I have a proposition which I think can fix 90% of this communities issues...

[acanterelle]

This post is an invitation to the entire community of players, and also personally to Dom.

Something happened between the 30th of June, and the 6th of July that has inspired me to do something that I do not believe has ever been done before in this community.

I have made a 30 segment series of videos exploring various gameplay mechanics. When I started work on this, I didn't really even understand HOW I needed to go about doing this... I made a ton of **** ups, and repeatedly had to make little investigations into sources that probably 90% of players have never even thought to look at, and then pushed a little bit farther into looking for more information (and found interesting things) in places that I don't think even the current top 10 players have looked at before or thought about or know is even possible... and I want to prove that and I want to give everyone a couple of reasons to get excited about this.

Here's the first one. I have 327 hours of playtime. Last season I hit 49th out of 11,000 players, and then 29th out of 15,000 players. This season I used specific things I leared in the space of 7 days to hit 9th... in 24 days, I've only dropped to 12th and one of those slots was Babledude playing for the first time. Before jumping into a couple of suggestions, we HAVE to address something...

Between 30th of June and 6th of July, Dom released patch notes, originally without explanations of WHY. Immediately a ton of people kicked off with toxic comments... honestly, if you look at the 2.14 event discussion posts my initial reaction was also quite emotional. I would like this post to be an apology for calling the new update a cesspit.

But far more important, Dom has publicly apologised in the patch notes for upsetting people. I'm doing all of this in the hope that this game can finally be understood for what it actually is... I have read Dom's dissertation (and actually understand a lot of it because I have some specific experience with a whole host of the technical issues but do not have much experience coding game engines) and I want to give everyone an opportunity to understand this game such that Dom never has to appologize again and can get good feedback.

Here are the main sections of video content:
- 01 Basic movement
- 02 Basic Run setup experiments
- 03 Advanced run setup experiments
- 04 How I figured all of this out (with explanations of how my testing process evolved)
- 05 Further testing (I will be adding to this)

The crowning piece to this is an absolutely disgusting 20556 point run (which isn't my top score, but which is the refinement of what I have been exploring..) I can, and want to break this score and I'm sure I can when I have time to sit down and dedicate a couple of days to this.

I also have made a spreadsheet comparing last years top 10 and this years at the time I made all of these videos... of course this has shifted slightly and I want to add to it when I get the time.

Dom is absolutely dedicated to continuing to put out updates. He has a vision... I think I know what it is, but do actually proceed with this, he needs quality, objective feeback based on pure analysis free from emotional responses, and in return the community MUST have a better way of documenting and demonstrating what they are seeing and thinking, and to want to do that, everyone needs more incentive to play.

The launch of this game was roughly 25,000 units... this is public knowledge which I found in the very first guide posted for this game.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2698106720

The link is buried right at the very bottom of the guide. Please go check it out...
Then go look at Refunct which has 25,000 postive views and a thriving community.
Dom... how were you that successful with your first major release, get equally that many sales and then only get 1500 positive reviews for swarmlake? I need about a month to produce all of this and make it public but I have answers

To wrap up, here are my suggestions:
1. Go check out what I already have posted on my youtube (I highly suggest subscribing as there is a ton of stuff coming after I finish this that you might find interesting if you are intrigued by this post. Here's the link https://www.youtube.com/@acanterelle )

2. There is a schism between players right now... one half wants infinite floor, the other is happy with the new arena limit. I hated the new confined space at first but now it's just second nature because i've figured out how to abuse it... The best solution to this is to offer an infinite plane as a testing ground/tutorial with a number of small and easy additions in terms of explanation which doesn't break the consistency with the previous UI

3. The primary concern players have with the idea of two ladders is that it will split the player base... Here's my compromise. Start tracking and providing MORE stats and ladders on the same ladder. Have one ladder, but on any given run provide the following stats (and then let the players filter different ladders per run) for:
- Bombs hit in a run (most bombs hit in a run could be a new ladder with exactly the same number of runs)
- Gem effeciency... instead of tracking just most gems collected, track how many gems are LOST as well... player with highest score AND least gems lost is a whole new way of looking at the game... that's a whole new exciting ladder based on the first one. It's just a filter.
- Anyone have any other suggestions as to what other methods of filtering the ladder might be interesting? We can have one ladder UI with a very modest new method of displaying data which can be calculated AFTER the run by the replay engine to save on computation time during the run...

4. We absolutely need an easier way of recording, posting, and analyzing runs... I deeply suspect the easiest way to do this is with an alembic cache of the 6 main particle systems in the game (chargers, divers, chasers, bullets, gems, and bombs) and one motion tracked instance of the player model...

5. If that isn't practical, it would be very helpful to be able to change the opacity settings during replay of each type of enemy so that we can assess spawn patterns of bombs... IE just make every enemy transparent so we can see the player model 100% of the time, and where and how much gems are spawning/despawning.

