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J.E. Sawyer

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Everything posted by J.E. Sawyer

  1. J.E. Sawyer
    Is it possible you're seeing the specific aesthetics of those rocks as "this is just what random stone jutting from the ground is supposed to look like," when it's really that those particular rocks are supposed to look exactly like that (with the little layers/ripples in them and such)? They're pillars of adra and aren't supposed to look like ordinary rock.
  2. J.E. Sawyer
    While it's true that we're not designing the game with touch screens in mind, we have had the game running on a Fujitsu Windows 8 tablet and it worked fine. We are trying to make the game one-button friendly, so while there is functionality on right-click, it's usually ease-of-use functionality rather than core. E: Also our min res is 1280x720. This is a terrible decision. I want to voice my opposition to this sort of mentality. One-button functionality as a design choice limits you and is a slippery slope. As soon as you begin to consider limiting yourself from the availability that is provided with a compter, there is no real reason why you wouldn't continue to limit yourself to "fit" your game to tablets or other consoles. If you allow one-button functionality then soon you will limit your game to the resources found on a tablet to allow for the one-button functionality to continue to make sense. Please do not do this. If you are limiting yourself you one-mouse button, you are putting in a bunch of handicap UI elements and engine modifications that are unnecessary for computers. This is a waste of time/resources in order to appease a market-crowd larger than what you originally intended and sort of goes against what Chris Avellone discussed when he spoke about the benefits of the PC vs the console. One of his gripes was the limitation that lay in joypads. Do not do this. Do not limit yourself to one-button. Make a game for PC/MAC/LINUX and only them. We are not limiting ourselves to one-button functionality. The BG and IWD games made very little use of the right-click and most of it was redundant with other elements of the GUI. You could open inventories on characters with right-click (as you can in ours), but you could also do that by clicking on the inventory icon itself. You could cancel actions with right-click (as you can in PE), but you could also do that with the Escape key. As long as there's a GUI element or other shortcut that allows redundancy, I have no problems with putting functionality on right-click; I just don't want to make it the only means of accessing that functionality. And I've said this before, but I'll say it again: most Macs still come with a Mighty Mouse, which technically supports right-click functionality but may as well not because a) you need to enable it and b) it is terrible. It is, in fact, because we are making a game for the Mac that I think it is important that we do not rely heavily on right-click functionality without offering a GUI or keyboard shortcut.
  3. J.E. Sawyer
    It will. It's only gotten harder over time.
  4. J.E. Sawyer
    We don't plan to have fights like that.
  5. J.E. Sawyer
    We currently have (and will continue to make) optional encounters that are too macho for your projected level going into them. There's an encounter in our vertical slice area that wipes almost everyone on the team who goes into it. It can be beaten with an "underleveled" group, but it requires a lot of tactical retreating and careful party management.
  6. J.E. Sawyer
    While it's true that we're not designing the game with touch screens in mind, we have had the game running on a Fujitsu Windows 8 tablet and it worked fine. We are trying to make the game one-button friendly, so while there is functionality on right-click, it's usually ease-of-use functionality rather than core. E: Also our min res is 1280x720.
  7. J.E. Sawyer
    Yes. We have made sure that almost all suits of armor have some pieces that can tint (usually cloth) exposed for that purpose.
  8. J.E. Sawyer
    On the inventory screen, you can see all of these things at once: For the currently selected character: * Name/portrait * Health, Stamina, Accuracy (both hands, if dual-wielding), Damage Threshold (base) * All four defenses * "Paper doll" * Primary/secondary and hair/skin colors for that character * All equipment slots (including weapon sets and quick items) and For the party, either * The packs (previously called Top of Pack) for all party members OR * The stash There are also filters you can turn on and off for every item type. The inventory screen also displays the party funds.
  9. J.E. Sawyer
    Those are 110x170. PE's are 210x330, like these, but close-up. http://www.planetbaldursgate.com/iwd/character/portraits/
  10. J.E. Sawyer
    The inventory and character screens are separate, but the inventory does show the individual pack of every party member on one screen.
  11. J.E. Sawyer
    It fits well, IMO. E: For comparison, the portraits in Shadowrun Returns were about the same size.
  12. J.E. Sawyer
    PE doesn't put any special marking on quest-related NPCs. We also don't use quest markers. You have to read what NPCs say and refer to your journal to figure out where to go. That said, we've established a standard for writing those entries that should ensure you will always know generally where you're supposed to be heading. Re: portraits: we've revised them a little bit. We are currently using two sizes of portraits, one for the character/inventory/dialogue screen and one for the main HUD. The "big" portrait is 210x330, the size of BG and IWD portraits. The smaller portraits are 73x86, though that size may change a little. The larger portraits are "head and shoulders" with a bit extra, the closest comparison would be BG1 portraits. For the companion portraits we've done so far, Kaz has managed to really capture some engaging characters. I think you will like them. The smaller portraits are cropped to just the face for easy recognition.
