Flare - Android Gameplay
I'll try to keep this post professional. I don't think that playing "Flare" on smartphone was a waste of time - when it'll be completed, I'm sure it'll be one of the best Diablo-style hack'n slash on Android (don't get me started on Dungeon Hunter 3,4 or 5). But there are some issues, which can be really frustrating and difficult to deal with for a Android gamer (mainly for smartphones, but tablets won't be in much better situation).
1) Graphics and performance
Well, graphics are practically the same as the ones on desktop version and they look very good for mobile device (in my opinion, at least), so as a isometric 2D hack'n slash Flare has nothing to feel ashamed of.
The biggest issue with visuals is that the interface is really small. And while I don't have any problem with it in inventory or abilities menus (I like that one tap on choosen icon displays info about item/ability, and with second tap you can drag it), it is a bit problematic in character menu, when you level up and you want to spend your points - buttons are very small and hard to hit - but more on that later.
Every font is clear and very easy to read - no matter how large or small the screen is, so I'm really happy with that (see, "Ieasabel"? It's possible)
I'm playing on Sony Xperia M2 with quad-core 1,2GHz processor and 1GB RAM, so the whole experience is pretty smooth (over 30FPS for all time up to 60FPS in small and closed areas such as caves or hyperspace). There is only a huge lag when a switch or other script (for example, waking up Ardwen) has been turned on. When lag ends, you usually find yourself being already attacked, like they were moving all this time (it usually takes about 1 second, so it's nothing crucial).
2) Audio
Not much to say, everything sounds just like you could expect after playing on desktop.
3) Gameplay
Controls are simple - tap to walk or attack. If you hold your finger on the ground, you walk in given direction. If you hold on the enemy, you'll attack in given direction until you take your finger away. If you'll tap on item's name or item itself, you'll take/activate it.
But what is the worst is aiming. I've choosen mage to see how spells and firing projectiles looks on mobile device. Many times I was trying to tap on enemy (moving or standing) and I just couldn't do it. There is no margin of error for touch device, so there are two sollutions:
a) try to stand still and tap on enemy - if you'll start attacking, don't take away your finger and keep attacking, until everyone dies (except for you, of course).
b) if you have some experience already, try run-and-gun approach - keep running from an enemy and shoot him with a ice bolt (it's best to have spells such as fire ball or ice bolt as a primary attack, especially if you've got at least level 7), when he's far away. If he gets to you, run again and so on.
As I wrote above, it's best to keep a powerful spell in primary slot - that's because using spells in other way is unreliable. For example - I have fire ball in slot number 3 (it appeared there automatically, when I've learned it). When I want to use it, I have to tap on that slot. Sometimes I'll miss, which makes me run south or drink mana potion. Of course I can place it in another slot, which is a good solution, until you have learned few spells already and you can sometimes use something else. You can keep that spell in the slot prepared for secondary spell, but the problem is similar - you will use it or walk south. And even if you use that spell, you use it in the direction, you are currently facing - and for spells being used like that, there are only 8 directions. If you want to use them like that, you have to stand in such position, to hit your enemy in straight line. But using these spells sometimes makes you face south and shoot south.
There are of course simple for use abilities, such as "Shield" or "War Cry", and there is even "Burn", which after activation makes you choose an area, where you want to make an explosion. But the simplest and often useful spells (especially against enemies, which get more damage from some elements) aren't fun to use.
My fight with Seagate looked like that - shoot with Ice everything, run to recover and to get distance, (try) to hit enemy with Ice, look out for ice bolts, spikes and Seagate, don't run towards Zombies near the entrance, run and recover and so on. It took me about 5 lives and 4 minutes during the last try.
Remember - store your gold in the stash and when you encounter some merchant like Abasi or Bakat - buy all you need - potions, better weapon, armor, as they have definitely better stuff than merchants in encampment.
Other gameplay related cons for me are:
- lack of on-screen keyboard, when I want to change name of my character or set an ammount of gold I want to store
- I can't read Abasi's journal, I think there's no way to do that on touch device...
- battle text had no colors - until I've gone to the options, unchecked and checked again option about showing text (weird...)
- no tooltips for statistics - there is no way to see what "Offense" does affect, when critical chance is getting higher etc.
So yeah - progressing is satisfying, I really like that kind of hack'n slash on mobile device, but it is very annoying at the same time because of controls. That's my conclusion for this section.
