Greetings to all, including the awesome devs and the almost as awesome players!
This morning I woke at 2:00 AM to get ready for the weekly planned match on the dev server. It turns out the time emailed out was wrong -- it's at 20:00 GMT, not 15:00 GMT -- so I had a few hours to muck around with the game seriously for the first time in more than a year.
By the mighty blood of Armok this game is fun. And it has been improved SO much.
I don't know what drives the devs. Perhaps they are strapped to padded sleds in front of computers in dark rooms, forced to develop the game further in order to please the hive. Around them viscous black compounds drip from disembodied talons, glinting occasionally in the dark. They sit like this for months, only occasionally being let out when the basilisks gas out the cockroaches:
...or they enjoy something to do with working with and developing the game, which is hopefully more likely:
Either way, this forum is too quiet and I want to throw some praise around. Some of it might not be well targeted at the development since forking from Tremulous, but I still want to throw it out here.
User Interface
Forcing the changes & new mechanics explanation dialogue to open on game start is awesome. It explains some of the elephants of the mechanics, even if it's targeted towards old Trem players instead of new ones. It's also very short and uses lots of colour -- not a wall of grey text.
The confidence bar system is almost completely self explanatory -- the icons along the bar really help. It is also not intrusive (especially compared to the rest of the HUD :P ).
The confidence system
I remember how fun unlimited Trem servers were, and how I disliked the fact you could not expand beyond an arbitrary size in normal games. But infinite resources also posed balance problems, with humans able to win RTS style simply by marching forward lines of rets. The new confidence system feels like a unification of these two systems -- but with a control (mining) to the expansion, so that building is not the only form of gameplay.
New content
Arguably this is the most two-dimensional of expansion, but it is always appreciated to have new maps. I'm going to have a stab at developing the old maps (eg Niveus) further to see if I can reform them with some minor changes & prettier surfaces to match the graphical improvements of the rest of the game. FYI: critique me to hell, I'm happy to take stab wounds at all of my work.
The new website
... looks really friendly to new players. The developer blog makes me seethe with desire. Don't ever stop using it -- blind development leads to community thinking projects are dead.
Bots that dance on crates
There are not many players at the moment, so bots are great -- but not perfect -- fill in. The best part is that they exhibit many dodging and attack behaviours for the aliens, which is something very opaque to new players. Now they can learn in their spare time.
Everything else I have missed
I've only played one serious session of games. Also, snowstation FTW.
The only thing I want to push is making the game UI even more approachable to new players, rather than just the dying race of old Trem nutters like me. Adding some more words to menus to explain a few things (eg to play a local game, you have to start your own sever) and adding an easy UI for bots would save players from having to be ex-quakers to know how to operate things past the main menu.
In no way should the gameplay be changed to suit beginners -- the learning curve might be big, but it has a fair slope. There are an infinite amount of skills and tactics to this game, giving everyone the opportunity to fight and learn in their own way. Anyway, enough of my shameful plugs!
Two things have kept this game succession alive. One is the gameplay style -- forcing an infinite variety of skill-level players from the absolutely clueless to the crack-cocaine 300hz freaks to work together. It does this without making anyone feel like they have been unfairly treated by the game mechanics, so that anyone can enjoy the bliss of slicing human faces off regardless of how long they have played.
The other is the people. You could have thousands of players and the best game ever, but it will die within a year without individuals that stand out. Many game communities have kept going for more than a decade online because a group of people have kept patching and improving the game for everyone else to benefit. Sound familiar? Our current devs, although they might enjoy what they do, will always want to do other things in life. Having more people will not just populate servers, but also help them too.
Thank you to all of the current players and devs. We need to get more people playing Unvanquished -- unique players from everywhere on the planet -- to take a little of the burden off the devs and give this community what it deserves. Get your friends playing. Share this game on social media. Push it and you will see this forum catch fire and the gameservers kneel before hordes of happy people.
And keep having fun!