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Loki The Witful1 year ago
This is a very impressive idea Firefly the sculpt mode ways is better than what I thought would even be suggested after the plat-former, but you are right it is easy for us to make a decision here and then you have to do all the work and add it. I do not think we should give up on this idea but I think getting the new game up right now will work it is the little things that make us happy like the sky the sun light, I know I would be taking screenshots all day if I had that light! Obi is right to though little steps first.
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Rob121 year ago
@Firefly, I think your sculpt mode idea would be great for us right here, but for beginners, probably not. For someone who can't build anything, absolutely not, but for advanced builders, absolutely. Will it make Angeldust a building game with creatures to hunt? "I thought it already was!" You might think that Angeldust is not the same as any other game, and it isn't exactly like them, but it is very close. When you added photon machines, other games had other similar machines. When you added NPC's, other games had NPC's. They also have creatures to hunt and fight as well, some drop resources instead of coins. The things that set this game apart from the others for me are, realistic trees and ground blocks like mud, that behave like mud when you build with it. Also I found flying on a drakeling to build was much easier in AD than jumping and climbing, like in other games. Which brings me back to your sculpt mode. It's once again a similar idea to another game that has "creator mode". But in that mode, in that game, you have access to every block, even if you didn't buy or discover them yet. The mode also allows you to hover (like a drone view), to build at any height you want. Importantly; has it ruined the discovery of items, resources and creatures or hunting creatures in that game? Answer is yes and no. The creatures are still fun to hunt as a side quest or even a main theme if you are into it. There is also mining for resources, that can be fun too. However if you just wanted to build, you would never bother to mine, hunt or discover anything. In Angeldust, we need coins to buy our blocks to begin with, which we get from hunting, quests, etc. So it's not going to have too much effect that way, on newer players. long time players that have already purchased every block, wont need to hunt anymore, at that stage anyway. If they don't want to.
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Firefly1 year ago
@Rob12: Thanks for bringing a balanced take on the situation. I think sculpt mode is a fantastic future addition to the game, and I've already thought up some good ways of making the interaction fun and workable on all devices and input methods we support. Of course you all feel the large 'but' lurking around the corner. There is no literal 'but'; instead there are two conflicting approaches I see for making the game more popular: Strategy 1: aim for superficial attraction that is based on improving the game's visuals in areas we currently lack. I'm currently on this path, with the new sky/sun/light-glow effects. The idea being that we can make a better first impression by looking more contemporary. Continuing along this path would involve changing up more and more graphical aspects of the game until it eventually doesn't resemble Angeldust anymore. I'll do my best to showcase another step in this direction on the upcoming livestream, and I have two or three more steps planned out for future reveals. And I must admit that for me personally this works—I love playing the game with updated visuals and every livestream I'm really happy how things look more polished, even though we're still totally Angeldust at the core for now. Strategy 2: aim for deeper attraction based on features. This is what I've been doing for eight years (except for the 3D visual style). It has been successful in deepening the connection with existing players, but I feel that a lot of features go to waste because newer players don't even get to them. Take dungeons; these took a few years to design and develop on the sideline and are a major changeup/addition for the game. At the moment of writing under 500 players have completed a dungeon run. I'm happy with hundreds of players finding the content, but it's a very low rate of engagement given we have thousands of active players each month. I like finding and doing dungeons. On the livestream they're a nice break from the hunting action, and they form a central focal point for players. It's great, but I want my future time investment to matter a bit more than this. --- So I think my personal conclusion is that strategy 1 is the most viable right now. Knowing that every single new player will see updated—hopefully "better"—visuals might drive engagement with everything that's already available: our forums, community, hunting, building, quests, dungeons, wonders. I hope to get into the situation where we have dozens to hundreds of players complaining about the building tools. That would mean we're at a much higher level of engagement and I need to start focusing on strategy 2: deepening the game to match its initial appeal. It's basically a recap of what I wrote and said before, but sometimes it can't hurt to reiterate or rephrase what I'm going through. Conclusion is that we have a ton of great ideas on many fronts to execute on when we gain momentum.
