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[thomasmahler]

Hey guys,

We're currently working on a Realtime Strategy First Person Shooter - we're heading into the polishing stage for our vertical slice and I'd love to get some feedback from you guys.

http://www.warsoup.com/builds/warsoupDevBuild_95.zip

The build isn't incredibly optimized, so you will need a neat machine to run it at 60fps.




Movement / Weapons:

WSAD - Move
LMB - Fire
RMB - Radial Menu / Build
MMB - Zoom (if accuracy upgrade has been purchased)
Space - Jump
E - Grenade
R - Reload
Q - Buy Ammo
1, 2, 3 - Change Weapons
F - Switch from Deferred to Forward Rendering
ALT+F4 - Quit

Cheats:

U - Get all Upgrades
I - Instant Research
M - Get 100 resources

Would love to hear some thoughts / feedback, etc. Thanks!

[deathtotheweird]

ummm the resolution for me is 1280x400

that...can't be right

it looks nice, I think. I can't really tell. the "build resource collector" text is backwards though.

[thomasmahler]

Yeah, it is - sorry. It's my development build, I always have everything windowed and set up so that I can have things running on the side. I'll put up a higher res build later on.

[deathtotheweird]

oh, I see.

the animations and particle effects are pretty nifty. All the weapons look really nice and feel nice to shoot.

The game runs fine though. Fraps is saying 50fps.

Also a bit funny to jump around and see a disembodied arm and gun shadows floating around. Are the objects in the game meant to be semi-transparent?

Good stuff. This is gonna be multiplayer right?

[Bood_war]

This looks to be neat. Downloading now, will be back to let you know in a bit.

[thomasmahler]

Just had to reupload the 55 build, since I accidentally picked the wrong branch :D

Sorry for that, it's all good now.

@Allen: Yeah, it's a 1v1 or 2v2 multiplayer game. We're basically mixing a FPS game like Halo / CoD with Starcraft and Tower Defense.

Haha, you'll NOT see the shadows from the weapon / arms later on, no worries

We're just in the process of polishing everything for a presentation, title screen (http://www.warsoup.com/files/titleScreen_05.jpg) and all that stuff, just making sure we have a really, really nice polished vertical slice.

Just uploaded a 720p build: http://www.warsoup.com/builds/warsoupDevBuild_64.zip

[Bood_war]

Very cool. I agree with allen, the weapons have 'weight' to them, the movement feels good, the animation is cool. I very much look forward to this.

Also, that title screen is fantastic.

[thomasmahler]

The big thing we're trying to tackle and polish right now is just the whole feel of the movement and to make the shooting mechanics feel really satisfying. That's probably the most important part of any FPS game - we're still quite some ways off, but I'd love to hear some feedback on that. Did you guys immediately get how to buy upgrades? How to cancel them? There's still a bug in the upgradeQueue sometimes, where it doesn't stack the upgradeTimers properly - In general, we're really concerned about the whole look 'n feel. That's what I'd love to get feedback on. I'm sure there are people here that love playing fps games, I'd love to hear some thoughts on how we could improve the current mechanics.

For me, a lot of messages are still missing - like, it's not really clear that you have to buy ammoClips by pressing Q, it doesn't tell you that you're out of clips, you don't get a reject message yet if you want to build a resourceCollector without having enough resources, etc. That sorta stuff, smaller, polish stuff that we can add in a short amount of time that still enhances the experience quite a bit and makes things clearer.

[fraxcell]

Great, looks very polished! Although all the post-processing effects and what-not made the HUD hard to read, so some options to tone that stuff down would be nice.

I'm not a big fan of using the middle mouse button to zoom (although I'm sure you'll include customizable keybindings at some point). I'm not sure what the exact fps was. It seemed a little laggy, but still playable. The only strange was that changing weapons was rather laggy; it seemed like it took multiple keypresses to switch weapons sometimes.

Looking forward to more updates!

