{"id":1496,"date":"2019-01-23T04:49:55","date_gmt":"2019-01-23T04:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/?p=1496"},"modified":"2019-01-23T04:51:49","modified_gmt":"2019-01-23T04:51:49","slug":"listen-to-the-feedback-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/listen-to-the-feedback-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"Listen to the Feedback, Stupid!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Fight With The Dark Knight\" width=\"630\" height=\"354\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7FMQ5JPcaFo?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>O.K. So I have been thinking about this for the last few days. On the last sneak peak game play video I posted over on Reddit. u\/ Flarfanex and u\/ branded both pointed out that the skeletons were \u201cbleeding\u201d when you attacked them as if they had flesh instead of bones and that that seemed \u201coff\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>At first I thought it was a bit nit-picky and completely blew off their comments.<\/p>\n<p>I had worked too hard to make the entire experience run on mobile VR, I wasn\u2019t going to worry about this small detail\u2026 and may have even been a tad snotty and slightly condescending in my inet replies to them\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFiredrake VR is for Mobile VR and I had only programmed one particle emitter into the game for blood effects.. You see\u2026 These particle emitters cost a lot, in terms of CPU rendering performance on a cell phone system, so it\u2019s really a good idea to keep their use to a minimum.\u201d I told them \u2026 and myself\u2026 but it wormed at the back of my mind the rest of the night.<\/p>\n<p>It was wrong, It did feel off. They were right\u2026.<\/p>\n<p>The blood effect seemed to almost take you out of the immersion when in VR. The players expectation, based on years and years of Dungeons and Dragons lore, game of thrones type books and a hundred million b movies\u2026. was that skeletons had bones instead of bleeding flesh and when you hack at them they should do something other then bleed\u2026<\/p>\n<p>And if one (in this case two folks had this opinion and voiced it, then you can bet there were 10 others that felt this way that hadn\u2019t spoken up\u2026 (the internets famous rule of \u201cTen\u2019s\u201d from the old CPM ratio days is a golden rule I live by when it comes to measuring these type of metrics\u2026)<\/p>\n<p>In the morning, I realized they were completely right. Skeletons don\u2019t normally bleed, and in VR, it\u2019s this little type of thing that can bring you out of the immersion. And lets face it. VR gaming is all about the immersion. So far , there aren\u2019t too many games that actually NEED VR. Currently VR just gets to put you within the gaming world. Lets you feel the immersion of the experience.<\/p>\n<p>And, I began to think.. If I don\u2019t listen to the feedback from users. Then I am missing a huge opportunity to have a sort of beta test outside of VR. I had posted the trailer as more of an awareness campaign to even let folks know firedrake existed, but also forgot and then quickly realized again that the game trailer is also a \u201cfirst look\u201d of actual game play. And end viewers, who are highly experienced and sophisticated game players in general (who else watches early access game play trailers!!!???) and may eventually become players, will have feedback and comments equally as valid as any live beta or gameplay tester will have.<\/p>\n<p>So, I sat down and figured out how to bring in some \u201cbone dust blood\u201d into the game. It took a little figuring, since I am a terrible C# programmer, but I think I have a working solution with minimal performance loss. It needs a bit of tweaking, but the base effect works for me.<\/p>\n<p>I am also figuring out a way to have the skeletons just break apart into a pile of bones, once you kill \u2018em\u2026. Seems somehow more fitting as I re-think the whole combat loop of the skeletons, But I\u2019m still working on that. Onward!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>O.K. So I have been thinking about this for the last few days. On the last sneak peak game play video I posted over on Reddit. u\/ Flarfanex and u\/ branded both pointed out that the skeletons were \u201cbleeding\u201d when you attacked them as if they had flesh instead of bones and that that seemed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-firedrake-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1496"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1498,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1496\/revisions\/1498"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}