Ok, in the next beta version your save files will go to My Documents (or the equivalent on Mac), which should resolve the installing in Program Files/save permissions issue that users were experiencing.
Firstly, well done on getting it this far. It’s been a long journey and it’s certainly getting closer. Apologies for taking so long to get some feedback to you, but I really wanted to dedicate some time and give it my full attention.
Tested on a couple of Macs (both running Yosemite 10.10.3) and I didn’t come across anything that I would classify as a bug.
I am not an experienced player of card games like this, apart from Hearthstone and Zombie Farm Battles, so feel free to treat my feedback as that of a relative beginner. My experience lies largely in the user experience and it’s always the deal breaker for me when deciding whether to continue playing a game or not.
The Story This is, for me, the least important and the least engaging part of the game. As soon as I realised that my answers had no bearing on the game, I lost interest. It’s unfortunately not enough of a driver for me to read through the story advance every time, so I ended up doing the nextnextnext dance every time. I don’t play games like this for the story, I really just want to play with the cards and beat someone.
Visuals The opening screen with the cityscape is really, really pretty. I like that a lot. The character portraits are a mixed bag for me. I can see that there were a few different artists used to paint them and they lack cohesion in terms of style. Even a little thing like having a rim light on all of them would help to hold them together more, but as they are now they all feel a bit off. Individually, there are some really good ones in there, but as a whole they need to be tied together more. Some of them are very detailed, while others look like quick concept sketches. In terms of iconography, the Hand icon isn’t very clear to me in that I can’t work out what it is a picture of. This is a little nitpicky, but the shape of the cards on the Deck icon doesn’t match the shape of the cards that we actually use in the game. Having that subtle visual reinforcement makes it easier to tie the two together.
The Onboarding Experience I felt that it took too long to get into the game. I like to get an early taste of what’s to come without having to go through so much scene setting first. The tutorials at the start are too condensed for my liking. I much prefer being shown something as I need to learn it, instead of giving my a bunch of instructions first before I’m able to do anything with that knowledge. It’s the biggest problem I had with The Witcher 2, where there was so much info thrown at me to learn about combos and fighting that I had forgotten what a bunch of them were before I’d had a chance to use them. Far Cry 3, on the other hand, nailed that perfectly. I’ve always enjoyed the simple process of see/do instead of see/see/see/do as it generally makes me feel like I have more control and have a better understanding of what to do if I’m able to try it out immediately. There were a few instances that I was very confused about what was going to happen. For example, It’s not immediately clear that one side of the board is mine and the other the oppositions. There needs to be a clearer visual separation between them - even if it’s just more space like Hearthstone. Having some sort of line that I need to cross / wall I need to break through will help with that, as well as having a bit of a colour difference between the two halves. It doesn’t have to be a full-on red vs blue, but making it clear where the battle line is will help. I don’t get a strong sense of Us vs Them from he game board at all, which unfortunately removes my engagement somewhat. I want to have an enemy and I want it to be clear. The other thing I didn’t realise at first was that each card is engaging the one directly opposite, and that I have no control over the sequence of play or where I want to target my attack after having selected a card. Again, this might be the Hearthstone lens through which I inevitably will view card games through, but having the freedom to choose which specific cards to attack each round is a massive reason I enjoy it so much. The scoring system wasn’t clear to me at the start either. I worked it out after a couple of rounds, but it wasn’t immediately obvious. The major disconnect here for me though, was the fact that I’m adding points to my side instead of removing points from the opposition. This seems odd because I’m hacking into their system, which means I’m breaking down their defences. By breaking these down, I’m weakening them which means I should be removing points from their stack. It just feels like the scoring system is the opposite of what I’m actually doing. I also feel that it would be better to start playing only with normal cards and introduce special abilities, modifier cards, etc, later on as I progress through the game. It’s a bit too much to take in right at the start if you’re not as experienced at this style of game. Likewise with the ability to redraw your hand before starting a mission - it feels pointless at the very start of the campaign because I have no idea which cards are actually going to be better or not. So again, limiting what is available at the start would allow the player to be more comfortable making decisions rather than relying on good old guesswork. During the hint on Modifier cards, the arrows are pointing at the rows of Agent cards. It would be more helpful to point at or highlight the modifier slots directly. I’m also guessing that the beneficial ones are green and the harmful ones are red? (I see we have this confirmed later) Also, how do I know just by looking at a Modifier card which one it is? Having some sort of visual tie-in between the card type and it’s slot will make it much faster to make decisions. Leave the Condition run description until it’s actually needed. When playing an Agent card for the first time, the hint that pops up could do with a small change: put the label for Positive Modifiers on top and the label for Negative modifiers at the bottom. The reason I would suggest this that everywhere else you have referenced these before, you’ve had Positive first, then Negative. Keeping them in the same order (as we generally read top to bottom) actually helps to reinforce the learning as it’s part of a phrase we’ve already encountered and become familiar with. It’s like I almost always hear people talk about their parents as Mom and Dad, which feels natural. But when someone says Dad and Mom it feels off in some way, Same situation. You’ve introduced us to the concept of Positive and Negative, so to suddenly see it the other way around feels slightly off. I tried something different on another play through where I chose to speak to Miriam first. After the call, I ended up with two additional missions on the map, both labelled Miriam’s Goons - Wave 1. I felt that having access to additional missions before I’d done the tutorial mission was a bit odd, but thankfully you tutorialised the first mission the player plays as opposed to only the tutorial mission. I would however still remove that as an option until the player knows what to do, especially as I had to get 50 OP on my first mission instead of 10. Obviously I was headed for a horrible, horrible death but somehow won and I have no idea why! I was down 45-12, had no cards in my hand and one card left in my deck. I got that new card at the start of my round and before I could see what it was the game was over. The board cleared and I was presented with a Victory screen and earned 500 Credits and a Bronze reward card. This was very confusing as I was headed for certain defeat. I hadn’t even had time to register what the card looked like, so I can’t describe it at all unfortunately.
