I jumped straight into the mechlab and made noob's first glass cannon with all ammo-based weapons and virtually no armor. Got my ass deservedly wupped. I love it, hope you add a merc career mode or something, MW2:M was my favorite and I only ever got to play a little bit.
No comment on the mechanics or visuals, they're both perfect. UI could use some work in some places but if the obvious good parts are any indication of the intended style then you've already got it down. Balancing on the chaingun is also a bit off, like you're shooting super-hot BBs. But if there's going to be infantry around to mow down someday then that's not a problem. It may also just be me ignoring the different armor types and maybe it's super effective against beam-reflective or something.
Not going to say anything about the Menu Visuals, I'm just going to assume they are all Placeholders.
Default Mech Weight is 18.10T? Seems an odd Weight, but alright I guess. Found the Engine/Structure/Etc Selection later, pretty neat. Theres a lot of customizability in Mecha building. Preview Mech is really neat, I'd prefer it not as a second Option tho, but always active on the Side. Shame that there's only one Chassis at the moment.
I can drag Guns, but I can't drag them onto the Preview Mech. I also don't know what Ammo what Gun needs, so I'm just putting Chainguns and 12mm Rounds everywhere, that'll work hopefully. Worked, but didn't work out obviously. Guess Armor is important.
Next try with only 2 Gaus Cannons and as much front Armor as possible, Auto-Fill Armor doesn'T work. Am pretty much invincible but overheated and run out of Cannonballs. No Melee.
If you run too close into the Enemy, their Wireframe appears on your Wireframe display.
Ran fullspeed of the Map. Its a lot bigger then I expected. Its also empty at the Moment which is boring for the Combat, I think it should have some Stuff to cover behind and/or blow up. Everything seems to work so far tho, the Mech Status Voice Anouncer works really well, nice.
Overheating doesn't do anything if you override it. I can easily go to 500% without anything happening.
Weapons and other Equipment doesn't show up on your Mech, shame.
I have no Idea what half of the Stuff is supposed to be, I'm not that into Guns and Armor and Stuff. Also Controls feel too Simulative to me personally, but thats just the Style of the Game you're going for I'm assuming.
Finally won by using a default Mech aswell, I suck at designing Mechs I guess.
1v1 Combat quickly turns into just strafing around the Enemy in case they have Directionlocked Weapons and firing away in bursts. Don't know if thats intended, but it feels a bit same-y and boring. Maybe better AI and different Terrain alongside proper Team battles instead of only 1v1 could fix this more. Or different Achievements to Win then just destroy the Enemy.
>I have no Idea what half of the Stuff is supposed to be
You can see more details about weapons and equipment by holding right click on them, it shows their ammo requirement and a description of what they do, as well as some stats. I definitely need to improve this though, I didn't have time to add an 'ammo warning' icon in the mechbay that tells you if a weapon requires ammo after placing it.
Stuff like armor and structure type currently don't have descriptions unfortunately.
>Weapons and other Equipment doesn't show up on your Mech, shame.
Yeah, sorry. That's supposed to happen but I haven't set up the weapon spawning system in a good enough way to be able to re-use it for the mechbay yet, but I'll be fixing that soon with a refactor.
>Its also empty at the Moment which is boring for the Combat, I think it should have some Stuff to cover behind and/or blow up
I'm definitely working towards that. This map is generally just empty as a 'free-for-all' type thing, but most actual missions and instant action maps will have much more stuff to use for tactical positioning.
>Overheating doesn't do anything if you override it. I can easily go to 500% without anything happening.
I think it's tweaked to be a bit too forgiving at the moment, but you can actually stay above 100% for a while due to the RNG.
When you overheat, all of your component's internal structure slowly takes random amounts of damage, bypassing armor, and doing random critical hits. If you have any equipment - such as heatsinks, or explosive ammo - the critical hits can destroy them and cause essentially a chain reaction. If you're already overheating and your heatsinks blow up, it's going to be a lot harder to *stop* overheating - etc.
