Single Player Campaign Feedback

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RossD20Studios

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Single Player Campaign Feedback
« on: July 10, 2019, 01:08:37 PM »
Single Player Campaign Feedback

With our recent DLC release of v0.32.5 we added two new single player campaigns. See here for more details. We launched these campaigns intentionally in a rough, WIP form to get early feedback from players. We'd like to hear from you what works/what doesn't work and where you'd like to see us take the experience next to meet your expectations of an amazing single player experience in Summoners Fate.

Use this thread to share your thoughts and ideas with us  :D

About the New Single Player Campaigns
For Ross's campaign (Li's Quest) the focus was to isolate character progression, escalating difficulty of enemies and see if the experience culminating in a final boss battle is fun. If so, we can continue down this path and add to it with ew features.

Peter's quest (Level 4) focuses on the idea of creating a sense of adventure (story telling without story) by having the levels progress in the environment and having unsuspecting characters play the role of Summoners as well as create new challenges beyond just 1v1 AI battles.

3 Known Issues:
  • Unit characters are out of proportions in the Choose a Card prompt
  • If you undo a choose a card choice or resize screen with this prompt active, the card choices will vanish and you'll have to restart campaign.
  • The hero's starting health will look like a debut instead of the intended base life being modified on the card.

IMPORTANT!
We discovered at the end of the stream that the new levels will not appear if you've previously completed campaign 1 and 2. This is because the playerData stores an impression of the old campaign map. To get the levels to show, you'll need to delete your existing player data. NOTE: This will also delete any custom decks you've made, so be sure to screenshot them before you delete your data.

To delete playerData on each platform:
  • PC: Delete the sf.sol file located at C:\Users\[USER_NAME]\AppData\Roaming\com.d20studios.summonersfate\Local Store\#SharedObjects\main.swf\sf.sol
  • Mac: Delete the sf.sol file located at /Users/[USER_NAME]/Library/Application Support/com.d20studios.summonersfate/Local Store/#SharedObjects/main.swf/sf.sol
  • Android: Tap and hold app icon. Select App Info. Select "Storage". Select "Clear Storage".
  • iOS: Delete the app and reinstall.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2019, 01:14:56 PM by RossD20Studios »

Outlander04

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #1 on: July 10, 2019, 02:02:11 PM »
If anyone is having trouble locating the AppData folder on pc, this folder is normally hidden. go to your search bar and type in %appdata% and you will find it.

RossD20Studios

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #2 on: July 10, 2019, 02:55:07 PM »
Thanks Outlander and also thanks again for your help on the stream - your observations and quick wit found the bug that would have halted our campaign release  :D

Also, I thought I'd jot down the couple of notes you shared during the stream here so we can track them:

1. Regarding "Choose a Card" and end of battle rewards, it would help to have something other than choosing cards. For example, have things like increased mana, gaining new abilities, etc.
2. Discard abilities (like that found on Animate Tree) are useful. What if cards could be upgraded to have more dualistic abilities that expand their abilities and make them more adaptive to challenges encountered?

RossD20Studios

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #3 on: July 11, 2019, 01:38:11 PM »
Notes from Discord

From LoginError

There are two interesting things about that screenshot
1) I have a loyal dragon, it is the best dragon and I don't want it patched out
2) I cannot walk to the exit because there are dudes in the way, maybe you should be able to move through allies in explore mode?


From tLark:
  • Confusion over loyalty and permanent control. Example: Believe Dark Temptation should grant permanent control of a character.
  • So that campaign (Ross's campaign, Li's Quest). It's like a puzzle. You can't randomize that. You need multiple play through to win. I wish I could skip first levels if I am happy with card choice.

From LoginError
You Died:
1) Retry from start
2) Retry from last campfire
3) Ragequit lol

If you died of bad luck or a small mistake, retrying from the campfire gives you another chance to make it right, but if you died of gross missmanagement of resources or really poor long term planning, then...you should probably start over
Having to start over because of a misclick is no fun
Having to start again from the campfire with an unwinnable scenario is also no fun
So you can mitigate both by giving the choice

From tLark
I liked the levels a lot though. Nice progression and skill curve. And mini puzzles.
And skeleton theme vs fire was nice. Hard to generate though, it's very designed

RossD20Studios

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #4 on: July 11, 2019, 02:01:01 PM »
From tLark:

Re: Peter's campaign
Phew nearly dead on first and second levels lol
Crawled to 3 for a rest
"I did enjoy that every battle was hard and short distance to camp fire."

