Hey everyone! Following a suggestion from a review, I'm making this thread in hopes of garnering feedback regarding my mod: Defense of the Storm. What is it? Basically a proof-of-concept for a PvE game mode in Heroes of the Storm.
I'm looking for testers for both single player and co-op games to give feedback so I can polish this to a mirror shine. To get a bit personal, my goal is to work for Blizzard (pretty sure a lot of people here have the same ambition) and I'd love to get this polished before presenting it to Blizzard Careers.
Mod Details
Players: 1-5
The Nexus is being assaulted! Gather your friends and come together in a brand new gamemode which brings the PVE to Heroes of the Storm. Play as Raynor, Nazeebo, Jaina, Uther, or Xul to defend your base against an increasingly difficult army. Survive 25 waves of the onslaught to win!
Current Bug List
- Missing sounds
- Catapault AI needs to be slowed
- Missing UI indicators
- Death models
Thank you in advance for any and all help you can provide! I am super open to critique and welcome any productive suggestions/criticisms. I look forward to hearing back from you all!
Ooh hello there. I like your ambition <3 , was worried for a bit that it would be a throwaway, so I'm relieved that you have have all the intention to work on this.
Sometime this week I'll try to get friends to play a few rounds of this with me to get a better impression of multiplayer experience.
Meanwhile, it would help greatly if you upload the map to EU server too, since that is the place where I usually hang around nowadays.
Wow awesome! I've been trying to get some feedback on the multiplayer to make sure my numbers were correct regarding the scaling difficulty. I'll be sure to get it to EU too when I release the version with sound added in.
With holidays and family I may be a bit slow but I'm definitely working on it. Feel free to PM me anything you weren't able to post in the review!
Thanks Wargirl too for having interest - any veteran mod makers looking at this would be more than welcomed.
Hey everyone! With it being Christmas I thought I'd give an update on where things are to avoid looking abandoned.
I am nearly finished with the sounds as all heroes now have voice/sfx. All that remains is troubleshooting some of the more interesting sound issues (making sure the Moon Well has the right sounds playing at the right time for example). Hoping to have a patch released by this Wed/Thurs. then wanting to jump on talents.
Heya. Wanted to drop by and say that I didn't forget about this, regrettably my motherboard and god knows what else got fried up so it'll be some time until I replace damaged hardware and be able to do SC2 again.
But I'll be cheering on you until then ^_^
-----------------
Also I got to play two games last week on NA.
It feels that siege weapons projectiles should be dodgeable, after all, siege's good vs static targets and mobility should be able a natural counter to it, instead we found that grouped up siege weapons would oneshot less tankier heroes, so we gravitated towards "run in, use ult, die, respawn, repeat" strategy every time we faced 5+ siege weapons, which felt somewhat scummy.
Also, on our second game we accidentally discovered "wave" command. Rip progress. With all the fps drops (maybe it was frozen, maybe it was something else, but we had game drop to 0-1 fps and stay there for a minute several times) and siege oneshotting heroes when they come one by one we decided to not go for 3rd playtrough.
And as of right now game feels somewhat limited. You look at abilities and can't help but to think - this is rather weak, looks balanced for PvP combat. I know it's supposed to mirror Hots, but I'm concerned that wanting to keep HotS familiarity could restrain game in a bad way. But you mentioned adding talents, which I imagine are some sort of leveling/progression system aimed at adding exploration and customization to heroes, so I'll wait for you to finish that first and think about these design questions later.
Thank you so much for testing! Especially with in a multiplayer setting as my own group of friends haven't found the time to test the game. I've managed to fix the catapults as you suggested! With that much damage, is should be avoidable especially to the attentive player.
I was curious though: where were you experiencing the FPS drops the most? After the Winter Soldier affix with the Frozen stuff? Or specifically on the boss? Or prior to all of the aforementioned stuff? I'll keep investigating though to see if I can pinpoint the culprit.
The talent system would mirror the one in HotS with the more PvP-centric choices removed. I've thought about doing strictly specialist heroes from HotS, but that would require removing entire heroes, abilities and assets then replacing them all with the next kits.
I'm currently putting in the talents and I'm about 50% or so through them (Raynor/Uther finished with some work into Nazeebo) so hoping to have the sounds, talents and other fixes in early next week. Again, can't overstate how much I appreciate the feedback and time - I'll remain diligent and get you an EU version soon!
