Hey all,
Lots of improvements! Another new NPC has been added to help expand the story. I’ve also fixed a myriad of movement bugs with the NPCs & they should now be able to swim. I’ve got lots to do, so I’m going to get right back to work!
Check out the version history for more!
There was a potential bug in the older version checking system, so I need to add these lines as a workaround:
Latest version: v0.27a
Latest Version: v0.27a
– Phr00t
3089: An Action RPG 
Where is the best place to talk about 3089, there is no forums link on the blog page?
I bought the game and it look good so far.
I don’t know if you plan to change those thing but here 2 things that easily turn me off right now:
– the cloud are annoying, I had a quest to see a npc and the npc was on a small island in the air, I had a telelocator, but I had to aim carefully to get on the island, but then the cloud got in front of me and I could not aim properly, I had to wait until it pass.
– the other problem I have is the auto-slide, I hate that whenever i’m trying to stand still I keep sliding slowly and it was really annoying when I was doing the quest I just talked about on the very small island in the sky because shorly after actually getting on the island, beside the fact that the npc that was supposed to give me something and end up shooting me, I slided off the island and it was not because of the npc.
p.s: I already bought the game, but I still think 10 min for the demo is too short, between 20 and 30 min would be better, when I tried the demo I had to start over 30 sec after actually getting a gun.
Thank you for your support 🙂
This is the best place, for now, to talk about 3089! I read everything here!
I do want to create an http://www.indiedb.com forum, but I don’t really want to open 3089 to ratings just yet (since the game has lots of work still left to be done to it & ratings on the site are forever!).
Sounds like your main complaints stem from trying to get & stand on that small island (e.g. clouds blocking its view & sliding off of it). I do plan on getting rid of that slide, or at least significantly reducing it. A grappling hook, or a flying ship, may have been a better option to get on that small island.
The demo is short by design… yes, the first time you play, you probably will have to restart quickly after getting a weapon. However, since you can play an unlimited number of new games, you should be able to get in quite of bit of gaming overall. If I extended it to say, 30 minutes, I think players would get in too much gaming — imagine a player playing an unlimited number of 30 minute games… they might actually farther than I’d want them to in a demo. Anyway, the bottom line is, the demo’s purpose is to determine if they want to play more & to see if the game will run smoothly on your machine.. it isn’t meant to provide a full gaming experience.
Hi i found a bug that when you crash a plane into a roof of a building you get stuck in it
Doh! OK, I’ll see what I can do.. I hope to have another bugfix release either for this weekend with a fix for this. Thank you for the report!
i did not think someone would do the same thing I did, now i’m stuck at the top of a building with the only caracter on which I played over 8 hours and I don’t have any explosive weapon.
Phr00t, could you add a key(like f6 or something) that allow you to kill yourself, right now i’m stuck and I can’t kill myself and I would appreciate being able to continue playing my caracter.
other stuffs:
– when you are in a vehicles, could you change how you get out of it or separate it from the key that allow you to examine something, because I always want to check how strong the enemy i’m going to fight and end up loosing my vehicles because I simply jump out of it instead of checking it
– what does programming actually do, I did not see any difference related to chip when I had a lot of programming skill
– sometime, I keep loosing my health until I only have 50% left and I don’t really know why, but I know I did not get hit, is there something related to stats that can do that?
I already have a “location rescue” feature in the development version — no killing yourself required. I hope to have it released today! 🙂
That is a great idea — being able to investigate another target while in a ship… I wonder what key I should change the eject to…
Programming is used to “program” blank chips. Try right-clicking blank chips (that have red dots on them) to attempt to program them. I plan on changing this to “development” and have it do more things than just program chips… 😉
You are losing health in a “radioactive” biome — you should also notice your energy goes up to 75% in these areas.
Still a little difficult for me.. the robots track their shots way too easily. can’t dodge them really. And then when you die you lose some random thing which usually means I lose the weapon (or a part of it, which is the same thing) I had and with not enough cash to buy a replacement, I am forced to start over. I picked the easiest quest available and still failed.
Yeah, I am still tweaking balancing & I agree it is a bit hard. Are you wearing armor?
If you lose a part of a weapon, you can replace just that single part & the weapon will be functional again. With the latest version, you should get some more money back when selling items & completing quest tasks (even if you fail the overall mission).
A few (possible) bugs I’ve noticed in 0.28a:
– I find that I can only use timewarp specials succesfully if I’m stationary in the instant I use them. If I’m moving at all, no visual effect occurs, no energy is lost, and no-one slows down.
– Using timewarp specials and then getting into vehicles leaves the vehicles slowed for a bit. Maybe this is intentional, and it’s actually pretty cool, but in case that wasn’t the intention, I’m reporting it anyway
– Homing shots target empty vehicles, but not crates. There should be more consistency between them, I feel.
