Hello!

Here's some pretty big wall of text, but i couldn't resist. Partly it will seem irrelevant to the main topic (Feedback & Suggestions), but in a sense everything i put down is a feedback, and it may contain suggestions too, besides some questions, of course.

Game experience

There have been some years for now since i played either Worms:Armageddon or Worms:World Party. I loved both. The overall gameplay and the funny weapons made them every minute worth. Now, that the Worms: Reloaded came out, it was an opportunity you couldn't miss. Well, actually, you could. Although it has new shiny weapons, some nice features, but all in all, it's a huge letdown. I wouldn't go in details, everyone interested please try the game out yourself, you'll see. At this point i decided to go back to the 2 older games mentioned above, however as they don't run natively on a win7 without tricks (Thank you, Microsoft!), and as they refuse to work even after applying said tricks posted all over the internet, i had to see for something else, preferably open source, that's how i found Hedgewars. 3 words come to my mind:

You. Guys. Rock.

The look and feel of the game is very Worm-like, except for the obvious fact that there are hedgehogs. The weapons are also similar to the ones i've got used to, with minor/major changes. And here comes the inevitable question:

Did you change the weapons due to copyright reasons, or wanted to be unique in a way and not only copycats/fans?

If the second, will it be possible to use the Worms series' weapons? A suggestion would be to make "weapon sets", a submenu-like addition to the already existing ammonution menu, where one can select which set he'd like to use and customize. (E.g. "Hedge weapons", "Classic Worms", "Everything", "Custom", and so on.)

This would apply to the original graphics/sounds/misc in-game items too, tho' some legal issues may occour there.

Back to the game. I'm glad that jump, small jump and backflip are all implemented, though the forward jump seems a bit "sudden", and of course backflip misses the flip part. Will they be changed, or is it the final style? Just asking.

It's also a nice touch for keeping the increasing bubbles while pressing space. They seem a bit "pale" though, and when aiming downwards, they seem to be misplaced at certain weapons (bug?).

Lurking through some of the forums topic's i saw that this issue has already been mentioned, but will repeat it, because it strikes really in-game. And that is the high "bouncyness" of grenades (and the mines of mine-strike). There was a simple setting during battle called "min bounce" and "max bounce" even in the older worms games which was very useful and would solve this problem.

The moving and interacting animations are cute too! Some sounds are missing (or maybe it's intentional? Like no sounds while taking damage of flames.), and some animations loose the cap, but it is really good!

I've read also that the programmers don't want to make the game 150% customisable saying it would make the setup overly complex and also mess up on-line gameplay. In my opinion you could always make the on-line play restricted to "official options", whereas in single player allow much more possibilities. Oh, btw, i haven't seen turning fall damage on/off option, not that it's used much, just out of habit. Oh and the "bleeding" eyecandy either.

I looked around the webpage but couldn't find a decent description of all the weapons included in the game, the ingame tooltips are helpful, though!

A weapon fix suggestion: now, when using the RC plane, after the launch the time freezes. Imho it shouldn't, thus making the player act fast and precise and not flying around for hours...

And the last one is a question to the authors:
What is your stance in this game being open-source? Do you think it's basically yours (but source viewable), so when we contribute to the awesomeness you do, we have to wait until the next version comes out? In this case, your doing it right, keep up the good work! Looking forward to further releases!
Or do you try to make it widely modular and/or customizable (as in open-source -> common property)? Then maybe some more in-game allowances (apart from those LUA scripts that look cool), and maybe some periodical "extension packs" (user content: flags, maps, caps, etc.) apart from the official release would help it much! The game OpenTTD comes to my mind where you can download user-content directly in-game through a built in surface. Not that this game needs something like this yet, but i hope the idea is clear.

Thank you for reading (or skipping the blah blah), and i wish you the best!