  13. J.E. Sawyer
    For the IE games, all levels were procedurally chopped up into series of 64x64 8-bit tiles and stored as .TIS files (IIRC).
  14. J.E. Sawyer
    Because the cipher is focusing more on damaging/draining the target's mind/soul than actually causing physical harm.
  15. J.E. Sawyer
    I disagree. Druids and clerics are both really powerful spellcasters in 3.X. That they have good melee capability on top of that is icing on the cake. I would say that our (PE) priests have shifted away from the original concept of them being melee/caster hybrids. They are closer-range casters than wizards, but they aren't particularly strong in melee (paladins take on the role of close-combat support). Their spells are designed to be on par with wizards' in overall power, but they have a different flavor and trend differently. E.g., wizards have some nice personal buffs but virtually no area buffs. Priests have a few personal buffs, but have a lot of huge AoE buffs. When druids are in their spirit forms, they can be powerful melee opponents, but that is a limited-use ability. They're still primarily casters.
  16. J.E. Sawyer
    The main upside to turning off Soul Whip is that you do full (normal) damage. When Soul Whip is active, your weapon-based damage is reduced.
  17. J.E. Sawyer
    Well, to be honest, the first footage we show is likely to be more whiz-bang than subtle, Fireballs and so on rather than Minor Grimoire Imprint or Arcane Reflection. But yeah, we are implementing more oddball spells. The oddball spells take longer to implement and have about a 50% viability rate. Some of them just wind up being bad spells (not effective or confusing/impractical to use) and have to be revised or thrown out.
  18. J.E. Sawyer
    No. We have three "full" caster classes that can avoid melee entirely if you choose to do so (wizard, priest, druid). I'm sorry that you don't like the style of the cipher, but I designed the class to be distinctly different from the other casters in terms of managing their power resource. And again: ciphers do not have to enter melee to use Soul Whip.
  19. J.E. Sawyer
    It doesn't function like chain lightning. Yeah, I can honestly say that the classes aren't going to be made boring to play for the sake of balance. Their Focus mechanic wasn't ARPG-inspired at all. It was inspired by the common A/D&D power point resource that a lot of psionics-oriented classes have and the melee flavor of the soulknife class.
  20. J.E. Sawyer
    It wasn't the stones in the picture, specifically, but similar (and smaller) stones that farmers knocked over and dragged out of a field to make it more suitable for plowing. Capital-P Psyche is a defense stat, similar to the Will save in D&D 3.X. However, the relationship between lowercase-p psyche and soul is a complex one. Animancers believe that both physical aspects of the body (including the brain) and the energy of the soul contribute to perception, cognition, memory, and personality. Deficiencies or limitations in one cannot be overcome by the other. "Mind" and "soul" are often used interchangeably, but "brain" and "soul" are not.
  21. J.E. Sawyer
    It does. It isn't. The "traditional" casters (wizards, druids, priests) all have per-rest and per-encounter spellcasting mechanics that share aspects of 3.x and 4E. Hullo. There's one thing I'm curious about. The cipher needs to successfully hit (grazes don't count) his target with the weapon, overcoming Deflection first, for the Soul Whip Psyche attack to take place, right? Yes, though I can't remember if Grazes count or not for Soul Whip. Grazes may only give a proportionally diminished amount of Focus.
  22. J.E. Sawyer
    Yep. You can thank Bobby for the vithrack. He loves mind flayers!
  23. J.E. Sawyer
    No, not final at all. Most of our current portraits in-game are using cropped images from non-portrait pieces of art (e.g. our wallpaper image from the Kickstarter drive). Even if we use some of those images as a starting point, the portrait artist(s) will be creating images specifically for portrait use in-game.
  24. J.E. Sawyer
    Yeah, we're doing head and shoulders portraits because it will allow us to do many more of them. Also, it's generally easier for players to match a portrait to a variety of character concepts if the body/equipment isn't visible. The IWD/2 "knees-up" portraits were cool but very time-consuming. On IWD, it took almost all of Jason Manley's time on the project just to generate the portraits.
  25. J.E. Sawyer
    Cool, thanks. Heh, are the left and right hand icons L / R mittens? They're fists, though one of them will likely be replaced with a breastplate and the character's Damage Threshold. The main/off-hand Accuracy stats will wind up stacked on one "fist" if the character is dual-wielding.
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