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I'm seeing a lot of new people that wouldn't normally play the game, checking it out via these LP videos. This is really cool! At the moment I'm working on designing the new interface for SS13 standalone, and I see the interface as a barrier to entry for new people. I've been quite conservative, keeping the hand slots and intents system. But i'm so tempted to just throw every element out and try something totally different. I'd like to get feedback from people that were totally put off by the interface if possible, and see if it's salvagable. Kernel Monsoon fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Sep 5, 2013 |
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Sep 5, 2013 15:06
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Hands are fine and a staple of the genre. The intent system is strange and would be better served by expanding the context menus, like in The Sims or something. The biggest barrier seems to be in the nonsensical variation of whether or not dragging does anything, or if you need to click instead.
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Sep 5, 2013 15:31
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Biggest problems I'm running into as a beginner are that the interactions with items don't always seem consistent. To eat, you have to click on it when it's in your hand. To smoke, you have to move it to your mask slot. To open a box, you have to drag it onto yourself. To hack something, you have to click on the panel first with an empty hand, close out of the menu that pops up to get to the hacking screen... If these could be also accessed through the RMB list, that would help quite a bit. Especially the "Open container" one.
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Sep 5, 2013 15:36
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I lost it when you found the money cake in the bar. That's where the station's budget went.
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Sep 5, 2013 16:35
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So, the first video was interesting but didn't really grab my attention. But... holy poo poo. The last 5 minutes of that janitor video. "We heartily applaud our station's chemists. They were apparently busy as gently caress." Indeed.
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Sep 5, 2013 16:52
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This is a cool LP of what looks like a pretty interesting game!tonberrytoby posted:Your video is blocked in Germany. Not to sound rude, but I don't think the OP should have to turn off the music in his LP because of Germany's ridiculous copyright mafia. Why not just use a proxy if you're German? Firefox even has an addon called ProxTube so you never have to deal with GEMA blocking Youtube videos.
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Sep 5, 2013 16:54
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Too bad you sound rude anyway.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:03
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Donnerberg posted:I lost it when you found the money cake in the bar. That's where the station's budget went. Talk about a wanton waste of precious, limited resources. How can the station even last sixty minutes with such slackjawed daffowits running the show?
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Sep 5, 2013 17:16
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I understand little of what's going on, but it's great to watch for the inevitable destruction of the Station and mad dash for the shuttle.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:18
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This looks like it could be fun. Not really convinced the game is raelly good right now from what I've seen so far, but the potential for chaos is great and that is good. Which profession are you thinking about playing next, OP?
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Sep 5, 2013 17:19
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Whoever was the QM who saved the janitor, that was awesome. It's the little moments like that in the game I enjoy. Which is why i would be a terrible player because I'd go out of the way to help people...then promptly be shoved out an airlock.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:46
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Supernorn posted:At the moment I'm working on designing the new interface for SS13 standalone, and I see the interface as a barrier to entry for new people. I've been quite conservative, keeping the hand slots and intents system. But i'm so tempted to just throw every element out and try something totally different. I'd like to get feedback from people that were totally put off by the interface if possible, and see if it's salvagable. I dropped some interface feedback in the other thread, but since you ask, I've got more thoughts. Keep in mind that I am still very new and may not realize the full range of interactions one can do and obviously these are just my dumb opinions anyway. On intents: I think the basic idea is actually pretty good. You want to be able to click things without additional rigmarole to make things happen in the world, and just the fact that you have an empty hand isn't enough to contextually determine what the thing ought to be. Having a button to put you, essentially, in battle-mode is not a bad idea. Where it falls down is the specific execution, so let's look at the current intents: 1. Beatings. I think this is a very reasonable use of the system. Click this button and then every click after that is intending to hurt some other being terribly. It's simple and easy to understand. 2. Help. This one is a bit muddled, possibly because helping someone is too generic to understand as a newbie. Basically you can use it to wake people up or give them CPR, which is okay, I just had no idea what it was for initially and that's probably solvable with clearer iconography. 3. Disarm. You could replace this completely by adding a "gun" or "tool" icon onto the targeting thing. Pick aggressive action, select gun, punchy punchy. 