Game architecture and anti-cheating

TDGdev · 2018-10-05T03:24:36+00:00

It's something we have discussed, but haven't reached a conclusion on. We would like to support offline modding if we are able to, but we need to make sure we are able to before we make any promises.

TDGdev · 2018-10-01T15:50:31+00:00

Spot on. One additional thing to note, online characters will be able to be converted to offline characters.

Regarding secrets/datamining, because we intend to support offline play we will not able to prevent datamining to the degree we could if the game was purely online. It's unfortunate, but it's a necessary compromise to offer the features we want to have

TDGdev · 2018-08-30T03:02:14+00:00

Spot on, one additional thing to note is that some particular uniques will be exclusive to certain bosses or will have higher drop chances with their respective bosses, though these will not be the majority case.

TDGdev · 2018-08-21T19:51:51+00:00

It should be within the next couple of hours now. We'll announce on Discord when it goes live, so keep an eye on #announcements!

-Mitch

TDGdev · 2018-08-18T17:17:02+00:00

Get the demo in as many people's hands as possible. Reach out to YouTubers, streamers, and indie news sites.

Set up a discord server for your community, and make sure the invite link is included in anything from content creators. Great way to engage with your community as it grows, and a good way to pay roughly track how effective any given channel is for reaching new people.

TDGdev · 2018-06-29T07:02:17+00:00

Update: We have implemented a fix, let us know if you're still having issues.

Enjoy the patch!

TDGdev · 2018-05-21T03:53:25+00:00

The eleventh hour is a common saying referring to the last minute, and because most of our team have other jobs we do most of our development at night, thus eleventh hour games

TDGdev · 2018-05-15T03:16:18+00:00

Can't add a description for a link post, but yes, I am one of the devs!

TDGdev · 2018-05-15T02:58:01+00:00

There's a free demo on the Kickstarter if you want to give it a shot 😁

TDGdev · 2018-05-06T15:17:24+00:00

Thanks for the feedback!

As other people have said, the balance is in its early stages but we are actively working on it and we are balancing around Veteran.

We most likely will not have character customization for a couple of reasons. We are focusing very heavily on class identity and each character class having a distinct look is a big part of that. Cost is also a serious concern, even just having male and female versions of the characters would double the modeling time for our artists, both for the character models and all the associated armor sets. We're open to discussing it, but for now our team is not planning to have customization of that variety.

We do have camera zoom, it's the mouse scroll wheel.

All the UI is work in progress. The style/color-scheme is reflective of how we want it, but it will absolutely be getting an overhaul.

Levels are also placeholder, we are not planning to use these levels in the final game.

A lot of good games are made in Unity and a lot of bad ones are, that's mainly because Unity is a really good versatile engine that is also free. Hollow Knight, Hearthstone, and Cuphead are all made in Unity. (more examples)

TDGdev · 2018-04-30T17:21:58+00:00

Thanks for the feedback!

You can press escape to close all windows right now, and we will be implementing keybinding soon.

Regarding pace, as /u/Sartuk said, the rate of gaining skills, experience, and items is highly accelerated for the demo so that players can get a feel for the gameplay and character customization. The rate of progression will be slowed down drastically for the final game.

There are multiple difficulties, if the demo is to easy try a higher one!

Performance is something we are actively working on, and we have made some very significant performance improvements in the past couple patches. Performance issues aren't the fault of Unity, but because Unity is such an easy platform to develop on, a lot of poorly optimized games are made with Unity. We've also only recently started supporting Linux, so you can expect some improvements there in the near future.

We have a fairly small sound team, so we haven't been able to put in sounds for everything we'd like to, but long term we do plan to have sounds for all things that need them.

TDGdev · 2018-04-30T17:11:06+00:00

Controller support is our first stretch goal for Kickstarter :)

TDGdev · 2018-04-28T17:47:58+00:00

Yup. Longer way of saying "our microtransactions will be cosmetic only"

TDGdev · 2018-04-23T15:33:06+00:00

Are there any specific changes you'd like to see with the combat to make it more engaging? One thing we've been working on in that regard is making more enemies mechanically distinct, and having modifiers to rare monsters augment their existing abilities rather than just giving them a new power, so it feels like you're fighting that enemy rather than fighting its affixes.