[thomasmahler]

@Ninjutsu: The HUD sucks in those builds :D

We want to take the blizzard route on keybindings: We pretty much want everyone to have the exact same configuration - you'll be able to change options like invert Y-Axis for the mouse, but we don't want to give users full keyboard customizability or other stuff like access to the camera FOV, etc. - I always hated that in other games. We don't want to give anyone a competetive advantage just because of a custom config.

What we will do is to automatically support game controllers right off the bat - also, we already have splitscreen working, so even the PC version of Warsoup will have a nice splitscreen option. Hooking PCs to HDTVs gets more popular all the time, everyone who likes consoles has controllers lying around and I think it'd be a really cool service.

And on another positive side, it helps us playtesting Warsoup while we still don't have a proper netcode

What I'd love to know is:



Did you guys all understand how the radial menu works? How to buy stuff? It's VERY important for us that this is as simple as possible and that people 'get it' right away.

[Nugsy]

We want to take the blizzard route on keybindings: We pretty much want everyone to have the exact same configuration [...] we don't want to give users full keyboard customizability or other stuff like access to the camera FOV, etc. - I always hated that in other games. We don't want to give anyone a competetive advantage just because of a custom config.

I think your reasoning behind this decision is odd. What if someone uses your default controls on a regular basis? When faced against someone who uses a completely different control scheme usually, the first person would have an automatic advantage.
With Blizz games (such as StarCraft), everyone learnt to play the game with the exact same controls. People who play FPS games like to have their own control setup to make the game easier to play for them personally. However, i can understand the decision about FOV, i don't like the option to customise that either.

Just my two cents! The game is looking very pretty, haven't given it a go yet but i will tomorrow.

[iffi]

Though the decision to keep everybody at the same FOV is understandable, I don't think giving everybody the same keyboard configuration makes things any fairer than allowing customization. Some people are better with certain keyboard configurations than other, and ideally mastering the controls should not get in the way of the actual gameplay. Allowing keyboard customization would ensure that everybody is able to find their most comfortable configuration so that the controls do not interfere with playing well.
I think left-handed players in particular may have issues with being forced to certain keybindings (though it probably varies among lefties).

[deathtotheweird]

Title screen looks nice. Heavily inspired by the new TF2 menu, which is ok since it's nice.

The radial menu is very easy to use and easily understandable. Works just like the radial menu in Left 4 Dead for the voice command thingy.

Just tried the 720 version and it looks nice but I think you went a bit heavy with the post-processing. Also runs pretty slow, but you already know that. Compared to the 400 width version it runs around 30fps instead of 50fps.

I agree with the middle mouse zoom being odd. Personally I'd map the radial menu to the F key and zoom to the second mouse button. I don't see how that would give me any advantage, it's just preference.

[thomasmahler]

Hey guys!

We just uploaded another build:

http://www.warsoup.com/builds/warsoupDevBuild_95.zip

We're almost ready, just a couple of things left to add til we have our vertical slice:

Controls:

Movement / Weapons:

WSAD - Move
LMB - Fire
RMB - Radial Menu / Build
MMB - Zoom (if accuracy upgrade has been purchased)
Space - Jump
E - Grenade
R - Reload
Q - Buy Ammo
1, 2, 3 - Change Weapons
F - Switch from Deferred to Forward Rendering
ALT+F4 - Quit

Cheats:

U - Get all Upgrades
I - Instant Research
M - Get 100 resources

We also added the little window to choose graphics settings - if you have trouble with the fps (fantastic is VERY performance hungry, cause the build isn't optimized), just try setting it to 'fastest'.

Also, the resolution we use is 720p - that's 1280x720. Some graphics aren't screen position fixed yet, so if you don't use 720p, you might get some weirdness.

Anyway, I'd love to hear some feedback. Would be great if you guys could try to upgrade all the skills, try all the weapons and give some feedback on general look / feel.

Xbox 360 Controllers aren't fully supported yet, sorry! (coming soon though! )

[Akari]

I'm at work right now so I can't test this out yet, but I assume you're doing this with Unity? Anyway, from the screenshots the artstyle looks great, though I'd expect nothing less from you (by the way, are you still doing stuff with Construct? I don't think I've seen you at the Scirra forums in a while).

