Yes! Even though the level editor and sharing is admittedly a bit crappy, it's been super rewarding seeing what people come up with and I'm very excited to improve it more. Lesson learnt - user generated content rocks!! If at all possible, put it in your game!
@Denzil Unfortunately all our levels aren't based on Shovel Knight levels.
@Dislekcia I'm not sure how they made that level TBH. The camera appears to work differently to the Broforce camera. As a single player experience I think it's an improvement over standard Broforce.
@Dislekcia I'm not sure how they made that level TBH. The camera appears to work differently to the Broforce camera. As a single player experience I think it's an improvement over standard Broforce.
Here's some other things we added recently:
Bwahahaha! OMG, that's from the movie after Deathproof!
I think that Indy's movement opens up a lot of possibilities for single player level design. I see players making cool stuff for Brade too.
There is a version of the trailer floating around where Dolf Lungren endorses the game. But we ran into last minute legal roadblocks, so that video is probably going to get pulled down. Seems weirdly ironic.
Joonas Turner did a great job with the trailer vocals (as usual).
And Deon van Heerden composed a trailer theme as a homage to the Expendables theme. It's fucking brilliant. It makes me so happy!!
(And Kert Gartner as usual kicked ass with the editing)
We just discovered... Broforce is currently the 14th highest rated (by users) game on Steam:
The game is still in Early Access, so reviews might be more lenient than they would otherwise (and I am not expecting metacritic to be so generous either for that matter), but it still feels like an incredible achievement.
Oh wow, I was just reading an article about how to fix steam sort rankings, because before it wasn't weighted correctly and essentially just mimicked most popular. Good guys Steam for taking action, AND WELL DONE FREE LIVES! That's just amazing!
They feel a bit like human voices through effects sometimes. When it's high-pitched squeals it felt right, but when I feel like I can hear speech patterns (at the beginning of the sample) it feels weird.
I can only compare it to a grunty simspeak. Which isn't what you want from aliens.
And I was totally expecting the acid to be harmful, but then I remembered being able to walk through scorched earth too, so I guess no damage fits into the game rules.
There's a sort of whiiirrrrl spinning up sound, at first I figured it was the aliens spinning (in which case it seems a bit long), but then it didn't seem like that, what are those sounds?
Really? Just double checking, I hear it at 0:11, 0:14 (twice) and 0:43 (the clearest, and didn't lead to anything else), 0:47 and 1:06 (multiple instances again)
If it's one of the random samples of screams, it's too distinctive to be thought of the same as other screams, and also it sounds too much like a power-up to me!
Been chatting to Joonas... Next week we might change the wind-up sound to something a little more vocal (and less mechanical sounding). Thanks for the feedback @Tuism !
@Actrox Is that a Playstation ZA store? It really shouldn't be listing Broforce. Is this from your Playstation or from your PC? (Is there a link to it?)
The game should only be purchasable through our website, Humble and Steam. And will only work on Windows and Mac.
Sorry. I didn't look very closelly. I see the release date shows TBC. I just assume it was region locked, because I cant find the same link on the US PSN site. Here is the link: https://www.playstation.com/en-za/games/broforce-ps4/
I haven't been keeping up to date with your progress, I just got very happy when searching best co-op couch games for PS4 and for some reason a website listed Broforce, lol. But, yeah on that then, do you and when do you plan on releasing for the PS4 ?
Yeah, thought it better to ask the developer, whos thread this is, when they are/if they are releasing to the PS4, rather than asking google (who got me confused in the first place, because apparently it is listed as a top co-op game for PS4 when not yet released yet).
But hell, I take no offence.
As the only "result" I get from google is: Release Date: TBC, have you guys any clarification, and if not that is cool as wel.
Yeah, thought it better to ask the developer, whos thread this is, when they are/if they are releasing to the PS4, rather than asking google (who got me confused in the first place, because apparently it is listed as a top co-op game for PS4 when not yet released yet).
But hell, I take no offence.
As the only "result" I get from google is: Release Date: TBC, have you guys any clarification, and if not that is cool as wel.
There are a bunch of Devolver press releases in those search results as well, all of them say that the game is coming to PS4 and that release dates aren't concrete yet. I reckon that the game's publisher is probably a pretty good source of information too ;)
Also, there's no way that someone like @BlackShipsFilltheSky can post anything about release dates here for a game that has the amount of attention that Broforce has. Press would pick it up and that would get him in trouble with his publisher. You're not going to get a more concrete answer here, sorry.
