Build 15

[craig]

Build 15 "Family and Friends" is now live!

Changes include:
* Enemies will now only drop one loot bag regardless of how they're killed.
* Enemy Armadas no longer receive buffs based on where they spawn.
* Miscellaneous bug/stability fixes.
Edit to add:
* Eliminate "swirly world" feature.
* Use 'C' key to swap between three different control schemes: non-swirly, swirly, and swirly-non-click-to-move


Enjoy!

Craig (Edit: and Rob)

And please reply to this thread with feedback on the test and on the game so far!

[amitp]

Thoughts:

• I like the animation when something drops and then flies into the slot at the bottom of the screen, or onto the side, or wherever. Don't know what all of these actually are but the animation is cool and helpful.
  
• After destroying an enemy building the squiggly tiles started turning into square tiles. Interesting.
  
• I find movement to be weird and disorienting. I think swirly world is probably fine but it's rotating when I don't expect it to, and that confuses me. Sometimes it feels like the tank is moving around on auto-pilot. I often feel like it's oscillating.
  
• If your servers are local, try running one ec2 instance on the west coast or singapore and run a server on it, and see how the game feels when there's more latency.
  
• The instructions say something about “towns” but I can't figure out what a town is. I think this is one of those things that's just harder when you use an unfamiliar setting, and you'll have to make things extra obvious. (Have you read Scott McCloud's “Understanding Comics”?)
  
• The tank graphics are nice. The big guys scare me!
  
• It's not all obvious from the UI what a “grid shard” or “socket” is. I see little lightning bolts on the right and various symbols in squares on the upper right and various symbols in squares at the bottom. What's what?
  
• How do I find the base?
  
• I like the quick auto-healing. I find it annoying to have to manage an inventory of health potions.
  
• The intro talks about square, pentagon, triangle sockets, but I'm not sure how to find square, pentagon, triangle shards. Or do they look different?
  
• The powerups are all “gray goo” and don't seem to provide noticably different gameplay. Compare this to games like 1942 where the powerups are very noticeable. If I don't notice it's not fun.
  
• I've not at all figured out how to build anything.
  
• I want health bars and keep using tooltips to get that information instead.
  
• Yay, I somehow upgraded the town of Origin to level 1.
  
• I like that you only change tanks in town.
  
• Am I “voting” on which buildings get built? If so, I strongly approve. :-)
  

[amitp]

Yay, the town of Origin is now level 2.

It'd be nice if the forum accounts and the in-game accounts were the same. On one hand it's never going to be a high priority to do this. On the other hand it's something that is harder to do later, and helps the community.

[rob]

Updated Build 15 to add some control scheme changes (see above).

Rob