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obi-1 year ago
I think everyone fully understands your situation and even expected you to say just this exact thing. Hence why the much more realistic proposition from the start was already a very reduced set of website side features limited to one claim at a time. I would hope that that wouldn't take years to finish, but instead maybe a week in the extreme case. I can probably say I'm speaking for everyone here: none of us expect a 'sculpt mode' to happen soon, or ever given how involved it is, but all of us would be extremely happy with just a copy paste and maybe one or two of those extra features we talked about, if you have time to squeeze them in. Also: Giving your active builders more tools allows them to build faster with higher complexity, which in turn makes visuals better as you get more higher quality marketable in-game material at a much faster rate. From my personal very limited no knowledge what so ever view: The website side tools would be more time efficient than the infinite claims feature as far as time investment goes on both fronts: the tools would be a bit more time spent developing and a lot more time saved on the players' side. The infinite claims saves builders the time needed to create a new account and level it up, (still, creating a new account might still be the preferred and faster way to claim for coinless builders (some multi-wonder builders don't even have all blocks)), the simple reduced website side tool set could on the other hand potentially save days of time with just some button clicks. And the time saved goes up more and more with every new tool. Would only a few people use the website tools? Yes, but also those very same few people are the ones still actually making stuff. It makes sense to give them these tools as soon as possible, to get them to build as much as possible, while they're still here. If we had just these few simpler tools like 6 years ago, there would be more wonders and existing wonders would be much larger and far more complex, at least I know mine would be. It would be amazing if you could squeeze in the simpler website side tools somewhere in-between working on the sexy new visual features, like you did with the infinite claim thing. And when the game has that traction you're talking about, the in-game UI can be added and the already working and battle tested code from the website side tools can just be moved over. (It's not a particularly new thing to have features on the website which would make more sense to have straight inside the game.)
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SodaMeow1 year ago
Here are my crazy ideas! Central location for grouping all players together on sign in (instead of in the village house) where players are on their own until they press playtogether mode). The most often complaints I hear is there is no one to play with. If friend A wants to play with friend B in the game, join game ..both go to different places on sign in. If there is an option in addition to play together mode that be pretty awesome I think, but am crazy so what would I know. heh! What would the central location look like: Main concept: a location where all players can just group together upon sign in, and existing players in the game chill and chat. They can also eye the newbies coming in. ( currently, @Firefly, correct me if wrong, with the exception of play together mode, the only way I can connect current in game players with new players is via GM tele-charger by being the conduit. And if there is no GM in game, current players don't even meet new players coming in unless they are in play together mode. What will the central location should / could/ might have: ( Should be a place players would visit often). Place to update skin, purchase weapons, buy exclusive paintings, summon creatures. Place to obtain some simple game tutorial Section (based on a theme) Desirable: Training pet to get stronger and bigger (maybe need 10 pet snacks per point to make it bigger -like the secret trapper big). Be cool to have a bigger pet than others...heh. Dance studio - place to spend coins and get coins for the best moves.(like random coins added for being groovy). All Angeldust website located there (with a link that takes them to those locations) ie. discord, youtube without them sign out or go to exit page of game to go to the website. A place where someone can leave a quick message for other players. (So encourage players to come back in to check)it doesn't replace private message as it should be less then 20 words maybe. (messages they would leave be like wait for me I be back in a sec..or if player xx comes in game, pls tell them to wait )... Because as a GM I find am asked to pass messages to others a bit often....heh. Allow rent a dragon for 10,000 coins & 100 dance for 1 hour Its simple concept to get these players together on signing and a place with purpose for interaction in addition to hunting/ building. Anyways have fun reading the craziness. =^.^=~MEOW
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Hummm1 year ago
Regarding playing together... I think Firefly should swap houses with Frank ... then, since everyone is friends with FF and he's only online during the Live Stream, you TP to Firefly's house if you want to play together... which you could do today, but if he swaps houses w/ Frank it becomes the central place that space is green has created... not to mention The Striped Road and Golden Road.