@AngryMoose I'd appreciate it if you PM'd @dislekcia rather than using the Broforce thread to air your off topic grievances.
A quick google search shows we haven't announced a release date, and it's not like I could post any different here if we haven't announced it elsewhere. Until we're 110% certain we can release on a particular date we won't be announcing.
When we do announce a release date it'll be in this thread. I'd expect this community will be some of the first to know.
Trying out some new blood effects (trying to get the blood more juicy) :
OLD:
NEW:
Also, tweaking it so that thrown enemies are briefly susceptible to friendly fire... could be both useful and dangerous, though mostly hilarious I expect:
Had to check some of our stats out for an interview.
Our Google Analytics says that 2.7 million unique people have played the free online webplayer version of Broforce (an average of 2 times each). It's hard to know the exact effect that's had on Steam sales etc. But I'm still glad so many people have checked it out.
Not sure quite what we should do with the free webplayer version now. It no longer represents the quality of the game. Should it be updated to be more like a demo (representative of the final game but limited in scope), or maybe it needs more explanation pointing to the paid game having had more years of development?
We also have a game called "The Expendabros" on Steam which is free, and has reached nearly 1.5 million downloads, which is an additional demo, and that sort of confuses things.
Having two seperate demos is kind of ridiculous (especially when a lot of conventional wisdom says demos are a bad idea in the first place).
I see what you did there, juiciness is definitely reached. Well with the alien update you can definitely separate the demo from the full game. Perhaps have something during the demo saying, "play full game with better everything AND ALIENS! also check out our other demo/game Expendabros"? or Two blocks,one saying "play free Expendabros!" other saying "buy the fully awesome game, now with Aliens!" However, I agree it is definitely a tricky situation.
Had to check some of our stats out for an interview.
Our Google Analytics says that 2.7 million unique people have played the free online webplayer version of Broforce (an average of 2 times each). It's hard to know the exact effect that's had on Steam sales etc. But I'm still glad so many people have checked it out.
Not sure quite what we should do with the free webplayer version now. It no longer represents the quality of the game. Should it be updated to be more like a demo (representative of the final game but limited in scope), or maybe it needs more explanation pointing to the paid game having had more years of development?
We also have a game called "The Expendabros" on Steam which is free, and has reached nearly 1.5 million downloads, which is an additional demo, and that sort of confuses things.
Having two seperate demos is kind of ridiculous (especially when a lot of conventional wisdom says demos are a bad idea in the first place).
Them's some awesome numbers :)
DD's free HTML5 version and the free download have between them have 1.4M uniques since our site launched. The tracking for the old free version downloads (that were hosted on download.com) was something like 1.6M downloads as well (we used to estimate sharing rates based on the leaderboards, but I can't find that math anywhere). The way I see that is that, as long as you make it clear how much BETTER the current version of the game is, then the demo is brilliant to have.
So put more on the page that explains how much more awesome the current game is, do some upsell, put some gifs in there: "Our BROFORCE is better than YOURS!" ;)
So these were a bit of a contentious change. The logic behind this, and some changes we've recently made to Robrocop and Indianna Brones, was that a lot of players weren't discovering the best ways how to play these characters, and so having a very bad time with them. Robrocop not so much, but a selection of players HATED Cherry Broling.
Now, some of this could have been solved by any kind of tutorial. And some sort of tutorial information (in come subtle form) might eventually exist in the game. Though Cherry's problem was (and to some extent still is) that she is very different and requires unique skills to play with.
Obviously the people who weren't enjoying these characters loved these changes. But some of the experienced players did not like these changes. The questions in my mind are:
Do they dislike these changes because it makes the game worse?
Or are they upset because a piece of information they discovered is now less valuable?
Cherry being able to shoot forward means that she can function a lot closer to Rambro. It takes away the requirement to learn how to shoot and fly with her. So I guess another question in my mind is:
Is requiring players to master a new skill in order to be effective a reasonable approach?
Is forcing them to challenge themselves a good thing,
as once they're over that hump they can have more fun.
And if they have other options that avoid that hump, they may never climb over it.
