Build 21

[rob]

Hello to all the Grid 12 testers!

Sorry for not being more communicative over the last week. My game-design consigliere amitp was in town and we were working hard on all sorts of issues, to the detriment of forum posting.

I just pushed build 21. Here are the changes:

* At each socket levelup, pause gridshard depositing for 1 second
* Add burst effect at building levelup
* Add building level markers underneath buildings
* Rename Homer, Tesla, Bluto and Ash to Scorpion, Hurricane, Hercules and Cobra.
* Adjust stats of Ash/Cobra and Tesla/Hurricane
* Add Spectre tank class
* Eliminate wilderness buff, pane cracks and most HUD elements from tutorial
* Autocall /who at server join
* Embed font
* Add error screen when build number is mismatched
* Highlight tank menu only within town borders
* Make town prefixes much less common
* Increase the socket density within towns
* Make town locations less streaky and more random-looking
* Add chatbox notification on research level change

Thank you so much for playing! Please post comments/suggestions/gripes here.

Rob & the Grid 12 team

[amitp]

I like the design foundations. I'm pondering whether there are indirect ways in which the game breaks them:

• Scorpion tank range is high enough that I can just sit somewhere and shoot at enemies without them noticing. On one hand the quick fix is to lower the range. But I think we should instead look at this as a preview of what happens when everyone's range is buffed.
  
• Of course I want the range buffed, if you ask a player. But what happens? The combat becomes uninteresting, if I do what's optimal. If I put shards into buffing global range, and you behave in combat the way that's optimal for you, then my action has made the game less fun for you.
  
• With the Ground Fortress, shooting at it triggers counterattacks that last for a while. This makes the area less safe to pass through. My actions (attacking but not killing a Ground Fortress) can negatively affect your travel plans. It's a mild effect, I admit. Are there other situations like this, where someone can kite an enemy into a place where another player could have expected to be safe?
  

[linkshot]

When buildings load, they do the "creation" burst effect. Pretty snazzy!

[rob]

Linkshot,

That effect may look neato, but it's unintended. I'll file a bug.

Rob

[linkshot]

Yeah, it will definitely drive down performance rates as towns expand

[zuboki]

Sorry for not being more communicative over the last week. My game-design consigliere amitp was in town and we were working hard on all sorts of issues, to the detriment of forum posting. - We still love you. "Consigliere" is a great word.

I just pushed build 21. Here are the changes:

* At each socket levelup, pause gridshard depositing for 1 second
-This is pretty nice, but sometimes the sockets can resume and squeeze a few more out of you while you start to drive away. Maybe 1.5 seconds would help?
* Add burst effect at building levelup
-Also helpful, see above.
* Add building level markers underneath buildings
-This is wonderful. I still think the buildings could use a bit more flair design wise, but on a practical level, seeing all of the building levels at a glance is muy bueno.
* Rename Homer, Tesla, Bluto and Ash to Scorpion, Hurricane, Hercules and Cobra.
-Cool! Now all of us earlier testers have something to feel elite about. I can't wait to exclusively use the old names just to confuse/annoy new people.
* Adjust stats of Ash/Cobra and Tesla/Hurricane
-I do like that the Tesla can kill things without requiring a substantial Green boost. As for the Ash- the twin front shields were essentially the only strategy required with it. Could we keep those, but make them weaker? I just like the feeling of doing something as I sit around sneezing, even if it is just rotating my shields.
* Add Spectre tank class
-Seems good so far. I'm not so sure about the shields- they seem too similar to the Tesla's. High offensive power + single targeting + good range seems to be balanced compared to the likes of the Tesla and Ash, but further testing is needed.
* Eliminate wilderness buff, pane cracks and most HUD elements from tutorial
-Yeah, I noticed that, but never said anything... Glad you fixed it. I'm a bad tester.
* Autocall /who at server join - Like it.
* Embed font- Not sure what this means, but okay cool.
* Add error screen when build number is mismatched - Useful.
* Highlight tank menu only within town borders
-Again, noticed this before, glad it's fixed, awful tester here.
* Make town prefixes much less common
-I do like the new town names. They feel more modern, which is good stylewise.
* Increase the socket density within towns
-I think it's a bit much? I get a lot of FPS slowdown in fully built towns now. even spacing them out more would be a little better. Or maybe it just needs some coding optimization. My coding days are behind me, so I don't know anything.
* Make town locations less streaky and more random-looking
-Much appreciated. I have a sneaking suspicion amitp had something to do with this?
* Add chatbox notification on research level change
-Pretty cool.

Thank you so much for playing! Please post comments/suggestions/gripes here.

Rob & the Grid 12 team

[amitp]

About Spectre:

-Seems good so far. I'm not so sure about the shields- they seem too similar to the Tesla's. High offensive power + single targeting + good range seems to be balanced compared to the likes of the Tesla and Ash, but further testing is needed.

