Questions from a new player

[MCBanjoMike]

Hey there, I played Hammerwatch for the first time last night and had a lot of fun, but was also left scratching my head a few times. The game doesn't seem to have a manual (bought it on Steam), and there are some basic questions that I was hoping I could get the answers to:

1. How do you suspend an online multiplayer game and pick it up later?

2. What are the benefits of being in Combo mode, assuming you haven't bought any upgrades past the first one?

And this is more of a development question, but:

3. Are you considering adding any more options to the cheat menu? We found the game to be pretty tough in our first few tries, but options like double damage and infinite lives seem to go too far in making things easier. Would you consider adding something like 2x/3x/4x lives, so that we can start with a handicap and work our way down to playing legit as we get better? Infinite lives takes all of the tension out of playing, but having to restart every time we wipe is kind of discouraging. Alternately, a mode where you get a fixed number of lives on every floor or dungeon section would be nice, where wiping brings you back to your save rather than the main menu of the game. Maybe there's a way to pick up a saved game and try an area again, but I couldn't find it in the menus. 

Anyway, great work on the game, it looks and plays great. I've mostly been playing the Wizard so far, which is lots of fun, although he's pretty damn squishy. Wouldn't bother me so much if those damned tentacle monsters didn't have such huge range...

[Hipshot]

Hi!

No, there's no manual, sorry about that, anyway:

#Whenever you switch floor (change level) or step on a waypoint, the game saves, when you load a game from the load menu, you can join that game with the IP. We know it's confusing, we will look at that later on.

#Combo makes you deal more damage and run faster, you can also add healing and nova to the combo to make it even better.

#Personally I don't like inf-lives and wouldn't mind changing that to like x5 lives or so, but I don't know what other people think and what the rest of the dev team thinks about that. I dislike it for the same reason you just mentioned, takes out the tension, but it might still be to hard with just the regular lives. Maybe we can add another option for it.

[sonicmega]

#Personally I don't like inf-lives and wouldn't mind changing that to like x5 lives or so, but I don't know what other people think and what the rest of the dev team thinks about that. I dislike it for the same reason you just mentioned, takes out the tension, but it might still be to hard with just the regular lives. Maybe we can add another option for it.

I will make a note that it can seem like the # of lives is too low, but having JUST completed a run on Medium the other night, I also know that for a decent group playing through the game, the COST of EXTRA lives can be way too low, especially when you're literally racking up coins from the final areas. We were dipping down below 10 remaining lives by Floor 12, but between all of us we were able to purchase about 71 Extra Lives right before the final boss (granted, having collected 42+ Tokens helped). This was DESPITE still being endgame skillwise (I ignored Frost Nova completely, and my ranger friends ignored Flurry, but we still had all our HP/MP upgrades, I had maxed-out Meteor, etc.)

It may be worth looking into a "rising value" for the shop items, where the first purchase is super cheap but it keeps getting higher and higher each time you purchase, ie that first Extra Life may be only 100 gold but the 10th may be 2000 (just random numbers). This will cause players to ask themselves "do I REALLY need another one of this?", to be less wasteful of the ones they purchase, and be more cautious overall. It can also foster communication between team members, especially if the values are separate for each player ("Hey, my Extra Life costs 1500 now, can someone buy theirs for cheaper?").

[MCBanjoMike]

Thanks for the responses, Hipshot and sonicmega. Glad to see that you can resume online games. I take it that you can have several games on the go, both local and online?

#Personally I don't like inf-lives and wouldn't mind changing that to like x5 lives or so, but I don't know what other people think and what the rest of the dev team thinks about that. I dislike it for the same reason you just mentioned, takes out the tension, but it might still be to hard with just the regular lives. Maybe we can add another option for it.

I wasn't thinking you should remove the infinite lives option, rather just add in a few other options at 2x/3x/4x, however many you like. From the sounds of sonicmega's post, if we got a bit better at the game then running out of lives might not be an issue. But for now we're a bunch of scrubs, and I know my friends were somewhat discouraged when we died and lost all our progress. Starting off with a bonus would make it easier for me to convince them to come back and play some more, since we'd have a reasonable chance of making it to the end. Anyway, I hope they'll want to play again, because I enjoyed the game a lot and I'd like to play some more soon, but I'm not terribly interested in playing solo.

[sonicmega]

Anyway, I hope they'll want to play again, because I enjoyed the game a lot and I'd like to play some more soon, but I'm not terribly interested in playing solo.

Playing solo still has its uses in collecting achievements and testing out the classes (especially once the new ones come out), as you're not being rushed by other people and you can quit/reload on your own time to conserve lives if you're quick enough between death + respawn.

However, you are still right, the lifeblood of this game is in both the multiplayer and the shared community of custom maps/campaigns, neither of which is particularly without flaws/issues at the moment.

[Grokitach]

There's enough lives on this game when you get all the secrets. Moreover, every boss give 5 lives, as soon as you don't die against them, you can finish the game with about 30 or 40 lives in stock...