Muse Forums // Guns Of Icarus //
Suggestions!
Honestly, if this game was given a persistent warfare setting in the spirit of Planetside or perhaps Pirates of the Burning seas, and some land-action on objectives could be achieved, I would pay so much money for this kind of thing. Ship to ship combat is simply too epic to be ignored.
Speaking of which, you might want to get with SOE on the subject.
Well, I don't usually jump into game forums but I've been playing computer games for over 20 years (back in the days when Atari came out with "Pong") and we owned a Commadore64. So I've been doing it a while 
Anyway, this game has so much potential that I figured I'd come out of my cave and make a few suggestions.
First off, it's okay to have a tough game but as others mentioned it can be frustrating to finally get some good weapons and not be able to backtrack with them. Gamers like to take their new toys and go back and explore previous areas. Give them a chance to do that.
Hiring additional crew, or having small bots to assist, or be assigned tasks or roles would be helpful. Let them take damage if you want, but as a possible upgrade path it would help reduce some of the frustration. Gamers like to be rewarded for good play. A simple spin-off of the flying security drones like what is in BioShock would be easy enough. The retro 50's look and technology would dovetail nicely with a possible bot (or multi-bot) system to take care of the more mundane tasks. Gamers get tired of micro-managing every tiny detail in the heat of battle. Give them a chance to distribute the burden a bit. If you go the bot-hirlings route, you can also add a small upgrade path (armor, speed) for your bots.
Saving in mid-game. Sometimes outside events require we step away. Allow the game to pick up where we left off if we are forced to exit for some reason. Some games (like Plants vs Zombies) do this automatically and I've found that I like being able to step away for a breather and then jump back right where I left off.
Pirates shouldn't be endless waves. Gives us a chance to clear regions. Provide a recognition system like "Defense Grid, the Awakening" where you get bronze/silver/gold medals based on how you handle a region/battle/zone. This adds for re-playability and often has people going back to try and score better than before. Check out Defense Grid, you will see what I mean. They handled it really well.
trying to be a game that is all things to all people won't work. But like Defense Grid, you can probably have "modes" where the emphasis can be on whatever you want. I apologize for bring up DG so much but they did a lot of things right.
micromanaging operations is okay for a short period of time, but reward us for suffering through the troll work. For the frigates it would be neat if we could right-click while manning a weapon and zoom in a bit like a sniper gun sight. It would be fun to target an opposing captain or a critical system to disable them so we could leave them behind.
If I've taken better care of my ship than theirs, then I should be able to leave them behind since they have more damage than I do. This was a common tactic in the old sea battles. You might not have the firepower to win a toe to toe battle, but if you could take out a critical part of their ship you could eventually outrun them. That would be an interesting addition to an air battle.
Well, I'll post this in the proper suggestions forum. Your game has a great foundation and a lot of promise. I enjoyed it. Your weapon slotting system was nice. You might want to consider giving us the option of adding additional emplacements or allowing us the ability to have a "weapons bot" that can man a gun or two for us should we be willing to pay for the privilege of automating a couple aspects of our defense (or give us areas to go to where if we fight our way through the locals can provide us with specific types of upgrades).
Allowing mission flexibility where we can be part of a flight convoy or hire out as a mercenary protector might be interesting. Personally, I don't want to have to manually steer the ship. But a simple "formation" selection would allow me to change where in the formation I'd prefer to place my ship.
Well, I guess this is long enough. Hopefully there might be something worth considering. I'll head back to my cave now
Anyway, this game has so much potential that I figured I'd come out of my cave and make a few suggestions.
First off, it's okay to have a tough game but as others mentioned it can be frustrating to finally get some good weapons and not be able to backtrack with them. Gamers like to take their new toys and go back and explore previous areas. Give them a chance to do that.
Hiring additional crew, or having small bots to assist, or be assigned tasks or roles would be helpful. Let them take damage if you want, but as a possible upgrade path it would help reduce some of the frustration. Gamers like to be rewarded for good play. A simple spin-off of the flying security drones like what is in BioShock would be easy enough. The retro 50's look and technology would dovetail nicely with a possible bot (or multi-bot) system to take care of the more mundane tasks. Gamers get tired of micro-managing every tiny detail in the heat of battle. Give them a chance to distribute the burden a bit. If you go the bot-hirlings route, you can also add a small upgrade path (armor, speed) for your bots.
Saving in mid-game. Sometimes outside events require we step away. Allow the game to pick up where we left off if we are forced to exit for some reason. Some games (like Plants vs Zombies) do this automatically and I've found that I like being able to step away for a breather and then jump back right where I left off.
Pirates shouldn't be endless waves. Gives us a chance to clear regions. Provide a recognition system like "Defense Grid, the Awakening" where you get bronze/silver/gold medals based on how you handle a region/battle/zone. This adds for re-playability and often has people going back to try and score better than before. Check out Defense Grid, you will see what I mean. They handled it really well.
trying to be a game that is all things to all people won't work. But like Defense Grid, you can probably have "modes" where the emphasis can be on whatever you want. I apologize for bring up DG so much but they did a lot of things right.
micromanaging operations is okay for a short period of time, but reward us for suffering through the troll work. For the frigates it would be neat if we could right-click while manning a weapon and zoom in a bit like a sniper gun sight. It would be fun to target an opposing captain or a critical system to disable them so we could leave them behind.
If I've taken better care of my ship than theirs, then I should be able to leave them behind since they have more damage than I do. This was a common tactic in the old sea battles. You might not have the firepower to win a toe to toe battle, but if you could take out a critical part of their ship you could eventually outrun them. That would be an interesting addition to an air battle.