>1v1 Combat quickly turns into just strafing around the Enemy in case
they have Directionlocked Weapons and firing away in bursts. Don't know
if thats intended, but it feels a bit same-y and boring. Maybe better AI
and different Terrain alongside proper Team battles instead of only 1v1
could fix this more. Or different Achievements to Win then just destroy
the Enemy.
Yeah, that's essentially exactly what I was thinking. I'm going to be adding more interesting mission objectives, more enemy 'roles', like a mech that might hide behind a hill and fire missiles at you, or a scout that harasses you, etc. There will also be ally commands you can give to your team for better strategy, and the maps will be much more complex and less empty. I'm hoping that will alleviate the issue a bit, but we'll have to see. It's going to be a while before all of that falls into place.
Also, if you wanted to play 2v2, there's already an option in the game to enable that if you check the "gameplay" tab in the settings.
Anyway, thank you for the in-depth feedback, I appreciate it a lot.
I'm a fan of the art style! I played with the retro 16:9 view mode. To me it looks like a stylized MechWarrior 2 which is something I would consider a positive. One thing which stood out to me is the sound design. While I think the game could use more sounds in general, the weapon effects and the little feet clacks had me immersed in the cockpit which is something I would want from a game like this.
Obviously the UI is a work in progress, but I think adding tooltips would help a lot. Even for someone who's played a lot of mech games it kind of felt like being tossed into the deep end when loading the mechbay. You do at least have a help menu which is praiseworthy.
I think the only real bug I noticed was walking into an enemy unit would show their mech on my own health display which seemed kind of odd. For instant action I couldn't seem to configure it for anything besides a 1v1.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. It's very useful to have the perspective of someone who's played many mech games in the past.
I'm definitely going to be overhauling the UI many times until I get to a point where I feel it's easy enough to understand. There are already tooltips if you hold right-click on equipment / weapons, but there definitely need to be more, and there's a bunch of areas where the mechbay UI has major failings - like, for example, the game doesn't explain what the different armor types (composite, KREM, reflective, EDA) even do, same with structure type and engines, etc. A lot of this is on my radar, and a lot of development time is going to go towards making the mechbay more comfortable and simple to use, considering it will account for 30-40% of the game.
I'm limiting the size of battles at the moment as anything beyond 1v1 is almost entirely untested, and may lead to performance or weird AI problems - but there is a setting in the 'gameplay' tab to enable 2v2 battles, if you'd like to try that out.
Pretty cool demo. I like going for the legs most of all, maybe that's why real world tanks don't have them. I think the Orion is a good middle ground to expand from to create all sorts of different builds and configurations, although I'm not sure how you can encourage people to do this.
On a different note, an issue I had which I want to point out was that using the automatic weapons overheats my mech instantly whereas auto-lasers and single shot weapons work fine.
I'm also having issues figuring out how to encourage customization. My idea for a campaign at the moment involves a lot of 'looking ahead' to see what types of enemy and environment you'll be up against, so you can plan and build the right type of mechs for the job.
>an issue I had which I want to point out was that using the automatic
weapons overheats my mech instantly whereas auto-lasers and single shot
weapons work fine
First thing's first - the game has exactly zero balance at the moment, and I'm waiting until a few more major features are done before I'm going to make any changes. So, it's probably just a lack of balance issue.
That being said, how many heatsinks did your mech have? I do a pretty bad job at explaining heat mechanics in-game, but a mech without heatsinks can only dissipate something like 4 heat per second. Which automatic weapons were they? Some single-shots like the Gauss Cannon and Particle Cannon generate a large burst of heat per-shot, and some automatics produce very little, such as the Chaingun and Autobeam Laser.
