There’s a really special real-time strategy video game cooking up at ComboMash right now. It’s name is Hextraction, and you can find it right now at Kickstarter. But why is it so special? Apart from the fact that, to me, almost every indie game is special per se, there’s an additional layer of specialness on Hextractionthat caught…
We were lucky to be able to join ComboMash for their cool party! (Also, go check out their kickstarter on that site!). We got to be right in the middle of the room, with our table connected to DJ Dain, who was spinning sick beats for us all night. A bunch of people showed up, providing great conversation and feedback!
This was our first time showing the latest build to a large number of new people. It's so much nicer to have the controls auto map. I didn't have to constantly watch as someone accidentally reset the controls and then go fix it for them. Although team selection went much smoother, it's still better for me to start up a group of people if they are new to the game. I think it's because I don't explain what that menu is doing, so people don't have context. I wonder if I can change the visuals to fix that.
The big thing that I noticed was how frequently players tackled each other. This build uses my new custom collision system, which is based off of how Flixel does it. I now have collisions with the lance implemented, which allows players to tackle other birds from behind and below if they hit lance first. This caused lots of tackles. Too many I think, as new players had a hard time orienting themselves when constantly respawning; Unlike at PAX, where our players were more experienced and didn't seem to get tackled any more frequently. To fix this, I'm simply going to shorten the lances. They were pretty big originally, and I think bringing in the player's attack radius will fix the situation.
Overall, the night was great and we had a continued positive response. So, we're going to just keep going in the planned direction and create more good times like this:
If you didn't catch us at ComboMash, you can check us out next Tuesday, the 29th at Full Indie! We'll have the replay system, results screen, and more implemented by then!
My latest comic strip shows the strange reasoning we all give in this 24/7 technological cocoon we wrap ourselves in http://www.drunkduck.com/Combomash/5393095/
Find out the latest film that Hollywood and Michael Bay have decided to remake and destroy! All in my latest Combomash comic strip! http://www.combomash.com/