PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[The Gronk]

<snipped for space>

I prefer to remain anonymous.

"Go make your own game that is actually fun if its so easy" - done

"Add voxels to it and use Unity and tell me how easy it is." - done, it isn't

"Code it on top of 7 years of other peoples code." - I made my living doing this with a wide variety of code bases and several times the variables were named in other languages such as Turkish, Arabic and Slovenian.

 

[Drithyl]

Cool down, madmole. I for one agree with you on this, but there's no need to antagonize people and start trying to find out who's a better developer or who has more experience or who has a bigger...

I personally don't see the need for a boat. You can build bridges over water bodies right now, and you have vehicles to drive around lakes faster. A boat would simply be a cosmetic, coolness factor, but it'd quickly feel empty without anything else. No fishing, no water threats, no underwater exploration, no loot to be found in water, no xp to be gained in water. There is literally nothing to do in water. So when people get a boat, next thing they'll want is something to do with it. And that is the feature creep that madmole is talking about.

Proper water content in a game is usually planned from the very beginning and accounted for throughout the entire project simply because water is a completely different terrain with its own set of physics and challenges. A lot of what you design for land doesn't work for water and viceversa. It'd be better left for another game.

 

[RestInPieces]

I get so tired of back seat developers

Bet that Shawn can add an A17.0 death penalty option in less than 10 minutes!

backseatdevcertified*

 

[Thecolours]

Screw the rafts and boats. That will be interesting fore a day before it gets old. Give me Bandits and NPC's. That will keep the game fresh for another 1000 hours.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

@MM careful of the bait, trolls be about.

In seriousness, I would like folks to think about a game that is not influenced based on their own experience, but on how that experience came to be.

Sure make things challenging as you level, or what have you, but don't assume your experience is the same as others, or folks read all of thsoe tips and tricks on the web, and therefore a player should know to build two places in this game.

Example: Horde night place, and regular place for crafting.

I dont do that, but i see how that would be advantageous.

I like the feel of "defending your home"? (yes an RPG element outside of the game)

To MM's point, play the way you want, when asking for things/events/features I ask folks to remember there are gamers that have never played this game before.

I LOVED A17 start.

It Sucked as it should, however it made the accomplishment of surving the 7th day with only 5 deaths in the first week a great feeling.

Needless to say, the expereince of hours on hours of learning by one player is not what everyone else has expereinced....YET.

With the possability a player may never expereince the same as another.

That is a great feature to have in a game.

Individual expereinces.

Semper Fi

 

[Aldranon]

You can have bandits and npcs, or boats. Do you see the problem?

Make a loot item: Toy Boat.

Scrap for 2 plastic. Done!

I win! I Win!

For added depth, a NPC gives you his kids Toy Boat as a reward (for saving his kid who was lost, looking for his boat) and afterwards the kid cries every time he sees you: "Where's my boat!".

Everyone... You're welcome.

 

[Ayrton]

I think all players of 7 days or at least 98% of all players prefer bandits and towns before boats

 

[Tin]

Make a loot item: Toy Boat.
Scrap for 2 plastic. Done!

I win! I Win!

For added depth, a NPC gives you his kids Toy Boat as a reward (for saving his kid who was lost, looking for his boat) and afterwards the kid cries every time he sees you: "Where's my boat!".

Everyone... You're welcome.

Haha, that would actually be a funny little quest

Bonus, If they are R/C boats and we can have boat races in a pool xD

 

[Ayrton]

Madmole how is the issue of mining and bleeding, and other buff you can inform us?

 

[Phoenixshade35]

eh, boats are not that appealing to me, I simply enjoy the land, plus i find it fun driving down my rng map and having waterfalls beside a road that randomly spawned down in water lol.

In seriousness though one thing that could make it amusing is zombie random color generator, i mainly mean for clothes, that would be neat.

After A18 Experimental is out I will see if i become more melee, the baseball bats sound fun.

If they were to add anything new, I would say as a trial run for bandits just recruitable npcs that are only in navezgane till balance is made, but i know something along those lines is down the road, defending an npcs house from a random zombie horde is already intriguing to me.