It's going to be quite hard for me to determine what is and isn't a bug with such a large variety of possible mech builds. If you want, you could send me the .mvar file of your mech design, which is located in:
I have a 4:3 CRT, so I decided to play on that since you went through the effort of making it work well. I had no issues and it looked great. I played a match for all 3 prebuilt types. Although fun at first, it quickly grew stale once I realized it was just circle strafe around eachother until someone dies. I will note I haven't played any mech games besides this, but I'm sure there is things you can take note of from those games to add more variety so it isn't like that(also aided if it isn't a 1v1). The overheat mechanic was decent, might be interesting if overheat is affected by the location; for example it's quicker in the dessert and slower in the snow, might add some strategy if you can customize your mech for a campaign or what have you. Maybe add special fire ammo that overheats the enemy into submission? Anyways, I also checked out the build-a-mech menu, but it just seemed a bit much so I refrained from making something beyond swapping a part or two from the ORION class.
Thanks for checking it out! I really like the fact that you played it on a 4:3 CRT, I decided from the outset to support 4:3 aspect ratios and I even design the UI elements around it.
The prebuilt types are unfortunately kinda shit right now, and don't feature very many of the possible weapons - it's one of the easiest things to update, so I'll try and get some better ones out in a bit.
>it quickly grew stale once I realized it was just circle strafe around eachother until someone dies
Yeah, this is my biggest issue right now, too. My current plan is to add more passive equipment and also some active equipment that you can use for defensive, movement, team support, or further offensive purposes. I'm also going to add maps with better cover, and more complex mission objectives than just "kill everyone".
Additionally, having more complex team formations, both friendly and enemy, may help - I'm planning on some pretty cool 'role' based AI, where you can get for example a missile mech hiding behind a hill, and a scout mech that runs around you to get a target lock so the missilier can blind-fire you. You will be able to, hopefully, tell your AI teammates to do things like this, too.
I've already noticed the game gets significantly more fun when playing with AI teammates, even if they're pretty dumb. (You can enable the secret 2v2 setting in the menu if you want)
I'm hoping this will get some semblance of strategy out of the current systems. As of now, It's definitely more in an 'rpg' direction of having your stats, all pre-determined before the fight, matter significantly more than your actual performance. I'd like to even that out.
>might be interesting if overheat is affected by the location
It's absolutely going to be!
>might add some strategy if you can customize your mech for a campaign
You'll be able to see a bit about what you're going up against, and the environment before you start a mission. A large portion of the 'strategy' will be planning ahead effectively with a decent build and fitting fireteam roles.
Last thing - there's actually a mechbay tutorial if you press the "help" button in the bottom left of the mechbay, but It's definitely going to be overwhelming to most people, especially if you haven't played a Mechwarrior title. I need to find a way to onboard people into the mechbay better, considering it's going to account for easily 30-40% of the entire game.
I only got two fights in but this was a very cool game. Being able to accidentally over heat my mech was a very nice touch, and I felt like I was constantly on the edge of disaster, but I managed to prevail.
List actual resolutions instead of just Low/Medium/High. Actually, just drop the "retro" bullshit entirely. I think you could count the amount of people who would want to play a 3D game at 640x480 or at 4:3 on your fingers, and I doubt the game is going to be demanding enough to justify a resolution scale slider.
What exactly does the filter mode affect? Rephrase it to make it more clear.
I get that it's a placeholder, but the controls list is an absolute mess with everything being center-aligned. At least separate the keys and actions and align them to opposite sides.
The instant action menu should list your team above the enemy team instead of the other way around.
Being able to adjust armor values this precisely doesn't make sense (what does adding 10 armor entail for the mechanics?) and I feel like it just adds bloat. Having different armor types per part is enough.
The mech bay UI feels cramped and overwhelms you with too much information at once. You should separate it into multiple tabs for chassis/structure/engine, armor, loadout, ammo, and cosmetics.
Needs a HUD indicator to show torso/leg facing along with the turn limit of the torso. The animated model in the corner isn't very helpful.
How are you supposed to avoid damage? Combat just seems like a DPS race.
The TTK is absurd. I ran out of autocannon ammo for the Orion-C and it took me like 3 minutes to finish the guy off with the laser firing constantly. I don't think it's even possible to kill an enemy with just guns.
Mechs overheating from firing guns/missiles makes no sense. How does the heat get from the barrel to the engine (presumably)?
Wish it had actual penetration mechanics instead of armor just reducing damage. Would help differentiate guns and lasers, too.
