[RELEASED] - Ravenwatch - Act 1 BETA - 0.18

[Kashlavor]

Got this off the workshop.  So far it seems super fun, aside from a few graphical glitches it looked awesome and seemed very cool.  You have a frankly ridiculous number of custom assets, of which my favorite are the ravens perched in the trees.  Looking for more of it.

Also I forgot if you've addressed this previous but how do you feel about your assets getting used other places?  OK to have a few ravens showing up in other people's maps or you want to mostly keep them your own thing?

[ZarroTsu]

So here's my experience with this campaign:

I played through as the Ranger.


At the start I noticed a pretty big flaw with your raven enemies, and it's that they can surround you very easily and deal a lot of damage. 1 damage times 50 hits per second equals one really dead ranger in a matter of moments. I imagine this was designed with the paladin in mind more than anything, and it shows a lot of the time when you're expecting the player to shrug the ravens off like they're wimps. It's hard to when you can only shoot in a straight, narrow line, and when bombs have a timer on them a little too long to be useful outside of kiting.

The second flaw I found was in level length - too much of it. This became really noticeable during the forest where you had to collect candles - I wound up running around for an hour because there was no clear indication of where to go or where I should look. Eventually everything was dead and I had to wander around a completely empty map with my minimap open the whole time in order to figure out which corners I didn't quite walk into before.

A third flaw was the use of atmosphere. When the levels started they set up some really nice atmosphere and a decent concept for a level, but tying in with my second flaw above, after a while it just sort of stopped. This is evident in the tomb level when it starts out - a nice crypt full of breakable sarcophagi and bone ornaments... And then you turn around and make 90% of the level a single-tile-wide maze over a black abyss. What the heck happened? Is wandering around aimlessly with a lack of visual stimulus something you found fun while testing?


Overall I found a lot of bad mixed with the good, and the campaign felt too drawn-out and very... "disappointing". There's potential here, but it doesn't feel like there's a good sense of direction for it it to follow.

[Kashlavor]

After running through Greyfall two buddies of mine and I ran through the first part of Hammerwatch, defeated the first boss before it got too late and called it quits,  which is unfortunate because I solo'ed the next area for a bit and it seemed well done. 

Bit of a review.

Cons

• Minor Graphical Glitches - a few out of place tiles on the beach, some minimap icons which down line up, lack of a border around the cave entrance doodad, and the lack of transition tiles between the different ground textures.  Overall super great (see pro below) but I assume you already know most of what you have to work on there
• Bit slow on the pacing - I really like the first area and you definitely build up to the full Ravenwatch experience at a slow boil, I just can't quite decide if its too slow of a boil
• Health - the variety of health items is good, but it seemed like there may have been a few too many ways to get health back.  I definitely got the sense that "Ravenwatch is a place where you are going to take tons of damage, but, is also willing to let you find plenty of opportunities to get it back," which changes the feel of Hammerwatch and makes it more about surviving individual encounters than the long slog against the inevitable hit point loss.  That part was good, but it still seemed like a few less mushrooms may make it a bit more tense.

Pros

• Direction - the maps felt very complex and windy, full of twists and turns and new areas which changed up the style and kept it fresh.  Despite this we never felt lost and it doesn't seem like just a linear hallway either, very good.  The use of the different levels and stairs also adds a ton to it, I feel like I'm wandering around some old school Gauntlet map
• Fun Loot - the gravestones were fun, and the loot rate on the monsters was high enough that taking out a crowd left a satisfying little coin pile, something I think which vanilla Hammerwatch maybe should do more often.
• Customs Assets - like a ton of super cool custom assets; beach with waves, multi-level areas, shops, town, ravens, cool trees.  Thats a ton of work and is pretty much the best thing ever.
• Cool Traps - the raven traps certainly add a nice little edge to the areas, I think you might want to touch up their sprite a little bit but overall very cool.  The area which combined the zombie hands (also great art) with the raven traps was unique and really stood out.  The whole boss battle as well had a fun dynamic to it also.

Overall I'd say you have a cool direction and that I was sold the moment I saw those little ravens hiding in the trees to come out at me.  You've a good sense of aesthetics and design and I wish you luck with making more Ravenwatch.

[Courtesy]

So how many acts are you looking for here, and about how many hours of gameplay? I'm curious at what your goals with this in the end are.

[Heretic]

So how many acts are you looking for here, and about how many hours of gameplay? I'm curious at what your goals with this in the end are.

There are going to be 2 acts, the second act is still currently being made slowly by myself and before anything is concrete I don't want to set an expectation. There are a lot of ideas that I've gone through and most of them involve changing or fixing act1 a bit and involve using all of the newest elements of the engine including UI, new items, and lighting effects to really make the mood a castlevania/shadowgate type feel to the castle.

While the length of act 2 might be a bit shorter it is going to have some cool things in it. And with it the town should also be finished with more minigames, as well as re-dos of Act1 levels and an in-game UI change. In total both acts might be a 5 hour endeavor, or much longer if you play with a keyboard or struggle with the difficulty

[broxen]

This is fun. Any way to throw money at this? Kickstarter or Paypal?

[Heretic]

I highly doubt there would be enough of a crowd to fun it - I do believe Hammerwatch itself was crowd funded. I'll ask Myran and Hipshot if that's true!

The only way I could do it is if I had enough to pay what I make at my job currently for a year, so around 45k - that's pretty pricey :/

I love your feedback though! I'm still slowly working on Act 2

[Hipshot]

There's really no reason to crowdfund a mod for an old game, I don't see a big enough crowd =/

And HW wasn't crowdfunded, it was funded from savings and took about 9 months to do. But people should be aware that the game released in august 2013, is not the same game as now, we have added so many features to make the game better and also the expansion.

[Heretic]

For some reason I thought it was crowdfunded - but I may have had that mixed up with Steam Greenlight. Either way - this definitely isn't a fundable project

[Flemse]

Have you given up on the project? I think it's really nice, and I'd like to see some more. It could use some more action/challenge and traps during the level, the pacing can become a little dull, but otherwise it's top class. Love the boss.

[Heretic]

I haven't given up - I just have a new job that demands a lot more of my time. This is a project I'm going to revisit someday, maybe with the new engine for their next game