Yes, the shields are inspired by the asymmetry of the Tesla's shields, but in addition, Spectre has asymmetric offense. If that wasn't enough, the asymmetry of the defense and asymmetry of the offense aren't aligned, so you have four sections:

• small area in front is strong offense + strong defense
  
• small area in back is no offense + weak defense (sontarans!)
  
• large area on right is strong offense + weak defense (like your right hand holding a spear if you're a greek hoplite)
  
• large area on left is no offense + strong defense (like your left hand holding a shield if you're a greek hoplite)
  

You only have one gun and it only points front and right. This tank is unusual enough that it'll take more testing to figure out whether this is at all fun…

About embedded fonts: the fonts will look nicer. :-)

About town locations: you know me well. :-)

[zuboki]

I-I-It's not like I'm your fanboy, or anything... I mean, I can usually pry myself away from your the articles on your games page after 2 hours of reading... </tsundere>

[linkshot]

I think the only memory issue with large towns right now is the accidental "building creation" particle burst whenever they draw.

[odin]

Just thought I'd post some of my typing issues after my chat with Rob in game.

Whenever I try to type at normal speed the client misses anywhere from 1/2 to 1/6 of my characters - this does not occur in any other part of my user experience with OSX, however occasionally it does occur when I'm playing realm.
•I'm on Mac OSX version 10.7.2, on a 2006 Mac Pro
•Flash Version 11.4.402.265
•Chrome Version 21.0.1180.89, most up to date

I might have included some extraneous information, but I suppose that more is better than less

If you want me to, I can post a private YouTube video for ya, accessible by link only.

Other than that I haven't noticed any issues, though that is most likely because I've only played it for about 20 minutes and still don't fully grasp how the entire game works. The only parts that I do grasp are due to my experience with Steel Chaos :/

[linkshot]

Probabaly a user-end issue, but when I start playing at maximized window (Windows 7 32-bit home edition, 1336x768 Landscape, latest Chrome) part of the bottom (about 100 pixels?) doesn't load (just light blue space) and I have to restore -> maximize to make it fill.

Tumblr does this to me, too.

EDIT: Maximized, not fullscreen.

[remm]

Alright, here are my thoughts after playing this for the first time today. As a preface, it was after about an hour or more that I realised my beer had gone warm. And I like beer; it was a coconut milk stout.
Anyway.
My thoughts in chronological order.

When the game started, I loved the music. It really set the theme.
The tutorial felt a bit hurried, and I didn't really remember much of it.
I was surprised how close enemies were to town. I guess I was expecting a bit of empty distance, or a more well defined town edge.

I was disappointed by the lack of skill needed to kill my first ground fortress, because once I found a safe spot, I just sat and fired at it. At later ones I did, I had the most fun when there were no safe spots and I had to time my passes through into the danger area, but because of the amount of hitpoints of it, it did take even longer.

After getting hurt pretty significantly, I wondered if I healed automatically because I wasn't healing for quite a while at least. I went all the way back to town to see if I healed there, and I did. So for a while I thought that I had to go to town to heal. I wondered how my shield was regenerating. Later on I figured that if I wasn't hurt after some time frame, the shield/health would begin to regen automatically.

My tank tries to drive through buildings if they happen to be in the way. It can be a bit of a problem because the buildings form a sort of random barrier around the quite unremarkable town socket. Why is the town socket so...normal?

When I first unlocked the mustang, that was exciting. Three shield and three guns! That was the first real sense I was progressing somewhere.
Because of the limited angle of the guns on it, I felt myself wanting to turn on the spot to aim better. But I guess that's part of the skill of the game; to be able to orient your tank in a way to deal damage efficiently.
I wasn’t interested in crystal splinters; I did not know what they did. I wasn’t interested in prisms; I did not know what they did (only later did I realise that the reward for a set of 5 was a lot of gridshards). I was only out there for the gridshards. And because the nearby enemies were weaker and gave the same amount of gridshards, I stayed close to town after spending a short while out far away.

I wanted to find out if the weaker enemies were weaker because they were far from the origin, or far from towns. I tried building a town (level 0 to 1) to see if that would weaken the surrounding enemies, and to my dismay it didn’t. I buffed Parchomenko up to level 3, built an extractor and a lab and the enemies didn’t disappear, or get weaker. So, while waiting to kill the ridiculously strong enemies that stayed alive but were effectively paralysed inside the town area, I made another character. The frame rate became noticeably lower, and this is a laptop that can run 4 windows of rotmg without losing frame rate. I might try this on a weaker computer I have here to see how playable it is. Also, straight away I picked up a better range prism than was on my main, which was a little disappointing.