6. It would be extremely helpful to also be able to just dump a video capture from a top down perspective. I spent over 3 hour just trying to win+alt+r screen capture the top 10 runs from 4 different angles to display the information I needed to potentially analyze gameplay strategies... Please make it easy for us to discuss your game engine with you and provide quality feedback.

Please do not put this in the 2.14beta chat... I'm going to add more when I have the time and I'm going to go back and reference things from literally every set of patch notes (because I've done that analysis as well if there is interest)

Lots of love to dom, to everyone playing this game, and special thanks also to Rubber chicken foot for bouncing around a ton of ideas that inspired all of this... particularly for immediately scrawling out bomb placement on a napkin and putting it in the discord XD, and for sticking with the initial batch of what must have sounded like completely unhinged things I needed to chat about to start this.

[RubberCF#4225]

while idk if i want seperate ladders for all that stuff, i do think having those as viewable stats would be very nice. it would require the game to keep track of more things which could slightly hurt performance but prob not a big deal.
the stat i most want to see is amount of enemies on the arena at any given time. it would be much easier to give advice based on enemy count instead of score, since not everyone will play at the same pace. its also a good way to give the player feedback on their pace, like if theres 1000 enemies and your score is only 500, you probably need to get faster. Just a small counter in the corner could do this. it would also bring more attention to the coolest thing about the game, which is the sheer volume of entities it can simulate

[Potentiality12]

volume? I think you mean number. It's like answering someone with an amount of time when asked for the distance (the time differs depending on how fast you travel from here to there), or mass vs. weight. Two things can have much different volumes but the same weight and mass, or can weigh the same but have differing masses and differing volumes. A googol of entities is a LOT of entities (1 x 10^100 entities = ten duotrigintillion, far fewer than the number of kg in the visible universe and even the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe), but if they're as small as your damage point, they might not consume any volume.

[Taehl]

I'm done playing this game until the invisible walls he added are removed. I thought this game was "Swarm LAKE", not "Swarm FISHBOWL". I don't buy games because they chain me to one tiny little area and never let me leave it. I couldn't give any less of a damn about the leaderboards fragmenting or not, that's NOT why I play games - the leaderboard is IRRELEVANT to players like me!

What IS relevant? Game feel. And you know what absolutely feels like ♥♥♥♥? Invisible walls.

Why is some leaderboard treated MORE IMPORTANT than how the game feels? (Hint: It's not, by a long shot.)

Anyone who wants to disagree with me, first you have to play the demo of Echo Point Nova, then come back here and try to explain how being stuck in a tiny fishbowl is a superior game experience to freedom of movement.

[RubberCF#4225]

Originally posted by Taehl:

I'm done playing this game until the invisible walls he added are removed. I thought this game was "Swarm LAKE", not "Swarm FISHBOWL". I don't buy games because they chain me to one tiny little area and never let me leave it. I couldn't give any less of a damn about the leaderboards fragmenting or not, that's NOT why I play games - the leaderboard is IRRELEVANT to players like me!

What IS relevant? Game feel. And you know what absolutely feels like ♥♥♥♥? Invisible walls.

Why is some leaderboard treated MORE IMPORTANT than how the game feels? (Hint: It's not, by a long shot.)

Anyone who wants to disagree with me, first you have to play the demo of Echo Point Nova, then come back here and try to explain how being stuck in a tiny fishbowl is a superior game experience to freedom of movement.

Originally posted by Taehl:

I'm done playing this game until the invisible walls he added are removed. I thought this game was "Swarm LAKE", not "Swarm FISHBOWL". I don't buy games because they chain me to one tiny little area and never let me leave it. I couldn't give any less of a damn about the leaderboards fragmenting or not, that's NOT why I play games - the leaderboard is IRRELEVANT to players like me!

What IS relevant? Game feel. And you know what absolutely feels like ♥♥♥♥? Invisible walls.

Why is some leaderboard treated MORE IMPORTANT than how the game feels? (Hint: It's not, by a long shot.)

Anyone who wants to disagree with me, first you have to play the demo of Echo Point Nova, then come back here and try to explain how being stuck in a tiny fishbowl is a superior game experience to freedom of movement.

i dont rlly see how the feel of another game matters to how this game should be. I think if you are trying to play well, you dont need to utilize the infinite floor anyways, you need to stick with and inside the swarm to keep it from collecting together very much, going in one direction for very long isnt a good idea, and i feel the walls add more to the game by giving you a way to gain a lot of altitude other than the swarm. but i also wouldnt hate it being removed.
the main issue though would be how to treat spawning, enemies spawns no longer depend on where the player is looking or positioned and i think that is for the better, though i havent played in a long time so idrk