Anyway, you should definitely have customizable keybindings - it gets troublesome very fast when you have players using different keyboard layouts than what you are using. For example, people using AZERTY could not play this game at all if the movement is hard-locked to WASD.

Also, if you don't like FOV customization, is this game going to run letterboxed on any non-16:9 resolution? If not, are you going to lock the FOV to something like 60? Because that's not really a good idea. At the very least you should automatically pick the right FOV for the right aspect ratio. One might argue that it "gives an unfair advantage", but let's face the truth - simply a higher screen resolution gives an advantage over smaller screen resolutions. Restricting the FOV is just an artificial handicap and only serves to make the game experience worse for those with unmatching screen aspect ratios.

[thomasmahler]

Hey Daiz,

Yes, we're using Unity as our engine. We're still working heavily on the style / art direction, but we should have something pretty unique going on

I'm not currently working on my Construct projects. We founded a startup and I grabbed some of the best people in the industry to make Warsoup - we're all-in now.

Regarding keyboard customization: I'm originally from Austria, trust me, I know about how annoying different keyboard layouts can be. We'll make sure it runs great on all keyboard layouts. We just want to make sure that Warsoup can become a competetive game, just like Starcraft. Hotkeys are locked in Starcraft as well - for a good reason.

We're not sure about how we'll handle the FOV issue for now. I don't want people to have custom configs that give unfair advantages. We'll probably do the SC2 trick of scaling up or down based on the screen position. We already make sure that the UI and all GUI elements always adjust to the users resolution. Doesn't matter what resolution / aspect ratio you use, the player should always see the exact same region of the game.

Does anyone here still use 4:3 monitors?

[Akari]

I still don't buy the argument of locked keys - why is it good competition-wise that they're locked in StarCraft? So that you can sit down to play competitively on any computer possible? Honestly, I doubt it'd be a problem if SC allowed hotkey customization - those who want to get used to hotkeys and play on any computer possible will know to train with the default hotkeys. Those who know they're never going to be playing the game competitively on an unfamiliar computer (and I'd bet these kind of people form the majority of SC2 players) would gain no additional benefit from being able to customize the hotkeys. What's comfortable for one person isn't necessarily comfortable for the next one, and hotkey customization ensures that everyone gets to have an equally comfortable play, not bound by controlling issues.

Plus I bet it'll be less work for you to just implement customizable hotkeys than work out preset controls for every keyboard layout imaginable, because there are tons of them.

[thomasmahler]

Don't worry, Warsoup will be completely community driven. If the community really, really wants hotkey customization, we'll add it, it's a non-issue. Internally, we're already working on an input manager that allows us to easily set up hotkeys for all input devices, making that accessible to the players would be super easy.

Locking keys to a certain layout is a competetive thing - You don't want players being able to raise their APM simply by changing all the hotkeys.

[Akari]

Locking keys to a certain layout is a competetive thing - You don't want players being able to raise their APM simply by changing all the hotkeys.

Is that really a realistic scenario, though? With a high number of hotkeys, I doubt your APM would increase that much no matter how you place them, since your hand(s) most likely have to traverse basically same amounts of distance in any case. And even if it can indeed enhance their APM, locking the hotkeys still won't solve the issue - after all, there's tons of keyboards with macro buttons, separate keypads with completely customizable buttons, programs that you can use to change your keyboard key presses... there's literally tons of ways to go about rebinding keys even if they are locked.

Not to mention that first-person and RTS games play completely differently to begin with: while your left hand is constantly hopping around the keyboard while playing SC2, on an FPS your three middle fingers are going to lay within your movement keys, be they WASD or something else, most of the time. Due to this, every other key should be as accessible as possible from this point, and what's the most accessible can vary from player to player - you're pretty guaranteed to be unable to come up with an "universal layout" that wouldn't give positive handicap for some and negative handicap for others. That's why you should let the players decide for themselves.

[thomasmahler]

Don't worry, if the community wants it, the community gets it.