4. Grab. This is probably the weirdest one. It has two functions, one of which is pulling someone (which is kind of redundant with another button on the interface and key combination) and the other is choking them (which could easily be combined with aggressive intention towards someone you're pulling). So if it were up to me, I'd probably have just two intents, much like Ultima 7's war and peace mode. If you're in peace mode, clicking on someone tries to help them if they're wounded, pick them up if they've fallen, etc. Clicking on an object manipulates it normally. In war mode, clicking on something makes a spirited attempt to destroy it with your fists or whatever you have in your hand; if the thing is a person is on the ground being dragged, it strangles them, and if you've targeted their item area it tries to disarm them. Splitting things in this way also makes it harder for you to attack your crowbar with your hat when you were trying to pick it up (since you'd only attack items with hostile intent on). Given there are only two options, this could be a single-button toggle rather than a set of buttons. Other buttons: I don't think we need a button for "resist". That only comes up in a few specific scenarios, and I think the right interface there is some kind of modal. Basically, if someone is handcuffing you, only at that moment do you care about deciding whether to resist them or not. It's good to have a choice, because in this game you might want to let someone handcuff you or feed you something, or you might have set yourself on fire deliberately for some reason, but there's no reason to have a button for those very specialized purposes clogging up the UI the rest of the time. So it could pop up in the status area, like YOU ARE BEING HANDCUFFED, CLICK HERE TO RESIST or YOU ARE ON FIRE, PUT YOURSELF OUT YES/NO. Having a button to pull things is okay, but I'd probably prefer that be a right-click option and then a HUD icon which could be clicked to let go of them. (And the existing ctrl-click shortcut since everyone should use that anyway.) The run/walk toggle is fine. The drop and throw buttons are okay, but I'd probably replace both by dragging; if you want to throw something in your hand, you drag it to where you want it to go in the world and your character throws it. If you drag it to where you're standing, you drop it. (Or you could have a "drop zone" in the interface where you drag things to put them down if you're worried about the world being too cluttered on a player's square to properly capture that event.) As a corollary to this, if you did it this way any machine or container you put something in should have a window with a target slot that you open by clicking on it, so that you're not dragging items into the machine in the world, but into a separate interface. It'd be nice to be able to expand the targeting window - just a clickable area to make it bigger so it's easier to select a target, then minimize it back to the normal size. The inventory button should probably open a paperdoll rather than a row of buttons, to make it more obvious where everything is going. It's probably reasonable to have a couple of slots down there for quick access, like the pockets, and belt, although I'd like to see those vary depending on what you're wearing. (Example: how about belts with holsters that add another two quick slots for weapons?) The hands are a neat idea in general and I like the way they influence gameplay, but they have a few issues: 1. Having different things happen when you click on the background of the button vs. the thing you actually have in that hand is horrifyingly unintuitive. Please eliminate all occurrences of that with extreme prejudice. Add an extra button or pair of buttons or whatever you need to do, just please, please make this go away. Bury it deep and salt the earth. 2. If I have something in my hand that I should reasonably be able to manipulate with that hand, like a PDA, let me just do that by clicking on it. When the object requires two hands, the "select the empty hand as the active hand and click on the object in the inactive hand" action chain is weird and confusing. If you need to have an empty hand to interact with something, that's fine, just have an error box pop up when you click on it saying "empty your other hand". (This is made easier if you have an agressive vs. non-agressive mode as above since there's no reason to assume in hippie mode that you'd want to hit item A with item B.) 3. Any interaction that involves moving an item out of your active hand (or anywhere else) into a container or anything similar should be replaced with dragging to avoid any ambiguity. This actually lets you very easily decide between, for instance, putting a barcode on a crate and putting a barcode in a crate without having to resort to workarounds. It's totally okay for interactions like this to require an empty hand, but they should be streamlined in general. (Drag hat from box to head, no problem. Do the same with something in each hand, error message.) This is already getting long, so I'll stop here and maybe come back to it later. Whatever you end up doing, thank you for at least caring about the interface. Donnerberg posted:I lost it when you found the money cake in the bar. That's where the station's budget went. Dude said he was going to fry the budget. He meant it literally.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:49
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a 16 year old girl posted:Not to sound rude, but I don't think the OP should have to turn off the music in his LP because of Germany's ridiculous copyright mafia. Why not just use a proxy if you're German? Firefox even has an addon called ProxTube so you never have to deal with GEMA blocking Youtube videos.  Razage posted:I'll have to investigate where else I can post the videos. I can also start recording with no background music but the game doesn't have a lot of audio so the video's would get quiet (The background music is just Grooveshark's Ambient Station, I don't even pick it). I can't edit the audio out of the existing episodes because it's all mixed into one stream prior to being recorded.
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Sep 5, 2013 18:01
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You could use Creative Commons music. http://freemusicarchive.org/genre/Ambient/ <--- load some of these into a playlist and go. Are a lot of them terrible? Sure. But who cares... there's thousands of songs and nobody's really paying that much attention to the music anyway.
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Sep 5, 2013 18:21
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I liked /tg/Station 13, which was built around some older code of Goonstation. Too bad it died. But the wiki is hilarious and I had a lot of fun. Even when I spent one match as a chef in desperate search of meat (corpses). I just stay in the kitchen and the station just goes to hell around me. We didn't have security, so this one guy broke into the armory and was like a mercenary cop for hire. It was awesome.