The gameplay One of the things that stumped me initially was that the cards weren’t using drag and drop to get onto the board. There’s a tactile-ness (is that a word?) that’s missing for me when I can’t do that. Also, dragging a card gives me the opportunity to change my mind whereas clicking is final - especially as not all cards require confirmation. The card shapes could also be tweaked to make it clearer which is which when glancing quickly at my hand - especially as they’re all partially hidden by the current front-most card. When adding a modifier card to an existing card (like the gun, for example) why do I have to hit a Play button when it’s not required when playing other types of cards? I played a hacking card that gave me 5 OP. This put me over the required level of 20 but I still had to play out the hand instead of winning immediately. This seemed odd. One thing that constantly bugged me was the layout of the cards in my hand at the bottom of the screen. It’s not always immediately evident which one is in front because they’re all perfectly aligned. This was even more problematic when there are multiple cards that can be played in a round - especially if there’s a playable card, non-playable card and another playable card and the one in the middle is actually in front. It looks like I can play that middle card because it looks like the glow is around it, but it’s actually emanating from the other two cards behind it. This confused me a few times. If the cards were offset from each other, that would help. If they were fanned out or there was some form of magnification on the front-most card (sort of like the way the Dock in OS X works) then it would be a lot clearer. The changing position of the hover is also weird for me because the text I want to look at is always in a different position.
Black Market Hovering over the cards to see their details is ok, but if I’m comparing cards to see which I want to keep or trade or build a deck with, I found the delay when moving over another card and the popup appearing to be frustrating. Also, because I want to compare the card stats directly, it takes longer because I have to look at a different part of the screen to see the same info based on where the popup actually appears. If one clicks on a card and the info appears somewhere on the screen, it should be a consistent position for all the cards and should be instantaneous. Ideally a permanent, dedicated space in the UI should show this info. I realise the stats are all visible on the card icon, but the extra text info is useful when still learning about the cards and formulating ideas about strategies.
Sound The loud beeps got very irritating very quickly and I couldn’t change the sound effects volume while in a game.
That's it! Feel free to ask if anything I've written is not clear. I know a bit of it is quite minor, but because you're so far along, those little things can actually make a lot of difference.
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate you taking the time like that. Sorry for the slow response, it's been a hectic week.
Firstly, let me say that I made some design decisions when I started with System Crash that I wouldn't make again. An example is the screen resolution being a fixed 4:3 aspect ratio. If you have a wide screen monitor, the remainder of the screen is filled with black. I basically didn't want to deal with the hassle of multiple resolutions and ratios, so I decided to fix it. I now think that was a poor decision, it wouldn't have been as complex to support as I think, and I can see how I should have approached it.
A number the UI decisions in SC fit into that category: "Not great, would do it differently now". Unfortunately, I can't reverse the clock, and a number of the things you're finding frustrating would take months of dev to revamp.
At this point, I can't face another 6-8 months of dev, the well is completely empty. I'm shipping in the next month or so, whatever can be fixed or polished in that time will be, anything else, well, I chalk it up to learning. And I'll try to do better in expansions and dlc etc.
With that out the way, let me go through your feedback.
The story, I understand why you don't find it engaging. I wish I could add more branching, but it's just too expensive right now, for this initial release. So feel free to just skip it. For some, the story segments are rewarding in themselves, enriching the sense of the game world. Like the lore books lying around in Elder Scrolls games. Some people (like me) read them all, and enjoy them, other people don't give a shit unless they add a skill point. Different tastes etc. :)
The visuals are inconsistent, yes. Part of that is different artists, but a bigger part is my inexperience as an art director. You're right, things like consistent rim lighting would have unified the look a lot more. It's something I'm learning, and will apply to future games, including expansions of System Crash.
Thanks for the feedback about the icons.
The board:
Let me see if I can do something to make it clearer that there are two sides, and that your agents will engage the ones directly opposite them.
At this point, I'm not going to add the ability to select targets for your agents, I'm afraid.
The scoring system is different because it's based around the concept that you're hacking an enemy server and stealing something, rather than dealing damage to a human opponent. So your rising score indicates that you're getting nearer to achieving your objective (scoring Objective Points), hacking through firewalls and accessing the central server. There are many board games that use a similar concept, usually referring to them as some variation of Victory Points.
I understand what you're saying about inexperience, but I have tried the tutorials with just Agent cards, no modifiers and special abilities, and it's an exceedingly dry experience. You just basically sit there watching your dudes biff each other. It might be slightly confusing initially, but players will soon get the hang of it, I feel. I would rather risk minor confusion than boredom, for a player's first taste of the core gameplay.
Noted on the modifier hint and condition tutorial hint.
And you're right, I should wait until the initial tutorial missions to introduce Miriam.
Hmm, your sudden win with Miriam's goons sounds either like someone had run out of cards or a bug. Do you have the save profile? Could you email it to me?
Gameplay:
I avoided drag and drop because I was trying to reduce scope, and it can complicate your UI a bit. I also had an example of a game that I enjoyed that wasn't drag and drop, Spectromancer. Admittedly, games like Hearthstone have raised the bar in terms of computer CCGs. Perhaps if I'd finished the game in a year, like originally planned, instead of 3, I wouldn't be so far behind the curve.
Changing the card shapes at this point is a huge undertaking. I'll see if I can make the hand highlights and so on any clearer.
Black Market:
A dedicated UI space for card details that shows the card large enough to be easily readable takes up a lot of space in the UI. I decided to nuke it and mimic Hearthstone. I'll see about either reducing the popup time or making it settable to 0.