I absolutely agree with a majority of this. Thank you for the feedback.
>List actual resolutions instead of just Low/Medium/High
The actual resolution of the game window is modifiable with the resolution dropdown. The "virtual resolution" dropdown allows you to preset resolution / aspect / filter settings. It shows the actual in-game resolution below.
I'm sorry that I really don't explain this in-game, same with stuff like "filter mode", which changes the virtual res upscale/downscale filter, which I added last minute and didn't really think about it making sense.
>Actually, just drop the "retro" bullshit entirely
I agree somewhat, but I'm targeting a specific audience which played mech games in the 90's. All of the [Retro] 4:3 presets were actually options in Mechwarrior 2.
I'm going to be keeping it for "nostalgia factor", and because I've already implemented it and I don't like removing options from the player, but I've been starting to move away from it. The 'welcome' screen that has you pick 'classic', etc. will not exist in the final game, making the retro feature optional and essentially hidden.
>Being able to adjust armor values this precisely doesn't make sense
Armor can be used as 'filler' for when you have, for example, 64t / 70t used by equipment / weapons and want to simply fill the remaining space - that's why it has to be granular like it is.
Unfortunately I forgot to re-add a feature that would have made this make more sense. You should in the future be able to just click a button to 'auto-fill' armor into components, up to the tonnage limit.
>Mechs overheating from firing guns/missiles makes no sense.
I agree, and my original game jam version had each weapon take heat damage separately, but I decided to go back towards a single heat bar because it's a decent enough abstraction and leads to more interesting gameplay decisions. It's not going to be a "strictly simulation" game.
>The TTK is absurd.
You're absolutely right, and the main answer to this is that I have not balanced the game whatsoever, and the default stock designs are shit. If you were to use two particle cannons, you could almost instakill most mechs. I'm not going to be balancing (at least, not much) until I've finished two more features that will drastically effect the balance, otherwise I'll have to do it all over again. Features such as...
>How are you supposed to avoid damage? Combat just seems like a DPS race.
Active and passive equipment should be one solution to this, but I know it's an issue. My other plans are improved maps with cover, team coordination with your battery of mechs, and more complex mission objectives that will hopefully lead to interesting encounters.
>Wish it had actual penetration mechanics
Weapons are going to be customizable with a "tag" system and I'm considering adding penetration so that the gauss cannon can be tagged to become a railgun that goes straight through armor and does high crit to destroy equipment easily.
Sorry for the longform response, once again I really appreciate it - It's difficult to get quality feedback, especially honest feedback, while working on a project like this.
Comments
I jumped straight into the mechlab and made noob's first glass cannon with all ammo-based weapons and virtually no armor. Got my ass deservedly wupped. I love it, hope you add a merc career mode or something, MW2:M was my favorite and I only ever got to play a little bit.
No comment on the mechanics or visuals, they're both perfect. UI could use some work in some places but if the obvious good parts are any indication of the intended style then you've already got it down. Balancing on the chaingun is also a bit off, like you're shooting super-hot BBs. But if there's going to be infantry around to mow down someday then that's not a problem. It may also just be me ignoring the different armor types and maybe it's super effective against beam-reflective or something.
Not going to say anything about the Menu Visuals, I'm just going to assume they are all Placeholders.
Default Mech Weight is 18.10T? Seems an odd Weight, but alright I guess.Found the Engine/Structure/Etc Selection later, pretty neat. Theres a lot of customizability in Mecha building. Preview Mech is really neat, I'd prefer it not as a second Option tho, but always active on the Side. Shame that there's only one Chassis at the moment.I can drag Guns, but I can't drag them onto the Preview Mech. I also don't know what Ammo what Gun needs, so I'm just putting Chainguns and 12mm Rounds everywhere, that'll work hopefully. Worked, but didn't work out obviously. Guess Armor is important.
Next try with only 2 Gaus Cannons and as much front Armor as possible, Auto-Fill Armor doesn'T work. Am pretty much invincible but overheated and run out of Cannonballs. No Melee.
