SC2Mapster

Very cool, its a bit like the game Bloodline Champion. (Free To Play)

I like it! 5/5 :3

I finally got around to posting on this thread again.

I like what you did with the text on the character selection screen. It's much easier to read, but to be honest, it could still use a tiny bit of resizing. It's still kind-of small.

Otherwise, I certainly noticed that something about the game felt different (maybe character HP balance?).

So far, I've tried out most of the characters that you have to select from, and there's 1 thing I noticed. You have zero 1/5 difficulty characters to select from, and only 1 5/5 difficulty character to select from. Are you intending on redoing the character difficulty rating?

I think a few of the characters could use a bit of a drop in difficulty haha. But by far, my favourite character so far which has a decent difficulty rating was the Firebat. He's awesome!

Keep up the good work and updates!

Feedback/Suggestions

Beacons

Number of Players

One thing I thought of the second time I played your game was what happens when a player leaves the game? And then it happened about half way through the game... and we had a 2 on 1.

During this time of playing a 2 on 1, one of the other players asked if he could have all 4 beacons so he wasn't so outnumbered, and both me and my teammate agreed. Letting the other player take all four beacons took quite some time, and there was roughly 2 minutes of game down-time. Even though the down-time wasn't that bad, it still felt like a problem... so I thought of something simple to fix this issue of players who leave and create uneven matches.

The solution

Change the rate at which the beacons are captured by players who are outnumbered. Simply allow a 50% increase in capture rate for a 2v1 and a 33% increase in capture rate for a 3v2. This would solve the issue of players leaving and being outnumbered for beacon capturing and being beaten down by character's ultimate zeal spells.

A second portion of the solution lies in the start of a new round. If it's a 2v1, at the start of the round, all beacons should start with percents captured at 66% for the lone player and 33% for the team of two (to even things out).

One thing I just thought of.... is a beacon captured at 2x the rate if two players stand on it at the same time?

Beacon Power/HP/Mana/Speed Increases

One thing I noticed in the same game that the single player had the advantage of all four beacons and played against me and my teammate... was how much more powerful he became. Instead of fighting my single opponent, me and my teammate spent the majority of the time running from him.

I think the reason for the imbalance was due to the increase of attack/hp/mana/regen/speed/whatever. 10% is enough to begin with, but then the advantage went up to 12% when it was fully captured. Why did it go up an extra 2%? 2% is actually a lot when you're dealing with unit hp's of anything over 2500. 2% is equivalent to 50 hp. For some units, 50 hp could mean the difference between life and death in terms of how much damage they can do in one hit.

I honestly don't think that the beacon's should give a 10% boost to units. A 5-8% boost would be plenty.

The solution

Lower the boost that fully captured beacons give. 12% is a lot in terms of hp, damage, or speed, and could easily be the determining factor in a game. The determining factor in the game should essentially be skill of attacking/defending, not beacon capturing (in my honest opinion).

Captured Beacons

Something else I've noticed both times I've played the game is where the beacons (when captured) are shown on a player's screen. The small icon near the mana/hp of a unit seems much too small and in a bad location to realize that a beacon has been fully captured, or is being recaptured by an enemy.

The solution

There is a lot of room on the screen to make a small icon or table of icons on either the left-hand or right-hand side of each players screen. This small table of icons could show each of the beacons that are on the map, and what percentage is captured for each team. A simple bolded orange percentage and a bolded blue percentage under/above each beacon's icon within the table would likely do the trick.

Zolstice, one thing I'd like to mention is that I don't expect you to implement any of my ideas or address any of the things that I've brought up as my opinion of an "issue".

What I'm attempting to do is give you feedback from my perspective. I'm basically just trying to help give you another view of the game from outside of your own. If some of the things that I see as issues are non-issues to you, I'm fine with that. All of what I've written so far is simply my opinion, and nothing more.

I just hope that my walls of text will somehow help develop your game or enable you to achieve high popularity on SCII. Just a fan, trying to help haha.

Let me know if you want any more feedback or could use a hand testing certain things. I wouldn't mind giving you a hand if you needed it.

@Zolstice: Go

I'll try to make these next little bits short and sweet haha. My text rampage last night came at about midnight where I live and ended sometime around 2 am, so if a view of my sentences made no sense, it was due to lack of sleep :)

So I finally remembered how to take a screenshot so I could show you what I mean with the text stuff.