DISCLAIMER:I am not terribly good at CCGs. Let me get that clear right up front. I managed to get past the tutorials and the first few formal missions before the game opens up. After that, ONLY DEATH. However, I'll give what impressions I can, and you're welcome to do with them what you will.
Firstly, I'm very impressed with the presentation. The interface is smooth and clear with lovely tweening and transition animations, and you've gone to great lengths to emphasise where the player should go next via your blinking buttons and such. I never felt lost in your UI or confused about where I should be going. UI animations mean that the flow of a round is clear - we know what's attacking what, we know what the flow of victory points is, there's no mistaking exactly what's going on on the board. Kudos all the way.
The drag 'n' drop thing's already been discussed, and I understand your leaving it out, but some elements of the UI feel a tad clunky without it (like equipment/buff assignment). Regardless, you've ensured that we won't be accidentally buffing the wrong cards through a misclick, etc, so props there.
I really, really like the way you've handled currency since the early build I last played. Having it slowly trickle in to control the pace of play it rather than leaving it to the luck of the draw feels MUUUUUUUCH better. Good move thar.
I thoroughly enjoyed the written client calls and "missions" that flesh out the world and lend your actions a bit of context. I think that helped a LOT in terms of my engagement. And dat music... :O~~~
I think the tutorial is robust. Your turn progress indicator combined with blinky "HERE'S WHAT YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BE CLICKING NOW" UI elements is great at guiding new players into learning the interface, and is a good at-a-glance guide to what you can do once you have the UI down. I finished the tutorial missions feeling that I thoroughly understood the game's basic mechanics and UI, so mission accomplished.
However, I feel that once the city opens up, the game's difficulty suddenly takes a sharp increase. We're told about a Black Market, but not what it can really do for us and why we should care. A million missions open up, but not one seems beatable with the starter deck (due to ROBOTS, or crazy-prepared security, etc), and not much emphasis is placed on "hey, dude, you should kinda expand your deck and stuff to not suck?". I really feel the game needs an intermediate stage where n00b-blossoms such as myself can learn a little of the intricacies of deck construction and try them out before the world opens up and we get inundated with failure at every turn. I'm sure your experienced target market feels differently though - deck construction is second nature. It's half the game, after all. :P
You're close to release, so I'm not sure how much of this is useful or implementable before you release this monster upon ye webz, but there you have it. Overall, she's slick and attractive, and the only niggles I have are due to my own unfamiliarity with the genre. Good luck with release! \o/
Glad you like a lot of the new touches, it's good to know that they've been received well. And yeah, the UI is a bit clunky, but that's a heck of a lot of work to change so close to release, so I think I'm going to have to ship like that.
About the difficulty: Heh, this illustrates why devs can't test their own games. I beat most of the early missions with just the starter deck quite easily, get about midway through the beta before I feel like I need to start adding in some of the cards I won. But I've been playing SC for 3 years, I basically know all the opening moves of the various deck types by heart. ;)
But noted. And don't worry, the next release introduces a more gentle ramp up, primarily by doing what I do in the tutorial, giving the player an advantage. So you'll still see some of those robots and things, and hopefully think (Hey, maybe I can buy some of those for meself at the BM*), but you won't get flattened quite so early.
*I'm going to look at hinting that the player should do that in dialogues etc too, based on your feedback. :)
The beta you all have played includes 16 of the 30 Easy missions in the campaign, IIRC. There are ~100 missions in total, broadly broken up into the Easy, Medium, Hard and Elite tiers.
I've finished testing Medium tier, and will be done with Hard shortly. Elite tier is pretty well-tested already, as it represents the best Archetype decks I could build with all cards unlocked, so I've tested them extensively over the course of building the card set.
Once those are done, I'll be doing a pass to add "special" missions, ie ones with special Conditions that alter the gameplay a bit. Probably be around 10~15 of those.
Full first-pass campaign testing is nearly done, is what I'm saying, at least on my side. Once it is, I'll be looking for testers to play through the full campaign and give me feedback on the other 3 difficulty tiers.
I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to create a decent difficulty ramp, that there wouldn't be a noticeable jump in difficulty between tiers. I'm happy to report that this isn't the case, a harder tier bumps difficulty nicely. If you're finding Easy challenging, wait until you face a wall of these guys. XD
Hello Cyberpunks, Shadowrunners and Console Cowboys!
System Crash is progressing rapidly toward a 1.0 release. All gameplay features are in, most of the bugs have been squashed, and the full set of campaign missions are finally in the game.
That's where you fine ladies and gents come in. I need help tuning the campaign. Are some of the missions too easy, or some too hard? Do the missions award enough cards and credits across the campaign to allow the player to experiment with their decks? Or are credits maybe a bit too easy to come by? How does the overall difficulty arc feel? Satisfying? Is the storyline understandable and enjoyable?
I need YOUR feedback to help me tune up the campaign until it's the best it can be.
So. I need some volunteers. In exchange for helping me polish up the campaign, you'll receive a copy of the FULL game for free*, along with a special thanks in the game's credits**.
All I need from you is for you to play the game through and let me know what you thought of it. Please, only sign-up for this if you think you have the time and capacity to play through the game at least once. To give you an idea, the full game is ~100 missions (The beta demo you might have played already is a mere 13 missions).
You WILL need to start a new profile, I'm afraid.
I will only be taking on a small group for this, around 20ish. So, depending on the number of volunteers I get, I might only be able to take on some of you, I hope you understand. I'm looking for a good mix of experienced CCGers and noobs to the genre. :)
If you're interested, please send an email stating that you wish to participate to admin at roguemoonstudios dot com. Please include your full name as you would like it to appear in the credits. If you wish your online nick to go in there too, include that with your name.
So, for example : John 'LazerNinja099' Smith.
