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Carnevil

Wrack launches on Steam!

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By the way, speaking of making the game more arcade-y, I redid the chain/combo graphics. Thought you guys might like this one in particular:

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Carnevil said:

By the way, speaking of making the game more arcade-y, I redid the chain/combo graphics. Thought you guys might like this one in particular:


Ha ha, that's great. I also loved the various Doom references in the achievements.

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Good! :) I was never sure if these were doing anything for anybody, or if they just went over everyone's head. Glad to have an answer! :)

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While I like what I see from the gampley perspective, there's one thing that bugs me: the cel shaded graphics, it's a style that for whatever reason I cannot stand (that's one of the reasons, along with other things, that I disliked Borderlands and TF2).

Will there be an optional, alternative shading? I know it would require extra work and the answer probably is "no" but...

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You can't disable the cel-shading, but the shaders that create the effect can be modded. I'm sure there will be a realism/non-cel-shading mod at some point.

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I hope so, but I don't know any game with cel shading that had it's graphic modded (XIII, Borderlands, TF2, etc).
=P
I can't see the appeal, but to each their own.

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Yeah I think to make an uncell shaded, they just have to redo the textures if not models.

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We've got a trailer out for the next update, called "Reach for the Skybox"! This shows off all of the new stuff in the update, and kudos if you can figure it all out - including the level being shown at the end!

Enjoy!

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Skyboxes, barrels, boxes and lighting. Looks a lot better.

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The update is out! Found someone who was able to help get the skyboxes done properly so that they don't look like, well... boxes! :P So, those are all done now. There's also new combo graphics to make the game feel way more arcade-y. Just need an announcer and those will be totally good to go.

Anyway, full changelog available by clicking the pic. Trailer is up a few posts.

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I bit during the Black Friday sale. Mean old Mister Creaphis has a few criticisms. I'll start with things that you could actually change with easy tweaks.

Monster sub-types aren't visually distinct. Slight size and head colour differences aren't obvious at a distance. Instead of colouring your main grunts blue, blue and slightly purplish, make them green, blue and red. Important projectile differences aren't distinct either - make a completely new model and sound cue for the purple dude's homing bolt. A constant "sizzle" or something like that lets the player know he has to keep an eye on that thing.

Your basic grunts don't telegraph their attacks properly - they shoot their bolt while they're still raising their gun. Playing against these guys would be more fun if their attack was delayed to the end of the firing animation, but then made more damaging. Reacting to a threatening attack and then dodging it is interesting. Constantly circle-strafing just in case you get caught off guard by an enemy's pea shooter is not.

I'm not sure what gameplay purpose the "sentries" serve. Fighting them has a lot in common with playing as a sniper in a modern shooter. You're clicking on a small target at a distance that wanders into your crosshairs in a predictable pattern. It's just a robot instead of a terrorist's head. This is the opposite of the Doom-like, Contra-like gameplay that I understand is your objective. I recommend keeping the sinusoidal bobbing but making these things rush at the player one at a time to make a melee attack, like Castlevania's Medusa Heads.

The player's movement speed is actually too high for what you're trying to do. This makes the platforming too "slippery" because the window of time between starting to move off a platform and falling off the side of it is very slim, making jumping difficult and unforgiving. The monsters also aren't nearly threatening enough to justify giving the player this agility. I feel like I'm Superman, soaring around, murdering forest creatures. Once in a while I get nailed by an acorn but it never matters.

I've been playing on the middle difficulty level, which is the difficulty you should design for players who are already experienced with shooters in general but don't yet have whatever advanced skills your game might need. In the levels I've played so far I was never in any remote danger of dying in combat - only a few platforming mistakes did me in. I showed this to a friend yesterday and found that I'm able to play and converse at the same time without slowing down at either task. It's mindless and unchallenging.

This last point is more of an academic one, since I realize it's far too late to rebuild every map to suit this, but your game needs hitscanners. I know, it seems like forcing the player to take cover now and then would make the game less fast-paced, or hectic, or whatever the desired adjective is, but the truth is counter intuitive. When you put a dangerous hitscan enemy on one side of a large arena, the safely maneuverable area is restricted to whatever cover the player can find. Then, if you throw some projectile and melee enemies at the player at the same time, he must dodge and maneuver in a much tighter "effective arena." This tension is necessary to make projectile and melee enemies interesting. Hitscanner enemies can also move, meaning that this effective arena changes size and shape and the player must be reactive to these changes. Arenas become dynamic even when they're just made of stationary map features. You end up with a lot more gameplay for the same developmental effort.