Urgh died out of combat from 4 in a row fire traps.
Rage quit
If it stopped me after 1 hit I would not be so annoyed
Action Item:  Stop movement after a trigger is initiated when in explore mode.


RossD20Studios

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #5 on: July 12, 2019, 07:39:14 AM »
From Apex
@RossD20Studios Re: Campaign save point as a resource. Solitairica has this where you can spend gold (increasingly expensive) to to buy a “celestial hourglass” to play against the last enemy again. The key to rogue-likes is to still provide a benefit or progression out of a failed run.

RossD20Studios

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #6 on: July 12, 2019, 11:18:25 AM »
Regarding benefit/progression out of failed runs:

Presently, all of the cards in Summoners Fate are unlocked, however, we have plans to tie card unlocks into the progression of single player. Once we're ready to establish unlock/progression, most cards will be locked by default. As you explore/complete/fail runs, you'll unlock new Summoners and cards that can be used to build decks for subsequent runs.

When starting with a run with a pre-constructed deck, we'll modify the difficulty tier appropriately.

RossD20Studios

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #7 on: July 12, 2019, 12:39:45 PM »
On Peter's Campaign:
Level 1 and 5 were the hardest - Perhaps too much synergy with the AI decks?

From tLark
The room design is good on Peter's campaign
I like the spatial puzzles

Level 2 troll in Castle is awkward and fun
And the random makes replaying more rewarding
Whereas rosses feels too deterministic so you are joylessly replaying rote moves on replay
The difficulty progression is weird, level 1 can be really hard sometimes
I kind of like it short and samey difficulty though
It's quicker to replay

I think it's a matter of removing some combos from ai deck
U want ai not to have synergy
As that's really volatile in attack power

Keeps the brain engaged every replay
U learn strategic weaknesses too but can't overfit the tactics

Yeah I think it is balanced ok that campaign
I liked it a lot
Random spawns is good

I kept hacking down thorns looking for treasure too
I was not really aware of much continuity between levels and did not care either
It seemed loose, like the monsters seemed to change a lot

RossD20Studios

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #8 on: July 12, 2019, 04:09:19 PM »
From Apex:

Regarding progression within a run: A resource, like gold, can help here, but it's not great for the current setup from an RP perspective. You could set up various types of shop keepers (nature summon cards, equipment blacksmith, card upgrades or extra lives, etc) with 3 semi-random items you can buy with gold at the campsites. It adds choices and excitement for the player (What can I unlock? Should I buy this now or wait? Is that thief guardian with extra generation but weaker attack worth it?)
You have to be able to almost instant back-track to a shopkeeper to make this work, and it still doesn't solve the issue of pick-one-of-three cards on victory gameplay.

i.e. you don't want to deal with a shop keeper after every room

The good part of adding a shop is that it forces valuation of the cards (gold cost), and you can write a function for random enemy summoners that scales them to where the player should be. Downside is this doesn't deal with synergy.
Part of the challenge for the current deck building  is that you only reshuffle at the camp. So you have to add new cards between camps to do anything. If you reshuffle every room, you would need to stop mana carry-over, but purging cards from the deck becomes valuable
So paying increasing amounts of gold to purge cards from the deck can be an interesting shop keeper
e.g.: first purge costs 5, second is 15, third is 50, etc.

Bad part of reshuffle and starting a 3 mana is that 5 mana cards become less valuable.

RossD20Studios

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #9 on: July 16, 2019, 11:43:07 AM »
From Outlander on Discord:

I was just catching up on chat, and regarding the deck building, I had an interesting concept that may work for it, that both gives you choices when you have 2000+ cards and also has the randomness that you want in a rouge like, but also takes synergies into account.

So imagine a branching path that whenever you chose a card it sends you down that path and determines what is offered next time.  except that there are many branches and the game only offers you a random 3 from the many possible options.

So you have first pick Option 1, 2, and 3.  you pick 2.  Well option 2 has 14 paths that have cards that would promote good synergies. but only 3 of those 14 are offered on your next pick, then the process repeats.

my only concern  with this method is that its a lot of work for the dev team to create these synergy paths in the first place.