Well, I'll post this in the proper suggestions forum. Your game has a great foundation and a lot of promise. I enjoyed it. Your weapon slotting system was nice. You might want to consider giving us the option of adding additional emplacements or allowing us the ability to have a "weapons bot" that can man a gun or two for us should we be willing to pay for the privilege of automating a couple aspects of our defense (or give us areas to go to where if we fight our way through the locals can provide us with specific types of upgrades).
Allowing mission flexibility where we can be part of a flight convoy or hire out as a mercenary protector might be interesting. Personally, I don't want to have to manually steer the ship. But a simple "formation" selection would allow me to change where in the formation I'd prefer to place my ship.
Well, I guess this is long enough. Hopefully there might be something worth considering. I'll head back to my cave now
OldHap wrote:Well, I don't usually jump into game forums but I've been playing computer games for over 20 years -- Hopefully there might be something worth considering. I'll head back to my cave now
This is EXACTLY what I was looking for, not so much just a suggestion as a complete novel!
You bring up very intresting ideas and I completely agree with you on the tedious mid-combat-repair-your-everything-else-you-die part of this game.
We are already promissed that a lot of what previous suggesters have suggested would be implemented!
You my man, are 100% win.
Keep the ideas rollin' people!
I apologize for the slight delay in getting back with you. I do a lot of international travel and I'm sometimes out of the loop for days at a time.
My first post was kind of a rambling shoot-from-the-hip response but I took the time to query some of my friends (other old-timers such as myself) to solicit their opinions of GoI (Guns of Icarus).
I went back through the various games that I had played over the years and cannibalized 1 or 2 of the best features (or intergame mechanics) that I liked about each game and distilled those down to a couple dozen possibilities that might mesh well with GoI. I presented those ideas to my friends and asked them to pick what they liked and discard the rest after they played GoI for a bit.
I'll post those ideas for you but it would help if I did a little artwork to help with the visualization of what suggestions I'd like to offer you. The overall focus was to keep things simple because simple works and to overlay it on what already works in GoI. The biggest attraction pre-GoI is that the artwork captures the imagination before you even play it.
I do have one question though ... do you have a simple wireframe rendering of your airships in CAD? I use Google Sketchup for 3D presentation and I've taken 40 or 50 screenshots of the ship so I can build a 3D mockup to illustrate various suggestions. It makes things faster later on but at a cost of being a bit slow to initially set up. If you don't feel comfortable providing something like that then don't worry, I can do it myself. I was just trying to streamline my response time
Not everything is about the ship or ship systems though. I have sketched out maps, possible storyline aspects, and realtime background dynamics based on suggestions that you might wish to consider that shouldn't take much coding to integrate.
Kudos to your art person (or team). They did some really cool stuff. That first sunset background in the opening battle was beautiful.
I'm about to travel again in the next day or so but I'll see what I can send your way before I hit the road.
H
My first post was kind of a rambling shoot-from-the-hip response but I took the time to query some of my friends (other old-timers such as myself) to solicit their opinions of GoI (Guns of Icarus).
I went back through the various games that I had played over the years and cannibalized 1 or 2 of the best features (or intergame mechanics) that I liked about each game and distilled those down to a couple dozen possibilities that might mesh well with GoI. I presented those ideas to my friends and asked them to pick what they liked and discard the rest after they played GoI for a bit.
I'll post those ideas for you but it would help if I did a little artwork to help with the visualization of what suggestions I'd like to offer you. The overall focus was to keep things simple because simple works and to overlay it on what already works in GoI. The biggest attraction pre-GoI is that the artwork captures the imagination before you even play it.
I do have one question though ... do you have a simple wireframe rendering of your airships in CAD? I use Google Sketchup for 3D presentation and I've taken 40 or 50 screenshots of the ship so I can build a 3D mockup to illustrate various suggestions. It makes things faster later on but at a cost of being a bit slow to initially set up. If you don't feel comfortable providing something like that then don't worry, I can do it myself. I was just trying to streamline my response time
Not everything is about the ship or ship systems though. I have sketched out maps, possible storyline aspects, and realtime background dynamics based on suggestions that you might wish to consider that shouldn't take much coding to integrate.
Kudos to your art person (or team). They did some really cool stuff. That first sunset background in the opening battle was beautiful.
I'm about to travel again in the next day or so but I'll see what I can send your way before I hit the road.
H
I'm back for a moment. I was happily working on everything and then realized I didn't have everything I needed to make a good visual presentation.
So I have been sidetracked with getting ramped up on using Terragen2. There is a bit of a learning curve. I don't need photo-realistic backdrops or anything like that, but I do need a couple features that it provides. Yeah, it seems kind of silly learning a new program just for a minor illustration point but it's worth the time anyway since I've always been fascinated with terrain generation but never had time to mess around with it.
So many programs ... so little time
I just wanted to check back in to reaffirm that I haven't disappeared into the void somewhere. I'll have something interesting to post but it's taking time to put it all together.
H
So I have been sidetracked with getting ramped up on using Terragen2. There is a bit of a learning curve. I don't need photo-realistic backdrops or anything like that, but I do need a couple features that it provides. Yeah, it seems kind of silly learning a new program just for a minor illustration point but it's worth the time anyway since I've always been fascinated with terrain generation but never had time to mess around with it.
So many programs ... so little time
I just wanted to check back in to reaffirm that I haven't disappeared into the void somewhere. I'll have something interesting to post but it's taking time to put it all together.
H