Life is Feudal Official Forum

[Belthize]

I like the minigame approach, been thinking for some years how to implement that and some of your ideas are pretty good.

There's a pretty wide variance in difficulty on the current games and I realize little to no balancing has occurred. One of the attractive aspects of your approach is it allows fairly trivial statistics to track frequency of use, frequency of success etc over time.

I'm sure you've planned on it but on the off hand chance you haven't I'd suggest harvesting any stats you can think of so balancing can be done objectively based on actual stats rather than the norm which is 'who cries loudest on forums'.

That would include running averages as well, for example if all of the games but one show a slow steady improvement in success rates that implies those games are skill based and the one is more luck or reaction based which would suggest that game's approach should be rethought.

The more stats kept the better, you'll always come up with new ways of interpreting them.

Anyway good job on the implementation, it's very promising.

ps: I clearly suck at stringing bows.

[Dailato]

yeah there is definitely some difference in difficulty between the games, where some are incredibly hard regardless of difficulty level, or easy for that matter.

The wood-sawing game has the game tell you to make big cuts rather than small rapid ones, but the only way to beat it is by spamming the cuts as fast as possible.

I've only beaten the herb gathering game once. Maybe it's just me but some of those herbs are either really damn hard to see or the indicator of where they are is broken x).

The tree-chopping game is pretty unforgiving too, sometimes not even giving you any progress when the animations shows you chopping in the right place, and I'm not convinced it's even possible to complete at the highest difficulty level (you just don't get enough passes across the green bits)

the bowstringing game doesn't have a minimum score so I don't know how hard it is.

the ore-gathering game is rather... well, luck based, as you can't sort ores while the ores are being removed and falling down, but pretty easy.

metal-hammering game is pretty easy on all difficulty levels.

plenty of time for tweaking these things though, the concept is really good, and the games are fairly enjoyable (not to mention it adds an actual factor of TIME to crafting, which is very useful.)

[Arrakis]

Well there is little time, and some games I just cannot complete

That wood-sawing game, i tried it several times on easiest difficulty and still couldn't finish it, not by spamming it fast or any other way.

Somehow I have failed in herb gathering as well, at the beginning I wasn't sure what I was looking for, and turning rate was slow as hell too.

I menaged tree chopping by miracle on easiest level, it's hard to hit tree in right place.

Bowstripping kicked my butt, I can't hold it to the end, maybe I wasn't trying enough, but still, it isn't that easy.

Honestly I have no freakin idea how to play that ore gathering game, I just don't know what to do. I know it reminds me of some game, but I'm not sure which one.

Anyway this pretty nice system there, even if it was hard, I enjoyed doing that. Finally something, that does not include only craft button and voila, finally you can try your 'manual' skills. Keep it going, it really unique project that people will just love.

[Dailato]

yeah the herb gathering is really hard, I know what I'm looking for but, some of those herbs are really hard to spot, and some of the background looks a bit like herbs as well.

treechopping is indeed hard, no arguments there.

bowstripping is hard, but! you're not supposed to hold it till the end, you're supposed to click before reaching the end, and then get points for how far you got, then repeat it. the further you get, exponentially more points you get per second. don't know if it's really feasible to reach all the way to the end.

The ore gathering game is like "Bejeweled" you click two ores next to each other to switch them around, and make a row/column of 3 or more the same ores.

[Cian]

I'm more worried about the out of game ability to play the mini-games. That seems like it is open to all kinds of abuse. I'm just waiting to see the Gold buying or character grinding scams from China to come rolling in.

[Telakh]

Dunno' guys, all of them look easy after 1-2 days of practice. Except gathering - that one remains tough.

[Saxxon]

I'm not bashing it, but I don't like it at all personally.

My question is will I be penalized ingame if I do not use the mini game mechanic?

Being "required" to do this for higher quality seems immersion breaking and forcing me to do it.

I don't mind some type of "minor" penalty like longer crafting cycles but do not hit me with a quality reduction.

[Tantal]

I think it was mentioned that minigames give just a little bonus in speed, so even when someone would cheat there, it would not hurt to much.

[Telakh]

You will not be penalized but those who choose to play minigames will get up to 5% quality bonus with best result in smithing and bowcraft and up to 20 seconds crafting time reduce in other crafts. You are not forced to play minigames and you will not often get best scores but it is quite reasonable that players who make harder efforts in craft will achieve slightly better results, as it happens in combat where your skills are more important than character's skills