If you run too close into the Enemy, their Wireframe appears on your Wireframe display.
Ran fullspeed of the Map. Its a lot bigger then I expected. Its also empty at the Moment which is boring for the Combat, I think it should have some Stuff to cover behind and/or blow up. Everything seems to work so far tho, the Mech Status Voice Anouncer works really well, nice.
Overheating doesn't do anything if you override it. I can easily go to 500% without anything happening.
Weapons and other Equipment doesn't show up on your Mech, shame.
I have no Idea what half of the Stuff is supposed to be, I'm not that into Guns and Armor and Stuff. Also Controls feel too Simulative to me personally, but thats just the Style of the Game you're going for I'm assuming.
Finally won by using a default Mech aswell, I suck at designing Mechs I guess.
1v1 Combat quickly turns into just strafing around the Enemy in case they have Directionlocked Weapons and firing away in bursts. Don't know if thats intended, but it feels a bit same-y and boring. Maybe better AI and different Terrain alongside proper Team battles instead of only 1v1 could fix this more. Or different Achievements to Win then just destroy the Enemy.
Thanks for checking out my demo Tomo.
>I also don't know what Ammo what Gun needs
>I have no Idea what half of the Stuff is supposed to be
You can see more details about weapons and equipment by holding right click on them, it shows their ammo requirement and a description of what they do, as well as some stats. I definitely need to improve this though, I didn't have time to add an 'ammo warning' icon in the mechbay that tells you if a weapon requires ammo after placing it.
Stuff like armor and structure type currently don't have descriptions unfortunately.
>Weapons and other Equipment doesn't show up on your Mech, shame.
Yeah, sorry. That's supposed to happen but I haven't set up the weapon spawning system in a good enough way to be able to re-use it for the mechbay yet, but I'll be fixing that soon with a refactor.
>Its also empty at the Moment which is boring for the Combat, I think it should have some Stuff to cover behind and/or blow up
I'm definitely working towards that. This map is generally just empty as a 'free-for-all' type thing, but most actual missions and instant action maps will have much more stuff to use for tactical positioning.
>Overheating doesn't do anything if you override it. I can easily go to 500% without anything happening.
I think it's tweaked to be a bit too forgiving at the moment, but you can actually stay above 100% for a while due to the RNG.
When you overheat, all of your component's internal structure slowly takes random amounts of damage, bypassing armor, and doing random critical hits. If you have any equipment - such as heatsinks, or explosive ammo - the critical hits can destroy them and cause essentially a chain reaction. If you're already overheating and your heatsinks blow up, it's going to be a lot harder to *stop* overheating - etc.
>1v1 Combat quickly turns into just strafing around the Enemy in case they have Directionlocked Weapons and firing away in bursts. Don't know if thats intended, but it feels a bit same-y and boring. Maybe better AI and different Terrain alongside proper Team battles instead of only 1v1 could fix this more. Or different Achievements to Win then just destroy the Enemy.
Yeah, that's essentially exactly what I was thinking. I'm going to be adding more interesting mission objectives, more enemy 'roles', like a mech that might hide behind a hill and fire missiles at you, or a scout that harasses you, etc. There will also be ally commands you can give to your team for better strategy, and the maps will be much more complex and less empty. I'm hoping that will alleviate the issue a bit, but we'll have to see. It's going to be a while before all of that falls into place.
Also, if you wanted to play 2v2, there's already an option in the game to enable that if you check the "gameplay" tab in the settings.
Anyway, thank you for the in-depth feedback, I appreciate it a lot.
I'm a fan of the art style! I played with the retro 16:9 view mode. To me it looks like a stylized MechWarrior 2 which is something I would consider a positive. One thing which stood out to me is the sound design. While I think the game could use more sounds in general, the weapon effects and the little feet clacks had me immersed in the cockpit which is something I would want from a game like this.
Obviously the UI is a work in progress, but I think adding tooltips would help a lot. Even for someone who's played a lot of mech games it kind of felt like being tossed into the deep end when loading the mechbay. You do at least have a help menu which is praiseworthy.
