Replies #1Love this! I like how smooth it looks already, you got those collisions down perfectly!
Thank you! the programmer did an oustanding awesome work with the smoothness of the controls in a really short time of work, thought there will be even more polishing later to have an even more smooth result!
This looks like it could be neat.
How does the game control?
Thanks! if you mean the player control side, everything its being planned on gamepads/keyboards that has 4 directional buttons and 4 action buttons, each action button as shown in the gifs has a primary unique action and later we might take 2 of this buttons to make them have 2 functions each (one when you press and another when you hold)
I regard the Pikmin series more or less as a masterpiece of gaming. None of the games disappointed me. None
. All three stuck to the same core of micromanagement antics but each had their own specific flavor going for them.
Sooo... when you say "Pikmin" you bring to a mind a pretty high standard in terms of gameplay and execution. I REALLY like Pikmin and its easily one of my top favorite franchises. So what I'd like to hear from you is:
A.) How you plan to capture that Pikmin feel?
B.) What details (of the Pikmin series) you are zeroing in on? And,
C.) What will be different from the Pikmin series about your game?
Some other things that come to mind:
With a top-down 2D view, you have a much smaller plane of view. A large plane of view is very important if you are trying to oversee multiple groups of minions, in particular if the tasks they are doing leave them vulnerable to enemy attack. How do you plan to address this? Do you see this as an issue?
This next one may be a bit hard to explain, but one of the things Pikmin does so well is the breakdown of the game and its tasks into small details/nuances and yet somehow never feeling superlinear.
This is a core foundation, in my opinion, of each and every game. As an example, you might take down a fire enemy with Red Pikmin naturally... or maybe instead, you'll draw the fire enemy into the water and then use your Blue Pikmin while its flame is doused. The applications are myriad; often the same task can be accomplished from a pool of two or three different types, albeit one type may have the optimal edge. You may have to even use one type first and then another to finish the job. Pikmin is a game that requires strategy and strengths management while still letting the player, in a sense, plan and play the game his way and to his strengths (is there any offensive fury unlike that of a 100 Flying Pikmin swarm? Cheesy) I'd like to know your thoughts on how this plays into your game.
I see a LOT of minions on some screens (300+). On the heels of the above, one of the facets of Pikmin is that you have to decide the balance of types for your group as a whole and for your subgroups working on tasks. A concern that comes to mind here is that the larger amount of minions will make it substantially easier to thicken your ranks with all types and not really have the "I need more type x" problem that Pikmin can easily throw at you to keep you on your toes (this was especially prominent in Pikmin 2 for the caverns,) as well as making a catch-all swarm that you potentially throw at 80% of tasks simply by reality of your massive numbers. Thoughts?
Scrutiny aside, this does look pretty smooth so far and that art is slick (like that tree thing you showed too.) Expect me to be watching this and I look forward to hearing from you.
Wooo first of all sorry if I made english mistakes, its not my first language, and I hope to be able to reply you as best as I can :D
ok
A.) How you plan to capture that Pikmin feel?
Pikmin is also one of my favourite franchises, specially from nintendo, and there is several feelings the game produces and of course each player may get a different feeling, the ones that I want to give are
- The feeling that you are in control of big groups of units where each one might be doing something different but you need to be around checking on them so they dont do anything not planned and everything goes right so even when we are talking about of dozen of entities, the success of their management its completely in your hands and constant checking.
- Personaly I loved the conection to the enviroment Pikmin had, I might admit not so much in the sense of "break that bridge to pass to that part" but more in the way that makes you feel that you are really inside lets say "the world of the ants" where you even enter tight caves and fight bugs that are way bigger than you, that is something I definetly want to give, making the player feel inside those little points of view against big enemies or obstacles and how you overcome them with good management
B.) What details (of the Pikmin series) you are zeroing in on? And,
Well clearly even when I like Pikmin so much, there are things that I like more and things that I dont like so much about it, for instance things that are in the plans of removal its the "time limit" system it had, even through I never ran out of time in the Pikmin games it was something that always stressed me xD I hope I am not the only one, and yeah it provides the feeling of "do it right you dont want to mess up" but we are thinking in a more open game with no time limits.
Also, the Pikmin games where pretty straight in their objectives "reach point B from point A and you need this stuff to do it", and after playing the same level various times it becomes a bit repetitive, we want to make a game that can be played any time and will provide a different experience also everytime, so dont expect to move bateries or make ramps to reach to the final levels, see it more of a open random generated world, where at night creatures appear and you either work on a shelter to survive the night and once daytime hits you can explore, fight day mobs and gathe resources/minions, with this there wouldnt be a time limit nor rules where to go so players will be open to try anything they want, from either gathering only one kind of minion ro build a big place to just explore and kill creatures.
C.) What will be different from the Pikmin series about your game?