Just a quick update: Sorry for the silence, the talent system took longer than I had planned on it taking but it's now complete. I've managed to figure out the cause of the lag issues. They stem from having too many units with too many effects on the screen that it clogs Battle.net's allocated bandwidth. So, instead of more units I've added a buff that increases per extra player added to the game. This buff increases the health of monsters and should hopefully feel more like a scaling raid in WoW than a complete zerg-fest.
I appreciate your patience, just know I'm still working diligently towards 1.0. I should have a public update between this week and next week. Thank you!
So, some further points I noticed immediately after starting to play:
- Why can't I zoom in. There are all these pretty HotS models but I can't get my camera close enough to actually appreciate all the details they come with.
- Why can't I select my ally units? I'd like to know what stats they have.
- Why can't I select enemy units. I'd like to know what stats they have to formulate strategy.
- Why do some of my skills say things "moderate damage" while some talent upgrades specify exact damage numbers. I'd like to know exactly how much dmg. my skills do.
- Initially, every time I healed from a well it appeared as if I didn't heal at all. The second time I played I payed close attention and noticed that it was healing me over time instead of instantly as I had expected (I don’t play HotS, only remember healing wells from WC3 where they were instant). I suggest displaying text tags over heroes displaying healed amount every time they are healed by any source (wells/spells/talents).
- Some heroes have no weapon icon.
- It appears that hero weapons have 0 scanrange, heroes weren’t auto-attacking enemies unless ordered to. Somewhat confusing.
-Raynors penetrating shot does not knockback, at least what it does isn’t what one would expect when reading “knockback”.
Now for more indepth talk.
Part 1 – Enemies
How much do you scale enemy life per player? I played 7 times with fullhouse and 1 time solo. And when I played solo – I actually did the damage I’d expected to do, killing enemy minions in 3-4 autoattack shots. When I played fullhouse however, it was taking seemingly around 15-20 shots to kill a single minion with game mostly revolving around:
1) Running around enemies trying to separate the wave into a smaller groups
2) Running around enemies waiting for cooldowns to wear off so that you can damage them.
It feels like you’re scaling +50-100% life for each player. Please don’t. At max a 15% increase otherwise enemies seem improportionally bulletspongy unless players spam their cooldowns in synch. And bulletspongy every now and then is fine. But when it’s all you get at all times it becomes boring, pretty much throwing away weapon attack micro and making heroes rely solely on cooldowns.
How about increasing the amounts spawned? You don’t have to spawn them all at the same time, each wave can have miniwaves, and you balance the amount of players by tweaking enemy quality and quantity in those waves.
Altho, such change alone would not be enough. Yes, a part of dullness when playing with full house comes from bulltetspongy nature of scaling, but that’s only like 15% of the issue.
When relating to enemies – a major problem is lack of variety in challenge. The 20 waves you fight are essentially allthesame, sprinkeld with affixes that do nothing but amplify boring parts of the design over time (enemy + life and + damage aren’t very interesting affixes when enemies already take forever to kill).
This can be addressed by adding more interesting enemies (enemy offensive/support mages? magic/melee hybrids?). However, I think there is an opportunity in here to really spice things up. How about adding buffed up HotS heroes as bosses every 5 waves. This way wave 1-4 will be a warm-up period and wave 5 will be a spike of excitement in a face of boss battle. If you decided to segment waves into miniwaves you can even spawn boss as 1st part of the wave with reinforcements spawning every X seconds from a portal behind them so that players need to formulate some sort of strategies.
Bonus Point: Make enemies more different aestethically. Right now enemies are mostly this small, thin mass of gray. Scaling them up and giving them more colors could be a good start. Look at usual sc2 units – they are all buff with distinct silhouette and a nice spread of teamcolor. Try to find a way to add color to enemies, either buy retexturing or by adding colorful in-game effects to them.
Part 2 - Heroes
So, uh, lack of variety in challenge really amplifies the obvious absence of depth in hero management.
As it stands right now – you always fight the same enemies and your skills see very little change (except for few OP things like infinite mana Jaina). There is nothing to look forward to as the game goes on, no strategizing by increasing your stats, no making a fallback plans by purchasing potions and whatnot. It’s a very dry hero management that is all about using those 4 skills you’re given from the start.
The talents you have are nice, but they’re not enough.
Do you want to stay 100% faithful to HotS?
If yes then your best bet is to polish everything else so much that the game plays great in spite of restrictions you decided to impose on yourself.
You still can have some other form of resource control. Like money for kills which can buy boons for temp hero buffs or hire mercenaries to be stationed at certain points in the map.
