrows being generated.

[Cat of Darkness]

Originally posted by Ryan Fenton:

In Unity specifically, there's a standard practice of using fixed collections of pre-allocated object that rotate, replacing the oldest when a new one is created - so you only have say, 20 arrows active in a scene at any one time.

The problem is if something is either scripted to consume an arrow on occasion, or else programmed to not 'give up' its slot in the set - then it's possible this bug is just the arrow object being used somewhere else after a lot of shooting arrows randomly resulting in no new arrows being generated.

Thats not just unity, its a pretty common optimization technique (from my limited knowedlge). Going back to what you mentioned, are you saying that you think all arrows (even single, non-flying) are all sharing the same item count? Theoretically then, firing an arrow should move around arrows objects, moving an old one to the firing point and giving it an acelleration. If thats the case they're probably not "moving around" properly. For something like arrows, that become non-interactable objects after a certain condition, it seems more efficient just to instantiate and destroy them as needed instead of moving them outside the interactable area each time you want to remove them.

[Ryan Fenton]

True that it's common general technique - but it's part of basically every lesson set you see on Unity optimization, where it was just a minor trick that folks used in most general game engine design.

The issue is that some folks apply the approach blindly, causing side effects when you try to script around those same objects.

[Flare]

Unrelated to the original topic, but we actually figured out the arrow issue (which, I should have been clearer, only popped up within the launch build and not before that.)

We had a high (as in, "tall") kill volume that was carrying over from the first swamp level after you left, which meant that your arrows disappeared because you were essentially shooting into a void as soon as you fired. This is being fixed for the next hotfix this week.