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Up Topic General / Feedback and Ideas / Feedback from first time player
- - By Anonymous [fi] Date 2014-05-22 22:07
Positive issues:
- The game looks really nice.
- There are a lot of interesting things to find and experiment on. E.g. airship in dark castle. Liquids.
- Start menus look nice and are quite easy to use.
- Local area network server auto detection is nice.
- Multi-player feature is nice.
- Material and the forum in English (as I don't speak German)

Negative issues:
- Once trees start growing the performance drops and the game starts to lag a lot. Game also lags on Linux, on Unity for some reason. But that could be an unity issue and it can be solved by using another window manager instead.
- Trees grow too fast and everywhere. Perhaps some limit would be nice. "Don't grow here if there is already a tree near you".
- Some things in the game are really difficult to learn, e.g. using a pump (how to make pipes). What to put into a cannon (there could be some hint in game). Digging a hole into the ceiling. Working in water. How to build a plane.
- Player gets quite easily stuck when mining rocks or working with elevator.
- Loading a saved game fails always, at least in 3 player multi player games (dark castle scenario). The game loads, but it claims to be on "pause" and then the game freezes. Not even esc is working (but e.g. alt+tab still works)
- All the scenarios seem to be really difficult and made for professional players. It would be nice to have something other than tutorial scenarios that could be played even by a 8-year old.
- There is no hint on how to open a menu when playing the game, you just have to know what keyboard button to press. Perhaps there could be a visible button on screen that could be used with mouse? Or text saying "press x to open menu"

The game is quite playable even with all the problems, so there is a lot of potential in it.

- Version 5.4.1
- I found the game via some random Google search "linux games" or something similar.
Reply
Parent - - By Maikel Date 2014-05-23 09:21
Good to hear something from a new player :) and even better to hear that you found it through such a google query.

I am mostly interested in your feedback on the scenario difficulty. What rounds did you play so far? The ones with pumping or mining above lava/acid are indeed hard. Maybe we should put difficulty indications in the description.

Did you manage to finish a the gold rush round? That should be at least easy and doable with one player. Also Iron Peak, but it has the problem that it is rather boring and repetitive.

Maybe you could specify more what makes the rounds hard? And which ones you have played so far. Dark Castle is indeed not easy at all.
Parent - - By Sven2 Date 2014-05-23 10:05

> Maybe we should put difficulty indications in the description.


But nobody reads those. Maybe we should go back to using mission access so people have to play the missions in a sequence from easy to hard?
Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2014-05-23 10:12
Or maybe we could update the interface that it shows the difficulty with little stars next to the title? I heard people like little stars.
Parent - - By Maikel Date 2014-05-23 17:24
Maybe it is better to put diamonds, since those would never appear ingame.
Parent - By Anonymous [fi] Date 2014-05-24 13:23
Stars usually indicate score as in would you recommend this to your friend. Would you play this again?

You can indicate the difficulty best by using a text "easy", "normal", "hard".
Reply
Parent - By Maikel Date 2014-05-23 17:26
That is probably good indeed, however, I think we should also create easier rounds, which don't take too long.

For example Iron peak could be about constructing a flagpole at the top of the peak, which is a challenge with heavy resources, but can be done in 20-40 minutes.

Gold Rush should already be doable in 20-30 minutes. Then the later rounds could be a real challenge like Gem Grabbers and Acid Goldmine.
Parent - By Zapper [de] Date 2014-05-23 18:04
For me, the passwords were a reason why I never played some of the advanced missions.
It restricts us to make all missions very easy and we could not create missions that are, for example, only reasonably doable with more players (because they would be a showstopper for single players).

I am actually against that. I'd rather show the difficulties (..with stars) and sort the scenarios according to their difficulty
Parent - By Pyrit Date 2014-05-23 19:48
True, important stuff like hints on how to win the round or quirks of the scenario get mixed up with boring suff like the geology of  the clonk planet.
Parent - - By Anonymous [fi] Date 2014-05-24 13:20
We have tried the plane crash and dark castle mostly. Others only shortly.

What makes a scenario difficult:
- If you can die only once
- There is no solid ground (the one which you can't break by accident) on which you can build buildings
- The amount of buildings which you can build is limited.
- Where you get serious punishment from mistakes (e.g. flowing lava/acid to your tunnels)

What doesn't make it difficult:
- Enemies
- Lava in some amounts is also OK, but it would be better if it wouldn't be so near of the starting area.

The dark castle eventually turned out to be the best scenario so far, even it is somewhat difficult. It would be quite nice to play if there would be enough solid ground on top for building buildings and perhaps leave the lava out. Air ships etc. are also a nice reward for getting past the enemies.
Reply
Parent - By Maikel Date 2014-05-24 14:21

>- If you can die only once


I think in most rounds you can buy clonks at the flagpole, maybe we should make an automatic respawn if enough gold is available.

>- There is no solid ground (the one which you can't break by accident) on which you can build buildings
>- The amount of buildings which you can build is limited.


The amount of buildings is limited to what we have and what is useful for that round. We don't want people to be able to construct boompacks in Crash Landing and just fly over to the plane. May I ask you whether you managed that scenario? By the way, that round you can finish without any buildings :(

>- Where you get serious punishment from mistakes (e.g. flowing lava/acid to your tunnels)


Yes, some scenarios build on that feature of the clonk landscape, which I find very interesting. Maybe it is too hard, and especially in Dark Castle not that necessary.

In general I have the feeling you started with the wrong scenarios, although we don't really have so much rounds for beginners: I'd recommend Gold Rush (rather boring, no challenge) and RubyCave (quite interesting already).

Scenarios like AcidGoldMine are really hard core and even the developers fail in that round two out of three times...
Parent - By Fluff [gb] Date 2014-05-23 12:29

>- Loading a saved game fails always, at least in 3 player multi player games (dark castle scenario). The game loads, but it claims to be on "pause" and then the game freezes. Not even esc is working (but e.g. alt+tab still works)


My keyboard has a "pause break" button, which pauses and unpauses the game. I don't know if yours has one too, or some equivalent. If so, try pressing that.
Parent - By Sven2 Date 2014-05-23 12:49

> - Loading a saved game fails always, at least in 3 player multi player games (dark castle scenario). The game loads, but it claims to be on "pause" and then the game freezes. Not even esc is working (but e.g. alt+tab still works)


Yeah, that's an old bug. Clearing the ControlFrame in the Scenario.txt of the savegame usually fixes this.
Parent - - By Caesar [de] Date 2014-05-24 23:12

>- All the scenarios seem to be really difficult and made for professional players. It would be nice to have something other than tutorial scenarios that could be played even by a 8-year old.


Interesting… Clonk has traditionally been a hard game and OpenClonk set out to change that. Have you tried Gold Rush, Kamikaze Cowboys or Rock Bottom? I wonder what you think about their difficulty.

Anyway, I agree with you. There are quite a few scenarios which I tried and gave up after a few minutes because there was no obvious next thing to do that wouldn't kill me.
Parent - By ala [de] Date 2014-05-24 23:20
OC has been pretty hard for me as well, especially the races with the rope jumps and this rocket to ride on.
Up Topic General / Feedback and Ideas / Feedback from first time player

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