Yeah, there's definitely a time and place for deliberately letting yourself be caught by the chicken's vision or by the hound or farmer's peripheral vision to cunningly manipulate them. I really enjoyed that too ^^
Hekateras
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+ Addendum:
I'm reminded of Invisible Inc, which is a fantastic game and works in all the right ways... and has a god-awful tutorial that fails to teach you some of the most important mechanics, such as the distinction between noticed and seen enemy vision. I regularly watch new players hamstring themselves by playing on self-imposed hard mode, navigating enemies under the assumption that the "You get seen and *overwatched* here" vision cone is twice its actual size.
It speaks to the flaws in the tutorial, which not only fails to explain the difference, but doesn't even let you move through peripheral/noticed vision, let alone force you to do so to teach you that it's basically safe. I wish the devs had improved the tutorial, but I am very very glad they didn't decide to instead cut the peripheral/seen distinction just because it was confusing to some players. *Shudder*
>I’m curious for feedback here from other designers. My instinct at this moment is to cut diagonal movement.
You're never going to make a game that instinctively "clicks" with 100% of players. I recommend resisting the impulse to fix what isn't broken to reach a broader audience. Besides, you spelled out a much better solution already: Simply rework the tutorial so that moving diagonally is unavoidable and have players repeat it once or twice so it sinks in.
Fantastic write-up. I was wondering about the map-gen - it was sufficiently challenging to explore and navigate without generating completely frustrating dead ends (such as ending up in one "prong" of the map only to find that the exit is on the other prong). Very interesting
Question: I can't speak to this with certainty, but I could have sworn that twice so far I've had maps (both cases it was the first level - chronologically, I mean, not LVL-1) where one of the data nodes was in an enclosed space only reachable via Burrow. One was a particularly memorable occasion because I tunneled into the room with the node and a patrol in it, had the Hunter follow me in, and then circled back around to the entrance I had made to get back out. I don't think I could have possibly missed an existing door if there had been one. Do you know anything about that?
Thank you for playing :)
Personally, I can say that luring guards out into the hedges works almost as well as with gardeners. They will aggro after a bit, but breaking line of sight seems to reset the timer, so you can pretty easily get away with it. The only downside of their disguise is you don't get the shovel. (And you can't interact with poisonous plants without raising suspicion, but it's usually not hard to do that without being seen, so it's not a major constraint).