Interview Matt Chat 284: Interview with Whalenought Studios

[Infinitron]

Tags: Matt Barton; Serpent in the Staglands; Whalenought Studios

The latest guests on Matt Barton's show are Joe & Hannah Williams of Whalenought Studios, developers of upcoming indie darling Serpent in the Staglands. After a little bit of goofing off, the interview takes off nicely, with questions about the game's incorporation of adventure game elements, its Transylvanian Bronze Age-themed setting, its lack of handholding, its inspiration from Darklands, its graphical style, its combat system and more.

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Man, these two really have it together. Nice job on adding rats to the game in anticipation of the interview.

 

[dukeofwhales]

I am very impressed by Joe and Hannah's colour-sorted book/game shelf.

 

[Kalin]

Nicely done Matt J_C, great interview and good job on the snazzificaishun! (Also nice to see ya more relaxed, sampled some ale early this time? )

Also, the game looks awesome! Will definitely buy it, and this cheap goy hasn't spent a single yehudimzahav on games since the AoD campaign.

 

[Amasius]

This was the best interview I've seen by Matt yet - he's not only well prepared, but also relaxed and funny. Those two made it easy for him, lovely couple and a really promising game. I love all I've seen so far and I'm grateful that finally someone picks up on Darklands legacy. About fucking time.

 

[roshan]

Fantastic! Love the story details and... Prebuffing! No micro for fighters! This is turning out to be pretty much the anti-poe.

 

[MicoSelva]

Pretty cool interview so far - they make a great couple and Matt seems to be more relaxed than usually. Looking forward to the other parts.

 

[Infinitron]

No micro for fighters!

tuluse, tell roshan about Staglands' approach to kiting

 

[roshan]

No micro for fighters!

tuluse, tell roshan about Staglands' approach to kiting

Uh oh. Sounds like I'm in for bad news..... Engagement???

 

[GlutenBurger]

Wow, they really do make a sickeningly adorable couple.

I didn't have the stomach to watch the entire interview, but from what I've seen the game continues to live up to my cautiously optimistic expectations.

 

[tuluse]

No micro for fighters!

tuluse, tell roshan about Staglands' approach to kiting

Uh oh. Sounds like I'm in for bad news..... Engagement???

Quoting myself:

Every combat is dangerous. I think in all but one or two, I've had to shuffle people around and desperately try to heal while hoping I can divert the enemy's attention. They've managed to cut the gordion knot of kiting by making it mandatory to get through fights. It doesn't feel like you're exploiting, it feels like you're barely surviving.

After further play I've found you can tank more as you level up though.

 

[roshan]

No micro for fighters!

tuluse, tell roshan about Staglands' approach to kiting

Uh oh. Sounds like I'm in for bad news..... Engagement???

Quoting myself:

Every combat is dangerous. I think in all but one or two, I've had to shuffle people around and desperately try to heal while hoping I can divert the enemy's attention. They've managed to cut the gordion knot of kiting by making it mandatory to get through fights. It doesn't feel like you're exploiting, it feels like you're barely surviving.

After further play I've found you can tank more as you level up though.

Huh? That really doesn't sound bad at all. I like the idea of every battle being challenging, as long as it doesn't get repetitive of course.

What I meant about not liking micro for fighters is that I'm not a big fan of fighters having lots of per encounter or per rest special combat abilities in an RTWP game where there are wizards and priests, because micromanaging every character's abilities can be a pain. Not all classes in a class based system need to have abilities, that's the point of a class based system. You use your fighter and your mage for a different purpose, because overall you are playing the whole party itself, not playing each individual character separately.

And the next thing is that fact such design is in fact really silly and impractical. You can see this in POE POTD mode, right now I no longer use Eder's knockdown. I just use him as a decoy to engage enemies before fireballing them (and Eder too) to death with my casters. The ability to knockdown one opponent when your enemies regularly come in hordes of 10 or so creatures is just silly and pointless. Only AOE from casters now has any relevance in combat.

