It Begins!
Added 2015-09-21 13:55:12 +0000 UTCStraight from Blue Bishop's tired claws, to you:
After many months of hard work I can finally reveal my 'Early Alpha' build of a Flash FS for you! Using Fenoxo's open-source UTG as the base, only the bare-bones, placeholder UI and some trivial but functional elements remain from that base, and you'll find it diverges quite a bit from Fen's games in terms of base mechanics, remaining loyal to FS's i7 origins.
Note that this milestone only contains the absolute bare essentials for the game: combat, room navigation, inventory and item management, infection, basic exploration and scavenging, and self examination. Players should not expect to find anything more than a few random events and two different monsters when exploring, and the game's length is only 7 days.
A more in-depth breakdown of what's planned with Flash FS will be produced at the main blog later this day.
Comments
I can confirm it works using wine to run flash projector, on linux. ^^
Dewey
2015-10-10 17:24:55 +0000 UTCYou've raised some points which were issues we were aware of from the onset. No matter what solution we pick in the end, there will be some functionality changes. Our hope is to search for solutions to these issues. We have plans to improve on several of the aspects you've mentioned, but it's far too early for attempting that yet. What you're seeing now is a very minimal initial starting point, but much will change. This new platform is in its infancy and much will change and grow over the coming months. And that's where your feedback and the feedback of the other fans comes in. Pointing this stuff out and offering solution suggestions now will help guide us going forward. We devs can come up with ideas, but the more ideas on how to improve the basics will improve the product in the long run. As for your specific points, here's some feedback and ideas we've discussed: - Lots of mouse movement and button swapping: This was always a minor frustration of mine with CoC back when I played it. It by no means was a deal breaker, but did wear on my hand during long sessions or grinding. As mentioned, we have plans for activating hotkeys soon for the main 6 buttons, which would make using them much more fluid. I've also put forth ensuring the 'Next' button is aligned with the chosen button or made into a large button covering the whole space, though that may be unnecessary with the advent of hot keys. - Text gameplay: As a touch-typer, I also took to this well. But not all our players are swift or accurate typists, so it will likely be an improvement for them, if not for you and I personally. Still, it is my hope that hotkeys will curb that somewhat. - Combat: I'm not sure we'll be able to restore something as straightforward as 'enter-to-keep-fighting', as that was a 'feature' that appeared, not a planned outcome. You're quite right that we'll want combat to flow w/o loads of unnecessary mousing/keystrokes, and we'll have to think on this. It seems like it's getting to the point I'll need to sit down and re-math combat/creatures. - Scrollback: I think this is a feature we're going to unfortunately lose in this version. As great as it is, I don't think we'll be able to maintain it.
TigerStripes
2015-09-23 01:23:22 +0000 UTCThe assertion here is built on the base assumption that the game's mechanics, post-overhaul, will continue to encourage this sort of behaviour. Your autocombat example, for example, may become entirely irrelevant with changing design philosophy; everyone on the team agrees that combat needs to be much more interesting, moving forward, and that the overall grind needs to be taken down several pegs, so subsequently combat may become too involved to abide such errant keyboard-bashing. Regarding hunting, as stated in the blog, you'll hunt from a list of creatures and events you've encountered before or have been hinted at elsewhere. Presumably, a cheat will be available to circumnavigate this, but otherwise that's the plan over there. Overall, I think we can all agree that skimming content for large stretches of time in order to grind experience or items isn't in keeping with the core intent of the game. CoC fell for this same trap, and we'd like to avoid it.
Flexible Survival
2015-09-22 22:09:15 +0000 UTCpossibly? but how is hunting for specific creatures/missions going to work? plus, a hotkey system still is a lot more to have to deal with than pressing up and return to re-do previous actions, or holding down return to atuocombat till you see you hp drop and need to act. Plus being able to see previous action with screen clearing turned off is great, being able to see what you were doing a screen ago is a lot less jarring and makes it easier to remember what you were doing in the world. I mean, no offense of course, i love this game. And I've played a lot of Corruption of Champions and T.I.T.S, and while fenoxo is great, and I love his storytelling, both platforms always felt clunky and time consuming, even at their most polished. I always fond myself coming back to FS not just for the content, but also because the UI was just so much easier to use. My 2 cents.
Halley Valentine
2015-09-22 21:34:47 +0000 UTCIt's a bit too early to highlight the functionality issues of the presently-barebones UI. The whole matter exists in this state purely as proof that it works, and is not focused on how it feels in your hands. I'm certain, once the UI is cleaned up and hotkeys are implemented, interaction with the gamespace will be a lot smoother.
Flexible Survival
2015-09-22 19:52:32 +0000 UTCI know this is in a really early stage, but this is kind of awful...I mean I know you worked hard on it, but the way you have to interact with the menu and buttons is totally backward to the way the text inputs in the previous version were. it was way easier and better to type or click hotlink then to bounce back and forth between buttons. And this is not just "I liked it better before! New stuff is bad!" complaining, its really clunky and difficult. The ease of the old system was the ability to press up and find previous text inputs you had used and hit return. you didn't have to search with a mouse, the whole game could and often was better played with just text inputs. the hyperlink were a convenience, but the game ran very quickly and smoothly with just text. If this is the direction you are going, are you still going to be using the old style interface as well? cause I'm not kidding, this is kind of killing it for me, and I can't be alone on that.
Halley Valentine
2015-09-22 18:16:48 +0000 UTC