Im still waiting on a skinny police officer, a male zombie in a lab coat, librarian zombie, fat farmer zombie, lady bikers, goth zombie, those are some i hope to see one day, only other thing on my wishlist would be a flintlock pistol and rifle to go along with the blunderbuss for a fun playthrough of old guns haha, but that being said i can't wait for a18

 

[madmole]

I prefer to remain anonymous.
"Go make your own game that is actually fun if its so easy" - done

"Add voxels to it and use Unity and tell me how easy it is." - done, it isn't

"Code it on top of 7 years of other peoples code." - I made my living doing this with a wide variety of code bases and several times the variables were named in other languages such as Turkish, Arabic and Slovenian.

Congratulations, you should apply to work for us then. (semi serious)

Still though, don't you see the feature creep? Its not simple to make any system polished and shippable.

I think people are used to us putting out janky unpolished features for many alphas, but we're trying to move to a AA quality bar now so we have to pick our battles, or we will lose the war. Boats do nothing you can't do now in a gyro. We'd rather see bandits, optimizations and other systems polished up before adding more stuff that will lead to 50 polish tickets.

 

[madmole]

Madmole how is the issue of mining and bleeding, and other buff you can inform us?

I don't understand your question.

 

[Roland]

Press Z to crawl add in this mechanic pls?
@madmole

attempt #2

This mechanic was in the game for a short time several alphas ago and was purposely removed. The developers don't want it.

 

[Roland]

Its really painful to keep reading about these hardcore fantasy versions of 7 days. If you can't imagine us doing it, lets not talk about it. I can assure you we will never publish a hudless version of the game. This belongs in mod requests. I might as well start talking about religion and politics in here, that is how alien most of these ideas feel to me.

Sorry man. Didn't mean to contribute to getting away from A18 topics. Let's everyone stick to what is going to be happening in A18.

 

[ItsHORDEnotHOARD]

How about adding some zombies eating corpses on the road?
You already have the animations ready and the corpse models ready, it will definitely add to the atmosphere and make driving more interesting.

Would be nice if some of the "sleepers" were replaced by zombies eating corpses on the ground. Same functionality, just different presentation for variety sake.

 

[SG1-09]

I think all players of 7 days or at least 98% of all players prefer bandits and towns before boats

I agree.

However, this game is already amazing.

It's scary to see so much disagreement while the forum aims to be constructive and not go into a delusion of perfection.

The best is sometimes the enemy of good.

 

[SnowDog1942]

On topic of A18, what is the new description for the charging bull perk?

 

[Survager]

What advantage does having a compass give anyone? Going North gains you nothing if you don't know what is there.

Madmole, you are a sly fox ))

You focus on the discussion of the compass because its uselessness is the easiest to prove) But you intentionally omit what the message also said about the clock =)

Why don't you discuss the clock?

I found my old post in which I described the idea with the clock in detail. I'm not sure that you paid attention to this post, because then I was new to the forum.

Maybe now you will pay attention to this post, and tell us why the clock is not needed at all in the game)

Thank you)

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?33767-Watches-as-an-element-of-atmosphere-games

 

[Viktoriusiii]

Clogging up yet more precious inventory space over tedium. Remember in 17 when you started out gimped and worked towards being "basic". Nobody liked it. Rust gave up on this idea and has out sold every survival game out there. This belongs in mod discussions.

I mean... there is an extra slot for cigars and earpiercings... I don't think two extra spots for a map and a compass (maybe a clock) would be all that hard to do... but this can surely be done by modding... nothing the base game absolutely needs... like more electronics for example... or more functionality of electronics (I mean look at that year old poll about electronics. EVERYONE wants it )

 

[bluepharoh]

Are you seriously trying to say that boats require the same amount of work as bandits? Add a water overhaul to that and it might just begin to be an issue.
I'll happily wait for either boats or bandits but to say it's either/or is false logic and I think you know that.

I guess the solution is obvious then, TFP hire you and the game is finished in a day because of course your the best AAA developer with 100's of published games and nobody else has a clue what they are doing. This is what it sounds like anyway.