Let's do this, people! Onward, to release!
And thanks up-front for the help, it's very much appreciated!
*You will get a full copy of the game as it currently stands, pre-1.0 release. Once the game hits 1.0 and is officially released, I will send you a 1.0 key via the email you provide.
**You'll only get the thank-you in the credits if you actually send me feedback on your play experiences. If I send you a test copy and get nothing in return, well, that's tough.
@garethf This is game. It is has become very serious problem you have created for me. I haven't stopped playing it since ICON!!. Every time i finish a match, I fall into the narrative. Every time i finish a dialogue scene, I fall into a match. I cant stop. Be prepared for a barrage of questions when i see you next. the first being; "When and where can i start telling friends to buy it?"
@Fenn: I am starting a System Crash Support Group so we can learn to control our addiction ... I am in the same boat as you ... I have actually moved the game to my laptop and taken it off my PC so that I don't accidentally click the Systsem Crash icon and start playing.
We meet the first and third Tuesday of every month and coffee and free copies of Magic The Gathering cards are provided.
p.s. -- I am just kidding, there is no support group but there bloody well should be. 8-p
You'll be able to tell your friends shortly, just have to fix one issue I found before I hit go on Greenlight. Won't affect you guys, but I need to get it sorted before main PR launch. Such is game dev. XD
It's about bloody time - I keep checking Steam, not thinking that you have it for sale on your site. Stupid me. Looking forward to playing, will I get an automated email with key and download link, or do I download the demo? It's not obvious as I've simply been returned to the 'sell page' which I started on.
Okay got the link now, but small problem - I have a mac. I guess I need to wait for the Steam version (which I'm happy to do). In the meantime I will go back to being frustrated with you for delaying my enjoyment.
Ah, damn. Sorry about that man, will have to frustrate you for a little longer. Mac build will follow in a month or two, once I've given it enough testing. But thanks for buying! :D
I'll send you a Mac build as soon as possible, once I start testing it. Shouldn't really be many problems with it, I don't think.
Just crossed the halfway mark on Greenlight! Woohoo! :D
Thanks for everyone who's shown their support so far, it's really appreciated! And if folks could help get SC the rest of the way by sharing the Greenlight link on your social media networks, that would be doubly appreciated!
Experiments with advertising which I thought might interest some folks (and feel free to share any results you've had, would be interesting to compare).
I ran a facebook ad campaign on one of my FB page's posts that was performing unusually well. This one.
Results:
I spent $20, reached 4131 males between the ages of 16-40 who like one of Sci-fi movies, video games or cyberpunk over 24 hours. Which translated into 21 post likes, 1 page like and 19 click throughs of my link. Can't really measure how many GL likes that translated into, but yesterday's performance was better than expected, given the rate of GL drop-off. Works out to $0.5 per "engagement"
In comparison, organic reach for that post was 1841.
Was it worth it? Not sure. Think it will be easier to compare once GL votes level off to a steady baseline. But it was interesting to see the reach. Getting 4k people who like cyberpunk, sci-fi or video games looking at my link for $20 feels like a pretty good deal, all told.
I'm enjoying this. It's like playing a real life RTS, with your own money. Test a maneuver, evaluate results, refine tactics. ;P
Does anyone have any bloody idea how to get a link to a page on the steam app?
Such a flipping waste of traffic, directing people to the GL page in the browser. People need to either be logged in, log in, or open the app, find the page again and upvote it. Every extra step will have huge drop-off. So annoying. -_-
Does anyone have any bloody idea how to get a link to a page on the steam app?
Such a flipping waste of traffic, directing people to the GL page in the browser. People need to either be logged in, log in, or open the app, find the page again and upvote it. Every extra step will have huge drop-off. So annoying. -_-
As far as I know, it's not possible and this is generally the biggest complaint about trying to market a greenlight campaign. Please correct me if I'm wrong cause I would like to know.
I'm not too sure what you mean. Are you talking about having someone click a link in their browser, and having their Steam application open to that page?
As far as I know, you're suppose to be able to link to a Steam url prefix. It works when you run it in a command line, and according to Valve's docs it's supposed to work in a browser address bar too, though it doesn't seem to work in my Chrome. Dunno if this is a direction for you to investigate.
For all the self-doubt I've weathered, there are moments like these. :D
"Thinking more about System Crash (that LCG I mentioned earlier this week by @GarethFouche). The campaign structure is really freaking brillo ... System Crash isn't perfect, and I certainly don't like everything in it, but I gotta say it's one of the best indie designs I've seen."
Holy crap. I should have kept more up to date on this thread! Congratulations man! I'm so happy you got it done. Will see if I can get some time to play over the weekend. Well done! :)
Quick question - one that's certainly been asked and answered elsewhere - but what is the situation with Steam and Achievements/Trading Cards. Once you've been greenlit, are you required to have achievements and or trading cards? Is it a fairly straightforward process to add these into the game, or is there any sort of approval that is required?
You don't have to have them, no. (Broforce released without trading cards.) But I think the vast majority of games do have them, so that if you don't players complain.
Yeah. You don't have to implement them, but Valve strongly recommends it. No approval needed, no, besides having been greenlit.
They need to approve your art assets though (so you can't use inappropriate pictures in your trading cards etc).
Adding them in requires integrating with the Steamworks sdk in your code. If you're using C++, they give you the dlls and header files, you'll need to integrate them as you normally would with any other 3rd party library.
I'm using Unity/C#, so I'd have had to write a wrapper, that is if I hadn't been pointed to the excellent Steamworks.NET wrapper by @Chippit.
It's a pretty straightforward, quick process. You can integrate it before you go into greenlight if you like, the sdk is available to download and there is a test game whose appID you can use to test if your achievements code is working etc (you get your own game ID once you're greenlit).
