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« on: July 09, 2014, 12:23:14 AM »
I have a suggestion from a design standpoint regarding the ravens.
Currently, ravens are not fun imo. They don't even feel challenging, they feel cheap. Now this is a big problem considering the campaign basically revolves around this enemy type. Ravens should be "fun" to kill. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be challenging at times, because challenges are often fun, but it does mean that they shouldn't be frustrating to kill. You don't want the player to be thinking, "Holy shit if another raven pops out from behind a tree I'm going to asdhfoasuidvhals..."
Here's my suggestion:
1. Don't hide ravens behind things often. The last version I played all the way through was plagued by ambush after ambush. I started dreading whenever I had to move forward because there were always hidden ravens in every other tree.
2. Visually design things for visually challenged people. What I mean is, make things obvious. If an enemy is fast-moving, you can't also make them very small and a drab color. The visually challenged player won't see it. "But I'm not making an experience for blind people", you may think. But your players are, at times, effectively blind. When you've got crazy weather effects, and animations going off, the priests fucking God beam, numbers popping up, and noises are happening, you can't see the single raven right behind you. Then the player finally notices the thing after it's knocked off 10 points of health and they become frustrated because they just couldn't see it.
You need to balance the raven's speed, contrast, and size. If the raven stays black (which makes sense) then it has to be slowed down a notch and scaled up a little or else your players will be blind to it whenever there's more than nothing happening on screen.
3. The physics are too small. The other melee classes (any class with a sword) don't have the extreme damage angle that the paladin can have. What happens is the ravens will get either a little to the left or the right of where the player's swing counts, and it misses. Fair? Yes, it's fair. Fun? It's really not. They play like mosquitoes. A constant game of "oops, you missed!". If ravens are to be as prominent as they currently are I would bump up the physics to make them more hit-able.
That's all I got. The mod is great fun and I can't wait to see more, I just wanted to explain my frustration.
And also I don't blame you for taking your time on the custom player sprites. They're quite tedious to work on.