The thing being that Broforce doesn't really have a safe place to try out new characters. It's all pretty safe if you're experienced with the game, but some players do feel heavily challenged, and stressed as a result, and those players aren't in a position to experiment in order to learn new things (and sometimes you do unlock a new character in a boss fight or otherwise particularly stressful situation).
I wrote this to some of the devoted fans who thought the changes amounted to a dumbing down, with less to differentiate bros from each other:
Yea, I do feel the design of Cherry, Robrocop and Indianna have been diluted a bit now.
That said, we find we're designing for a very large group of people who experience things quite differently to each other. It seems to mean we need to head towards a place that pleases everyone the most with the bro designs. Rather than differentiating bros with strengths AND weaknesses we're left with only being able to differentiate them by their strengths.
Which is a bit sad.
But at the same time it means we're allowing for more possible play space. Cherry now can be played like an immobile Rambro AS WELL as an awesome hovering death machine. The play space is bigger even though the incentive to play differently is lessened.
If you've read this far, I'm curious as to what anyone else thinks about implementing mechanics that don't teach themselves very well. Our approach at this point is to include unobvious mechanics that give certain characters advantages, but to make mastering these mechanics inessential to play effectively. Nowhere to force players to learn much more than press forward and shoot, but there's a lot to discover for those that are curious. I'm not certain this is the best approach.
Perhaps the skills required to play Cherry well could have been broken up, having a simpler character that shares some of the mechanics first (like the way Brade paves the way for more complex melee characters).
Or maybe some kind of training room, or specialized mission where the character can shine and the player can experiment.
Or maybe a mission that is required before progressing with that character, like the way Super Meat Boy requires players to beat individual challenges before incorporating them into more complex levels.
Of course, a number of the problems in this situation are unique to Broforce and how new mechanics are unlocked. But I'm still interested to know if anyone has thoughts on how this could have been handled differently.
(Thanks for bearing with my rambling. Not certain if this is interesting to anyone else)
@BlackShipsFilltheSky just read your rather lovely post. Unfortunately it's 1:30am, and I've been cramming, and I have to get up in about 3 hours so errrrr skipping on good feedback. (I need to drop that in a couple of places tomorrow.)
But I found this post insightful well written and raises some really good design questions <3
What about loading screens that act as practice rooms. Kinda like what some of the FIFA games did. So why you are waiting for a stage to load you get to play around with a bro. Once the load is complete the player could get a ''hit certain key to continue'' prompt so that they have the choice of continueing with the game or continueing to practice with a bro. Give them a new bro in the training that they might unlock for the first time in the next level, or which they had seen for the first time in a previous level.
I think the new Cherry makes sense. I'm assuming that she can't move while firing forward? That feels cool - make her worse at what the other characters can do, but not entirely terrible at it, which then incentivises players to try other things that she might be good at and then go "OMG, check out this flying thing!" (is her grenade-jump new?)
Not sure what you've changed with Indy. What were people's problems with him?
Also, not sure what you've changed with Robrocop... I assume it has to do with the gun charge-release no longer spewing stuff in a cone? It doesn't seem like too big of a change, TBH.
I think that figuring out what each of the characters do and play like is a huge part of the fun of Broforce. Having the odd character that players feel is "weak" when they're actually not is a good thing, I think. It gives players a chance to learn that they're wrong... I mean, look at how polarising McBrover is (team McBrover 4 eva!) I think that works in your favor. The thing you don't want is stuff that's just imbalanced or totally breaks movement limitations, which is maybe why Indy and Cherry feel tricky to manage.
This is a design issue that I've always grappled with... My philosophy was always "throw the game at people and see what they do", and so I've moved more and more away from nuanced, less obvious things due to 1) time to tutorialise and 2) immediate accessibility.
In chargeshot and death from above's case, it's only a problem because the "baseline" has been drawn by the other characters who are staightforward. I don't particularly the format of Broforce and tutorialising individual bros really fit, unless you REALLY re-engineer how you introduce new characters through the campaign, and basically rewrite the campaign structure. That's gotta REALLY suck.
One thing I remembered in Samurai Gunn as being really smart is the start screen that allowed players to play around with their characters in their own space before the game started. If you did that AND gave some character-specific hints in their own window, I think it would go a long way towards solving that.
Of course, that hinges on players playing multiplayer (non-campaign) and discovering that specific bro. But if people play multiplayer and start to understand that particular concept (selecting a bro in multiplayer, see some character-specific info), they'll naturally be inclined to check out other ones.
