KickStarter Phoenix Point - the new game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop

[ArchAngel]

Animation speed up options coming soon.

This is such insanity.
If I developed a turn-based game, the first fucking thing I'd implement with the turn-based system itself would be the option to speed it up.
Even if I didn't care about wasting the players' time, think of the time (and thus money) savings for QA...

Neither Firaxis Xcom had this. Actually they had it hidden in console, Long War mod brought it forward as a command.

 

[thesheeep]

battletech was also launced without the option to skip/speed up animations.

Both games are Unity, probably it has something to do with it.

It really, really doesn't - as someone with 10+ years of experience in programming (including some game engines, including Unity) please believe me when I say:
That is a problem of code structure/design.
If you didn't plan for speeding up combat to begin with, and you didn't decouple animation logic from actual game logic as you should have, it would always be a lot of work to alter it after the fact.
When things go really spaghetti-code (and with lots of game devs, that's honestly what I've come to expect) there might even be a giant tail of code that depends on animations actually playing out "nicely" so that other things work right, so then you'd have to change the animation code and all the things that depended on that and... if that sounds annoying, that's because it is.
I'm facing similar kinds of problems in lots of projects I work on - a lack of foresight that lead to an absolute mess, costing days or weeks to fix...

Anyway, point is that this is a certain kind of incompetence that is independent of any used programming tool and not even purely related to games.

What is so insane about it to me is that every single player of turn-based games knows that these games NEED a way to speed up combat. And yet, here we are.

 

[desocupado]

battletech was also launced without the option to skip/speed up animations.

Both games are Unity, probably it has something to do with it.

It really, really doesn't - as someone with 10+ years of experience in programming (including some game engines, including Unity) please believe me when I say:
That is a problem of code structure/design.
If you didn't plan for speeding up combat to begin with, and you didn't decouple animation logic from actual game logic as you should have, it would always be a lot of work to alter it after the fact.
When things go really spaghetti-code (and with lots of game devs, that's honestly what I've come to expect) there might even be a giant tail of code that depends on animations actually playing out "nicely" so that other things work right, so then you'd have to change the animation code and all the things that depended on that and... if that sounds annoying, that's because it is.
I'm facing similar kinds of problems in lots of projects I work on - a lack of foresight that lead to an absolute mess, costing days or weeks to fix...

Anyway, point is that this is a certain kind of incompetence that is independent of any used programming tool and not even purely related to games.

What is so insane about it to me is that every single player of turn-based games knows that these games NEED a way to speed up combat. And yet, here we are.

This might be the case. I ran into that troubling coding a game a couple of years ago.

My first attempt was to completely decouple the game stats from the animations. That resulted in problems like the hp bar reducing in size before the bullet animation hit the sprite. There was also a problem when a character died. Since the game logic recorded the character as dead before any animations happened, the character was removed from the screen before the animations played.

I had to create a function that would tell the game logic if any animation was playing, so it could wait before it could proceed with the "clean up" (removing dead chars, updating stuff).

That said, I think I ended up fixing it, and in a way that would support animation speed changes. But it was not trivial, and the code got a lot more complex than I would like.

 

[ArchAngel]

battletech was also launced without the option to skip/speed up animations.

Both games are Unity, probably it has something to do with it.

It really, really doesn't - as someone with 10+ years of experience in programming (including some game engines, including Unity) please believe me when I say:
That is a problem of code structure/design.
If you didn't plan for speeding up combat to begin with, and you didn't decouple animation logic from actual game logic as you should have, it would always be a lot of work to alter it after the fact.
When things go really spaghetti-code (and with lots of game devs, that's honestly what I've come to expect) there might even be a giant tail of code that depends on animations actually playing out "nicely" so that other things work right, so then you'd have to change the animation code and all the things that depended on that and... if that sounds annoying, that's because it is.
I'm facing similar kinds of problems in lots of projects I work on - a lack of foresight that lead to an absolute mess, costing days or weeks to fix...

Anyway, point is that this is a certain kind of incompetence that is independent of any used programming tool and not even purely related to games.

What is so insane about it to me is that every single player of turn-based games knows that these games NEED a way to speed up combat. And yet, here we are.

This might be the case. I ran into that troubling coding a game a couple of years ago.

My first attempt was to completely decouple the game stats from the animations. That resulted in problems like the hp bar reducing in size before the bullet animation hit the sprite. There was also a problem when a character died. Since the game logic recorded the character as dead before any animations happened, the character was removed from the screen before the animations played.

I had to create a function that would tell the game logic if any animation was playing, so it could wait before it could proceed with the "clean up" (removing dead chars, updating stuff).

That said, I think I ended up fixing it, and in a way that would support animation speed changes. But it was not trivial, and the code got a lot more complex than I would like.

This sounds like some problems Xcom2 had where you would know if someone was killed before animation was done.

 

[thesheeep]

This sounds like some problems Xcom2 had where you would know if someone was killed before animation was done.

Quite possible.

I've definitely seen both cases in games.
Games without proper decoupling and without proper animation speed up options.
And games that do have decoupling (with or without speed up), but fail to wait for animations to finish until displaying the updated gameplay info (e.g. unit is dead before shot visibly connected).

