Coffee Diary 14/11/22

Zetheros

Developer
Hey Exanimates,

Good progress on the pathfinding this week, we're building the multi-layered 3D maps, it's fast and automatic, and they look very tidy. We're now adapting the pathfinding to take advantage of this and we expect that even putting aside the new features it supports, it will immediately result in a much smoother experience for general navigation and movement.

We've also been going through our planned QoL changes, we have a long list of these, but we think there's a few that are particularly important as they remove some fiddly or tedious aspects of gameplay and controls that can be quite detrimental. Some are pathfinding related, but we also have things related to moving objects, comparing equipped items, interacting with small icons and objects, playing dead after a KO, queuing some inputs and more.

Comparing equipped items is a problem we've been juggling for a while. Unlike in other games, items don't always have direct equivalents and sometimes replace multiple items if equipped, so the solution isn't as obvious, and we still want to keep things minimalist and unintrusive. We do think this is important, the layered equipment makes the process difficult and also very confusing for new players who end up just ignoring important upgrades. This should be a fun and rewarding part of the game, not tedious and confusing.

Along these same lines we'd also like to see companions being more autonomous in managing their items. We talked recently about expanding AI to be aware of more things surrounding them than just other characters, which is an important step. However, we realised that before NPCs can search the environment themselves, we could also have them search bodies and containers after the player has, making use of what they left behind and perhaps letting them know if they missed something useful.

In general we do want to make the gameplay experience more streamlined and comfortable so you can focus on the fun stuff, with solutions that don't feel hand-holdy or gamey, but just more comfortable and intuitive, and that can contribute to immersion rather than detract from it.

Have a great week!
-the BM team
 
Last edited:

DezZzO

Member
This should be a fun and rewarding part of the game, not tedious and confusing.

In general we do want to make the gameplay experience more streamlined and comfortable so you can focus on the fun stuff, with solutions that don't feel hand-holdy or gamey, but just more comfortable and intuitive, and that can contribute to immersion rather than detract from it.
This is what I really like to see in an Exanima blog.
I made plenty of people try Exanima and literally every person complained about how some mechanics like inventory/item management can be unnecessarily complicated and just frustrating to deal with.
Oh boy, I'm glad they didn't see these things when they weren't as polished and you had items dupe or disappear from your inventory, I was losing my mind playing with these bugs.
I think lack of these QoL features was indeed a huge factor for those new players.
Nobody had issues with game being hard to learn or generally unforgiving. It was part of the fun for majority.
But dealing with some things like inventory is still an unenjoyable experience even to me after 160 hours.
Hell, to be brutally honest at least 3 people I know who played the game said it has the worst inventory management system and UI they've seen in gaming in years and it hurts. Considering how complex Exanima's items are, it was just depressing.
People would get frustrated over simple things, which leads to a cycle of "Yay I got new items, oh no I hate to equip it".
So it genuinely makes me happy for devs to acknowledge the importance of streamlined and comfortable experience.
You should be mad about getting destroyed by a dumb zombie, not because you can't understand how things that are simple in other games work.
 

r7448kf

Member
Having the potencial highest stats of the weapon visible might help in making it less of a hastle to compare weapons since a well made and prestine conditioned handsaw can be worse than a rusty short sword. Maybe particly transparent dots will do.
 
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