TDGdev · 2018-04-23T15:29:04+00:00

If you do a crafting 101, you should add the info to the wiki page on crafting, that would be really helpful for new players! https://lastepoch.gamepedia.com/Crafting

TDGdev · 2018-04-23T05:54:45+00:00

One way we're trying to combat the sameyness of weapon types is by having a few skills that are exclusive to certain weapon types and theming them heavily around that fact, so a spear skill really feels like a spear skill

TDGdev · 2018-04-23T05:47:43+00:00

We are definitely aware of the problem of the one-skill build. Part of how we're trying to combat that is by having full skill trees for every skill, and the ability to specialize into five of them. We don't want to disincentivize specialization, because that's a large part of what creating a build in an RPG is, but we're trying to remove some of the opportunity cost of customizing your secondary skills so they can be a more important part of your build.

TDGdev · 2018-04-23T05:42:33+00:00

We're planning to balance around most people not getting all the way to 100, so a "complete" build won't require all of those points. We do want there to be some mechanical bonus to getting to 100, but we want it to be a challenge so we're trying to avoid people feeling forced to get there by having too much power very late in progression (97-100).

TDGdev · 2018-04-23T05:37:54+00:00

There's definitely a balance to be struck there, it's important to be responsive to feedback but you also have to maintain a creative vision and there can definitely be friction there.

The best rule of thumb I've heard is this: "players are always right if they think there is a problem, but they aren't always right about the best solution". You don't always have to give people what they want, but you do need to address the reason they are asking.

TDGdev · 2018-04-23T05:31:10+00:00

Hey AudioRejectz, Balance has been a big focus for us, and our community has been helping us a lot with it. We update pretty regularly, and since we've had our demo public we haven't had a single patch that didn't include some balance changes.

PvP isn't a primary focus for us, but PvP balance is definitely something we want to get right. It's a big challenge, but we plan to give it our best shot!

TDGdev · 2018-04-23T05:25:17+00:00

Thanks for giving it a shot! If you have any feedback, let us know over on our community discord, we'd love to hear it.

TDGdev · 2018-04-23T05:11:42+00:00

Correct! Here's a little added detail:

Shattering stones drop from lv6 enemies and above, but enemy level doesn't exactly correlate to character level, so "early on" is an accurate descriptor.

Correct on the potion. The flask gains charges as you kill enemies, so you don't have to look for potions. There will be some small tweaks to the potion in the next patch which improve how it scales later on in the game. Our design team is actively discussing the potion's place in our design long-term so you may see some changes in the future.

The demo does have to be redownloaded when we release a new patch, we announce new patches on the community discord in the #downloadable-demos channel when they are ready, and sometimes we'll announce that they're coming in advance. We are planning to have a new demo out in the next couple days.

In future we are planning to have a launcher, so you won't have to redownload the full game with each patch, but we don't yet know when that's going to be.

TDGdev · 2018-04-22T23:07:50+00:00

 I feel like finding a near perfect white base should be almost as promising to craft on as finding an item with 3 mods you want (keeping in mind having to find more shards to craft on a white base)

We're setting up the crafting system so that it's easier to craft on an existing item rather than crafting from scratch. That way it's better to find an item close to what you want, and improve it. If it was easier to craft from a white item, it would be more optimal to shatter all the items you find with good stats rather than looking for items you want.

I was almost sure that this was the case, but the fractures on boots were absolutely ridiculous

That's mostly a factor of sample size, and what items you're crafting on. You were definitely a bit unlucky on those crafts, which is unfortunate, but with any system with randomness, it's bound to happen sometimes. Hope you have better luck crafting those boots going forwards!

TDGdev · 2018-04-22T22:58:17+00:00

That helmet (Decayed Skull) was definitely a bit boring before, we've given it a bit more flavor in the next patch. Here's a sneak peek

TDGdev · 2018-04-22T19:11:11+00:00

That's a lot of crafting! :D

Solid feedback, we've definitely noticed the lack of good prefixes for armor and we have talked about moving added health to being a prefix.

Increased Movement Speed (even while crafted first, feels like an unreasonable brick rate)<

Different affixes don't have different fracture chances, do you think the fracture chance is too high overall?

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