- I suggested last time to use letters instead of numbers when giving orders, and after having to relearn how to do it for the third time, I'd say it's absolutely necessary. For example, ordering your squad to clear a room is on 5 when hovering over the center of the room, but when breaching a door it's on 4. Making it C for "clear" every time would make it a lot more intuitive and quicker to use.
- I also still think the orders menu really needs to stop or at least heavily slow down time. Expecting the player to memorize the entire order tree and go through up to six sub-menus when an enemy can rush into the room and kill you in seconds is too much.
- Warning a suspect from behind should make them much more likely to surrender and not instantly whip around and shoot you.
- Told my squad to breach a door and clear a room, only for them to go through the room from the other side, gunning down all suspects, and then throwing a flashbang at me.
- A door being opened should cancel a breach order.
- Ran out of time several times in the bomb mission, mostly because giving orders takes so long even if you know what you want to do.
- The clunkiness of giving orders makes it feel like I'm not working together with my squadmates. I'm alternating between clearing rooms on my own beause it's faster and letting them do it with their perfect aim and automatic warnings while I stay out of the way. It almost feels like you're playing two separate games at the same time. I've also never found any use for giving the red and blue teams separate orders, partly because the first team will be long finished with their task before I can finish telling the other team what to do.
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Thanks for the feedback, sorry I haven't addressed the command menus being clunky, I plan to rework it entirely so hopefully it'll be more usable when I get around to it.
Gotta say I'm not fond of the "letter hotkeys" idea, I play a lot of RTS games and I can't stand the ones that do that instead of having grid hotkeys.
I'll experiment with it once I replace the command menu but honestly something like a wheel menu should eliminate the need for hotkeys entirely, we'll see.
Can you screenshot which door caused the squad to go all the way around? It sounds unintended behavior but keep in mind that the squad AI consider the squad's position instead of the player position when deciding which door to use and the shorter path to take, this is so you can give them orders without having to move to their position.
If it was unintended behavior I'll try to fix that.
Regarding the working together aspect, It's kind of the Achilles' heel of the genre: the friendly AI needs to handle itself and not be a nuisance to the player, this means that often it's viable to simply make them clear rooms on their own.
In general these kind of games work best when played alongside other humans rather than AI, that's why I started working on multiplayer, although right now it's only LAN multiplayer.
Currently the player is incentivized to clear rooms with the squad because suspects are more likely to surrender with every officers they see, I could increase this effect for the player character to make it more felt but tbh I'm still focused on adding mechanics so those parts of the gameplay aren't quite polished, I'll get around to it.
Thanks again for the feedback, I really appreciate you playing my game again.
>Can you screenshot which door caused the squad to go all the way around?
It was the door north of the bottom right bomb. I'd left my squad at the starting location. I think previews like in Republic Commando as well as a line showing what path they'd take to get there would make things a lot clearer. Having icons at the edges of the screen for off-screen squadmates would be nice, too.