My ylands concern

[Oliver Hope 261]

hello

I feel like iv been a very positive person on the forums, partly because I know game dev is very complex and I would imagine it helps to have a positive community. However I feel like this might have led me to not completely expressing my concerns and now that some of those concerns  are quite big I feel i should share them, of course all my respect and understanding that the game is work in progress remain?.

My concerns are really just one main concern. Ylands is both a game and an editor which is awesome however whenever something is added to the game it effects the editor sometimes positively or negatively.
I feel the editor and game should be seperated more in the development progress.

Lets take for example the dash mechanic although it seems quite broken in explore i dont play that much so dont know. In my oldest game, thieves vs security I used the set speed boost quite a bit.All players speed is reduced at the beginning of the game but now players can just roll around the map at mach 1(super fast). I also use it to stun players setting there speed to -100 so they cant move again they can just roll around.

Another example: when equiping players with items all non weapons/tools dont go to the hotbar, this makes sense in the explore mode but for alot of editor games you would want it to go into the hotbar, in my case vacuum tubes renamed as a smoke bomb, when dropped they spawn a cloud of smoke. When the game starts players get given them but they have to go into there inventory and manually equip it, this really interupts the flow. 

We are going to need a way to disable almost any feature in the explore mode for the editor so that we can be completely creative, have no limitations and not need to put extra code for say despawning items from the players inventory if the pick a plant they arent supposed to, or disabling interactions for enities like workbenches or storage containers. There are so many features in the game that a developer might not want in there own and this is a big problem.

We already kind of have a system like I have suggested which is the game settings panel, it allows you to disable trading and terrain editing ect. This just isnt enough though, I personally dont know the right approach myself but i dont feel a long list of check boxes  is the best way to solve the problem.

So in short it is great to have access to all the features of explore but we need a way to reduce the editor version of the game to the bare bones.

I dont have massive experience on game dev however if you agree with me then it is something that should start being done as soon as possible so things dont have to be remade. 

Thank you for reading, This post wasnt the best lay out?.

Edited May 8, 2019 by Oliver Hope

[Houp 237]

Hi,

unfortunately sometimes happen that new features added to a "explore" are not perfectly handled from a custom games view. At the moment there are a lot of interaction among all of the features.

I think that it should be exactly opposite of what you want. Editor and game should be handled together. We need to think more how new changes in game/editor affects the other.

1) Roll is new type of movement. In the new update you will be able to change  it too. (we discussed it and it seemed to us that it will be better to have 2 separate instruction to handle speed of movement and distance of roll)

2) In 0.13 using Equip will add item to your equip (if target item is an armor) or it will go to hotbar (if target item is not an armor) - in the future we want to add instruction to set specific hotbar slots and to lock active item to it's slot

3) You are right that editor needs to have a way to make some "mass operation" easier. We sure want to do something about it. (our designers of mini games suffer too. You are not alone. )

-> and sorry that this answer take too long.

[Oliver Hope 261]

3 hours ago, Houp said:

Editor and game should be handled together

hmm.I agree with this.

1) I just feel that when a new feature comes out like the role then in that same update we need to be given the editor functions to control it, then if something is added that breaks a game it can straightaway be removed by the developer instead of waiting for the next update.This also applies to number 2.

3) glad we argree?

 

[RedEagle_P1. 905]

5 hours ago, Houp said:

Hi,

unfortunately sometimes happen that new features added to a "explore" are not perfectly handled from a custom games view. At the moment there are a lot of interaction among all of the features.

I think that it should be exactly opposite of what you want. Editor and game should be handled together. We need to think more how new changes in game/editor affects the other.

1) Roll is new type of movement. In the new update you will be able to change  it too. (we discussed it and it seemed to us that it will be better to have 2 separate instruction to handle speed of movement and distance of roll)

2) In 0.13 using Equip will add item to your equip (if target item is an armor) or it will go to hotbar (if target item is not an armor) - in the future we want to add instruction to set specific hotbar slots and to lock active item to it's slot

3) You are right that editor needs to have a way to make some "mass operation" easier. We sure want to do something about it. (our designers of mini games suffer too. You are not alone. )

-> and sorry that this answer take too long.

Many of our games broke during the 0.12 update. CastleHunt, Procedural parkour,. ChefWarz etc. Is there a way we could work on a system in which we send you a few games to check what breaks during the update so we can have slightly smoother transitions? It's really heart breaking to see so much hard work reversed. 

[Oliver Hope 261]

20 minutes ago, RedEagle_P1. said:

Many of our games broke during the 0.12 update. CastleHunt, Procedural parkour,. ChefWarz etc. Is there a way we could work on a system in which we send you a few games to check what breaks during the update so we can have slightly smoother transitions? It's really heart breaking to see so much hard work reversed. 

too be fair, alot of those broke because of the changes to event listners. these changes were needed and all it needs if for people to tweek things, chefwarz was very simple to fix...