4) Other problems
- after being attacked (mainly after being stunned), when I want to move after recovering, my character attacks, even if I clearly tapped on the ground (I think the same problem is with mouse control on desktop)
- tapping on the enemy makes my character attack, but not always in the direction, where the enemy stands (it's probably about that I tapped on the enemy and when I lied my finger on the screen, to keep attacking me, the game "thinks" that I hold it a bit lower/higher than when it landed at first)
- fighting with Mez - I tell you, this could make me stop playing Flare on Android as an adept. I had really nice equipment, level 7, mental damage 80-85, absorbtion 38-46, lightning resistance 12%, 680HP, Shield active, 66% chance to dodge and 580 HP Regeneration. And I died about 10 times. Before every try I was grinding on viverns, that are flying around him, but I had really enough. But I killed him - with a bug. I don't know if it's possible with a mouse on desktop version, but when I was firing my ice bolts towards Mez, he had about 50% HP and I had plenty of Mana points and still holding my finger on the screen, in one moment I've fired a massive amount of ice bolts (which drained me every Mana point I had), so it looked like I've fired a white ray, which was 4 times longer than my character, the game freezed (hah, funny) and when it was fully working again, Mez was dead, I had 0 mana points and I was shocked.
- I swear, sometimes after level up when I open abilities menu, I have no point to spend and it seems that the point I got on this level has been used to the first skill in opened tab, which I've learned (in my case, "Stone Wall" in warrior's abilities or "Fire Ball" in wizard's abilities)
5) Some suggestions
I think that separate interface has to be done for touch device, maybe with a space on the right prepared for some virtual D-pad, which could be used to precisely use abilities such as firing projectiles. Besides that, rest of the interface can be as it is, but with larger icons. I don't know how to solve the problem with lacking tooltips on character screen, though. Maybe create a new tab which shows what attributes are being affected after spending points on offense, mental, what else gives you leveling up etc.
I really wanted to make everything I've encountered clear for you and I'm sorry, if it sounds negatively. Maybe game is easy and really fun for brutes, but I didn't test it yet, so I can't tell. But I'm sure it's difficult for other characters, that's why I wanted to pinpoint problems with Android port.
I'm very thankful for making playing "Flare" on mobile possible and I hope you'll still be upgrading it and someday you'll release it on Google Play.
Thanks for this awesomely detailed feedback! The contributors that work on the Flare android port will find this very useful.
I admit that when I started Flare, I only had Keyboard + Mouse gameplay in mind. These contributors have had a tricky task to make all of that work on mobile.
And I have to admit, that I really didn't expect that a mobile port would work so well, despite the controls. So I respect them nonetheless.
To be fair, the Android port has mostly been a fun "because we can" experiment. I'm a bit relieved that someone else had the same issue as me with the game freezing when opening switch-controlled doors. I think some devices might have an issue with modifying textures directly, so we may need to do our pixel writting in a regular SDL_Surface and convert afterwards...
As for the controls, there's probably something we could do about the areas where we expect the player to mouse-over on PC, like the Character menu tooltips. I'm not sure how we fix reading books from the Inventory menu yet.
Combat controls are definitely the toughest. The controls are essentially the same as enabling mouse movement on PC. So one solution I've thought of is taking advantage of multi-touch to emulate SHIFT-clicking on the PC. This would work by holding the player in place with one finger, and using another to do the aiming. We'd probably have to refactor a bit of our input code to handle multiple input points.
Anyway, thanks for being so thorough.
About reading a books - maybe there's a way to display a button "Read" in the tooltip? Or use scrolls/potions/books directly from the directory by holding a finger on them for a second or two?
And I think that multi-touch would be useful in other situations - sometimes during a combat, when I was running away (that's how I do combat XD) and I tapped on a potion, I've completely stopped.
Here I am again with another good news (you can hate me by now).
I've installed new Flare on Android with new game data. First of all - Black Oak City design looks really interesting and I like such an unusual map design. he problem is that when I'm walking through it, it looks pretty much like other villages. It'd be cool, if a different type of architecture could be found in the game.
And I've found a little bug - after building the game and launching it for the first time (with all mods installed), I started the game and all battle text was white. I was changing every possible option (by the way, what does colorblind mode do exactly?). Solution was simple - I've closed the game, launched it again (with default settings) and after that every battle text has colors (at first - about two weeks ago, I though that it was a matter of light in my room, but now I'm sure it's a bug).
And something entirely positive - I really like Necromancers new AI - not only they can flee in different directions, but their shield and summoning minions, while being fairly close to the player is in my opinion pretty good strategy, as for melee heroes, scouts and mages.
Colorblind mode only adds text descriptions for item qualities. So for "green" items, we'll display the text "Quality: High" in the tooltip. That bug you describe with combat text is a new one. I have no idea what could be causing that.
As for alternate architecture, I would want to try using this artwork by Clint: http://opengameart.org/content/medieval-building-tiles. We'd need to add these tiles to the grasslands tileset, and potentially need to re-render them to fit the most recent lighting scheme.
This alternative architecture looks preety nice and I'd like to see it in the game :) And thank you for explaining "colorblind mode".
