What changed
1 fix2 additions5 changes1 removal
- Balance
- Gameplay
- Performance
fixedOne painful item on this regard was the irresponsiveness of unit selection; there have been layered things that led to this, and some of them had been fixed already in 1.0.1, however, this version includes a further small but important change to reduce the pixel perfect accuracy required to select units; there’s now some tolerance for that so you can now click somewhere near the unit, and that should do the trick.
addedAnother point that causes frustration to the player is the units AI; units would stand there while their nearby friends were being massacred, and even sometimes when THEY were being attacked. In order to fix this I had to include a way to set the stance of the unit (because there are some times when you actually need the unit to stay away from combat to prevent it from dying). So you can now set the stance of each unit to aggressive or defensive, which will affect how it reacts to what is happening around.
changedAggressive units will engage in combat with the nearest enemy, and will turn back and fight whoever attacks them while running to some direction; Defensive units will instead conserve their movement commands regardless of being hit, and will stay where you put them (they will still attack back if they are attacked once they’ve finished moving).
changedAnother weirdness was units being stuck walking against a wall or against a unit for cases where pathfinding failed (or just in edge-ish cases with a lot of units cramped together in close spaces). The solution for this, for now, is that units will drop their movement command if they happen to be stuck in this situations. This seems to be ok for most cases based on experimentation.
removedSome other smaller fixes were done to this, including cases where units would crash their behavior if their targeted enemy was killed in the middle of action, removing some unwanted colliders from enemies such as the Giant Tarantulas and Scorpions, and prevent rocks in paramos from being ignored in pathfinding.
changedWhile it didn’t have as many improvements as combat, there were some important changes here too.
NovaMundi changes
fixedOne painful item on this regard was the irresponsiveness of unit selection; there have been layered things that led to this, and some of them had been fixed already in 1.0.1, however, this version includes a further small but important change to reduce the pixel perfect accuracy required to select units; there’s now some tolerance for that so you can now click somewhere near the unit, and that should do the trick.
addedAnother point that causes frustration to the player is the units AI; units would stand there while their nearby friends were being massacred, and even sometimes when THEY were being attacked. In order to fix this I had to include a way to set the stance of the unit (because there are some times when you actually need the unit to stay away from combat to prevent it from dying). So you can now set the stance of each unit to aggressive or defensive, which will affect how it reacts to what is happening around.
changedAggressive units will engage in combat with the nearest enemy, and will turn back and fight whoever attacks them while running to some direction; Defensive units will instead conserve their movement commands regardless of being hit, and will stay where you put them (they will still attack back if they are attacked once they’ve finished moving).
changedAnother weirdness was units being stuck walking against a wall or against a unit for cases where pathfinding failed (or just in edge-ish cases with a lot of units cramped together in close spaces). The solution for this, for now, is that units will drop their movement command if they happen to be stuck in this situations. This seems to be ok for most cases based on experimentation.
removedSome other smaller fixes were done to this, including cases where units would crash their behavior if their targeted enemy was killed in the middle of action, removing some unwanted colliders from enemies such as the Giant Tarantulas and Scorpions, and prevent rocks in paramos from being ignored in pathfinding.
I decided to continue development of NovaMundi to address some of the feedback we have received about the game after its release; updates won’t be constant but hopefully we’ll take it to a point where the player experience is smoother.
Combat Player Experience
A point of the game that is often noted as a weakness is the player experience while in combat; of course there are many things that build up to that, so better start working on them.
One painful item on this regard was the irresponsiveness of unit selection; there have been layered things that led to this, and some of them had been fixed already in 1.0.1, however, this version includes a further small but important change to reduce the pixel perfect accuracy required to select units; there’s now some tolerance for that so you can now click somewhere near the unit, and that should do the trick.
Another point that causes frustration to the player is the units AI; units would stand there while their nearby friends were being massacred, and even sometimes when THEY were being attacked. In order to fix this I had to include a way to set the stance of the unit (because there are some times when you actually need the unit to stay away from combat to prevent it from dying). So you can now set the stance of each unit to aggressive or defensive, which will affect how it reacts to what is happening around.
Aggressive units will engage in combat with the nearest enemy, and will turn back and fight whoever attacks them while running to some direction; Defensive units will instead conserve their movement commands regardless of being hit, and will stay where you put them (they will still attack back if they are attacked once they’ve finished moving).
Another weirdness was units being stuck walking against a wall or against a unit for cases where pathfinding failed (or just in edge-ish cases with a lot of units cramped together in close spaces). The solution for this, for now, is that units will drop their movement command if they happen to be stuck in this situations. This seems to be ok for most cases based on experimentation.
Some other smaller fixes were done to this, including cases where units would crash their behavior if their targeted enemy was killed in the middle of action, removing some unwanted colliders from enemies such as the Giant Tarantulas and Scorpions, and prevent rocks in paramos from being ignored in pathfinding.
Finally there was a TINY error causing a huge feeling disruption (in my opinion). The running animation for units was offset by a single frame, which caused it to jump awkwardly when it was looping.
Inventory Player Experience
While it didn’t have as many improvements as combat, there were some important changes here too.
Players can now select how many of a given item to drop; this was more significant before the relaxation on the carry capacity, but still might come in handy for situations where your party is almost massacred and left you carrying around a lot of stuff, so you don’t have to go through an awkward flow of dropping maize one grain by one.
Also, the items in the barter screen are now sorted using the same criteria as the loot screens, which is a huge improvement to make it easier to find stuff to trade (especially if you plan to dump all the excess weapons and armor that you got as loot)
More UX Improvements