Here's what I was talking about:

The text directly below Luxstra's name is very very small. If I can impose my own idea for this fix, I think that moving "Luxstra" (the massive character in the center) up a bit and shrinking her would be a good idea to create more space. To be honest, when I saw that the characters were that large, I was kind of confused because it seemed like the "character selection" screen had a lot of wasted space.

Also, if you notice very closely, I play SCII on the lowest settings, and I believe that a lot of other people do as well. Therefore, having the character that you've selected as large as it currently is doesn't really do much for visual appeal because my graphics are set to the lowest setting.

Back to my suggestion... By moving Luxtra upwards and making her smaller, you could easily move the "Luxstra" text box on the left with her description above the "Burst, Control, Survival" box, and then make both of those two boxes larger and stretch them out so that you've got more room.

Just as a side note, I think a neat idea would be to have all three team members' characters shown at the top of the screen when selecting your character, instead of just your own. That way, you get a very visual appeal as to what your teammates are playing, and you can more-easily coordinate whose doing what on your team (in terms of character choice).

And as an aside to the side note, I wanted to put up this picture and give out a big Thank You!

The text in the top left that says "Check in-game hints to view change log" almost brought a tear to my eye when I read it. Keeping your loading screen very neat and tidy is a good tactic for a good-looking game. Other games like "Cruiser Command" which have a massive and very poorly edited change log showing on the loading screen look a lot like what I wrote you last night for suggestions - a massive regurgitated chunk of text that no one will likely read anyways :P

I'm going to be posting a few more comments for you (yes... prepare yourself) when I get a chance today. At the moment, I'm running out the door, but I thought I'd respond for ya since it's the weekend and you've probably got some time on your hands to read haha.

Last minute edit: apparently my pictures are too large/wide for this forum. Fortunately for me, the side that got cut off isn't the important side for explanation purposes :P

Alrighty, so I finally got a chance to sit down without anything to distract me from writing a whole pile of comments... so here goes!

First Comments

My first reaction to the game was that it looked very visually appealing, but also very confusing at the same time. There is a lot of text and there are a lot of different colours and colour schemes. Some of the things that confused me involved the size of the text because the smaller text seemed to contain the important information that I needed to learn the game with, while the larger text seemed fancy and a bit distracting.

Once I just dove right in, the game felt just fine, but the learning curve was very very steep. Most of the learning curve I speak about was likely due to unit imbalance and me needing to find ways to accommodate much stronger characters than the one I chose (Immortal). Some other attributes to the game's learning curve were definitely due to the complexity of the players screen and map layout. However, the complex screen (text/buttons) and very intense map layout, as I said before, made more sense and "felt just fine" once I took time to read over the fine details. If I could define my first experience with the game with one word, it would certainly be "overwhelming".

Now on to the nitty-gritty bits. I'm sure that my comments will get negative feedback from others because my comments will be generally about things that I think need improving... but they're my opinion of the game... nothing more.

Feedback/Suggestions

Gameplay Interface

Text/Colours

The text/colours of the game are very thematic and they make the game look very original. However, they also heavily restricted my first experience in learning how to play the game.

In terms of text, the vocabulary and diction are astounding. Sentences are clearly written with proper grammar and correct arrangement so they read at an adult level. The bad part of the text is that the important bits are sized very small and some of the less important things are sized large. Another minor issue with the text is some of the vocabulary choice. Words like "Charm" or something similar have no clearly stated definition which make understanding the attacks/spells of the units difficult to understand.

In terms of colours, the selections for both the text and game interface are very vibrant and make the game stand out very well. However, the problem with the colour choices is that they aren't contrasted very well. Two good examples of poor contrasting, but good choice of colours are as follows:

Life Bar / Total Wins

When I started the game, I picked my player colour as orange because it's my favourite. When I looked at the top of the screen after winning 2 rounds in a row, I couldn't tell what the heck those four vertical bars on top of my life total was... After losing enough life from a very strong ultralisk, I realized that those vertical bars were number of wins out of the total of 7 rounds that are played to determine a winning team. Take note that it was only after I saw the contrast of the orange "wins" over the black life-less bar, that I understood what the heck those vertical bars were.