As far as the game's packaging goes, I like the in-game art design and the engine is solid. I'm not convinced that the dialogue between missions adds any value. Note that I'll eagerly sit through fifty hours of voice acting in a Mass Effect game, while I couldn't bring myself to read Wrack's inter-mission quips. I understand some people like groaners, but it's a very narrow aesthetic that most people don't enjoy, and putting writing like that in a project like this is risky.

I am rooting for you Carn. I wish you success. This is how I show it: with the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile.

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I'd really rather not see the dialog. Hitscanners would add something to the game in my opinion, even if its just an accuracy cone or a distance damage reducer. Like Contra, you can dodge a lot and what actually hits you is pretty minimal.

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I've been playing on the middle difficulty level, which is the difficulty you should design for players who are already experienced with shooters in general but don't yet have whatever advanced skills your game might need.


But then there's a slight difference between "has played a FPS before" and "is doing Nightmare trick speedruns". ;)

If you were the standard for medium skill, then the game would have to have about four or five easier skills below that. Whereas all upper difficulty levels would appeal to <5% of the players.

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That's true, I am awesome. Then the difficulty selection screen at least needs to describe the differences between levels and make recommendations. Funnel all the Doom vets into the hardest level. Labeling a difficulty "Bullshit!" without explanation implies that it's a bad idea for anyone to even try it.

While I'm here, another thought: I didn't mention score in my last post because the truth is that it never entered my consciousness. I've never found score to be all that motivating, at least not in single player games. I've seen the words "arcadey" and "fast-paced" bandied about these parts but not any discussion about what those things actually mean, or how those concepts are reflected in Wrack's design. Lots of arcade games have score, yes, but that's not their defining feature. When I think about classic arcade games I think about games with well-defined challenges with constant pressure to excel or die. You can't dangle score on a stick and expect players to jump for it, you have to grab a whip and flog them from behind.

The tricky thing is that the FPS genre doesn't come with natural sources of time pressure, unlike shmups where it makes sense that the player has to keep flying forward or make a crash landing in hostile territory. This is why FPS game designers constantly resort to forced constructs like rising lava, timed countdowns, sawtooth designs and monster closets that dump the player into the middle of a fight, etc., but you can only do this so many times in a row without damaging the atmosphere or fatiguing players who are used to taking it easy.

What I'd recommend to you is: in the interest of making something unique and arcadey with niche appeal, screw atmosphere and screw those players. Every time the player enters a room, throw a timer on the screen. He has exactly that many seconds to kill everything in the room and tag the next door. Add restrictions like "sword only" and set score goals in some rooms, just for the hell of it. Don't even try to explain this in the story - just roll with it. This would turn Wrack into Tony Hawk with Guns which might actually be a good target to shoot for. You should be able to use existing level architecture for this if you add the right triggers and scripts to doorways.

I'll share a couple more thoughts on the nebulous idea of "fast-paced" before I go. I think it's an error to interpret "fast-paced" as having a literal correlation with movement speed. Making monsters move faster can actually slow down the action, because the player must play more cautiously. Horror FPS games are some of the most fast-paced by that criterion. Raising the player's running speed means also slows down the action because the rest of the game world is now slower than the player by comparison. These are variables that must be tweaked carefully, within a very clear overarching design.

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I agree, explaining the difference in game between difficulties would be nice. But I can't think of any other game that does.

And nope, score isn't motivating so much as getting through the game. I feel achievements are more driving than points. I too didn't even realize it was score based as we've discussed before on this thread and others. Didn't Bulletstorm have a score system too?

