Pocket Heroes - D&D meets Words with Friends

[Vovin]

WHAT THE...?

Stop making suggestions! They need even more time to be implemented within the game. This will delay the release! You all know the world will end this year, let them finish the game so we can play until the universe hands us our a$$e$ over!

[Ayjona]

Originally Posted by Vovin

WHAT THE...?

Stop making suggestions! They need even more time to be implemented within the game. This will delay the release! You all know the world will end this year, let them finish the game so we can play until the universe hands us our a$$e$ over!

Post more suggestions! Delay the launch! I betcha it will be worth the wait

[Pitta]

After being obsessivly addicted to async games (in particular recently Ascension thanks to some dear friends of mine), I think I could write some sparse thoughts on the matter in this thread, being this game the one I'm waiting for most (all my friends have already been alerted).

Async games personal mandatory list:

1) Gamecenter integration with friends invite (no random opponents crap).
2) Chat. (nothing pisses me more than Ascension missing it).
3) Multitask and possibily FAST loading....nothing is more boring than staring to a rotating circle or having to tap several times to be in the action, especially in an async game.
Async games have the tendency to make me use much more the app switching bar while waiting for a friend making its turn, so proper multitask should be in order.
4) Reliable push notifications that informs you briefly bout what is happening (ie: seeing directly in the notification which character is it about). A cool unintrusive push sound is a plus.
5) Universal with iCloud support (or a way to be able to play on your iPad and then continue on the go with your iPhone).

While Ascension is my personal top async game now, I would suggest devs (not necessarily Poket Heores only devs) to check Carcassonne, the game that handles all this in the best way, touching perfection.
Push notifies you which game it's your turn in, it's fast loading and bring you directly to the right board, at the end of a turn it warns you if you have other pending turns in other boards, it has a reliable and fast chat, it's universal...it has everything done right, almost a year ago now.

It puzzles me that many recent games, in particular board games that gain the most on being async on iOS, still miss some of those points (Hero Academy it's not fast loading, Ascension miss the chat, Caylus miss the invite friend option....)

Why the wall of text?
Because I really want Pocket Heroes be perfect on day one...

[Ayjona]

Originally Posted by Pitta

Lots and lots of good stuff

Great post, Pitta. As another async fan, I'll contribute with me own as well (and make wall of texts the default for this page of the thread ):

For a polished and appealing implementation of asynchronous gaming, these features or options will all contribute greatly:

• A well-developed chat system. Ensure that new chat messages:
  • Show up across the screen once we enter the game in question, but also send their own push notifications.
  • Furthermore, in addition to displaying new chat messages on top of the actual gaming area, also provide a chat log (accessed via a chat bubble icon or similar) were we can read the chat history. This is also probably where we will be sending new chat messages.
  For a very successful chat implementation, see Carcassonne.
• Informative push notifications. Preferably, the name of opponents should be included in the push notification, plus other information that will aid us in separating different on-going games from each other. (“It is your turn in the game with Brandon Pollet” will do, but “It is your turn on the 56th party turn in the Gruelling game in the Dungeons of Moordred map with Pitta, Brandon, Vovin and Hodapp” is much more informative.) For async games that result in really long and complex matches (Starbase Orion, the most sophisticated async game for iOS, is currently the only such game), custom naming of matches might be preferable.
• In-game notifications of new turns in other Pocket Hero adventures, plus a quick way to jump to these matches. UniWar does this best, with a button that sends the player to the next match with an available turn, and a badge that displays the number of available turns on top of the next match button.
• Allow the players to remain in-game and play the game as a real-time multiplayer game. Luckily, most async games do this by default, but some very few forces the player out of the game upon submitting the turn. Even sending the player to the next active async match in the same game can be annoying, and is better accomplished with the feature mentioned in the point above.
• Upon entering or RE-entering an unsubmitted turn, display a replay of the events of the last turn. It is practical, but also important for immersion and flow. As SharpCarlos wrote, "without it, each turn is like a dry little puzzle, cut off from the flow of the match".
• Allow us to enter the adventure/match directly from the push notification. Most async games do this, but Starbase Orion did not, in the beginning, and it became tiresome to go through the login and retrieve active games process each time.
• A custom and characteristic notification sound. (Not possible at the moment if you rely on Apple’s own async APIs)
• Options for turn timer expiration, to prevent players from withholding their turns for weeks, together with warnings of impending turn expiration sent via push notifications.
• Don't use Apple's new async APIs. Seriously, don't They are EXTREMELY basic, with limitations such as no custom notification sound, you can only submit chat messages as you end the turn (GC just piggy-backs a chat message on the end of the game's turn data), and no easy way to use informative text strings for push notifications. A durned shame, I was hoping Apple's new GC additions would do much good for async gaming.
• Further progression and persistence. This is the aspect that the VAST majority of async games overlook. In the long run, async games tend to become a long blur of endless strings of matches, and this often leads to a sense of exhaustion, and a lack of purpose. Here is how to sex us up with purpose and context :
  • Ideally, all async games would include some sort of semi-MMO/MMO-inspired campaign mode, where all matches won led either to some sort of progression (unit/army/character development, whatever is suitable for that particular game), territorial gain (for war and conquer games. Something as simple as a world map that displays ownership of territories based on matches won, a visual representation of player stats, would be enough to offer incentive for many players. An extended meta-game where matches won and territorial gain led to further in-game advantages would be something wholly unique, and really appealing), or at least visual upgrades (new unit appearances, colors, badges, medals, etc, whatever is suitable for that particular game). It seems as if Pocket Heroes already has this down pat, thanks to the nature of the game.
  • If not, ELO/other suitable ratings, extended stats and a complete adventure history at least offer players a way to track their progress, and look back upon their accomplishments. UniWar does this partially well, with ELO ratings and detailed player stats, which tie in to the game’s community features (being able to send messages, view player profiles, etc), and while Pocket Heroes is very different in nature, most of these mechanics could be used here as well.