It's not totally trivial to do, but very few things in game development are.
My personal nightmare is UI - tough to find a good UI library to begin with. And then you need to support different resolutions and, worse, different aspect ratios and, even worse, scaling of fonts and, even worse, make everything adjustable and also support localization and also support accessiblity options (color blindness, etc.) and of course all of that without having to restart the application - and then die inside when you have to implement drag & drop from one window to another.
If you see a game with shitty UI lacking millions of features - that's why. It's a catastrophic pain to create.

Currently I'm just doing algorithm R&D for a project. Maybe I'm taking this long for R&D subconsciously to delay having to work on UI in the future.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

battletech was also launced without the option to skip/speed up animations.

Both games are Unity, probably it has something to do with it.

I made a mod to speedup solasta combat animations -- a unity game -- in about half an hour using builtin engine commands.

Fixed a couple bugs and added an option to pause when it's your turn because I think it looks cool. Download link: https://megaup.net/TCau/FasterCombat.zip
https://streamable.com/xsalw0

It's not done by devs either through arrogance, ignorance, or laziness.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

battletech was also launced without the option to skip/speed up animations.

Both games are Unity, probably it has something to do with it.

It really, really doesn't - as someone with 10+ years of experience in programming (including some game engines, including Unity) please believe me when I say:
That is a problem of code structure/design.
If you didn't plan for speeding up combat to begin with, and you didn't decouple animation logic from actual game logic as you should have, it would always be a lot of work to alter it after the fact.
When things go really spaghetti-code (and with lots of game devs, that's honestly what I've come to expect) there might even be a giant tail of code that depends on animations actually playing out "nicely" so that other things work right, so then you'd have to change the animation code and all the things that depended on that and... if that sounds annoying, that's because it is.
I'm facing similar kinds of problems in lots of projects I work on - a lack of foresight that lead to an absolute mess, costing days or weeks to fix...

Anyway, point is that this is a certain kind of incompetence that is independent of any used programming tool and not even purely related to games.

What is so insane about it to me is that every single player of turn-based games knows that these games NEED a way to speed up combat. And yet, here we are.

Unity decouples animation(to be more specific, time itself) from logic by default, you can speed up/slow down the game universe at will. Unity is one of the easiest engines to implement this in.

 

[ArchAngel]

battletech was also launced without the option to skip/speed up animations.

Both games are Unity, probably it has something to do with it.

I made a mod to speedup solasta combat animations -- a unity game -- in about half an hour using builtin engine commands.

Fixed a couple bugs and added an option to pause when it's your turn because I think it looks cool. Download link: https://megaup.net/TCau/FasterCombat.zip
https://streamable.com/xsalw0

It's not done by devs either through arrogance, ignorance, or laziness.

Well I used Speedhack with PP for weeks now, and it worked well. I guess devs only needed to implement it as internal options and turn it off for out of combat use.

 

[Infinitron]

Let us share some early strategies for success for those looking to play their first Phoenix Point campaign. And share your tips in the comments!

 

[Anomander]

New update adds Animation speed options but

Marked for Death change.

• Mark an enemy target. Increases damage suffered by the target from each hit after armor until the end of the turn by 50%. Only 1 instance of Mark of Death is allowed per enemy unit.
  

Good that I just finished. That was one of my main skills in second part of the game. 5 Marked for Death (one full willpower soldier) and Scylla dies in two sniper shots (from other side of a map). Last boss in 5-6 shots.

 

[razvedchiki]

nerfing the flamethrowers doesnt actually degrade the usage of heavies because they can be used in multiple usefull ways (death from above,rocket/lazer spam etc).
we wont be able to defend bases with one heavy saturating the entrance with napalm anymore though

 

[ArchAngel]

New update adds Animation speed options but

Marked for Death change.

• Mark an enemy target. Increases damage suffered by the target from each hit after armor until the end of the turn by 50%. Only 1 instance of Mark of Death is allowed per enemy unit.

Good that I just finished. That was one of my main skills in second part of the game. 5 Marked for Death (one full willpower soldier) and Scylla dies in two sniper shots (from other side of a map). Last boss in 5-6 shots.

So what you are saying you are not capable to finish without a I win button?

 

[Anomander]

New update adds Animation speed options but

Marked for Death change.

• Mark an enemy target. Increases damage suffered by the target from each hit after armor until the end of the turn by 50%. Only 1 instance of Mark of Death is allowed per enemy unit.

Good that I just finished. That was one of my main skills in second part of the game. 5 Marked for Death (one full willpower soldier) and Scylla dies in two sniper shots (from other side of a map). Last boss in 5-6 shots.

So what you are saying you are not capable to finish without a I win button?

In the end I just wanted to finish already. I think it's too long or maybe feeling of progress drops drastically after some point. Few last hours I ignored everything (attacks on bases etc) and just waited to the final mission.
Also I didn't know that was a bug.
I played on Hero and it wasn't especially difficult (even without this bug).

 

[ArchAngel]

New update adds Animation speed options but

Marked for Death change.