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Firefly1 year ago
On building tools: I am not a fan of quick hacks on the website. Anything more than a 'copy claim contents' function begs for a visual preview. My estimate is that building a preview requires almost as much effort as kicking off a rudimentary in-game framework. Both require a lot of time to get right, and then my preference would be to invest my time in the long-term solution instead of having to do twice the amount of work. I understand the frustration of the lack of tooling now that I've painted a picture of what could be, but noticeable improvements are going to take a ton of time. This leads to the uncomfortable truth that the only thing holding Angeldust back is me. I have no ideas yet on how to fix this. More practically: I have issues with the sculpt mode as I described it. Pointing-and-clicking works great with a mouse, but it has bad precision on a touchscreen and can't work with game controllers. After thinking about it, there is also no obvious benefit to point and click in 2D space compared to 3D space. For any form of cubic selection you probably need to select along three axes anyway, and this is equally well visualized in-game as it would be in a 2D picking user interface. So I'm leaning towards in-game tools now. Having a selection tool to build a 3D volume based on the extents of blocks that you pick. Simplest case: pick one end of volume, pick other end of volume, done. If you can't immediately pick all ends of the volume—like with a tall tower standing on the ground—you need intermediate steps. In that case: pick one end of ground surface, pick other end of ground surface, pick highest point of tower, done. Once a volume is selected you'd want to use tools on it. I think the essentials are cut, copy and 'roll along axis'. Cut and copy would place the selected contents into a buffer. A paste tool would let you point at a block in the world to paste the buffer. This takes your XY-orientation into account so that you can rotate stuff while pasting. The buffer is retained, so you could build a 360º enclosure made from a single wall element in one go. None of this would work on 'full claims' by design, but I think it does offer the flexibility to make backups and copies of elements at a good granularity. Setting aside the implementation details, does this sound like an '80% start' to majorly improve building workflow? I'm omitting creative tools like shape creation and texturizing from the core set as they'd require more thought to make them useful and I somewhat believe that these always need artist intervention to make them look good. On a common starting point: I believe this is sorely desired. I just have no clue what shape or form it needs to take. I want players to feel at home at their, well, home when they start playing. But I also admit that the current village layout isn't conductive to player interaction at all. We need someone to come up with a stroke of genius to fix this. The city/town housing the casino, boulevard, 'announcement board' being the common starting place is probably the next best bet. It would still need more thought to make it everything we want. Also, for those wondering: @Hummm is referring to @Frank, a special player account in the game that happens to be at the starting corner of the village. I don't believe that replacing my house with that location would offer many benefits: to me it's not so much about the physical location of the common place, but about the functionality we offer there to keep players around.
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obi-1 year ago
In my opinion the preview can be totally dropped, I'd much rather have a very hard to use version of the tools now, then nothing now and a complete user friendly setup far in the future. I think every real builder has enough skill to visualise what would happen, at least the ones who would benefit from this do. --- Dropping the website idea: (I completely forgot commands exist and don't require client updates.) The other game has a chat command controlled world-edit plugin, that works like this: - select a region (most basic way, there are more): using a wooden axe, left click on a block to get one corner of the volume, right click on a block on the other corner - they call the wooden axe a 'wand' which can be called into your hard with //wand, or just get it normally from the inventory - the volume can be edited while selected - chat commands: all world-edit commands start with '//' for some reason - //copy: copies region to clipboard - //cut, //paste (with extra -options) - //rotate: rotates the clipboard - there's also //undo, //redo .... and much much more: wiki with more info: https://minecraft-worldedit.fandom.com/wiki/Worldedit_Commands Totally forgot about commands, but this is another no-UI, no-client-update solution that also doesn't require website UI. It's visual as it happens straight up ingame. You can also use //pos1 //pos2 to select the two positions with your in-game player location. Which would probably be the best implementation for this game, since I don't see how the wand thing could happen, but also typing in the in-claim coords manually is INSANE (wireless photons are torture, Loki should complain more, there should be a copy block coord to clipboard button on the block picker), also how do you select regions that span multiple claims, can't really use claim coordinates. So //pos1 //pos2 is probably the best and only real way to do it with least effort. The chat command way solves all issues, it's visual and ingame, it's as easy to use on mobile as on pc. And is less dev work considering it requires no UI. Also: The base vanilla game has a /fill x y z x y z block_name [options] and /clone x y z x y z x y z x y z [options] to copy regions, and probably more cuz it has been years since I've used those commands. Of course the world-edit commands replace both of these with better versions.
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Firefly1 year ago
@obi-: Thanks for the additional information. It's clear to me that you want 'it' or 'something' RIGHT NOW, but I've been noticing that this isn't really helpful for me to understand and decide what to do. Can we focus on defining use cases and functionality first and then let me worry about what, how and when to bring it to the game? I'll do my best to add it in a form that I think makes the most sense and I hope my communication here has been illustrative of this mindset. Gathering all requirements and wishes from everyone's posts I see three main areas where tools can assist with building: structural modification, detailing and shape creation. I think these are listed in the priority I'd like to bring them to the game as they offer diminishing returns. Structural modification seems essential, with detailing and shape creation being nice-to-have. So my original question still stands for you and everyone else: to what extent would cutting, copying, pasting (rotation) and rolling (shifting) cover your structural modification needs? @sl_pro: I'm intrigued! Can you elaborate on a few points? What does 'good 3D character animations' mean for you, something like what you see in 'the other game'? And what does a 'new lobby' mean, is that akin to what we're talking about with the new starting area?
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sl_pro