Together, all the added progression mentioned in the last bullet points adds up to longevity and an active community, which in turn leads to far greater chances for monetization (= more dough for devs ). And boy, it feels good to post this list to the thread of a game that already HAS progress mechanics, and seem to have them in abundance! Currently, it is the one glaring hole in the iOS async landscape, and Pocket Heroes promises to alleviate a LOT of this holeishness

[Vovin]

Ack.

[Brandon Pollet]

Wow! Those are all really great suggestions guys! I love to see how interested you all are in our game

First I want to say that we appreciate all the suggestions you have contributed, and we're looking at how we can best integrate them into the interface. I'm not going to say that we will have them all implemented at launch but we definitely want to make it easy to jump in and out of the game for quick play sessions, and we are making it a priority that you can easily team up with your friends to form a party.

To speak to some of the progression ideas. We are definitely planning a campaign for your characters to adventure through. Each quest will build on the previous one, and each campaign will build on the one previous to it. Right now we're building the game so that each character you create ( and you can have multiple characters at one time ) will be linked to a party of your friends. That party will move together through the quests and, hopefully, complete the campaign as a group.

The idea is that after you finish the first campaign you'll be able to start the second, although I'm sure Pitta and some of the rest of you will fly through it much faster than we can get the second one released. I'm looking into how we could allow you to move you character to another party in-between campaigns so that you could work through the second campaign with a different group if you wanted to.

We're also looking into letting you do a character swap in-between campaigns. So if you were a Paladin in the first campaign but decide you want to be a Mechie now, you could start up a new character that had the same level as the rest of your party and play through the second campaign with them. This all plays into the house/family/clan vault for transferring weapons and gold around but in the beginning it may be as simple as changing your character class and letting you retain all the items and gold you acquired with the first character.

One thing that has been brought up in this thread before, and that we've been thinking a lot about, is player death. We haven't settled on any specific mechanic for dealing with it yet but there is an interesting post over the dinofarmgames blog about player death in MMOs and how it should be more punishing than the norm On MMOs.

I'd love to hear some of your perspectives on the death issue. One current solution would be that if your player dies in a dungeon you could be revived by a spell or item but if you aren't, you just simply die. At the end of the quest, if the rest of your party survives, you would be able to create a new character of approximately the same level and continue on but you would lose the items you had been carrying.

If your entire party died in a level however, things get really murky. Do we make you start all over!? Do you just have to start the quest over as if your deaths never happened, or do we make you all start new characters, at the appropriate level, and try the quest again?

Let me know what you think. I don't want to make the game so hard that no one can finish it [cough] RavenMark [/cough], but I do think consequences to your character will make the experience much more memorable and fun.

[Pitta]

Originally Posted by Brandon Pollet

To speak to some of the progression ideas. We are definitely planning a campaign for your characters to adventure through. Each quest will build on the previous one, and each campaign will build on the one previous to it. Right now we're building the game so that each character you create ( and you can have multiple characters at one time ) will be linked to a party of your friends. That party will move together through the quests and, hopefully, complete the campaign as a group.