Player Heads Up Display (Player HUD)

Another example of colour contrast lies on the top of the gameplay interface at the bottom of the screen. The lightly coloured orange-ish/yellow-ish text of "Q", "W", "E", "R", "T" against an even more lightly coloured green don't make the letters for each of the attacks/moves "pop" out enough to make them noticeable. Putting orange against grey, black, deep green or a leafy green would be a better choice.

Suggestions

Grab a colour wheel (google it) and go to work. Keep the colours that you have, but change them around so that everything is very distinct and visible. Some of the colours and contrasts don't matter all that much, but the two that I've suggested do. The best way to change the life bar and win count would be to have blue over orange and orange over blue. Not blue over blue and orange over orange.

Define text more clearly, and make sure you define what certain moves/meanings are more clearly. Maybe have a list of what things like "charm" mean at the start of the character selection? Something like "Charm - Forces foes to move toward your hero character for the allotted time amount".

Lastly, make definition text larger. During character selection, I noticed that a lot of the very fine small white text was somewhat poorly placed and very hard to read. I've got 20-20 (perfect) eyesight, and even I had a hard time reading/articulating what was going on with some of the text.

Maps & Arena

Layout

While I enjoy a cool-looking map with lots to offer for visual effects, I don't enjoy a map that's so complex that I can't tell what's a spell and what's a map doodad. Some of the maps have a great feel when you first look at them without heroes moving around and battling on them, but once hits the fan and the war starts, it's hard to tell what's part of the map and what's part of the battle.

The best thing that could be done with the maps is take out all of the extra details that aren't really needed. The maps are complex because they have too many colours or too many extras on them. Things that aren't needed and could be taken out of the map include coloured boxes, lights, large trees and shrubs. The reason for removal is so that there aren't so many distractions on the map and so that the players can simply play the game. Some of the trees restrict arena vision and other doodads are simply distracting.

If you want extra doodads for video/release purposes, that's just fine, but take them out after you're done spicing up your videos.

Beacon Location

Some of the beacons on the map don't seem to make much sense if you ask me. They're in locations that are prime for fighting which is all well and good, but they're all too accessible. Heroes start near a beacon, so they're instantly getting a boost of some sort. If beacons were placed somewhere on the map that you actually had to travel to in order to receive their boost, it would make much more sense. Although, even as I write this "Beacon Location", it's not honestly that big of a deal where they are on the map... just some food for thought.

Suggestions

Simplify the maps. They're too "busy", and could use a bit of a breather from all of the colours and extra trees/lights/boxes. Something very simple and easy to do... take away from the maps. For videos, keep them busy because it makes the release look awesome. For gameplay, simplicity is your friend.

Hi Zolstice,

I just had my first play through your game, and I have to say that I really liked it. I left some feedback for you on SCII, but I didn't really have enough room to fit all of my comments over the SCII review system, so I thought I'd bring my comments here.

Since this is my first post to Mapster, and I don't really have enough time to write everything I'd like to say out, I figured I'd just give a shout out to you and say that you've done a really great job. However, I do think that this game has a very very very long way to go before it's complete.

I honestly can't say that I think that the game is "REALLY well polished" (LogicalY).... but I can say that the game has a "REALLY good start" on something great.

Since I don't have enough time to write everything out at the moment, I'm just going to say that you should watch for the rest of my comments sometime soon. I've got a lot of feedback for you, and some of it is probably going to sting a little, but it's all constructive criticism. On a positive note, this game looks to be one of those "defining" games of SCII, similar to how Tower Defence was a defining game for SC:BW.

Good job so far, keep working on it!

@Zolstice: Go

No problem :P Im staying in the game's chat channel, hopin people will join, I used to play alot of SmashCraft, if you know of that game, and this seems in the same genre. The changes make the dark templar feel alot more balanced in my opinion. I need to learn how to play more of the people though :) Do AI's work in the map? It would be cool to still be able to play the game while it isnt popular(sadly).

REALLY well polished. Looks great! I played it a few times, and thoroughly enjoyed the game. However, I do think the DarkTemplar hero does a little too much damage... Either way, hope it gets popular, it definitely deserves it!