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Sep 5, 2013 18:40
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idonotlikepeas posted:Dude said he was going to fry the budget. He meant it literally. This is amazing 
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Sep 5, 2013 20:40
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idonotlikepeas posted:Dude said he was going to fry the budget. He meant it literally. nimby posted:This is amazing That is amazing and this game is amazing. Thanks a lot for doing this LP Razage! It's been a lot of fun seeing the LP and reading game stories in the Games thread, and without this LP I might never have even heard of SS13.I liked seeing the highlight reel too. I appreciate seeing the full runs from start to finish and I hope you'll show off how to actually do each job there, but I think highlight reels are a great chance to show off some of the fun shorter moments in the game. It was surprising/hilarious that one shot of something got you apparently completely wasted. What was in that shot glass? In any case, it was great to hear tips like pulling something behind you going through the QM door. I'll have to look out for more tips like that in future videos. Hopefully you'll be able to capture more admins being awesome on camera too. Looking forward to the rest of the LP!
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Sep 5, 2013 21:22
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That janitor run was great! I loved how surprisingly coherent that session all was. The ending was loving hilarious. So satisfying. I really look forward to the other roles played out. I am very curious about engineering and AI.
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Sep 5, 2013 21:29
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This game has a magical sense of persistance unlike any other. My favorite part of the whole Janitor run was the journey of the gibs. From the admin exploding himself, to the chef notifying sec, and finally being disposed where they found the chance to bother some miner in his pod. Such a little thing was able to affect at least 5 people's rounds makes me really want to pick this up and play.
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Sep 5, 2013 21:52
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My only exposure to SS13 prior to this thread is reading about in the griefing thread. It's a real pleasure to see the insanity spoken of there live up to the real deal.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:09
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I'd heard of this game a few times and always been curious so this LP is a welcome introduction. I have to say it looks rather intimidating but also fun as hell. I love the casual "And there's the monkey pen" as if that's something everyone should expect on a space station and now I hope at some point you go on an animal rights activist run.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:31
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Popo posted:I'd heard of this game a few times and always been curious so this LP is a welcome introduction. I have to say it looks rather intimidating but also fun as hell. Not long after this LP started, I decided to take a minute to wander around the station. I didn't have a map, and all the lights were out (the radio said power was fine, but the AI blew out all the lightbulbs), so I quickly got lost and ended up in a forest complete with owls. I don't even know.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:36
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Popo posted:I love the casual "And there's the monkey pen" as if that's something everyone should expect on a space station and now I hope at some point you go on an animal rights activist run.
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Sep 5, 2013 22:37
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Bremen posted:Not long after this LP started, I decided to take a minute to wander around the station. I didn't have a map, and all the lights were out (the radio said power was fine, but the AI blew out all the lightbulbs), so I quickly got lost and ended up in a forest complete with owls. I don't even know. (Less importantly, there are no security cameras covering the owlry, so it's one of the few places on the station where the AI can't track you.)
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Sep 5, 2013 23:48
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KirbyKhan posted:This game has a magical sense of persistance unlike any other. My favorite part of the whole Janitor run was the journey of the gibs. From the admin exploding himself, to the chef notifying sec, and finally being disposed where they found the chance to bother some miner in his pod. Such a little thing was able to affect at least 5 people's rounds makes me really want to pick this up and play. The engineers failing to start up the engine caused the Head Of Personnel to fry the entire budget, which caused problems for the quartermaster's ability to order equipment, which inconvenienced Razage when he attempted to request a new mop bucket. How's that for player agency?
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Sep 5, 2013 23:59
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Supernorn posted:I'm seeing a lot of new people that wouldn't normally play the game, checking it out via these LP videos. This is really cool! I'm curious: Are you guys planning to eventually include the possibility of AI-controlled crewmembers that have at least a basic understanding of their job function and social interaction (on the level of 'Help me, I'm wounded!', 'I need item X for my job.' or 'Crewman X is a traitor!')? Having a working station to experiment around in offline mode would do wonders for people like me who are afraid to make any mistakes that could endanger other crewmembers. It's the reason I only ever play assistants and janitors anymore. I guess I got shouted at a little too often. :/
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Sep 6, 2013 01:16
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gently caress that, just get drunk and play Sealab: Space Edition. Be as ludicrously, unapologetically, hazardously incompetent as you possibly can without deliberately harming people. You'll learn stuff and you'll be part of the background insanity radiation that makes SS13 so funny.