As for bugs, with the tank selection menu up, I could still highlight over buildings that were hidden behind the menu.
Most of the time the highlight on the tank menu was off when I was away from towns, but I did notice one time that it was highlighted while I was out hunting. However, it wouldn't let me open the menu to change tank because I was outside the town area.
Also, I could be sitting on a socket, but because my target was inside the building area, I would be ‘moving’ and therefore couldn’t deposit gridshards into the socket.
Even with some nice damage boosts, I think the Hurricane still didn’t do more than 10 damage per shot.

One thing I didn't like was the ridiculous strength of the enemies far away from the civilisation (I saw enemies with over 100x the hitpoints), and the complete lack of incentive to try and kill them.
I mean, it's fine to not kill them, but even the enemies with a single buff above the minimum (600HP buildings, compared to the normal 300HP) have no reason to be killed. They take at least twice to three times as ling as long to die, and the loot is identical.

There wasn't really an incentive to create towns. Once there are two or three large towns back in the safe area, it takes a long time to level up every building to stage 4 or more. I saw many empty sockets in these towns.
There should never be empty sockets in a well established town. That tells you that either there are too many sockets available, or the bonus from building them seems like it's not worth the time.
Maybe it would be better to have less buildings in a town, and to give more levels to the buildings. I get the whole idea of building more towns in order to get more buildings of each type, and to get cheaper upgrades at the lower levels, but the balance isn't quite right there for that yet. With so many nearby towns, and so many buildings in each, there is quite simply an abundance of buildings.

I have more to say, but this post is pretty long already.

[amitp]

odin: you might try another browser to see if the keyboard problem goes away. I've had bad luck with chrome and keyboard and flash, not only on grid12 but also other sites. Not sure why.

[frogboffin]

Grid 12 is looking great!

I spent a couple of hours playing the game now, mostly with Stupidity.

I'll start with the first thing people see in the game, the tutorial.
"Click here! --- Now Here!" Seems quite unnecessary, wouldn't a single popup saying "Use the mouse to move your tank!" work to explain to players the first and most important control. What about a simple slalom at the start of the tutorial which will accustom the players to turning and moving.

"Gun Awarded!" - What am I being awarded for? Being able to move?

I could go through the whole tutorial but I think it just needs more explanation towards the controls and game objectives.

Speaking of more control explanation, it took me over an hour to figure out I could rotate my tank on the spot by dragging away from my tank.

It took me a minute after the tutorial to realize that the squares around me were building and not portals, I think that the teleporter in the tutorial made me think that I had to go through another teleporter to fight the enemies. (Or maybe my head was stuck in Realm land still)

After realizing that The enemies were around the town and there were other towns, I felt like I had most of the basics down and I could start working towards goals. The first thing to do is to kill things! I noticed I was picking up different things. Most commonly the Gridshards. After learning from Stu that the gridshards could be applied to sockets to make/improve buildings/towns, I knew that they were the base form of currency/experience. I don't know how long I would've gone not knowing to apply Shards to sockets.

From there I've helped find a few new towns and learnt from Rob about how to increase the global research level. On my own I was not aware that both Extractors and Labs need to reach the goal to increase the research level.

Other bonuses I picked up were applied automatically, this worked nicely as I don't have to worry about them too much and they reward simply playing the game.

After playing a while I decided to go exploring the buffed areas. After finding a few more towns to the west it seems that the research levels on expand the debuff zone from around the Origin town which it feels like I should be able to find a town and have a localized debuff zone around it. (Maybe from some kind of specialized building from within that particular town.)

Anyway, after travelling further out past the towns, I was in constant red zone buff, but the enemies kept getting stronger the further I went out. I managed to reach a ground fortress with more than 6 million HP. Considering I do about 10-40 damage per shot with the global/personal bonuses, it shouldn't be possible to reach this far.

It's possible to get that far away from origin due to the slow moving enemies all aligned in a grid. Simply driving in-between the grid while avoiding the supertank turrets you could go on to the end. Bearing in mind most enemies will 1 hit you at that distance.

Here's a few bugs I've encountered so far.

Building tooltips can be seen through the Tank select UI.

Occasionally the Chat will disappear and you wont be able to chat. (No idea how to replicate this but I think it have something to do with teleporting/dying)

Shards being deposited into a building while I'm moving away.

Edit: You can shoot through buildings.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

[mcfarvo]

I could echo a lot of frogboff's sentiments and observations. I was rather flummoxed outside of controlling my vehicle. I will have to read a lot more on the forum and learn a lot more from more experienced players before I actually know enough about the game to contribute fully. Fortunately, on my first outing I had amitp and HGK to help. ty /goto and /tele

As far as asthetics, I'm sure you'll improve the START screen. Otherwise, the old school tank/tron graphics are cool. The music is decent too!

Concerning possible bugs/expected behavior: I saw some shooting through buildings (shooting over them?) and at times shooting into the ground (or enemy hitbox was off?). Not bad at all for b21! /bravo

I only played a lil' bit, less than an hour I think... HI HO SILVER!