As someone who is sadly not that young anymore and have long forgotten almost 10 years of actively playing D&D with a bunch of nerds (the first D&D edition, mind you), I'm simply LOVING the sound of it.

I'm looking into how we could allow you to move you character to another party in-between campaigns so that you could work through the second campaign with a different group if you wanted to.

About the linking characters thing....this one it's tricky.
Surely, linking and sticking with a group of close friends would be the best thing to do, IF POSSIBILE.
But it's a big IF, and it brings the problems that I personally had sometimes more than 30 years ago playing in real life.
What happens if someone for some reasons cannot play anymore?
What if time is constrained?
What if you do not get along any more with your party?
Won't you play anymore?
Will you restart from scratch with other people, rinse and repeat?
I do not know...but these are all things that should keep in mind when planning a game with this scope.
I think that quests should be a group of stand alone games with a grand story connecting them, that only towards the end of the campaign starts being deeply interconnected requiring the very same group to continue (towards the end a group should be now fixed...while in the start one could play with different people, all same level).
Starting quests could be concurrent in the main storyline.
Example: you could have like 5 'starting quest'...all approachable by 1-5 level characters.
They could be 2 dungeons, 2 forests and 1 city...everyone a stand alone quest with CLUES about a developing story...
I could play those with my character (always the same, and not concurrently) with different people...
I already imagine talking with friends with too different timelines to play togheter: Did you tried the Goblin camp quest? It's Cool!!! OH, really, you found a dragon? Nice, I will play it asap!!!

Let's make it pratical: I start play with a single friend of mine the day that the game is out...other friends are not avaible.
The next day they all get the game, but I'm already playing one quest.
They can play the same quest too, and we all can continue togheter.
Or we can play starting quests in smaller groups and then be able to coordinate a group merge to approach the final quests of the main campaign.

Quest lenght is critical too...things are very different if quests take 1-2 days in realt ime, or 2 weeks considering different hour times of various people (not your problem, but you have to take this in account when planning the quests...you want people to play the game till the end and possibily pay for expansions and the like).
I would consider better (personal opinion) somewhat short but packed quests than too long ones, at least in the start.
Having an asyinc ongoing game (I mean single quests here) for weeks could be boring, especially if there are forced pauses between turns.
This is just my opinion on the matter out of my mind reading the post...probably I wrote many absurd things...I do not want even to re-read it...I'm just getting out of my memories problems arised in D&D real sessions.

I'd love to hear some of your perspectives on the death issue. One current solution would be that if your player dies in a dungeon you could be revived by a spell or item but if you aren't, you just simply die. At the end of the quest, if the rest of your party survives, you would be able to create a new character of approximately the same level and continue on but you would lose the items you had been carrying.
If your entire party died in a level however, things get really murky. Do we make you start all over!? Do you just have to start the quest over as if your deaths never happened, or do we make you all start new characters, at the appropriate level, and try the quest again?

Let me know what you think. I don't want to make the game so hard that no one can finish it [cough] RavenMark [/cough], but I do think consequences to your character will make the experience much more memorable and fun.

Super tricky one.
IMHO death SHOULD have great consequences, but in an async group games, shouldn't hamper other fun (and yours too).
Permadeath coudln't work because balancing the game would be impossible (too easy to let everyone see the end and have fun, possibily buying next games, or too hard to stick to reality?), but some consequences should be there...
Stripping objects? Can someone resurrected mantaining his level continue the game with only starting equipment?
Maybe the family could give some money to him...a value in line with his level...but then, consequences wouldn't be so important.
A ressurected characters could be VERY feeble and sick for some time...so he will regain stats (HP, Mana) in time...one should be very careful playing him till he regains all his stats...meaning even a full quest.
This could put some responsibility in the group too...the priest should watch out that the warrior do not die...or he will be forced to be in the first line of attack for the rest of the quest).
If everyone dies...well...I would give the possibility of a 'reload' of the quest in the start, with everyone alive.
I will think about it...would love to hear other opinions too...it should be a balanced thing that let you continue the game and have fun, but be sorry for your loss and more careful for at least some days...

[Vovin]

Going to kill Pitta soon.

[Pitta]

Originally Posted by Vovin

Going to kill Pitta soon.

LOL!!!
Have you already decided which characters will you use?
I'll be, as always, a fighter, possibily with sword&shield.

[scarypharaoh]

Pitt! Stop enabling! you are such an enabler!!

I want to be a ranged class by the way. Our group will be Vovin's Voracious Villans