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Sep 6, 2013 01:59
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Angry Diplomat posted:gently caress that, just get drunk and play Sealab: Space Edition. Be as ludicrously, unapologetically, hazardously incompetent as you possibly can without deliberately harming people. You'll learn stuff and you'll be part of the background insanity radiation that makes SS13 so funny. The last time I did that, I accidently set several people on fire and was afterwards threatened with a job-ban by an admin. I'm not making this up. Bots would be really nice.
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Sep 6, 2013 02:03
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Have we seen, like, anyone actually earnestly attempting to do their job other than that heroic Quartermaster who got incinerated along with everyone else on the shuttle and I suppose the AIs? I mean how long were the drat engines in the station off?
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Sep 6, 2013 02:04
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Gimmick Account posted:The last time I did that, I accidently set several people on fire and was afterwards threatened with a job-ban by an admin. I'm not making this up. If you're genuinely not trying to hurt anyone and you apologize for the mix-up, the admins should be relatively cool about it. Sometimes you just get a really really cranky admin who yells at you because he's been dealing with creeps and morons all day. It happens. There was also a period of much stricter administration a while back. They're generally pretty laid-back about most things now though.
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Sep 6, 2013 02:09
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Feinne posted:Have we seen, like, anyone actually earnestly attempting to do their job other than that heroic Quartermaster who got incinerated along with everyone else on the shuttle and I suppose the AIs? I mean how long were the drat engines in the station off? Loading it normally is unnecessary because a competent AI will usually set up the solar panels in the first minute of the round to keep the station adequately powered.
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Sep 6, 2013 02:11
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Traitors are always doing their job. Razage narrowly missed running into it, but most of the middle portion of that round was the guy who foamed the shuttle bombing medbay with sarin.
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Sep 6, 2013 02:16
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Feinne posted:Have we seen, like, anyone actually earnestly attempting to do their job other than that heroic Quartermaster who got incinerated along with everyone else on the shuttle and I suppose the AIs? I mean how long were the drat engines in the station off? The first video had a Head of Personnel still at his desk 20+ minutes into the round.
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Sep 6, 2013 02:19
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Sindai posted:generate 100x what the station needs and spit fire and lightning all over the room. Like the other day when the chief engineer set up the engine and the screen on the generator started blinking with a picture of a mushroom cloud on the screen. "Don't worry about it. It just gets angry when you run it so hard." It exploded and took out a fair chunk of the surrounding structure a few minutes later. Then I got fed into a crusher.
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Sep 6, 2013 02:19
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Angry Diplomat posted:If you're genuinely not trying to hurt anyone and you apologize for the mix-up, the admins should be relatively cool about it. Sometimes you just get a really really cranky admin who yells at you because he's been dealing with creeps and morons all day. It happens. Oh yeah, I should note that this incident happened about two years ago. It was just one of a series of very bad admin/admin friends experiences that caused me to retreat to my janitorial cabinet.
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Sep 6, 2013 02:24
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Gimmick Account posted:Oh yeah, I should note that this incident happened about two years ago. It was just one of a series of very bad admin/admin friends experiences that caused me to retreat to my janitorial cabinet. There used to be some of that going on way back, and it caused me to take a hiatus too. Things are better now, though. Kanthulhu posted:This looks like it could be fun. Not really convinced the game is raelly good right now from what I've seen so far, but the potential for chaos is great and that is good. The next two video's are already recorded and I'm not spoiling 'em! However, submit ideas for names or profession/gimmick ideas! I do plan to play all the professions (Even the dreaded security officer) at some point. Steak Flavored Gum posted:You could use Creative Commons music. This looks cool and I'll see if I can work it into my existing setup. For now, I am uploading to Daily motion as well (In the process of uploading the first episode as I type this), it's a good idea to have mirrors anyway because what if Youtube goes down, how will we all get our LP fix of SS13 then!
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Sep 6, 2013 03:17
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Razage posted:I do plan to play all the professions (Even the dreaded security officer) at some point. 
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Sep 6, 2013 03:21
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Yapping Eevee posted:But wouldn't that mean revealing some of the secret chemistry recipes to us at some point? So long as Razange isn't making grog, sarin, or the other elaborate and/or kept-quiet-for-a-goddamn-reason recipes I don't really give a gently caress what he shows in chemistry, so long as he uses common sense. please don't make us have to deal with an armada of space-lube-extinguisher copycats or whatever
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Sep 6, 2013 03:29
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Or just do show it and edit/lie about the recipes. It'd be just like TV!
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Sep 6, 2013 03:34
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Daeren posted:please don't make us have to deal with an armada of space-lube-extinguisher copycats or whatever I dunno, I get nostalgic for the first days I was playing where space lube and a broken window/open airlock was the method du jour for traitor chemists.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:46
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