Also, I agree with Destro about the sliding. It makes sense to slide on steep terrain, but when your character slides around on their own constantly, seemingly regardless of whether the terrain is actually steep enough to cause that, and even when menus are up, it gets annoying pretty fast…
Anyway, keep up the good work, Phr00t! The pace of development is seriously fast, and made even more impressive the fact that you’re doing the vast majority of development on your own.
– Odd.. I’ll look into the timewarp issue.
– The timewarp / vehicle thing is a side-effect, but I also think it is kinda neat.. might keep it.
– Yeah, I’ll make homing shots ignore vehicles.
I’ve already fixed the sliding issue in the development version, so expect it in the next release!
Thanks again guys, much appreciated 🙂
I couldn’t seem to reproduce your timewarp issue… were you running? If you run, you can’t use any items, timewarps included.
Ok, so, finally got around to sitting down and trying this out. This looks to have alot of potential to be pretty darn good, like the previous games were (enjoyed both Gentrieve 2 and 3079 quite a bit, and play them pretty often). For this one though, right now, it’s a bit tough to get into, particularly at first. Though of course, it is an alpha, heh.
A few problems:
1. Buildings. These are…. well, a mess. The very first thing that the player must do upon entering the world is to find the various “stations” that sell things and recharge stuff and give quests, and actually FINDING them is about as irritating as possible. Not only is it super confusing to find them once you actually find a building that has what you want in it, but the list of what is in each building on the map very often outright says that something is there…. except that it isnt. So far, this has happened in many (almost all) of the buildings I’ve entered. Something that the map tells me is there is just nowhere to be found, even after entering every single possible room. But even without that, the building layouts are just super irritating, at least as far as finding the station that you want. These are DEFINITELY my biggest problem with the game thus far.
2. The early game is…. painful. The player starts out with next to nothing, and has very little chance in the early game to change that fact. The main problem is the “burden” level. You simply cannot seem to carry hardly anything at the very first part of the game. I would say, either increase the max burden that the player starts with, or make some early items take less of it. This alone might make the first part of the game less frustrating, particularly when you’re finding cool loot from destroyed robots or crates… pretty annoying to not be able to carry more stuff when I only have like 4-5 items held as it is! As it is, if you DONT put a huge pile of points into agility right away, you’ll be moving really darned slow for quite some time. Doesnt help that the level-1 movement items like the grappling hooks have very low max burden levels as well. A low speed makes early quests take forever. Having a grappling hook or something of that nature seems absolutely essential at times. Early game is also pretty darn hard. Good armor is a MUST here, which makes the burden thing even worse.
3. The quests themselves. First off, there can be a huuuuuuuuuge distance between different quest objectives, which seems unnecessary…. alot of somewhat pointless walking between each area. Also, I keep seeing quest objectives very suddenly zoom really fast (often for a very large distance) across the map; they just do this very abruptly and randomly. It doesnt happen super often, but often enough to be a problem. Finally…. some “kill” quests lead the player to enemy ships that they must destroy… early on, these are nigh-impossible to even HIT most of the time. I remember in 3079 there were those flight gizmos you could use (which were definitely a neat part of it), but I’m not finding any of them yet in this one.
4. Consumables and similar things. There needs to be a better way of using these. Something like health items can be important in battle, but I have to slowly enter the inventory every time I want to use them. And I’m going to guess that there’ll be lots of different activatable items in this, going by how 3079 was, so that’s something that might be important to address.
Beyond that, there’s ALOT of things that arent really explained by the game right now, but I’m putting that down to it being in such an early state, heh.
Once the game gets moving, it’s pretty good. Once I got past the frustrating early parts and actually figured some stuff out, I was quite enjoying it (besides the blasted buildings/stations issue). The combat is good (unless I’ve got a low-accuracy gun, at which point it’s just a long string of swear-words), I love the look of it, and I like the idea of the combining/disassembling system, though I’ve not had overmuch chance to mess with it yet. The screwed up buildings, and some quests taking way too long are the biggest issues. The game world also seems kinda sparse/empty in alot of areas currently. And it took me forever to realize that agility increases the amount of stuff I can carry without becoming overly burdened…. the description of what agility does in-game is a little odd. As with 3079, the different “movement” things like the grappling hook or that crazy telewarp gizmo are a really good part of the game, and are pretty fun to use. I do miss the Minecraft-ish destructible/buildable terrain that 3079 used though, that was a pretty nice part of that one.
Definitely seeing alot of potential with this game, and looking forward to seeing how it develops! I’ll probably be playing this a bunch, and I’ll try to remember to give more overly-detailed feedback as I go along.