Sadly I can't check that issue with colors on other phone (my girlfriend has another android based smartphone, but it's definitely too weak... I can't be sure if it's a problem with some default settings or just with my smartphone. Maybe after April 30 I'll be able to check it somewhere else.
I wasn't playing "Flare" recently, about a week ago I've found another little AI problem (I've got a screenshots on my phone, I'll upload them tomorrow) - in the Black Oak City I've found a minotaur behind a house. Because he couldn't see me (he was standing still behind the house), I thought I'll use a "Burn" skill (the one which can be targeted on the ground after selecting the skill) and try to burn that minotaur. Luckily I've managed to do it and the enemy didn't do anything (he was standing still despite being on fire 4 times). Maybe some panic reaction after being hit but before seeing an enemy could be implemented?
I've prepared some other screenshots on my laptop, but I can't remember what was there (I'm not at home), so tomorrow I'll update this post.
I'm sorry it's taking so long with these screenshots, I've a problem with my laptop.
Long story short - that problem about a monster standing behind a building is complete, only lacks screenshots.
I'll try to describe other problems - in the Black Oak City I was playing with environment. To be precise - I placed my character near the ruined tower in the center of the map. I've placed him in some spot, co half of him isn't visible, as if he was covered by a part of that tower graphics layer. If I'll manage to do it on Android, I'll attach screenshots with my phone.
But there is bigger problem in my opinion. I'm wearing rings, that are supposed to give more experience (on Android and on PC) and normally for 10lvl monster I'm supposed to get 1024 experience points, right? So with a ring I'm supposed to get more, but I'm gaining 1006 points, if I recall correctly (I'll write the name of this ring and supposed bonus later, as I'm in work now).
Unfortunately, I'm not seeing the XP issue. I have two +8% rings on, and killing a level 10 monster nets 1239 XP.
I'm sorry about that XP report - that was entirely my mistake - I just took one "1" from 1106...
I'm attaching screenshots about previous problems -
1) minotaur could be hit with "burn" skill and he could not move
2) part of character model is being covered by ruined tower's graphics
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I've just finished additional two levels and sidequests, which were recently added - levels are nice, especially "Mog Cavern". Unfortunatelly, I had to look for notes like a blind - on Android notes can't be read.
By the way - I bought myself a 7" tablet - targeting is much easier and more forgiving in comparision with 4" smartphone. It has quad proccessor, but only 512MB RAM, so loading a saved game takes about 10 seconds.
I just pushed a change that should allow reading notes/books on touch screen devices. Just select the note in your inventory and tap on it to open it. Here's the relevant commit for reference: https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine/commit/a86456227cbe23dcff...
Funny you should mention that you went from phone to tablet. My tablet recently died, but I got a smartphone to replace by old dumbphone and the tablet in one swoop. It definitely makes me want to make a small game with much lower resolution art assets to better fit small screens.
Well, I didn't say here anything for a while...
First of all, I'm playing campaign from the beginning on the tablet. I've choose a scout.
Second of all, one should not simply create a Permadeath character on mobile.
Third - playing on tablet is much easier and more pleasant than on smartphone, but it would really be nice, if the assets and UI could be a bit larger, because it's still hard to use abilities for Action bar.
Thourth - some time ago I've written about a bug, where all battle text was white. It's still happening - but only after launching the game for the first time after building it on the mobile device (I've attached a screenshot). After restarting the game (I didn't change any option after closing the first game and before beginning another) and loading my save file, everything's fine - "miss" is grey, damage done to my character is red etc.
Fifth - reading books is now possible - thank you :)
Sixth - not exactly Android exclusive, but new frames for description windows look really cool.
And the last thing - I was thinking about using abilities on a mobile device... I was playing a game called "Mage and Minions", which is a free to play hack'n slash. Player can assign abilities to few slots and each slot has a corresponding gesture, which activates an ability - for example, you can draw "V" with a finger for your character to charge in the spot, where you've started drawing or order your companion to shoot arrows there. Maybe there's a way for Flare to use a similar method? If not, maybe minimize action bar to less slots and - let's say - give 3-4 slots for abilities at the right lower corner of the screen, 2 for potions in the left lower corner of the screen and 3 for extra things, like scrolls in the middle. Abilities are not being used immediately after tapping on their icons, but are being selected as the default, which will be used after tapping on the enemy. What do you think about that?
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I can confirm the combat text issue happens on the PC build as well. I'll look into it.
As for the action bar, I think it might be worth trying to split it like you described. Put a 5 slots in each of the bottom corners for easy thumb access. We won't make the slots contain specifically items or powers, as we want to keep Flare flexible. For example, a game might not have potions at all, relying entirely on hero powers.
It would be cool if you find that idea worth trying. I'll be waiting for new commits :)