I think the only real bug I noticed was walking into an enemy unit would show their mech on my own health display which seemed kind of odd. For instant action I couldn't seem to configure it for anything besides a 1v1.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. It's very useful to have the perspective of someone who's played many mech games in the past.
I'm definitely going to be overhauling the UI many times until I get to a point where I feel it's easy enough to understand. There are already tooltips if you hold right-click on equipment / weapons, but there definitely need to be more, and there's a bunch of areas where the mechbay UI has major failings - like, for example, the game doesn't explain what the different armor types (composite, KREM, reflective, EDA) even do, same with structure type and engines, etc. A lot of this is on my radar, and a lot of development time is going to go towards making the mechbay more comfortable and simple to use, considering it will account for 30-40% of the game.
I'm limiting the size of battles at the moment as anything beyond 1v1 is almost entirely untested, and may lead to performance or weird AI problems - but there is a setting in the 'gameplay' tab to enable 2v2 battles, if you'd like to try that out.
Thanks for checking it out!
Pretty cool demo. I like going for the legs most of all, maybe that's why real world tanks don't have them. I think the Orion is a good middle ground to expand from to create all sorts of different builds and configurations, although I'm not sure how you can encourage people to do this.
On a different note, an issue I had which I want to point out was that using the automatic weapons overheats my mech instantly whereas auto-lasers and single shot weapons work fine.
Thanks for trying it.
I'm also having issues figuring out how to encourage customization. My idea for a campaign at the moment involves a lot of 'looking ahead' to see what types of enemy and environment you'll be up against, so you can plan and build the right type of mechs for the job.
>an issue I had which I want to point out was that using the automatic weapons overheats my mech instantly whereas auto-lasers and single shot weapons work fine
First thing's first - the game has exactly zero balance at the moment, and I'm waiting until a few more major features are done before I'm going to make any changes. So, it's probably just a lack of balance issue.
That being said, how many heatsinks did your mech have? I do a pretty bad job at explaining heat mechanics in-game, but a mech without heatsinks can only dissipate something like 4 heat per second.
Which automatic weapons were they? Some single-shots like the Gauss Cannon and Particle Cannon generate a large burst of heat per-shot, and some automatics produce very little, such as the Chaingun and Autobeam Laser.
It's going to be quite hard for me to determine what is and isn't a bug with such a large variety of possible mech builds. If you want, you could send me the .mvar file of your mech design, which is located in:
Either way, thank you again for the helpful feedback.
I have a 4:3 CRT, so I decided to play on that since you went through the effort of making it work well. I had no issues and it looked great. I played a match for all 3 prebuilt types. Although fun at first, it quickly grew stale once I realized it was just circle strafe around eachother until someone dies. I will note I haven't played any mech games besides this, but I'm sure there is things you can take note of from those games to add more variety so it isn't like that(also aided if it isn't a 1v1). The overheat mechanic was decent, might be interesting if overheat is affected by the location; for example it's quicker in the dessert and slower in the snow, might add some strategy if you can customize your mech for a campaign or what have you. Maybe add special fire ammo that overheats the enemy into submission? Anyways, I also checked out the build-a-mech menu, but it just seemed a bit much so I refrained from making something beyond swapping a part or two from the ORION class.
Overall pretty fun for what it is as a WIP.
Thanks for checking it out! I really like the fact that you played it on a 4:3 CRT, I decided from the outset to support 4:3 aspect ratios and I even design the UI elements around it.
The prebuilt types are unfortunately kinda shit right now, and don't feature very many of the possible weapons - it's one of the easiest things to update, so I'll try and get some better ones out in a bit.
>it quickly grew stale once I realized it was just circle strafe around eachother until someone dies
Yeah, this is my biggest issue right now, too. My current plan is to add more passive equipment and also some active equipment that you can use for defensive, movement, team support, or further offensive purposes. I'm also going to add maps with better cover, and more complex mission objectives than just "kill everyone".