I hope you're not too burnt out to enjoy the launch. And if you are, I hope you recover soon! (And of course I hope the sales exceed your expectations and the reception continues to be excellent!)
And, once System Crash is behind you, I look forward to playing what you create next!
The last 24 hours have been an emotional rollercoaster, let me tell you. But hellova exciting. SC was even featured on the main carousel for a while there, which I'm told is a good thing. :D
Steam sales have certainly exceeded every other source so far. The sheer number of eyeballs you get for that $100 GL fee is insane. Hopefully, over time and with participation in a few of the big sales, SC will earn out.
Comments
Firstly, well done on getting it this far. It’s been a long journey and it’s certainly getting closer. Apologies for taking so long to get some feedback to you, but I really wanted to dedicate some time and give it my full attention.
Tested on a couple of Macs (both running Yosemite 10.10.3) and I didn’t come across anything that I would classify as a bug.
I am not an experienced player of card games like this, apart from Hearthstone and Zombie Farm Battles, so feel free to treat my feedback as that of a relative beginner. My experience lies largely in the user experience and it’s always the deal breaker for me when deciding whether to continue playing a game or not.
The Story
This is, for me, the least important and the least engaging part of the game. As soon as I realised that my answers had no bearing on the game, I lost interest. It’s unfortunately not enough of a driver for me to read through the story advance every time, so I ended up doing the nextnextnext dance every time. I don’t play games like this for the story, I really just want to play with the cards and beat someone.
Visuals
The opening screen with the cityscape is really, really pretty. I like that a lot.
The character portraits are a mixed bag for me. I can see that there were a few different artists used to paint them and they lack cohesion in terms of style. Even a little thing like having a rim light on all of them would help to hold them together more, but as they are now they all feel a bit off. Individually, there are some really good ones in there, but as a whole they need to be tied together more. Some of them are very detailed, while others look like quick concept sketches.
In terms of iconography, the Hand icon isn’t very clear to me in that I can’t work out what it is a picture of.
This is a little nitpicky, but the shape of the cards on the Deck icon doesn’t match the shape of the cards that we actually use in the game. Having that subtle visual reinforcement makes it easier to tie the two together.
The Onboarding Experience
I felt that it took too long to get into the game. I like to get an early taste of what’s to come without having to go through so much scene setting first. The tutorials at the start are too condensed for my liking. I much prefer being shown something as I need to learn it, instead of giving my a bunch of instructions first before I’m able to do anything with that knowledge. It’s the biggest problem I had with The Witcher 2, where there was so much info thrown at me to learn about combos and fighting that I had forgotten what a bunch of them were before I’d had a chance to use them. Far Cry 3, on the other hand, nailed that perfectly. I’ve always enjoyed the simple process of see/do instead of see/see/see/do as it generally makes me feel like I have more control and have a better understanding of what to do if I’m able to try it out immediately.
There were a few instances that I was very confused about what was going to happen. For example, It’s not immediately clear that one side of the board is mine and the other the oppositions. There needs to be a clearer visual separation between them - even if it’s just more space like Hearthstone. Having some sort of line that I need to cross / wall I need to break through will help with that, as well as having a bit of a colour difference between the two halves. It doesn’t have to be a full-on red vs blue, but making it clear where the battle line is will help. I don’t get a strong sense of Us vs Them from he game board at all, which unfortunately removes my engagement somewhat. I want to have an enemy and I want it to be clear.
The other thing I didn’t realise at first was that each card is engaging the one directly opposite, and that I have no control over the sequence of play or where I want to target my attack after having selected a card. Again, this might be the Hearthstone lens through which I inevitably will view card games through, but having the freedom to choose which specific cards to attack each round is a massive reason I enjoy it so much.
The scoring system wasn’t clear to me at the start either. I worked it out after a couple of rounds, but it wasn’t immediately obvious. The major disconnect here for me though, was the fact that I’m adding points to my side instead of removing points from the opposition. This seems odd because I’m hacking into their system, which means I’m breaking down their defences. By breaking these down, I’m weakening them which means I should be removing points from their stack. It just feels like the scoring system is the opposite of what I’m actually doing.
I also feel that it would be better to start playing only with normal cards and introduce special abilities, modifier cards, etc, later on as I progress through the game. It’s a bit too much to take in right at the start if you’re not as experienced at this style of game.
Likewise with the ability to redraw your hand before starting a mission - it feels pointless at the very start of the campaign because I have no idea which cards are actually going to be better or not. So again, limiting what is available at the start would allow the player to be more comfortable making decisions rather than relying on good old guesswork.
During the hint on Modifier cards, the arrows are pointing at the rows of Agent cards. It would be more helpful to point at or highlight the modifier slots directly. I’m also guessing that the beneficial ones are green and the harmful ones are red? (I see we have this confirmed later) Also, how do I know just by looking at a Modifier card which one it is? Having some sort of visual tie-in between the card type and it’s slot will make it much faster to make decisions.
Leave the Condition run description until it’s actually needed.
When playing an Agent card for the first time, the hint that pops up could do with a small change: put the label for Positive Modifiers on top and the label for Negative modifiers at the bottom. The reason I would suggest this that everywhere else you have referenced these before, you’ve had Positive first, then Negative. Keeping them in the same order (as we generally read top to bottom) actually helps to reinforce the learning as it’s part of a phrase we’ve already encountered and become familiar with. It’s like I almost always hear people talk about their parents as Mom and Dad, which feels natural. But when someone says Dad and Mom it feels off in some way, Same situation. You’ve introduced us to the concept of Positive and Negative, so to suddenly see it the other way around feels slightly off.