If you however are willing to mix things then here are other options that instantly come to mind:
1) Give cash for kills and for reaching certain waves. Add shop, in shop sell consumables (life/mana pots, scrolls of 1-time use spells) and items. For starters items can give you things like life, attack damage, spell damage and maybe some passive. WC3 hero items could be nice starting point of reference.
2) Skillpoints and perks. If you don’t want a shop, you can expand skill system. Every level grants a skillpoint and each skillpoint can be used to either increase skills aspect/level or grant a passive boost (life/mana/armor/regen). Talens can be reworked into here to to unlock additional spell upgrade aspects.
Part 3 – Closing Thoughts
Initially I played around 4 fullhouse games on normal. We won all games by spamming abilities, but it didn’t feel satisfying. Game just showed us victory screen while background displayed “wave 21/20”. No closure, no outro, just the “you won, now go away” cut =/
So for now, this feels like 3/5, mostly because of all the HotS importing work and that it functions properly. It’s dozen times better than previous version, but then again, previous version mostly had obvious technical grievances that had to be addressed before any design feedback.
So anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye on this. Hope the feedback was of use. It’s a shame there aren’t more people posting their view so that you don’t get your feedback from just me, but oh well..
I appreciate the feedback and will continue working on it! A lot of the locked controls come from trying to replicate the control scheme found in Heroes of the Storm. Honestly when I was putting in the 'locks' I was worried that some players would prefer the RTS control scheme versus the MOBA control scheme. What I may do is leave it to player choice, allowing players to turn on SC2 controls versus Heroes controls.
From the get-go this has been my attempt at replicating Heroes of the Storm truthfully, which I agree is rather weighty restrictions to place on myself. Moving forward I'll probably start experimenting with ways to make it differ or start branching off in my own direction.
Thanks again for the feedback - I don't want you to think I'm shrugging it off either because I still want to keep improving this game. I'll post here once I release the new update.
Map Link: battlenet::starcraft/map/1/280895
Backstory
Hey everyone! Following a suggestion from a review, I'm making this thread in hopes of garnering feedback regarding my mod: Defense of the Storm. What is it? Basically a proof-of-concept for a PvE game mode in Heroes of the Storm.
I'm looking for testers for both single player and co-op games to give feedback so I can polish this to a mirror shine. To get a bit personal, my goal is to work for Blizzard (pretty sure a lot of people here have the same ambition) and I'd love to get this polished before presenting it to Blizzard Careers.
Mod Details
Players: 1-5
The Nexus is being assaulted! Gather your friends and come together in a brand new gamemode which brings the PVE to Heroes of the Storm. Play as Raynor, Nazeebo, Jaina, Uther, or Xul to defend your base against an increasingly difficult army. Survive 25 waves of the onslaught to win!
Current Bug List
- Missing sounds
- Catapault AI needs to be slowed
- Missing UI indicators
- Death models
Thank you in advance for any and all help you can provide! I am super open to critique and welcome any productive suggestions/criticisms. I look forward to hearing back from you all!
Looks good I have to check this out!
Marie T. Freeman If you're too busy to give your neighbor a helping hand, then you're just too darned busy. https://www.facebook.com/wargirlmaps.maps
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Ooh hello there. I like your ambition <3 , was worried for a bit that it would be a throwaway, so I'm relieved that you have have all the intention to work on this.
Sometime this week I'll try to get friends to play a few rounds of this with me to get a better impression of multiplayer experience.
Meanwhile, it would help greatly if you upload the map to EU server too, since that is the place where I usually hang around nowadays.
Wow awesome! I've been trying to get some feedback on the multiplayer to make sure my numbers were correct regarding the scaling difficulty. I'll be sure to get it to EU too when I release the version with sound added in.
With holidays and family I may be a bit slow but I'm definitely working on it. Feel free to PM me anything you weren't able to post in the review!
Thanks Wargirl too for having interest - any veteran mod makers looking at this would be more than welcomed.
Hey everyone! With it being Christmas I thought I'd give an update on where things are to avoid looking abandoned.
I am nearly finished with the sounds as all heroes now have voice/sfx. All that remains is troubleshooting some of the more interesting sound issues (making sure the Moon Well has the right sounds playing at the right time for example). Hoping to have a patch released by this Wed/Thurs. then wanting to jump on talents.
Thanks so much for the interest!
