Beta test the new campaign.

[Hipshot]

Steam only, we need to have this tested before we can make a final launch of it.

Play with your friends and whatever, it's the entire campaign, all levels, all bosses, all secrets the full story. NO achievements though.

This is the password for the steam beta: DesertCampaign130

Please write what you think about difficulty, the vendor upgrade system, the new level deisng approach where you have a central hub and all that.

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR MODDING CONTENT

If you have any extracted assets from the game, like the english.xml you probably want to move or delete those. An old english.xml will conflict with our new one.

[MadMan]

Cool

[MadMan]

So far, the map LOOKS amazing, but the dialogue is a bit ughh. It's probably just me, the dialouge gets boring to read, and just tires you, until the point when you just ignore everything, and not read it at all, because theres just too much.

[MadMan]

The dead guy under the library doesn't have a minimap icon.

[Phantom]

Hm, for some reason my steam crashes and I can never start steam back up trying to launch it.

[Hipshot]

So far, the map LOOKS amazing, but the dialogue is a bit ughh. It's probably just me, the dialouge gets boring to read, and just tires you, until the point when you just ignore everything, and not read it at all, because theres just too much.

No need to read most texts, but the ones with "!" is probably things you want to read, because some of them are required to complete the campaign... you can just activate the text though, for most part the event triggered is done so at the start of the actual dialogue.

[Hipshot]

Hm, for some reason my steam crashes and I can never start steam back up trying to launch it.

What do you mean? Did you input the betacode at the right place?
Can't you start steam at all?

[Phantom]

I input the beta code and updated to the beta. I launch hammerwatch then steam froze up and crashed. I could not restart steam at all after that so I try to kill the process but couldn't.

[Hipshot]

Delete the entire Hammerwatch directory outside steam, in the steamapps folder and then start steam again and redownload it.

Uh, backup any mod before you delete anything...

[Phantom]

Did that and it crashes right as I input my username... I get the bootstrapper error from steam after that. I guess I'll just wait for final release then. Redownloaded, etc, it only happens with beta for some reason for me.

[prophet]

I went through the campaign once.
I think I've found every room and secret, except for that one guy locked in temple f1 (and a random ? baloon that I've considered a bug).

Bugs and BadDesigns:
LIBRARY - make the spawner from the library coming from the entrance (with the npc) to the side, so the player doesn't get in a loop while pressing up.
ARENA - There's a boss hp glitch (keeps flashing up and down, probably related to boss respawning constantly?).
PASSAGE - There's no ground indicator of flower hit area || door spawner problem as in library.
TEMPLE F1 - There's a ? baloon close to the lever guy room, inside a wall.
TEMPLE F2 - mana tower (purple) hit's glow sometimes stays after hitting.
TEMPLE F3 - after activating the portal back to the hub you can't come back from the hub to this lvl.
SUN TEMPLE ENTRANCE AND LIBRARY - down exit door has no map indicator
OUTSIDE - the npc next to the final boss portal says it's activated even if it's not || make it so the cook has a potion vendor icon (I included the lack of this npc as a bug untill I actually found out it was a quest unlock - let it  be clear from the start).

Boss Feedback:
ARENA - Put enemies inside the Arena with the SandMouths. It's easly cheeseable if you go to the bottom of the screen and move horizontally.
KRILIT - We definetly need some new mechanic for this one, as it's a recycled crystal lich. Make it so you slide in the icy floor is a good start.
FINALBOSS - The whole concept of being able to leave the room is ok, but it gets a bit annoying to move in and out through those vaults. I went in cuz of completionism, but it cut out a lot of the adrenaline from the boss itself.

Miscelanea:
MIRROR - There's a mirror reward for killing one tower. I usually kill every monster in the game, but I can see ppl who skip stuff getting stuck with this one!

That's it.

P.S.: Hipshot, plz answer my questions in the composite thread, will ya? I'm quite frustrated as of now... If you can also take a look in the designs I've come up with in my HammerSouls thread, would be nice to have some light.

[Hipshot]

Thanks prophet.

For all modders and people who might run into issues with text that looks like this: "d.npc.vendora1"'
Go into your assets/language folder and delete the english.xml file.

[prophet]

No problem.

I did a multiplayer run, found a weird loop in the passage lvl, where from the second to last section we would be warped back to like... the 2nd section? kepting loop back and foward instead of moving us to the next section.

Ah, also, nice idea on making the entrance to temple floor 3 randomized! I was surprised at first.


P.S.: In a side note, there was a problem with ppl not being able to deal dmg or collect coins, but I'm afraid it was lag/ network problems. Just throwing it out here.

[CrusaderDeleters]

I like this campaign. Nice work.
I'll be playing this more tomorrow, and doing a more thorough list of faults and little minor things.
But one thing that bugged me was the rocks on the surface didn't have a map icon. So it looked like you could go a certain path in the map, but you really couldn't.

[Olaf]

Just got started. Having a sense of people and towns is a nice change after so many dives through the main campaign always being waist deep in monster!

Is there anything you can do about the dialog interface?
A button to scroll through to the next message would be great. I've walked away from 2 different people now having read what they said, only to find they had more to say.
If you can make it button sensitive, it might be easier to read through the dialog if each sentence had its own box with a (more..) or some kind of icon to indicate they have more to say on each box until they dialog is complete.

That seems pretty intuitive to me when it comes to talking to NPC's. It also, hopefully, would reduce the size of the text boxes. Large blobs of text are daunting, and I have friends with this game that wouldn't even bother to read it the moment one of those huge boxes filled their screens.

EDIT: Right after posting this, I found the guest book. That's really nice to look at and gives you an idea of where you are in flipping through the book. Must better then trying to talk to the NPCs.

EDIT 2: Arena boss mysterious reset his HP bar on me. I had killed 3 of the mouths and the HP bar was at about 65-70%. Did a little damage to it in the south central part of the map. It wandered off, and suddenly had full HP again. Another mouth finally showed up and died quickly without changing the boss HP. The rest of the fight went fine with the final mouth going showing boss HP bar damage until I won.

Playing as Cleric on Hard. Inf lives. with Run Speed 1, Smite 1, Move Penalty 1, Drain Circle, and 1 mana upgrade. Picked up 4 damage upgrades, 2 armor, 1 mana, and 3 health. Had around 343 gold during the fight. Is there any other info that would be helpful for these situations?