I tried something different on another play through where I chose to speak to Miriam first. After the call, I ended up with two additional missions on the map, both labelled Miriam’s Goons - Wave 1. I felt that having access to additional missions before I’d done the tutorial mission was a bit odd, but thankfully you tutorialised the first mission the player plays as opposed to only the tutorial mission. I would however still remove that as an option until the player knows what to do, especially as I had to get 50 OP on my first mission instead of 10. Obviously I was headed for a horrible, horrible death but somehow won and I have no idea why! I was down 45-12, had no cards in my hand and one card left in my deck. I got that new card at the start of my round and before I could see what it was the game was over. The board cleared and I was presented with a Victory screen and earned 500 Credits and a Bronze reward card. This was very confusing as I was headed for certain defeat. I hadn’t even had time to register what the card looked like, so I can’t describe it at all unfortunately.
The gameplay
One of the things that stumped me initially was that the cards weren’t using drag and drop to get onto the board. There’s a tactile-ness (is that a word?) that’s missing for me when I can’t do that. Also, dragging a card gives me the opportunity to change my mind whereas clicking is final - especially as not all cards require confirmation.
The card shapes could also be tweaked to make it clearer which is which when glancing quickly at my hand - especially as they’re all partially hidden by the current front-most card.
When adding a modifier card to an existing card (like the gun, for example) why do I have to hit a Play button when it’s not required when playing other types of cards?
I played a hacking card that gave me 5 OP. This put me over the required level of 20 but I still had to play out the hand instead of winning immediately. This seemed odd.
One thing that constantly bugged me was the layout of the cards in my hand at the bottom of the screen. It’s not always immediately evident which one is in front because they’re all perfectly aligned. This was even more problematic when there are multiple cards that can be played in a round - especially if there’s a playable card, non-playable card and another playable card and the one in the middle is actually in front. It looks like I can play that middle card because it looks like the glow is around it, but it’s actually emanating from the other two cards behind it. This confused me a few times. If the cards were offset from each other, that would help. If they were fanned out or there was some form of magnification on the front-most card (sort of like the way the Dock in OS X works) then it would be a lot clearer.
The changing position of the hover is also weird for me because the text I want to look at is always in a different position.
Black Market
Hovering over the cards to see their details is ok, but if I’m comparing cards to see which I want to keep or trade or build a deck with, I found the delay when moving over another card and the popup appearing to be frustrating. Also, because I want to compare the card stats directly, it takes longer because I have to look at a different part of the screen to see the same info based on where the popup actually appears. If one clicks on a card and the info appears somewhere on the screen, it should be a consistent position for all the cards and should be instantaneous. Ideally a permanent, dedicated space in the UI should show this info. I realise the stats are all visible on the card icon, but the extra text info is useful when still learning about the cards and formulating ideas about strategies.
Sound
The loud beeps got very irritating very quickly and I couldn’t change the sound effects volume while in a game.
That's it! Feel free to ask if anything I've written is not clear. I know a bit of it is quite minor, but because you're so far along, those little things can actually make a lot of difference.
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate you taking the time like that. Sorry for the slow response, it's been a hectic week.
Firstly, let me say that I made some design decisions when I started with System Crash that I wouldn't make again. An example is the screen resolution being a fixed 4:3 aspect ratio. If you have a wide screen monitor, the remainder of the screen is filled with black. I basically didn't want to deal with the hassle of multiple resolutions and ratios, so I decided to fix it. I now think that was a poor decision, it wouldn't have been as complex to support as I think, and I can see how I should have approached it.
A number the UI decisions in SC fit into that category: "Not great, would do it differently now". Unfortunately, I can't reverse the clock, and a number of the things you're finding frustrating would take months of dev to revamp.
At this point, I can't face another 6-8 months of dev, the well is completely empty. I'm shipping in the next month or so, whatever can be fixed or polished in that time will be, anything else, well, I chalk it up to learning. And I'll try to do better in expansions and dlc etc.
With that out the way, let me go through your feedback.
The story, I understand why you don't find it engaging. I wish I could add more branching, but it's just too expensive right now, for this initial release. So feel free to just skip it. For some, the story segments are rewarding in themselves, enriching the sense of the game world. Like the lore books lying around in Elder Scrolls games. Some people (like me) read them all, and enjoy them, other people don't give a shit unless they add a skill point. Different tastes etc. :)
The visuals are inconsistent, yes. Part of that is different artists, but a bigger part is my inexperience as an art director. You're right, things like consistent rim lighting would have unified the look a lot more. It's something I'm learning, and will apply to future games, including expansions of System Crash.
Thanks for the feedback about the icons.
The board:
Let me see if I can do something to make it clearer that there are two sides, and that your agents will engage the ones directly opposite them.
At this point, I'm not going to add the ability to select targets for your agents, I'm afraid.
The scoring system is different because it's based around the concept that you're hacking an enemy server and stealing something, rather than dealing damage to a human opponent. So your rising score indicates that you're getting nearer to achieving your objective (scoring Objective Points), hacking through firewalls and accessing the central server. There are many board games that use a similar concept, usually referring to them as some variation of Victory Points.
I understand what you're saying about inexperience, but I have tried the tutorials with just Agent cards, no modifiers and special abilities, and it's an exceedingly dry experience. You just basically sit there watching your dudes biff each other. It might be slightly confusing initially, but players will soon get the hang of it, I feel. I would rather risk minor confusion than boredom, for a player's first taste of the core gameplay.
Noted on the modifier hint and condition tutorial hint.
And you're right, I should wait until the initial tutorial missions to introduce Miriam.
Hmm, your sudden win with Miriam's goons sounds either like someone had run out of cards or a bug. Do you have the save profile? Could you email it to me?
Gameplay:
I avoided drag and drop because I was trying to reduce scope, and it can complicate your UI a bit. I also had an example of a game that I enjoyed that wasn't drag and drop, Spectromancer. Admittedly, games like Hearthstone have raised the bar in terms of computer CCGs. Perhaps if I'd finished the game in a year, like originally planned, instead of 3, I wouldn't be so far behind the curve.