Heya. Wanted to drop by and say that I didn't forget about this, regrettably my motherboard and god knows what else got fried up so it'll be some time until I replace damaged hardware and be able to do SC2 again.
But I'll be cheering on you until then ^_^
-----------------
Also I got to play two games last week on NA.
It feels that siege weapons projectiles should be dodgeable, after all, siege's good vs static targets and mobility should be able a natural counter to it, instead we found that grouped up siege weapons would oneshot less tankier heroes, so we gravitated towards "run in, use ult, die, respawn, repeat" strategy every time we faced 5+ siege weapons, which felt somewhat scummy.
Also, on our second game we accidentally discovered "wave" command. Rip progress. With all the fps drops (maybe it was frozen, maybe it was something else, but we had game drop to 0-1 fps and stay there for a minute several times) and siege oneshotting heroes when they come one by one we decided to not go for 3rd playtrough.
And as of right now game feels somewhat limited. You look at abilities and can't help but to think - this is rather weak, looks balanced for PvP combat. I know it's supposed to mirror Hots, but I'm concerned that wanting to keep HotS familiarity could restrain game in a bad way. But you mentioned adding talents, which I imagine are some sort of leveling/progression system aimed at adding exploration and customization to heroes, so I'll wait for you to finish that first and think about these design questions later.
Thank you so much for testing! Especially with in a multiplayer setting as my own group of friends haven't found the time to test the game. I've managed to fix the catapults as you suggested! With that much damage, is should be avoidable especially to the attentive player.
I was curious though: where were you experiencing the FPS drops the most? After the Winter Soldier affix with the Frozen stuff? Or specifically on the boss? Or prior to all of the aforementioned stuff? I'll keep investigating though to see if I can pinpoint the culprit.
The talent system would mirror the one in HotS with the more PvP-centric choices removed. I've thought about doing strictly specialist heroes from HotS, but that would require removing entire heroes, abilities and assets then replacing them all with the next kits.
Here are 2 recordings of the games we played, maybe seeing when what occurred will help you figure stuff out.
Oh my god, thank you! This is perfect Ducky.
I'm currently putting in the talents and I'm about 50% or so through them (Raynor/Uther finished with some work into Nazeebo) so hoping to have the sounds, talents and other fixes in early next week. Again, can't overstate how much I appreciate the feedback and time - I'll remain diligent and get you an EU version soon!
Just a quick update: Sorry for the silence, the talent system took longer than I had planned on it taking but it's now complete. I've managed to figure out the cause of the lag issues. They stem from having too many units with too many effects on the screen that it clogs Battle.net's allocated bandwidth. So, instead of more units I've added a buff that increases per extra player added to the game. This buff increases the health of monsters and should hopefully feel more like a scaling raid in WoW than a complete zerg-fest.
I appreciate your patience, just know I'm still working diligently towards 1.0. I should have a public update between this week and next week. Thank you!
Defense of the Storm is released to the public on both EU and NA servers. Please let me know what you guys think!
So, some further points I noticed immediately after starting to play:
- Why can't I zoom in. There are all these pretty HotS models but I can't get my camera close enough to actually appreciate all the details they come with.
- Why can't I select my ally units? I'd like to know what stats they have.
- Why can't I select enemy units. I'd like to know what stats they have to formulate strategy.
- Why do some of my skills say things "moderate damage" while some talent upgrades specify exact damage numbers. I'd like to know exactly how much dmg. my skills do.
- Initially, every time I healed from a well it appeared as if I didn't heal at all. The second time I played I payed close attention and noticed that it was healing me over time instead of instantly as I had expected (I don’t play HotS, only remember healing wells from WC3 where they were instant). I suggest displaying text tags over heroes displaying healed amount every time they are healed by any source (wells/spells/talents).
- Some heroes have no weapon icon.
- It appears that hero weapons have 0 scanrange, heroes weren’t auto-attacking enemies unless ordered to. Somewhat confusing.
-Raynors penetrating shot does not knockback, at least what it does isn’t what one would expect when reading “knockback”.
Now for more indepth talk.
Part 1 – Enemies
How much do you scale enemy life per player? I played 7 times with fullhouse and 1 time solo. And when I played solo – I actually did the damage I’d expected to do, killing enemy minions in 3-4 autoattack shots. When I played fullhouse however, it was taking seemingly around 15-20 shots to kill a single minion with game mostly revolving around:
1) Running around enemies trying to separate the wave into a smaller groups
2) Running around enemies waiting for cooldowns to wear off so that you can damage them.
