Goonhub
05-10-2022, 06:50 AM
Some thoughts:
I like the ideas here quite a lot, and I think they suit wraith well. Right now, I'd say the coolest part of wraith is all the spooky spectacle stuff they can do. It's exciting (at least the first time) to see items floating around and fart jokes materializing on the ground in blood. This feels like a logical extension of that part of what makes wraith good, since it increases the -amount- of that stuff, and adds some nice variety to keep it interesting and fresh longer. Players having agency and choices to make both make them feel smarter for making good choices and makes them feel excited to play antags a second time through, so they can mix it up and try newer things in new situations.
One of the checkboxes on the PR todo list is to add more vulnerabilities and counterplay, and I think that's probably the biggest issue wraith has right now. I'd like to point out that (in my opinion) the biggest issue with the salt mechanic right now isn't that it's *not effective*, but that it's actively not very fun at all to employ. The factors that go into this are that making salt is basically busy work (you have infinite of it but with a time deficit, you don't give up anything but you still gotta repeat a pattern), placing it encourages you to put them in pretty unsatisfying spots (under tables, on walls, places people can scuff them up and where the wraith won't see them because it's not shown visually), and how it's so passive (you rely entirely on the wraith slipping up when you're around to see any results.) When designing this new counterplay stuff, I think it'd be useful to try and keep in mind why salt kinda sucks and what the new thing would do to avoid the same traps.
So yeah, if you can get that right then wraith would be very very fun. The class ideas are very cool and I like them a lot. Sorta piggy-backing off of Kyle I'd recommend focusing heavily on completing the content for one of the classes before the other two, since once you have one done it's both a lot of extra motivation in a big project (since you've already gotten something tangible All The Way Done) *and* it gives you an easy anchor to compare the other classes to. Should be helpful for figuring out how strong other classes need to feel, what level of unique content (audiovisual and abilities) they all need, and what even makes a good wraith class. Cutting big projects up into steps has been very helpful for me in my experiences working on bigger projects in the past.
Overall: excited to see this worked on more, very cool
I like the ideas here quite a lot, and I think they suit wraith well. Right now, I'd say the coolest part of wraith is all the spooky spectacle stuff they can do. It's exciting (at least the first time) to see items floating around and fart jokes materializing on the ground in blood. This feels like a logical extension of that part of what makes wraith good, since it increases the -amount- of that stuff, and adds some nice variety to keep it interesting and fresh longer. Players having agency and choices to make both make them feel smarter for making good choices and makes them feel excited to play antags a second time through, so they can mix it up and try newer things in new situations.
One of the checkboxes on the PR todo list is to add more vulnerabilities and counterplay, and I think that's probably the biggest issue wraith has right now. I'd like to point out that (in my opinion) the biggest issue with the salt mechanic right now isn't that it's *not effective*, but that it's actively not very fun at all to employ. The factors that go into this are that making salt is basically busy work (you have infinite of it but with a time deficit, you don't give up anything but you still gotta repeat a pattern), placing it encourages you to put them in pretty unsatisfying spots (under tables, on walls, places people can scuff them up and where the wraith won't see them because it's not shown visually), and how it's so passive (you rely entirely on the wraith slipping up when you're around to see any results.) When designing this new counterplay stuff, I think it'd be useful to try and keep in mind why salt kinda sucks and what the new thing would do to avoid the same traps.
So yeah, if you can get that right then wraith would be very very fun. The class ideas are very cool and I like them a lot. Sorta piggy-backing off of Kyle I'd recommend focusing heavily on completing the content for one of the classes before the other two, since once you have one done it's both a lot of extra motivation in a big project (since you've already gotten something tangible All The Way Done) *and* it gives you an easy anchor to compare the other classes to. Should be helpful for figuring out how strong other classes need to feel, what level of unique content (audiovisual and abilities) they all need, and what even makes a good wraith class. Cutting big projects up into steps has been very helpful for me in my experiences working on bigger projects in the past.
Overall: excited to see this worked on more, very cool