Changing the card shapes at this point is a huge undertaking. I'll see if I can make the hand highlights and so on any clearer.
Black Market:
A dedicated UI space for card details that shows the card large enough to be easily readable takes up a lot of space in the UI. I decided to nuke it and mimic Hearthstone. I'll see about either reducing the popup time or making it settable to 0.
I'll look at adding the options menu in-game. :)
Thanks for the feedback!
Firstly, I'm very impressed with the presentation. The interface is smooth and clear with lovely tweening and transition animations, and you've gone to great lengths to emphasise where the player should go next via your blinking buttons and such. I never felt lost in your UI or confused about where I should be going. UI animations mean that the flow of a round is clear - we know what's attacking what, we know what the flow of victory points is, there's no mistaking exactly what's going on on the board. Kudos all the way.
The drag 'n' drop thing's already been discussed, and I understand your leaving it out, but some elements of the UI feel a tad clunky without it (like equipment/buff assignment). Regardless, you've ensured that we won't be accidentally buffing the wrong cards through a misclick, etc, so props there.
I really, really like the way you've handled currency since the early build I last played. Having it slowly trickle in to control the pace of play it rather than leaving it to the luck of the draw feels MUUUUUUUCH better. Good move thar.
I thoroughly enjoyed the written client calls and "missions" that flesh out the world and lend your actions a bit of context. I think that helped a LOT in terms of my engagement. And dat music... :O~~~
I think the tutorial is robust. Your turn progress indicator combined with blinky "HERE'S WHAT YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BE CLICKING NOW" UI elements is great at guiding new players into learning the interface, and is a good at-a-glance guide to what you can do once you have the UI down. I finished the tutorial missions feeling that I thoroughly understood the game's basic mechanics and UI, so mission accomplished.
However, I feel that once the city opens up, the game's difficulty suddenly takes a sharp increase. We're told about a Black Market, but not what it can really do for us and why we should care. A million missions open up, but not one seems beatable with the starter deck (due to ROBOTS, or crazy-prepared security, etc), and not much emphasis is placed on "hey, dude, you should kinda expand your deck and stuff to not suck?". I really feel the game needs an intermediate stage where n00b-blossoms such as myself can learn a little of the intricacies of deck construction and try them out before the world opens up and we get inundated with failure at every turn. I'm sure your experienced target market feels differently though - deck construction is second nature. It's half the game, after all. :P
You're close to release, so I'm not sure how much of this is useful or implementable before you release this monster upon ye webz, but there you have it. Overall, she's slick and attractive, and the only niggles I have are due to my own unfamiliarity with the genre. Good luck with release! \o/
Glad you like a lot of the new touches, it's good to know that they've been received well. And yeah, the UI is a bit clunky, but that's a heck of a lot of work to change so close to release, so I think I'm going to have to ship like that.
About the difficulty: Heh, this illustrates why devs can't test their own games. I beat most of the early missions with just the starter deck quite easily, get about midway through the beta before I feel like I need to start adding in some of the cards I won. But I've been playing SC for 3 years, I basically know all the opening moves of the various deck types by heart. ;)
But noted. And don't worry, the next release introduces a more gentle ramp up, primarily by doing what I do in the tutorial, giving the player an advantage. So you'll still see some of those robots and things, and hopefully think (Hey, maybe I can buy some of those for meself at the BM*), but you won't get flattened quite so early.
*I'm going to look at hinting that the player should do that in dialogues etc too, based on your feedback. :)
The beta you all have played includes 16 of the 30 Easy missions in the campaign, IIRC. There are ~100 missions in total, broadly broken up into the Easy, Medium, Hard and Elite tiers.
I've finished testing Medium tier, and will be done with Hard shortly. Elite tier is pretty well-tested already, as it represents the best Archetype decks I could build with all cards unlocked, so I've tested them extensively over the course of building the card set.
Once those are done, I'll be doing a pass to add "special" missions, ie ones with special Conditions that alter the gameplay a bit. Probably be around 10~15 of those.
Full first-pass campaign testing is nearly done, is what I'm saying, at least on my side. Once it is, I'll be looking for testers to play through the full campaign and give me feedback on the other 3 difficulty tiers.
I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to create a decent difficulty ramp, that there wouldn't be a noticeable jump in difficulty between tiers. I'm happy to report that this isn't the case, a harder tier bumps difficulty nicely. If you're finding Easy challenging, wait until you face a wall of these guys. XD
System Crash is progressing rapidly toward a 1.0 release. All gameplay features are in, most of the bugs have been squashed, and the full set of campaign missions are finally in the game.
That's where you fine ladies and gents come in. I need help tuning the campaign. Are some of the missions too easy, or some too hard? Do the missions award enough cards and credits across the campaign to allow the player to experiment with their decks? Or are credits maybe a bit too easy to come by? How does the overall difficulty arc feel? Satisfying? Is the storyline understandable and enjoyable?
I need YOUR feedback to help me tune up the campaign until it's the best it can be.
So. I need some volunteers. In exchange for helping me polish up the campaign, you'll receive a copy of the FULL game for free*, along with a special thanks in the game's credits**.
All I need from you is for you to play the game through and let me know what you thought of it. Please, only sign-up for this if you think you have the time and capacity to play through the game at least once. To give you an idea, the full game is ~100 missions (The beta demo you might have played already is a mere 13 missions).
You WILL need to start a new profile, I'm afraid.