It feels like you’re scaling +50-100% life for each player. Please don’t. At max a 15% increase otherwise enemies seem improportionally bulletspongy unless players spam their cooldowns in synch. And bulletspongy every now and then is fine. But when it’s all you get at all times it becomes boring, pretty much throwing away weapon attack micro and making heroes rely solely on cooldowns.
How about increasing the amounts spawned? You don’t have to spawn them all at the same time, each wave can have miniwaves, and you balance the amount of players by tweaking enemy quality and quantity in those waves.
Altho, such change alone would not be enough. Yes, a part of dullness when playing with full house comes from bulltetspongy nature of scaling, but that’s only like 15% of the issue.
When relating to enemies – a major problem is lack of variety in challenge. The 20 waves you fight are essentially allthesame, sprinkeld with affixes that do nothing but amplify boring parts of the design over time (enemy + life and + damage aren’t very interesting affixes when enemies already take forever to kill).
This can be addressed by adding more interesting enemies (enemy offensive/support mages? magic/melee hybrids?). However, I think there is an opportunity in here to really spice things up. How about adding buffed up HotS heroes as bosses every 5 waves. This way wave 1-4 will be a warm-up period and wave 5 will be a spike of excitement in a face of boss battle. If you decided to segment waves into miniwaves you can even spawn boss as 1st part of the wave with reinforcements spawning every X seconds from a portal behind them so that players need to formulate some sort of strategies.
Bonus Point: Make enemies more different aestethically. Right now enemies are mostly this small, thin mass of gray. Scaling them up and giving them more colors could be a good start. Look at usual sc2 units – they are all buff with distinct silhouette and a nice spread of teamcolor. Try to find a way to add color to enemies, either buy retexturing or by adding colorful in-game effects to them.
Part 2 - Heroes
So, uh, lack of variety in challenge really amplifies the obvious absence of depth in hero management.
As it stands right now – you always fight the same enemies and your skills see very little change (except for few OP things like infinite mana Jaina). There is nothing to look forward to as the game goes on, no strategizing by increasing your stats, no making a fallback plans by purchasing potions and whatnot. It’s a very dry hero management that is all about using those 4 skills you’re given from the start.
The talents you have are nice, but they’re not enough.
Do you want to stay 100% faithful to HotS?
If yes then your best bet is to polish everything else so much that the game plays great in spite of restrictions you decided to impose on yourself.
You still can have some other form of resource control. Like money for kills which can buy boons for temp hero buffs or hire mercenaries to be stationed at certain points in the map.
If you however are willing to mix things then here are other options that instantly come to mind:
1) Give cash for kills and for reaching certain waves. Add shop, in shop sell consumables (life/mana pots, scrolls of 1-time use spells) and items. For starters items can give you things like life, attack damage, spell damage and maybe some passive. WC3 hero items could be nice starting point of reference.
2) Skillpoints and perks. If you don’t want a shop, you can expand skill system. Every level grants a skillpoint and each skillpoint can be used to either increase skills aspect/level or grant a passive boost (life/mana/armor/regen). Talens can be reworked into here to to unlock additional spell upgrade aspects.
Part 3 – Closing Thoughts
Initially I played around 4 fullhouse games on normal. We won all games by spamming abilities, but it didn’t feel satisfying. Game just showed us victory screen while background displayed “wave 21/20”. No closure, no outro, just the “you won, now go away” cut =/
So for now, this feels like 3/5, mostly because of all the HotS importing work and that it functions properly. It’s dozen times better than previous version, but then again, previous version mostly had obvious technical grievances that had to be addressed before any design feedback.
So anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye on this. Hope the feedback was of use. It’s a shame there aren’t more people posting their view so that you don’t get your feedback from just me, but oh well..
I appreciate the feedback and will continue working on it! A lot of the locked controls come from trying to replicate the control scheme found in Heroes of the Storm. Honestly when I was putting in the 'locks' I was worried that some players would prefer the RTS control scheme versus the MOBA control scheme. What I may do is leave it to player choice, allowing players to turn on SC2 controls versus Heroes controls.
From the get-go this has been my attempt at replicating Heroes of the Storm truthfully, which I agree is rather weighty restrictions to place on myself. Moving forward I'll probably start experimenting with ways to make it differ or start branching off in my own direction.
Thanks again for the feedback - I don't want you to think I'm shrugging it off either because I still want to keep improving this game. I'll post here once I release the new update.