Whalenought was also mentioning RNG keeps combat dangerous, and I'm actually a big fan of RNG. You can prepare for and estimate RNG, it's just part of the challenge, a systemic challenge. What I hate though is randomness ala Pillars of Eternity where the outcome of combat depends on how the melee clusterfuck randomly arranges itself due to shitty pathfinding, engagement, running, where you cannot even predict whether orders you issued will be carried out or not due to the general buggyness of the game, and where your characters will stupidly run after and attack enemies you never ordered them to attack in the first place, breaking formation, or where they will randomly run around the entire melee clusterfuck when the enemy you ordered them to attack was right beside them in the first place.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Does anyone else think that the woman is Dawn?

 

[Infinitron]

Huh? That really doesn't sound bad at all. I like the idea of every battle being challenging, as long as it doesn't get repetitive of course.

What I meant about not liking micro for fighters is that I'm not a big fan of fighters having lots of per encounter or per rest special combat abilities in an RTWP game where there are wizards and priests, because micromanaging every character's abilities can be a pain.

Well, micro-managing movement (constant kiting) requires a lot more effort than micro-managing abilities (which just requires you to click on somebody who's already next to you), and PoE has a lot less of the former.

Use the right terms.

 

[Kalin]

Micro-manage this!

Oh, wait...

 

[Makabb]

Matt JC is a troll, i swear

 

[Whalenought_Joe]

Unless the player is just starting out or massively underpowered, most fights will be a bit slow paced. If you’re in a pickle you can certainly put on that sundress and kite as needed. Attack speed doesn’t reinitialize until a different action is performed though, so once they/you catch up the attack is usually instantaneous. AI just rolls to change targets if hit.

POE’s addition of positioning/opportunity attacks to the realtime genre looks really neat! We’re excited to try it out when we get time off. Since we didn’t use a grid/turns for this game we had a devil of a time working with the pathfinding to account for large number encounters.

In the end our approach to pathfinding wasn’t very novel — we emulated what worked well in games with micro-grids like what early RTS had. Moving units pass through each other, and when stopped they collide and do distance checks. Figured if it worked for a dog-pile of 100 SCV units moving around in the same 20 pixel space, it could work for us.

Nice job on adding rats to the game in anticipation of the interview.

They were originally going to be owls! Our [will] check failed against Matt’s [diplomacy].

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

POE’s addition of positioning/opportunity attacks to the realtime genre looks really neat! We’re excited to try it out when we get time off.

Funny. After playing PoE, I'm looking forward to Serpent in the Staglands even more, specifically because it lacks this mechanic.

 

[roshan]

POE’s addition of positioning/opportunity attacks to the realtime genre looks really neat! We’re excited to try it out when we get time off.

Well, I hope you end up hating it as much as many others do, I would be seriously worried about future Whalenought games if you end up liking the PoE engagement system... It doesn't actually lead to any sort of positioning whatsover. Characters will randomly assemble into an indiscernible cluster at the start of combat, and remain lumped up in that same cluster bashing at each other till the very end of combat unless one of your character's pathfinding epically fails, in which case that character is basically dead.

Moving units pass through each other

I feel this is one of the serious flaws of PoE compared to the IE games. If I recall correctly, in the IE games, an enemy could never pass through another enemy's circle. This meant that for you as a player, unit movement speeds and patterns were ultimately predictable, which allowed you to make tactical decisions in combat. In PoE that is really not the case, when you fight a horde of monsters, the one closest to you that you subjected to a ranged volley may very well end up being the furthest enemy from your front line once the enemies have all run over. It's very frustrating to play with a system where the movement of enemies ends up being very random since your decision making ability becomes impaired. Basically you can scout out a group of enemies, check their positioning, but ultimately you are collecting useless information. In IE games knowing the positioning of a group of enemies was important information, relevant to the resulting battle. Please don't violate the circle.