I will only be taking on a small group for this, around 20ish. So, depending on the number of volunteers I get, I might only be able to take on some of you, I hope you understand. I'm looking for a good mix of experienced CCGers and noobs to the genre. :)
If you're interested, please send an email stating that you wish to participate to admin at roguemoonstudios dot com. Please include your full name as you would like it to appear in the credits. If you wish your online nick to go in there too, include that with your name.
So, for example : John 'LazerNinja099' Smith.
Let's do this, people! Onward, to release!
And thanks up-front for the help, it's very much appreciated!
*You will get a full copy of the game as it currently stands, pre-1.0 release. Once the game hits 1.0 and is officially released, I will send you a 1.0 key via the email you provide.
**You'll only get the thank-you in the credits if you actually send me feedback on your play experiences. If I send
you a test copy and get nothing in return, well, that's tough.
This is game.
It is has become very serious problem you have created for me.
I haven't stopped playing it since ICON!!.
Every time i finish a match, I fall into the narrative.
Every time i finish a dialogue scene, I fall into a match.
I cant stop.
Be prepared for a barrage of questions when i see you next.
the first being; "When and where can i start telling friends to buy it?"
We meet the first and third Tuesday of every month and coffee and free copies of Magic The Gathering cards are provided.
p.s. -- I am just kidding, there is no support group but there bloody well should be. 8-p
You'll be able to tell your friends shortly, just have to fix one issue I found before I hit go on Greenlight. Won't affect you guys, but I need to get it sorted before main PR launch. Such is game dev. XD
Thunderbirds are go! I repeat, Thunderbirds are go!
We are finally, fully, properly live!
Try the demo, share on social media, tell all your friends! :D
systemcrashgame.com
And please vote for SC on Greenlight!
You won't accept my money anywhere. Please resolve this asap!
http://systemcrashgame.com/
Scroll down a little, it's below the fold. I put the Greenlight banner above it because I want those sweet, sweet Steam votes right now.
It's about bloody time - I keep checking Steam, not thinking that you have it for sale on your site. Stupid me.
Looking forward to playing, will I get an automated email with key and download link, or do I download the demo? It's not obvious as I've simply been returned to the 'sell page' which I started on.
I'll send you a Mac build as soon as possible, once I start testing it. Shouldn't really be many problems with it, I don't think.
Thanks for everyone who's shown their support so far, it's really appreciated! And if folks could help get SC the rest of the way by sharing the Greenlight link on your social media networks, that would be doubly appreciated!
Right, back to the Press Release mines! :D
I ran a facebook ad campaign on one of my FB page's posts that was performing unusually well. This one.
Results:
I spent $20, reached 4131 males between the ages of 16-40 who like one of Sci-fi movies, video games or cyberpunk over 24 hours. Which translated into 21 post likes, 1 page like and 19 click throughs of my link. Can't really measure how many GL likes that translated into, but yesterday's performance was better than expected, given the rate of GL drop-off. Works out to $0.5 per "engagement"
In comparison, organic reach for that post was 1841.
Was it worth it? Not sure. Think it will be easier to compare once GL votes level off to a steady baseline. But it was interesting to see the reach. Getting 4k people who like cyberpunk, sci-fi or video games looking at my link for $20 feels like a pretty good deal, all told.
I'm enjoying this. It's like playing a real life RTS, with your own money. Test a maneuver, evaluate results, refine tactics. ;P
Such a flipping waste of traffic, directing people to the GL page in the browser. People need to either be logged in, log in, or open the app, find the page again and upvote it. Every extra step will have huge drop-off. So annoying. -_-
As far as I know, you're suppose to be able to link to a Steam url prefix. It works when you run it in a command line, and according to Valve's docs it's supposed to work in a browser address bar too, though it doesn't seem to work in my Chrome. Dunno if this is a direction for you to investigate.
@francoisvn's link does the trick. Note, it doesn't work if you type it directly into Chrome's browser, but it does work as a link in a webpage.
Here's a list of steam browser commands, if anyone would find them useful.
"Thinking more about System Crash (that LCG I mentioned earlier this week by @GarethFouche). The campaign structure is really freaking brillo
...
System Crash isn't perfect, and I certainly don't like everything in it, but I gotta say it's one of the best indie designs I've seen."
Nelson (@VidGames_Bible)
https://twitter.com/VidGames_Bible/status/723906733081563136
AAAAAHHHHH!!!
I was giving myself a pep talk in the shower this morning. Just gotta keep pushing, just gotta keep sending emails, I told myself.
Then I checked my mail...!!! :D
Let me know if you find any issues please. :)
Sooooon!
They need to approve your art assets though (so you can't use inappropriate pictures in your trading cards etc).
Adding them in requires integrating with the Steamworks sdk in your code. If you're using C++, they give you the dlls and header files, you'll need to integrate them as you normally would with any other 3rd party library.
I'm using Unity/C#, so I'd have had to write a wrapper, that is if I hadn't been pointed to the excellent Steamworks.NET wrapper by @Chippit.
https://steamworks.github.io/
It's a pretty straightforward, quick process. You can integrate it before you go into greenlight if you like, the sdk is available to download and there is a test game whose appID you can use to test if your achievements code is working etc (you get your own game ID once you're greenlit).
*F5 button begins to melt under the pressure.*
store.steampowered.com/app/481180/
*party party party party*
I can already see people wanting expansions and more cards ... you have unleashed the Kraken. 8-}
I'm sure you've seen, but great review on LazyGamer.
http://www.lazygamer.net/review/system-crash-review-card-runner/
And, once System Crash is behind you, I look forward to playing what you create next!
The last 24 hours have been an emotional rollercoaster, let me tell you. But hellova exciting. SC was even featured on the main carousel for a while there, which I'm told is a good thing. :D
Steam sales have certainly exceeded every other source so far. The sheer number of eyeballs you get for that $100 GL fee is insane. Hopefully, over time and with participation in a few of the big sales, SC will earn out.