When I played Wrack I never once tried to get a better score, but when I play games like Beat Trip Hazard, I do everything it takes to get a higher score. Things like, don't shoot while enemies are around to get a bonus multiplier. Thus letting the enemies build up on screen. Staying alive bonus multiplyer or not getting hit after X amount of seconds multiplier :-)

Tony Hawk with guns. Good slogan :-)

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Captain Red said:

Oh my god the player movement:


Yo Captain Red, your youtube video of the Simpsons clip was copyrighted. Makes me think someone at Fox is a Doom fan trollen forums :-)

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Creaphis said:

I am rooting for you Carn. I wish you success. This is how I show it: with the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile.

I feel like a woman in an abusive relationship: Being beaten senselessly while being told "This is for your own good!", and then going around telling my friends that see me with a black eye "No no! It's my fault! I left the roast in too long!"

Your points are perfectly valid I'm sure, and this certainly isn't directed at you personally, but the fact that so many gamers idea of support is to devour their own young makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible to succeed.

Again, it's not like you don't have a point. I know that text on a screen probably isn't as engaging as a full cinematic with professional voice acting. Maybe the writing isn't even that great. I'm going to take the scripts to a local writers workshop here on Monday and see what they have to say. But if people are going to hold a game that I've personally financed with a few tens of thousands of dollars to Mass Effect Fucking Three... *throws hands up in the air*

So, maybe everything isn't totally perfect with this game. Maybe some of the animations aren't that great. Maybe a lot of them aren't. Again, it's not like I don't agree with you and it's not like I'm not trying to get a lot of these things fixed. I desperately want this game to be better. But at the same time, we've got to be realistic here. We're an independent developer without a lot of resources doing the very, very best we can here. We're not Call of Duty or Halo or Mass Effect or anything like that, and if people aren't willing to cut us some slack while we're starting off, we'll never be able to blossom into something of that caliber.

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Carnevil said:

But if people are going to hold a game that I've personally financed with a few tens of thousands of dollars to Mass Effect Fucking Three... *throws hands up in the air*

Well, you're always going to have that, but to be fair the methodology of delivering your narrative isn't the only thing that matters when it comes to grabbing someone's interest. We approach games, and all the content in them, based on our preconceptions of what we expect the game to be and how we expect to enjoy the game. In other words, if Creaphis goes into Wrack expecting an FPS experience similar to Doom or some other faster paced shooter he probably won't put as much importance into the story as he would if he was expecting to be playing an RPG.

Similarly if you go into an RPG expecting it to be an RPG, you probably won't care as much whether the game has the production values of ME3 or some low-budget romp with no voice acting at all. You'll still go through the narrative, because that's why you're there playing that game in the first place.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that don't worry too much about comparisons to big budget tittles or games of other genres, because they are rarely objective enough to be taken seriously.

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While its none of my business, I hope you're turning a profit now that the game is unofficially released. I've bankrolled things too.

As for dialog, it doesn't have to be Mass Effect 3. For me, I'd rather play a game. There are some stories like Uncharteds that have sucked me in, but for the most part, I just don't care about any story in any game and I play RPGs. RPGs are more of a chess match to me and a FPS is like a shooting gallery.

Let's get back to the new update and positives. I gave it a try today, the skyboxes really add a lot of beauty and made the game levels feel more open. The game is really looking much better. Just having barrels adds more to the game and gives me something else to shoot. I like how one barrel into another barrel will make the outer barrels move.

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@Jodwin: I don't get the impression he didn't enjoy/didn't give the story a chance because of the genre. It just seemed like he didn't enjoy it because Jennifer Hale isn't reading the lines. I think part of that speaks to a larger problem we have: We're actually trying! As a result, we get compared to AAA titles, whereas something like Starbound doesn't evoke those comparisons. I've described this to Phml before as "AAA uncanny valley".

geo said:

While its none of my business, I hope you're turning a profit now that the game is unofficially released.

No, but not because the game hasn't sold decently well (in about two weeks we made what we did in a year and a half of alpha funding). A PR firm I contracted to help with the Early Access release recommended that I take out a full page ad on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I resisted because it was going to be incredibly expensive, but he insisted and I trusted him. The ad didn't even come close to paying for itself.

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There should be a push once the game is complete and officially released. As I was reading the ad thing, I thought please don't. Not til its finished, but too late. No matter how much publicity a paid ad can get from any game website... steampowered.com is viewed more than anywhere else video game related. Kind of like why go regional when you're already national. I feel for ya Carn, that's a lot of money and that stuff hurts.

