Way of the Warrior Game - Beta

Playing Beta Testing Requests and Discussion
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Hello everyone,

We’re looking for beta testers for our new online game, Way of the Warrior (http://about.wayofthewarrior-ga.me/).

The game is a browser based samurai warrior rpg, taking some of the good points of text-based games and adding some intuitive interfaces to give a blend of the two. To see what I mean, take a look at the screenshots on our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/wayofthewarriorgame).

It has been in development for a few months now, with a handful of alpha testers having helped us find issues so we can iron them out. We’re now ready to kick on to the next stage of development - adding further advanced features and optimising the existing code - and have decided it’s time to open up the game to anyone who would like to play.

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Does anyone have any feedback? It’d be very much appreciated!

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This seems intended to be a very CRPG grindy experience, without much focus on writing or story. I don’t really see any of ‘the good points of text-based games’ here - there’s a fairly distant relation insofar as its interface is a descendant of the point-and-click graphic adventure, and there’s a node-based map, but the similarities seem to end there.

I’m not sure that the side-scrolling screens add much - and hotspot-hunting is annoying, particularly since it often doesn’t always correspond very well to anything obvious in the image itself.

I’m assuming that the character art is placeholder. If not… it’s pretty freakin’ cheesy to have highly-recognisable actors in the avatar list. That immediately makes me wonder about all of your art assets. The rest of it could be stock photo or freely available or even your own photos, but the actors make me suspect that you’ve just stolen images and run some light Photoshop over them, which is a shitty thing to do, particularly if you’re aiming to monetise your game.

The dojo minigames don’t seem to work at all if you’re using a laptop trackpad mouse. (I mean, I expect this sort of game to suck with a trackpad regardless, but I at least expect it to register my suckage.) The main combat screen is not very intuitive at all, and needs more clarification - who are these guys down the sides? are some of them on my side or something? is this meant to represent a battle and I need to make strategic choices, or should I just pick people and attack them? if characters aren’t in my area, why are they shown at all? how do I get out of this mess?

And… I guess I don’t know what I’m really meant to be aiming at, here. Fighting and leveling up and getting better stuff, sure, but the fighting is not exciting enough to justify the whole game. If you want people to grind, you need to offer them goals. Right now it feels as though I’m wandering around for no reason.

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As I said it’s a beta, so it’s pretty bare bones at the moment. We haven’t put any story in it yet, with the exception of a couple of simple tasks to test the interface. Our plan (at the moment) is to add content like that later, since the interface and back end are incomplete. We’re undecided as to how much of a storyline there should be - we want it to be as open as possible so people can do what they like. That freedom is one of the things we’re trying to take from some of the text-based rpgs we have played in the past.

Most of the other feedback we’ve had for the side-scrolling has been good (and we’ve solved the few concerns people did raise about them), since it makes the world more interactive than what you see on most similar games. Hotspot hunting is definitely something we need to address though - we plan to add some visual indicators to the backgrounds that signify the different actions in the area, we just haven’t had the time to get around to it yet.

Funny that you’d say that about the avatars - I can see where you’re coming from, but the alpha testers much preferred them to more generic ones, since it linked the game to films they loved. I’m not sure whether to be flattered that you’d think those are simply altered photos - they’re digital paintings (based on reference photos of course, but that’s pretty irrelevant). As a design professional plagiarism is one of my pet peeves, we’d never stoop that low.

Interesting that the minigames didn’t work for you, we’ve tested them on a couple of different laptops as well as desktops and they’ve been fine. The exception is the target practice minigame, which is pretty impossible at the moment on a trackpad - we’ll be adding an option to change the speed so it’s slower to combat that. Was that the bit you were having problems with, or was there something else going wrong with the other section? In either case, d’you think slowing down the target would help you in that section?

That’s a fair point about the combat screen. Most of the people who have tested it for us are friends who used to play a game that had a similar interface and as a result it feels natural to them, so your viewpoint is very useful there. The next thing we’ll add to the game is a quick guide (like the intro one) that briefly explains it when you first try to enter a battle. The smaller avatars are people in nearby areas, and you can target them with your distance weapon. Each location has several sub-areas. You can attack people in the same sub-area as you with your main weapon, and anyone in any of the sub-areas with your distance weapon. To shoot at them you just click on their avatar (closer to the center means a greater chance of hitting). To run away/move between sub-areas, you click the red “Nearby” button in the top left of the screen, and then choose which location you want to travel to. In terms of strategy it’s just select your target and fight. We’ve got a few ideas that would add a layer of strategy to it, but they’ll be linked to the story, and haven’t been fleshed out much yet.

So yeah, there isn’t anything to aim at beyond levelling at the moment, which would be rectified when we get to the point of adding a few different quest/mission storylines to follow.

Thanks for the feedback, it’s been great to get a different perspective. You’ve highlighted a couple of issues that we hadn’t really considered, as well as a couple that we were planning to address. I think in particular we might make the stories a higher priority, and add some more interface explanation asap.

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I’d be very careful with that if I were you—I’m Not A Lawyer but there’s a small but non-zero chance that some of those actors (or more likely their or a studio’s representative) will find out and say it’s using their likeness without permission, whether they have legal grounds for it or not.

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Interesting, I’d never heard of that being applied in this kind of case. I’ll read up on it, and if it’s a potential issue then we’ll have to reconsider. Thanks for the tip!

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Game related example: Activision paid No Doubt a decent chunk of change to use their image in Guitar Hero 5, and then No Doubt sued Activision for using their likeness in a way they didn’t like. (rollingstone.com/music/news/ … t-20121004) If it were legal to use a celebrity’s image without permission, I imagine Activision would have done that in the first place and No Doubt wouldn’t have had a legal leg to stand on.

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But in that case Activision had profited from the use. You still need permission, even if it’s noncommercial, but you’re less likely to get sued over it.