This is awesome!
Two things:
1. Hedgewars is really cool! My friends an I have been playing old Worms games for years at our Lan parties, and they're really showing their age. Simply being able to play a smooth, high-res modern version was great. Discovering cool features like zoom and all the new weapons was even better!
2. We have lots of ideas! I'm a programmer in the games industry, and I've always wished I could tweak things here and there with the "worms" formula. Is there a good place to start if I wanted to say, make a new weapon for Hedgewars? Is this the kind of thing the team might want to consider including in an official release if it's cool enough?
One idea we were tossing around at our last LAN party, is what to do with the players who have been elimenated from a multi-person game. What if there were a "worm heaven" a couple screens above the terrain, where you could have some kind of effect on the game below? Maybe you can control the wind to some degree, or decide where the crates drop and what's in them? Some kind of metagame to keep you occupied and possibly grief your friends
I actually like that idea...
He actually likes that idea!
Hi there, and thanks for the positive feed back, it really is very nice to hear.
As for adding a weapon and it being included in the official release, we are very community orientated and we absolutely love to include any quality work the community produces into our official builds.
A good place to start would be joining the #hedgewars irc channel on freenode, or clicking "live chat" at the top of this page if you're unfamiliar with IRC. There you'll find people who can help you get into coding for Hedgewars.
The heaven idea is an interesting (and unique!) one, I think it would require a lot of planning however as it could easily affect game balance in a negative way.
Cool, I'll definitely log in there soon!
Yeah the heaven thing could definitely cause some balance issues (although I think it'd be fun) The main thing it's trying to solve is: How you prevent everone who dies from getting bored out of their minds while the remaining teams toss grenades back and forth? I'm sure there are other solutions too.
The other big wishlist feature I have is more hands-on help in the game. It'd be cool if you could turn on a "hint mode" that walks you through how to execute each weapon. It took about 5 tries to figure out the flying saucer, and to this day I still don't know how to use the Switch feature. Maybe I could make myself useful here
Game could include a training demo.
Seems to me that so long as it stuck to basic stuff (2 hogs taking turns talking and firing a weapon) that it wouldn't need to be rerecorded very often since it is unlikely there would be any changes in there that would desync (assuming the weapons were fired into the sea or some harmless target).
So could simply move it to new protocol release w/o rerecording.
And of course the website weapons writeup needs updating.
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Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev
Yeah that's one route - in my experience, people get bored with training videos though and don't really learn how to actually play (which is why you don't see these in AAA games these days.)
I'm thinking of something a bit more hands-on, like a tutorial mode (I guess it'd be kinda like the mission mode in Worms, only more organized.) Every time I try to introduce someone to Worms (and now Hedgewars instead!) it's always pretty daunting just explaining all the controls... Double jumping, each individual weapon, etc. Let alone the more advanced concepts like ropes. Half the people that try the game (that I've seen) get frustrated and walk away before they really realize how fun it is.
That rope video from the front page was AMAZING - I'd never have guessed you could do that with the rope. What if there was a tutorial about it?
The target training missions are a pretty good start. Maybe what'd be really ideal is a set of tutorials you could work through - basic movement/aiming/jumping for starters, on up through the more advanced techniques.
Anyway I'd love to help out with something like this in my spare time. I should probably download the source before I get too carried away though!
This is probably getting off the topic of "feedback and suggestions" but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask here. I tried logging onto the chatroom but it seemed nobody was around at the time, so here goes:
I have WinXP and MacOS. Would you recommended one over the other for getting up and running with the Hedgewars source?
I understand you guys probably do most of your stuff in Linux...
If you were trying to do it yesterday, there were some problems with freenode server splits. I could'n log in to my own room with Op priviledges .
Now everything works well. (I hope so )
Press any key to continue, or any other key to cancel.
It reminds me of one of the Bomberman games, back to the SNES or maybe Playstation days. There dead players would appear around the map armed with very limited weapons. In the event a dead player manages to kill an active player, he may come back to life with a smaller amount of health.
As Hedgewars is turn based almost none of these applies, but I like the idea of having a little firepower when dead: nothing too powerfull, but enough to help your teammates, for example.