Can the same concept be introduced into single player and multiplayer campaign mode without too much problem? Prooooooobably not. Or maybe I'm wrong.
Comments
@Dislekcia I'm not sure how they made that level TBH. The camera appears to work differently to the Broforce camera. As a single player experience I think it's an improvement over standard Broforce.
Here's some other things we added recently:
I think that Indy's movement opens up a lot of possibilities for single player level design. I see players making cool stuff for Brade too.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2canrg/story_time/
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/05/introducing-the-expendabros-broforces-free-expendables-3-expansion
There is a version of the trailer floating around where Dolf Lungren endorses the game. But we ran into last minute legal roadblocks, so that video is probably going to get pulled down. Seems weirdly ironic.
Joonas Turner did a great job with the trailer vocals (as usual).
And Deon van Heerden composed a trailer theme as a homage to the Expendables theme. It's fucking brilliant. It makes me so happy!!
(And Kert Gartner as usual kicked ass with the editing)
We've been trying to be more open with our development for our fans that are interested. It's been nice.
The game is still in Early Access, so reviews might be more lenient than they would otherwise (and I am not expecting metacritic to be so generous either for that matter), but it still feels like an incredible achievement.
I'm mostly concerned about the feeling of the screams.
I can only compare it to a grunty simspeak. Which isn't what you want from aliens.
And I was totally expecting the acid to be harmful, but then I remembered being able to walk through scorched earth too, so I guess no damage fits into the game rules.
There's a sort of whiiirrrrl spinning up sound, at first I figured it was the aliens spinning (in which case it seems a bit long), but then it didn't seem like that, what are those sounds?
Looking great :)
If it's one of the random samples of screams, it's too distinctive to be thought of the same as other screams, and also it sounds too much like a power-up to me!
Hope this hasn't been asked before. I have a US PSN account. Why can't I buy broforce on a US PSN account? I see it is listed on the ZA store.
The game should only be purchasable through our website, Humble and Steam. And will only work on Windows and Mac.
I haven't been keeping up to date with your progress, I just got very happy when searching best co-op couch games for PS4 and for some reason a website listed Broforce, lol. But, yeah on that then, do you and when do you plan on releasing for the PS4 ?
But hell, I take no offence.
As the only "result" I get from google is: Release Date: TBC, have you guys any clarification, and if not that is cool as wel.
Also, there's no way that someone like @BlackShipsFilltheSky can post anything about release dates here for a game that has the amount of attention that Broforce has. Press would pick it up and that would get him in trouble with his publisher. You're not going to get a more concrete answer here, sorry.
A quick google search shows we haven't announced a release date, and it's not like I could post any different here if we haven't announced it elsewhere. Until we're 110% certain we can release on a particular date we won't be announcing.
When we do announce a release date it'll be in this thread. I'd expect this community will be some of the first to know.
OLD:
NEW:
Also, tweaking it so that thrown enemies are briefly susceptible to friendly fire... could be both useful and dangerous, though mostly hilarious I expect:
Our Google Analytics says that 2.7 million unique people have played the free online webplayer version of Broforce (an average of 2 times each). It's hard to know the exact effect that's had on Steam sales etc. But I'm still glad so many people have checked it out.
Not sure quite what we should do with the free webplayer version now. It no longer represents the quality of the game. Should it be updated to be more like a demo (representative of the final game but limited in scope), or maybe it needs more explanation pointing to the paid game having had more years of development?
We also have a game called "The Expendabros" on Steam which is free, and has reached nearly 1.5 million downloads, which is an additional demo, and that sort of confuses things.
Having two seperate demos is kind of ridiculous (especially when a lot of conventional wisdom says demos are a bad idea in the first place).
Well with the alien update you can definitely separate the demo from the full game. Perhaps have something during the demo saying, "play full game with better everything AND ALIENS! also check out our other demo/game Expendabros"?
or
Two blocks,one saying "play free Expendabros!" other saying "buy the fully awesome game, now with Aliens!"
However, I agree it is definitely a tricky situation.
DD's free HTML5 version and the free download have between them have 1.4M uniques since our site launched. The tracking for the old free version downloads (that were hosted on download.com) was something like 1.6M downloads as well (we used to estimate sharing rates based on the leaderboards, but I can't find that math anywhere). The way I see that is that, as long as you make it clear how much BETTER the current version of the game is, then the demo is brilliant to have.