Scribe

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Re: Single Player Campaign Feedback
« Reply #10 on: November 13, 2019, 02:51:15 PM »
OK, I'm waaaaaaaay late for posting an answer, but anyway...  ::)

First I must say that I fully back the comments made previously. And probably most of all the fact that the randomness of Peter's campaign added to the replayability. I also have ideas about how to tackle the difficulty of proposing relevant cards to the player, but I'll keep this for another post as this one is already long enough (brace yourselves!).

Indeed besides these technical aspects I've been thinking about the storytelling supporting the single player campaigns. I think it's also important in making it enjoyable to the player, and contributing to a compelling experience.

Quests
I see a campaign as a quest, and each quest as a collection of locations that you can explore. Each location has several rooms, connected together, in which the encounters and adventures take place.
I envision quests being organized by summoner, for instance Sylvia's initiation quest where she gets her squirrel hurling staff to achieve her objective. After all, this game's name is "Summoners' Fate", right? So how should that become apparent during single player campaign?
My proposal is that each quest starts with an encounter with a seer. The seer uses a divination method (see the following section for details),  revealing to the summoner that his/her fate is to fulfill a given mission objective.
In Sylvia's example it would be freeing the sacred forest from the orc intruders, and the seer would for instance read that fate in the shape of the shadows of a dying tree's branches. This campaign would therefore be known as "Sylvia's dying tree divination".
If we keep the notion of the campaign culminating in a big boss fight, then the divination will likely reveal that saving the forest requires killing the orc chief who launched the attack (text overlay on the divination picture, as the seer provides his interpretation). Of course the chief is not easily accessible, being remote and having lieutenants and factions guarding the area that they have already invaded, between Sylvia and his headquarters. However the ways leading to his headquarters are made plain by the seer's divination.
But divination is imperfect, and it only provides limited information: possible paths, approximate strength of the opposition, and resource spots. Paths are symbolized by lines (shadows of branches in our dying tree example). Strength of the opposition is symbolized by the size of the nodes (the larger the stronger the opposition). Resource spots are symbolized by movement (a fluttering leave at the corresponding node in the case of the dying tree).
Now this storytelling can blend with the campaign map concept, providing both an explanation and a beautiful background for each campaign. And the fact of combining summoner + divination to define a campaign provides limitless opportunities wiithin a common framework. Wikipedia alone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_divination) can provide tons of divination ideas.

Divination methods
Here are suggestions of how to implement various divination methods in the above framework. The intent would be to build an engine capable of creating the rendering of the divination based on input parameters (number of nodes, levels, etc.), just as the campaign map was working.
- "Coffee ground": The shape of coffee ground traces on a percolating cloth (movement: drops of the remaining water passing through)
- "Green sticks": Sticks dropped on the floor (movement: leaves left on sticks, fluttering in the wind)
- "Beachcomber": Sticks and stones thrown back on the beach by the sea (movement: dried algae fluttering in the wind)
- "Spider web": A spider web in a tree, illuminated by the light of dawn, whose rays are filtered by branches and therefore only light up some of the strings (movement: bugs trying to escape)
- "Could": The shape of clouds (Movement: flickering light, or circling birds)
- "Fur": The shape of spots on an animal's fur on a stretcher (movement: roaming bugs)
- "Rune dices": Dices with engraved runes thrown onto dry dirt, making traces as they roll (movement: dried leaves captured underneath some of the dices, fluttering in the wind)
- "Mercury chiromancy": Lines on a hand's palm, some getting highlighted by mercury poured onto the palm, and mercury pooling forming nodes (movement: vibration of some of the pooling spots)
- "Bonfire": The shape of charcoal and ashes after a bonfire ceased to burn (movement: remaining ambers revived by the wind)
- "Petal": petals scattered and pooled by the wind (movement: fluttering)
- "Dying tree": Shadow of the almost bare branches of a tree (movement: few remaining leaves fluttering)
- "Rodent track": Traces of rabbit steps in the snow, between bushes, seen from a high point (Movement: moving branches)
- "Crystal": Veins and inclusions inside a slice of stone crystal, revealed by placing it before a candle (movement: flickering light)
- "Stream": Sticks and stones at the bottom of a shallow mountain stream (movement: flickering light at the surface of water, or water gushing around the few stones surfacing)
- Etc

Thanks for reading to the end. Comments are welcome!
 ;D