Definetly making it more of an open world like I said and focus in future player/player interaction, in the Pikmin games the coop side vs side was really limited, and even thought it was fun to fight someone randomly gathering color pills and just throwing all of your pikmins there was not too much about it, but again it will depend on the feedback of the people, if they love it more single player or they want multiplayer, a final future scope would be to imagine that you have your minions and you travel on your own and do your own things, until you randomly find out scout minions from someone you dont know, and you dont know if its a friendly or hostile player, you dont know if its a trap and you are suddenly surrounded by someone's army, or find someone and each one with their minions start building a place and exploring together, the posibilities are quite open but again, all of this would be a future plan depending on what the community thing about it, for the first demo we will provide just the basic fighting system and management control.
For the battle system in Pikmin sending the wrong color to the wrong task/enemy meant a mostly secure restart/redo thing, (and several pikmins dead) it was clear that you can not make mistakes in Pikmin, we are trying to make it slightly more casual, meaning that new players can just throw all the minions to an enemy and yeah they will provide good result but at the same time we are making that each minion has a really different function (wich looks similar throwing all of them at once) but for experienced players will be clear wich minion to use, let me show you
http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2014/305/0/2/plan_by_srgrafo-d84w1uq.jpgas you can see in the planification, each minion will be able to do a normal damage and be constant even when you throw them all, but its the "passive" effects of the minions what will make them really different for experienced players, see it like its clearly the best to use Red Minions against week enemies but that come in hordes, since they have a area damage they will be able to dispatch weak hordes in no time, and in the other hand the Poison Minions have slow attack speed but provide poison, making them the best option against enemies with big amounts of hp since they will make the poison grow every hit, so they solo targets more than the red ones, and the Blue ones and Yellow ones are more of a support side, since the blue ones can stay longer in battles against enemies that constantly damage few, Blue and Yellow should be the primary decision if you are running out of minions and you are in danger, so you need few group of minions to last, maybe not fast to kill but strong/resistent enough to survive
but again, a new player can throw them all and they will work, while an experience player will observe first and decide the right color.
With a top-down 2D view, you have a much smaller plane of view. A large plane of view is very important if you are trying to oversee multiple groups of minions, in particular if the tasks they are doing leave them vulnerable to enemy attack. How do you plan to address this? Do you see this as an issue?
oh that is impression, game screen is 800x600 and in the gifs I am using like a 1/4 1/5 of the screen size, in future updates will add pics of the whole screen so you see it better.
This next one may be a bit hard to explain, but one of the things Pikmin does so well is the breakdown of the game and its tasks into small details/nuances and yet somehow never feeling superlinear. This is a core foundation, in my opinion, of each and every game. As an example, you might take down a fire enemy with Red Pikmin naturally... or maybe instead, you'll draw the fire enemy into the water and then use your Blue Pikmin while its flame is doused. The applications are myriad; often the same task can be accomplished from a pool of two or three different types, albeit one type may have the optimal edge. You may have to even use one type first and then another to finish the job. Pikmin is a game that requires strategy and strengths management while still letting the player, in a sense, plan and play the game his way and to his strengths (is there any offensive fury unlike that of a 100 Flying Pikmin swarm? Cheesy) I'd like to know your thoughts on how this plays into your game.
hmm most of it is replied with the mechanics of the minion's colors I did few points back, but again the game will evolve however we see it fits better, for now all I gave you its a writed down planification of what it can be, its really different from what it could be, we will experiment battle system today and we might make changes or take a different direction (dont worry we will update everything on here xD )
I see a LOT of minions on some screens (300+). On the heels of the above, one of the facets of Pikmin is that you have to decide the balance of types for your group as a whole and for your subgroups working on tasks. A concern that comes to mind here is that the larger amount of minions will make it substantially easier to thicken your ranks with all types and not really have the "I need more type x" problem that Pikmin can easily throw at you to keep you on your toes (this was especially prominent in Pikmin 2 for the caverns,) as well as making a catch-all swarm that you potentially throw at 80% of tasks simply by reality of your massive numbers. Thoughts?
and about the amount of minions, the gifs are for testing and showing big management groups, the plan its to actually have really few and slowly increase them, will show in future gifs but in this game you get minions from plants that grow, they have a low chance to appear and only provide 1 minion (unless you wait until the plant gets bigger then you can get up to 6 from it)
also, in the Pikmin game yes, you had to define what pikmins and wich amount to bring into the stage, we are going different on that, you will carry all of them at once all the time and you decide what to carry in the way that you can build a shelter and leave there all the blue minions and just be with 3 colors, (this is planification for probably the second version of the game)
we are not imagining to have more than 400 minions (100 per color) that is planned to be the "maaaaximun" amount, but again testing is at hand maybe we are wrong ^^"
Scrutiny aside, this does look pretty smooth so far and that art is slick (like that tree thing you showed too.) Expect me to be watching this and I look forward to hearing from you.
thank you very much, its not only about the art, the programmer working on the game its actually really fast and effective in the smoothness, even when there is way more to go so far I am quite impressed.
I like this.
Thanks we do too xD
I love swarms.
Wait to see enemy swarms
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