Thank you for the extensive feedback.
Improving the buildings are a priority. I made an important improvement in v0.29a by preventing stations & spawn points from being placed underground in buildings that intersect with terrain. The station list currently seems inaccurate because rooms (with stations) may be generated that are impossible to reach. I need to redesign the floor generation code so paths are created (instead of random walls).
I’ll probably make Agility points more effective (e.g. each Agility point supports 1.5 burden instead of 1.0) — then your starting max burden will be higher & putting points into Agility will be more rewarding. Although, it seems like you like to carry lots of items, which would require extra points be placed into Agility.
I have an idea on what may be causing greater-than-desired quest distances… all quest task locations are determined based on where you got the quest from. However, the second task might be all the way to the left, when the first task was all the way to the right. I should base the task locations on the previous task location… but I also don’t want the player going too far away from the starting quest location (since it may cause the player to wander into very difficult areas).
About consumables.. I’m not sure about this yet. I don’t really want health items to be so easily used in combat. You could just buy a handful of health items & spam the “Use Health” key in battle & become practically invulnerable. Opening the inventory & right-clicking the item balances out their use. I want the player to rely on weapons, defense & fighting strategy instead of how many health items you have in your inventory. After the battle, then you can bring out your consumables to patch yourself up. In 3079, I did have hotkeys for using consumable items, but I think it gets abused… I don’t plan on having many items activated in the inventory — that is why I have another “Held Items” slot, where you will hold items to use them.
What key things do you believe need explaining that are not now? I need to know so I can put them on the to-do list!
I do plan on adding some construction features to 3089, but not like Minecraft… stay tuned 🙂
That is a very good point about the consumables…. I agree with that, thinking about it further it would probably not be good to have them be instantly useable, particularly since they always seem to start with multiple in one stack. I found that it is though still quite possible to use them in battle, by simply opening up the inventory and doing it anyway…. so that might be an issue worth looking at.
Which actually reminds me of a potential bug: The first time I did that particular thing was during a quest to defeat a particular robot, and he was wrecking me pretty bad, so I went to open the inventory to use a healing item, thinking it might pause the game while I did so, and while it doesnt… he still stopped attacking me anyway. When I closed the inventory screen, he resumed his attack, and stopped AGAIN when I opened it a second time.
On the note of bugs, another one I’m suddenly reminded of involves the actual launcher; the anti-aliasing setting is forgotten each time the game is closed and needs to be reset every time. Have that problem with Gentrieve 2’s launcher as well, but kept forgetting to report it.
As for stuff that could use more explaining, hmmm….. some of it I’ll have to jump into the game again to remember exactly what it was, but a couple of things I can think of:
1. That colored bit that is sorta behind the health/energy display, and rises and falls and changes color…. not really understanding exactly what that even is.
2. I dont remember the game explaining that the interact key can also be used to check the status of nearby targets, I think I only found that on accident.
3. It might be good to display the Burden level a little differently, like: 20/40, with 40 being the max, where it turns red beyond that and you go all slow. Just so that it makes it easier for the player to know just how close they are to being full up on inventory and all. That would be pretty helpful.
4. There’s a stat that appears on guns called “burst”. I really have no idea what this one means.
5. It’s not clear just how chips work. I’m still very early in the game since I havent had much time with it yet, but the ones I’ve found, as well as the ones generally being sold, are usually blank chips (or pieces of them), and it’s not very clear as to just what they do exactly.
There’s more beyond that, but those are the ones I can remember at this moment. Hope that helps!
I don’t mind so much bringing up the inventory to use the health consumables.. it is a compromise. You have to take at least a few seconds of vulnerability to use a health pack.. if it still gets abused, I may make health recharge slowly (like in 3079).
Very odd with the attacking / inventory “bug”… it might have been a coincidence. NPCs, like you, have a “burst” count (which allows a weapon to be fired a number of times but then a longer delay is incurred). You might have been opening your inventory during those burst delays… if you can keep repeating the behavior, though, it might be a bug (that doesn’t make much sense to me now, hehe!).
That anti-aliasing setting is actually getting dropped, since conventional anti-aliasing is terribly slow compared to better things like FXAA. I will probably re-add the FXAA option in effects, but just have it disabled by default.
1. It is your detection level — the higher it is, the more you are seen. Green = friendly guy seeing you, orange = enemy seeing you & red = enemy attacking you. I’ll see where I can put in some info on it…
2. OK…
3. This is already being included in the next release!
4. Ha, I just explained this one above 🙂 A burst of 4 allows you to shoot 4 shots quickly, then wait a bit more…
5. Blank chips are cheap & ready to be programmed into something useful (if you have a decent programming skill).
Thank you, this does help and I’m working on it 🙂 Keep the input coming!