PC Alpha 20 Dev Diary

Status
Not open for further replies.
hiemfire said:
Teas, Stews etc (every recipe past the early game straight meat or meat + water requires crops) for 2+ players from one field with how quickly food and thirst bars deplete (without running constantly, it's even faster with running around like a YouTuber on crack with a deadline) and have the ability to have a sufficient stockpile to cover any game glitches that kill off the player planted crops or destroy the portion of the players base that has the crops can result in 100+ plots being necessary in A19 even for a small group.
Click to expand...
I've got a solution! 

CANNIBALISM  :croc:

 
faatal said:
Many choices devs make are not great. Game development is a lot of experimentation. Dev teams internally often add or change features and later find them not fun or impractical or resource hogs. Early access just exposes this to the public, who then if they choose, get to experience all the back and forth of the design process. We try to minimize that with public releases, but there is only so much time to test things or else people complain you are too slow and don't release updates.
Click to expand...
Well i think newsstands looks great this is the most important thing ^^

Jost Amman said:
I've got a solution! 

CANNIBALISM  :croc:
Click to expand...
Okay i need to remember to run away from you if we someday stuck on desert island

 
Jost Amman said:
I can emphasize with that. I've been literally fighting in long discussions with some self-proclaimed "devs" on Steam, that come to the forum and say that doing what you just said is unprofessional! That it shows a lack of project management and so on and so forth... According to them, you plan something on paper, determine the time it will take and deliver at the scheduled date in time! When I ask them which successful game they developed, then they find any possible reason why they can't tell...
Click to expand...
LOL!

That only works when your feature takes 5 minutes to do or you are just copying someone else's idea. I exaggerate, but it is usually the case.

I never trust how long someone says it will take to do something in game dev. Usually it is x2 and I've worked with people where it was x3. At a past company we would ask if it was "done, done, done", because at "done, done", it was still not.

Blake_ said:
@faatal there seems to be a bit of a problem with thin obstacles with Zds and animals (like street signs) and fence avoidance (also both, but that would arguably make sense with Zds, not animals, as they can perfectly avoid obstacles).
Click to expand...
I saw a case with horizontal bars (yes, saw it on a stream!). Possibly path gen top down ray casts are missing their collider (thin or off center?), so it looks open.

 
faatal said:
LOL!

That only works when your feature takes 5 minutes to do or you are just copying someone else's idea. I exaggerate, but it is usually the case.

I never trust how long someone says it will take to do something in game dev. Usually it is x2 and I've worked with people where it was x3. At a past company we would ask if it was "done, done, done", because at "done, done", it was still not.
Click to expand...
Well people like speedruns right? we have , complete game speedrun, boss speedrun, even make  games speedruns.

so..... updates speedruns!

So - take 10- 20 modders and 2 guys from devs teams.  make condtions like : 2 hd zombie models, 1 gun and 1 type of quest + version must be stable. 

Who do this first win^^

 
hiemfire said:
have the ability to have a sufficient stockpile
Click to expand...


This is exactly what is being nerfed-- your ability to stockpile and thank goodness since there is zero spoilage in the game. It was too OP. You probably do need a 100+ farm to collect stacks of 64 stews and have them in storage for whenever anyone in the group needs it but Madmole already stated he doesn't want a design where having a stockpile of stacks of food is easy to do.

Besides, you don't balance a game to cover the possibility of glitches. You design it for how it should work. The creative menu and console commands are available for when there are glitches but a farm doesn't need to be able to automatically and easily produce a stockpile of food just in case something glitches.

I would be all for the food progression arc being a scramble to just find enough food to stay alive to sustainable food production to meet daily needs, to self-sustaining food production to stockpile for the future IF there was also spoilage and a need to refrigerate/preserve as an entropy loop for all the production. But there isn't and likely never will be any of that which means that being able to easily create stockpiles ends that part of the game.

 
I'm sorry if these have already been pointed out or this is the wrong spot for it, but a few things I've noticed watching Jawoodle's two videos:

1. Zombies on his horde night wouldn't climb ladders to get to him, so they just milled about and randomly swatted at stuff below him

2. Raining indoors again

3. This could be pre-existing behavior and I'm only noticing it because there's more stuff in the world, but zombies seems to be getting distracted and caught by objects that pose no threat. They just seem to be ignoring the player more to do inane things, but again I can't swear to this.

 
Eromivus said:
I'm sorry if these have already been pointed out or this is the wrong spot for it, but a few things I've noticed watching Jawoodle's two videos:

1. Zombies on his horde night wouldn't climb ladders to get to him, so they just milled about and randomly swatted at stuff below him

2. Raining indoors again

3. This could be pre-existing behavior and I'm only noticing it because there's more stuff in the world, but zombies seems to be getting distracted and caught by objects that pose no threat. They just seem to be ignoring the player more to do inane things, but again I can't swear to this.
Click to expand...