So put more on the page that explains how much more awesome the current game is, do some upsell, put some gifs in there: "Our BROFORCE is better than YOURS!" ;)
So long as we never launch the game, and never sell on discount, we might reach top 10!
So these were a bit of a contentious change. The logic behind this, and some changes we've recently made to Robrocop and Indianna Brones, was that a lot of players weren't discovering the best ways how to play these characters, and so having a very bad time with them. Robrocop not so much, but a selection of players HATED Cherry Broling.
Now, some of this could have been solved by any kind of tutorial. And some sort of tutorial information (in come subtle form) might eventually exist in the game. Though Cherry's problem was (and to some extent still is) that she is very different and requires unique skills to play with.
Obviously the people who weren't enjoying these characters loved these changes. But some of the experienced players did not like these changes. The questions in my mind are:
Cherry being able to shoot forward means that she can function a lot closer to Rambro. It takes away the requirement to learn how to shoot and fly with her. So I guess another question in my mind is:
The thing being that Broforce doesn't really have a safe place to try out new characters. It's all pretty safe if you're experienced with the game, but some players do feel heavily challenged, and stressed as a result, and those players aren't in a position to experiment in order to learn new things (and sometimes you do unlock a new character in a boss fight or otherwise particularly stressful situation).
I wrote this to some of the devoted fans who thought the changes amounted to a dumbing down, with less to differentiate bros from each other: If you've read this far, I'm curious as to what anyone else thinks about implementing mechanics that don't teach themselves very well. Our approach at this point is to include unobvious mechanics that give certain characters advantages, but to make mastering these mechanics inessential to play effectively. Nowhere to force players to learn much more than press forward and shoot, but there's a lot to discover for those that are curious. I'm not certain this is the best approach.
Perhaps the skills required to play Cherry well could have been broken up, having a simpler character that shares some of the mechanics first (like the way Brade paves the way for more complex melee characters).
Or maybe some kind of training room, or specialized mission where the character can shine and the player can experiment.
Or maybe a mission that is required before progressing with that character, like the way Super Meat Boy requires players to beat individual challenges before incorporating them into more complex levels.
Of course, a number of the problems in this situation are unique to Broforce and how new mechanics are unlocked. But I'm still interested to know if anyone has thoughts on how this could have been handled differently.
(Thanks for bearing with my rambling. Not certain if this is interesting to anyone else)
But I found this post insightful well written and raises some really good design questions <3
Not sure what you've changed with Indy. What were people's problems with him?
Also, not sure what you've changed with Robrocop... I assume it has to do with the gun charge-release no longer spewing stuff in a cone? It doesn't seem like too big of a change, TBH.
I think that figuring out what each of the characters do and play like is a huge part of the fun of Broforce. Having the odd character that players feel is "weak" when they're actually not is a good thing, I think. It gives players a chance to learn that they're wrong... I mean, look at how polarising McBrover is (team McBrover 4 eva!) I think that works in your favor. The thing you don't want is stuff that's just imbalanced or totally breaks movement limitations, which is maybe why Indy and Cherry feel tricky to manage.
This is a design issue that I've always grappled with... My philosophy was always "throw the game at people and see what they do", and so I've moved more and more away from nuanced, less obvious things due to 1) time to tutorialise and 2) immediate accessibility.
In chargeshot and death from above's case, it's only a problem because the "baseline" has been drawn by the other characters who are staightforward. I don't particularly the format of Broforce and tutorialising individual bros really fit, unless you REALLY re-engineer how you introduce new characters through the campaign, and basically rewrite the campaign structure. That's gotta REALLY suck.
One thing I remembered in Samurai Gunn as being really smart is the start screen that allowed players to play around with their characters in their own space before the game started. If you did that AND gave some character-specific hints in their own window, I think it would go a long way towards solving that.
Of course, that hinges on players playing multiplayer (non-campaign) and discovering that specific bro. But if people play multiplayer and start to understand that particular concept (selecting a bro in multiplayer, see some character-specific info), they'll naturally be inclined to check out other ones.
Can the same concept be introduced into single player and multiplayer campaign mode without too much problem? Prooooooobably not. Or maybe I'm wrong.