Additionally, having more complex team formations, both friendly and enemy, may help - I'm planning on some pretty cool 'role' based AI, where you can get for example a missile mech hiding behind a hill, and a scout mech that runs around you to get a target lock so the missilier can blind-fire you. You will be able to, hopefully, tell your AI teammates to do things like this, too.
I've already noticed the game gets significantly more fun when playing with AI teammates, even if they're pretty dumb. (You can enable the secret 2v2 setting in the menu if you want)
I'm hoping this will get some semblance of strategy out of the current systems. As of now, It's definitely more in an 'rpg' direction of having your stats, all pre-determined before the fight, matter significantly more than your actual performance. I'd like to even that out.
>might be interesting if overheat is affected by the location
It's absolutely going to be!
>might add some strategy if you can customize your mech for a campaign
You'll be able to see a bit about what you're going up against, and the environment before you start a mission. A large portion of the 'strategy' will be planning ahead effectively with a decent build and fitting fireteam roles.
Last thing - there's actually a mechbay tutorial if you press the "help" button in the bottom left of the mechbay, but It's definitely going to be overwhelming to most people, especially if you haven't played a Mechwarrior title. I need to find a way to onboard people into the mechbay better, considering it's going to account for easily 30-40% of the entire game.
Again, thanks for the feedback!
I love it. Blowing the legs off mechs was sick
I only got two fights in but this was a very cool game. Being able to accidentally over heat my mech was a very nice touch, and I felt like I was constantly on the edge of disaster, but I managed to prevail.
I absolutely agree with a majority of this. Thank you for the feedback.
>List actual resolutions instead of just Low/Medium/High
The actual resolution of the game window is modifiable with the resolution dropdown. The "virtual resolution" dropdown allows you to preset resolution / aspect / filter settings. It shows the actual in-game resolution below.
I'm sorry that I really don't explain this in-game, same with stuff like "filter mode", which changes the virtual res upscale/downscale filter, which I added last minute and didn't really think about it making sense.
>Actually, just drop the "retro" bullshit entirely
I agree somewhat, but I'm targeting a specific audience which played mech games in the 90's. All of the [Retro] 4:3 presets were actually options in Mechwarrior 2.
I'm going to be keeping it for "nostalgia factor", and because I've already implemented it and I don't like removing options from the player, but I've been starting to move away from it. The 'welcome' screen that has you pick 'classic', etc. will not exist in the final game, making the retro feature optional and essentially hidden.
>Being able to adjust armor values this precisely doesn't make sense
Armor can be used as 'filler' for when you have, for example, 64t / 70t used by equipment / weapons and want to simply fill the remaining space - that's why it has to be granular like it is.
Unfortunately I forgot to re-add a feature that would have made this make more sense. You should in the future be able to just click a button to 'auto-fill' armor into components, up to the tonnage limit.
>Mechs overheating from firing guns/missiles makes no sense.
I agree, and my original game jam version had each weapon take heat damage separately, but I decided to go back towards a single heat bar because it's a decent enough abstraction and leads to more interesting gameplay decisions. It's not going to be a "strictly simulation" game.
>The TTK is absurd.
You're absolutely right, and the main answer to this is that I have not balanced the game whatsoever, and the default stock designs are shit. If you were to use two particle cannons, you could almost instakill most mechs. I'm not going to be balancing (at least, not much) until I've finished two more features that will drastically effect the balance, otherwise I'll have to do it all over again. Features such as...
>How are you supposed to avoid damage? Combat just seems like a DPS race.
Active and passive equipment should be one solution to this, but I know it's an issue. My other plans are improved maps with cover, team coordination with your battery of mechs, and more complex mission objectives that will hopefully lead to interesting encounters.
>Wish it had actual penetration mechanics
Weapons are going to be customizable with a "tag" system and I'm considering adding penetration so that the gauss cannon can be tagged to become a railgun that goes straight through armor and does high crit to destroy equipment easily.
Sorry for the longform response, once again I really appreciate it - It's difficult to get quality feedback, especially honest feedback, while working on a project like this.
Password is "aggy"
Please bear with me as I add more info to the page and fix glaring issues in-game.
EDIT: Removed the password requirement