1. There seems to be an issue with zombie pathing on ladders. If there is a block above the ladder, even if it's 100 blocks in the air, the zombies may no longer see it as a viable path to the player, even if the ladder itself touches the floor.

 
Roland said:
Besides, you don't balance a game to cover the possibility of glitches. You design it for how it should work. The creative menu and console commands are available for when there are glitches but a farm doesn't need to be able to automatically and easily produce a stockpile of food just in case something glitches.
Click to expand...
Hopefully they're able to find a way to stop the glitches from happening. I don't mean crashes either. I mean leave base for a few game days, come back and every plant is broken if not entire portions of the base. If "Just use the creative menu." ends up being their go to when it hits "gold" then they might as well have just cut the entire farming portion of the game instead of likely neutering in game steps that players can take to mitigate when it does happen.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Laz Man said:
The end game has technically been pushed out more with the inclusion of more POIs especially since players can now choose lower tiered POIs even after progressing to the next tier.

Labeling some T4s as T5s would only speed up progression since those can be cleared faster and would deincentivize doing the "true" longer T5s.

FYI, there is also a new T5 factory.
Click to expand...


Ah, I thought some of the new T4 were allegedly harder than t5, so labeling them t5 didn't seem like it would make it easier, but of course that depends on the difficulty of the new PoI.

Personally that frickin half destroyed grocery store added in A19 gave me more trouble than any T5 does lol, and I think that one is a t3 or a t4? Super excited to see the new A20 ones, I've been trying to avoid spoilers on the streams so it's hard to tune in only for the relevant testing stuff and then turn my eyes away when they start clearing a PoI I haven't seen yet

Kalex said:
What do you mean it was wrong on drones? The drone was listed in the patch notes, and the drone is in the game. Just because you didn't read the patch notes carefully enough, doesn't mean it wasn't there.
Click to expand...


As Roland says, the patch notes specifically says the Drone scales with Intellect perk, but it doesn't in the final permanent unchangeable experimental release that streamers got

Anyway as for my stance on the farming debate that everyone demands to know, I personally think it's a good idea to make the perks more impactful, so making farming less easy mode encourages using the perk so that's fine. My only issue is just that it will require replanting which is just tedious and takes more time for no real benefit, so I'd say rather than RNG which is dangerous, just making the plants take longer to grow and having the farming perks reduce grow time makes more sense and seems far simpler and easier to balance. You only have to deal with the "how does the plant know who planted it and if they have the perk" and "what happens if you plant a plant then get the perk to make it grow faster" issues, which are fairly easy to work around

 
Jost Amman said:
(which is not the case since I don't even know those guys)
Click to expand...
No bias opinion here, I thought the video was well done.  Good summary of the changes without going into too much details, I think they did a great job of combining all the information previously shared in the various dev streams.

 
faatal said:
That only works when your feature takes 5 minutes to do or you are just copying someone else's idea. I exaggerate, but it is usually the case.
Click to expand...


This is categorically not true. It's actually how development works in most major companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc). I speak from some experience.

The gaming industry works very, very differently than other programming industries. I'm glad I don't work in it. :)

 
hiemfire said:
If "Just use the creative menu." ends up being their go to when it hits "gold"
Click to expand...


Who said that was their philosophy?

I'm pretty sure that this phase of development is meant to solve as many of those glitches as possible so that the game can go gold. Relying on the creative menu and console commands is what you do when playing an alpha understanding that there will be glitches while waiting for those glitches to be fixed. That was the point of my post-- not to say that TFP plans to go gold with creative menu and console commands as normal recovery features for glitches that regularly occur to the point that players feel like they need to have stacks and stacks of food put away to protect against it.

khzmusik said:
This is categorically not true.
Click to expand...


It is for the industry the conversation is about. I really doubt faatal was trying to speak for fields outside of his own experience.

khzmusik said:
The gaming industry works very, very differently than other programming industries.
Click to expand...


I needed this a couple days ago when Mr. Program Manager of office software was trying to analyze TFP workflow according to the way things work in his background...

 
MechanicalLens said:
My only real concern about the farming is super corn. What if you get to the point where you run out of the stuff, seeds included? Therefore I have the following questions:
Click to expand...


If you clear the entire map of super corn then you need to accept a quest to reset one of the Bob's Boars POIs.

If you are already farming it you only need 1 level in the farming perk to make a profit.

 
I'm loving all of the new visuals in A20, but from what I've seen the blood splatters that erupt from zombies when you attack them with melee/ranged seem a little bit too over the top imho. They were fine the way they were before I think. Now they just look like dirt clouds.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top