One Shots: The glow of Love

Informations needed.

I played Alpha. I hated it deeply. Building and managing the base is so much fun. But running randomly and hopping thru bushes to capture and collect the mushrooms while bashing the koopas was SO MUCH lame i wanted to kill myself.

Did they eliminate the boredom of collecting all the crap? Is the game now only about what's fun, building a base and managing the defenses, and maybe handling relations with other players' bases, diplomacy/politics, maybe trading and overall economy?

Since the alpha a few things have changed, namely the way tokens are collected.

As it is now, only a few tokens can be found in the wild, a lot of the more important ones (better weapons, better infrastructure) have to be found in specific AI bases, of which there are 5 types, each with distinct architecture.

Trading and economy don't have a place in Love, it's just not that type of game.

procedurally generated sand box game, looks kool.

I had a brief look at this game recently. How anyone can like the look of it is utterly beyond me, it's positively awful.

The config tool is the one you're referring to... i had problems understanding what exactly it is as well.

Sadly it's not a thing you have by default. It's one of the damn mushrooms "tokens" you're supposed to collect, then plant in the base, then you can grab it by assigning it an inventory slot(1, 2, 3, 4). It's a an unhappy design decision IMO, because the config tool is too important to not have at once. The point is when you make the base, you need A LOT of things to be able to defend it(including obviousl the config tool). And you need them at once or the NPC's will bash it. Needless to say there's not enuff time to collect ALL the tokens you need... and it's an incredibly boring process of pointless running thruout the place that i have no idea what Eskil was thinking when he thought this was fun. I was wondering if he made it more interesting, or just less dumb. To top it all, NPC's are super aggressive, they destroy the most harmless under-construction base, they got über weapons, they can shoot things they don't clearly see in their line of sight, but they calculate trajectories perfectly for grenades, and sometimes they have no-clip on. Eskil gave us cheating NPC's.

Please update me, did he fix all this?

I played this at the beginning of early Beta. There's a great idea under the surface here, but it's going to take a lot more effort to get it working.

The art style is one concern: the numerous filters make it very difficult to see what you're doing. Sometimes you get a lovely shot like the above, morning sun glimmering off an ice cap, light filtering through the trees, or a lake that shimmers with a sliver of light from a sunset through a gap in the mountains... but those are rare and far between, mostly due to the randomly generated terrain. Ultimately, the filters need to be cut down so players can see what they're doing and who they're shooting at.

The rest of the game is a RTS in a persistent world. There's a base management aspect, and a resource collection aspect, and they're both initially fun. The excitement wears a little thin if you get in a world with a lot of rocky terrain, leaving you to jump between rocks that may or may not get you to the top of that cliff, or you fall in a lake and learn there's no beach from which you can climb back out (Another problem with procedural generation). There don't tend to be many landmarks as you explore, so it gets really easy to lose track of where you're going. As a result, explorers tend to get lost and see a lot of the same areas over and over, especially if it involves climbing an annoying cliff to get out of a secluded area.

There's also no real end-game condition in sight. Once you've collected all the tokens and built the base, you can't really 'beat' the AI or otherwise 'win'. You just wait until the base is sufficiently damaged to need more tokens and start over.

There's a great game concept here, but it's not there yet. Eskil needs to move past the procedural elements, and make the next goal the creation of game elements that give the players achievable goals to complete.

-SirNiko