• Mark an enemy target. Increases damage suffered by the target from each hit after armor until the end of the turn by 50%. Only 1 instance of Mark of Death is allowed per enemy unit.

Good that I just finished. That was one of my main skills in second part of the game. 5 Marked for Death (one full willpower soldier) and Scylla dies in two sniper shots (from other side of a map). Last boss in 5-6 shots.

So what you are saying you are not capable to finish without a I win button?

In the end I just wanted to finish already. I think it's too long or maybe feeling of progress drops drastically after some point. Few last hours I ignored everything (attacks on bases etc) and just waited to the final mission.
Also I didn't know that was a bug.
I played on Hero and it wasn't especially difficult (even without this bug).

Well ignoring missions and just waiting for last mission to pop up is how I played 1994 Xcom as well. At some point it was not worth risking your high level guys in top gear vs Etherials, Sectopods, masses of Chrysalids and Blaster Launcher commanders. I would just intercept their UFOs and then ignore ground missions.

 

[Parabalus]

New update adds Animation speed options but

Marked for Death change.

• Mark an enemy target. Increases damage suffered by the target from each hit after armor until the end of the turn by 50%. Only 1 instance of Mark of Death is allowed per enemy unit.

Good that I just finished. That was one of my main skills in second part of the game. 5 Marked for Death (one full willpower soldier) and Scylla dies in two sniper shots (from other side of a map). Last boss in 5-6 shots.

So what you are saying you are not capable to finish without a I win button?

In the end I just wanted to finish already. I think it's too long or maybe feeling of progress drops drastically after some point. Few last hours I ignored everything (attacks on bases etc) and just waited to the final mission.
Also I didn't know that was a bug.
I played on Hero and it wasn't especially difficult (even without this bug).

Well ignoring missions and just waiting for last mission to pop up is how I played 1994 Xcom as well. At some point it was not worth risking your high level guys in top gear vs Etherials, Sectopods, masses of Chrysalids and Blaster Launcher commanders. I would just intercept their UFOs and then ignore ground missions.

Had the same experience, but it wasn't really related to 'risk', just it all getting boring and becoming burnt out.

You have 3-4 squads and later on you get spammed with sameish missions all over the globe, which aren't really consequential at that point.
Easier to let global population tank while you finish the end-game research.

This is probably a good thing, compared to the alternative, and it does make sense, but it feels a bit weird.

 

[Norfleet]

This sounds like some problems Xcom2 had where you would know if someone was killed before animation was done.

Quite possible.

I've definitely seen both cases in games.
Games without proper decoupling and without proper animation speed up options.
And games that do have decoupling (with or without speed up), but fail to wait for animations to finish until displaying the updated gameplay info (e.g. unit is dead before shot visibly connected).

Does that actually matter? It's not your turn, and the animation is just a replay of an event that has already been done and you are powerless to alter in any event, and you will not be given the opportunity to act upon any of this information until it IS your turn again. I don't really see this as a problem.

 

[thesheeep]

Does that actually matter? It's not your turn, and the animation is just a replay of an event that has already been done and you are powerless to alter in any event, and you will not be given the opportunity to act upon any of this information until it IS your turn again. I don't really see this as a problem.

Well, it looks like shit.
But other than that, no.

 

[ArchAngel]

This sounds like some problems Xcom2 had where you would know if someone was killed before animation was done.

Quite possible.

I've definitely seen both cases in games.
Games without proper decoupling and without proper animation speed up options.
And games that do have decoupling (with or without speed up), but fail to wait for animations to finish until displaying the updated gameplay info (e.g. unit is dead before shot visibly connected).

Does that actually matter? It's not your turn, and the animation is just a replay of an event that has already been done and you are powerless to alter in any event, and you will not be given the opportunity to act upon any of this information until it IS your turn again. I don't really see this as a problem.

If it does not we might as well play with tokens and no animations

 

[Trithne]

If it does not we might as well play with tokens and no animations

 

[Galdred]

This sounds like some problems Xcom2 had where you would know if someone was killed before animation was done.

Quite possible.

I've definitely seen both cases in games.
Games without proper decoupling and without proper animation speed up options.
And games that do have decoupling (with or without speed up), but fail to wait for animations to finish until displaying the updated gameplay info (e.g. unit is dead before shot visibly connected).

Does that actually matter? It's not your turn, and the animation is just a replay of an event that has already been done and you are powerless to alter in any event, and you will not be given the opportunity to act upon any of this information until it IS your turn again. I don't really see this as a problem.

It does, in a way. Animations somewhat replace waiting for the dice to display the result, and removing the suspense altogether diminishes the experience. But as TheSheep said, it is difficult to time it well.

 

[kreight]

Any news on DLC with flying saucers?

 

[ArchAngel]

Any news on DLC with flying saucers?

No flying saucers but I think they want to have something until end of month or soon afterwards.

 

[razvedchiki]

Flying crabs?

 

[ArchAngel]

Flying crabs?

Probably.

 

[cw8]

battletech was also launced without the option to skip/speed up animations.

Both games are Unity, probably it has something to do with it.

You can speed up Unity games or put a slow motion bullet time effect or completely stop it in just 2-3 lines of code.