The fact you've got update trailers will mean a lot. The game will look better and better to people that are on the fence about buying. Eventually, they'll cave in.

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Had my eye on this for ages and really keen to play this, looks like its right up my street. I love FPS, but getting fed up with the modern junk!

This looks like classic fun, being on Steam just makes it that much more appealing :)

Congrats :)

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@geo: We've got to start building a market at some point. Steam isn't marketing. It's visibility, but that doesn't guarantee success. And considering that they're rumored to be switching to a more Amazon.com-like store, rather than a curated storefront, it'll be more and more up to developers to market and get their games out there on their own. If we didn't start getting the ball rolling now, we'd have the same sort of DOA status when the game is finished and then wouldn't have anywhere to go. Thankfully now it's in Early Access, so we've got time and room to do some things. Had we done a Kickstarter this would all have been much easier, but that's a topic for another day.

@bcwood16: Thanks! :)

Also, just did a blog showing how modding works in Wrack. Thought you guys might find that interesting, given that Doom is largely still around due to modding. There's no need to look at the description, BTW. None.

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That's the thing though, people know about your game on Steam, there is no bigger site. People know it already. They see your image and click on your game to buy it or not.

The catch is upon seeing your big image on the Steam homepage; do FPS players realize that its a FPS?



Let's take a look at some other games I've never heard of. I've never heard of Starbound before. Let me look at the image that appears on Steam's homepage right now:



I can tell it looks like a side scroller, medieval type of thing.

Now let's look at another game I've never heard of:



Dungeon? Endless? They're in a cave? never ending procedurally generated RPG comes to my mind! You might get a party. My mind races with this image.



^^^ bus driving sim clearly.



^^^ Man with guns fucking shooting shit up. I'd laugh if the twist was... its a RPG.



^^^ man with beard is in it. Sword. Super nova. Art style along the lines of RPG art:



Your PR company should be telling you this stuff.

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https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gmnp6j0pdijjfef/nKXFIQ8EYM

Box art, logo, portraits, and other art assets. If you think you can do a better job, knock yourself out. But "I don't know what kind of game it is" is almost certainly not the problem, and I'm not so sure the genre is so crystal clear in those others as well.

... and no, nobody knows about the game. We were on the front page for all of six seconds before getting yanked. Other games like Project Zomboid have had a long marketing buildup prior to their launch on Steam. Other games that had Kickstarter campaigns had the same thing going for them. Wrack came out of nowhere with nobody ever hearing of it, and not a lot of people are going to spend $15 on something they've never heard anything about no matter how it looks.

geo said:

Your PR company should be telling you this stuff.

I won't be working with them anymore.

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Carnevil said:

I don't get the impression he didn't enjoy/didn't give the story a chance because of the genre. It just seemed like he didn't enjoy it because Jennifer Hale isn't reading the lines.


Then I gave you the utterly wrong impression, and I apologize for that. I was trying to focus on low-budget changes because I realize you're living on a shoestring; I'm not going to ask you to hire Hollywood talent to improve the window dressing. What I'm saying is that you can remove the story entirely, which would save yourself the effort of illustrating the rest of it. My problem with Wrack's dialogue is that it's written in a style that appeals to a very niche audience. It's teenage banter that's trying pretty hard to be funny, and I got pretty sick of that style ten years ago when I was reading lots of homebrew webcomics on Comic Genesis. Perhaps some people are enjoying Wrack's writing, and it's probably not scaring anybody away, but personally, I'd prefer "NOW ENTERING SEWAGE PLANT..."

Geo raises a sad truth. Now that you're on Steam there isn't another target to shoot for as far as marketing goes, and Wrack is already losing what momentum it had. Are there any stats on how well indie games usually sell on Steam years after release? If you make sure Wrack is the best product it can be with the assets that you have, it may pay for itself in the long run. Then again, it may not. If you have the will to keep fighting, I recommend pulling back on marketing for now until you're sure Wrack is as appealing to its target audience as possible. Then build up a fresh marketing push from scratch, release new gameplay trailers, and rebrand the game so that game journalism sites have a hook for their stories. "After extensive rework, Final Boss Entertainment has released Wrack: Reborn." You know. Something like that.

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