Donate and they will stream a game of Zero-K live! - Streamed Indie Gaming Marathon

For anyone who's interested, the ZK part is in this video, starting at 33:42:00.

Thank you, knorke.

I set it up for them in slavering anticipation.

They used one of my alternate logins.

I told them to wait for donations, though, so I had left by that point.

I'm hoping to return tonight and convince them to let me at it.

[ACP]ScarySquirrel

sry im abroad currently (and will be for another 3 weeks). maybe ask next time in chat #zkdev or #zkadmins

I was a bit disappointed that most of their praise/positive remarks are about things they heard about the game.
They mentioned the physics, terraforming and huge armies etc because they were told about them - not because they saw them while playing. They seemed interessted but the gameplay shown was not that awesome or interessting at all.
In other games it is more "Oh look, you can do XY", imo a big difference to "So I read you can do XY [but now I can not figure out how to do it (like upgrading com or rotating camera)]".

quote: Although they played poorly and didn't seem to have knowledge of RTS ("oh I can build stuff in this game?")

Think that was because of the allied AIs defenses etc the game seemed more like DOTA at first.

Even if the usual problems showed again, still was a good idea to enter.

jseah , think you are right with those observations.
But I would interpret them differently.
I think none of the mistakes is really their (players) fault, it is all more or less flaws in the game or mission.

quote: They don't read the mission popup. Not sure if this is the effect of listening to the guy in the middle talk or if a normal player would never read it.

Problem is there are too many texts and popups. For example the biggest messages are the chicken messages ("20x pigeons, 15x Spitter") but those are the least important ones.
All those messages and numbers and tooltips everywhere compete for players attention. There is just too much going on in the GUI. If there is too much information it eventually all becomes just noise and (especially new) players will ignore all of it.

[quote]Run for the hills! -runs towards the chickens-[/quote]The map has hills in the south. In the north is a flat concrete base thing. So "hills = south" makes sense. The mission should instead tell player to "run to safety of base!"

quote: He thinks eggs spawn chickens. Lol.

It kind of makes sense that eggs would spawn chickens, it would be intuitive. Eggs being the wreck/corpse of chicken does not make much sense at all.

quote: Why do I get the feeling that most of them aren't that strong in the skill of observing units work and learning to predict their behaviour and therefore use-cases

Think that is a bit much to ask from first time players. Especially from two missions that are kind of random choatic pew-pew of allied units vs chickens..

quote: ...and that economy is good (but the AI does it for him and shares its excess so he doesn't feel it).

Imo zK/TA economy is the most confusing one an RTS can come up with. For start, the resources are invisible! One can only see them if they get marked by a yellow circle with some icons. The AI shares him lots of M but appearently no E. Think if the idea of mission is that player does not have to worry about resources, he should get both resources "for free." Or none, otherwise is even more confusing.

It is also worth to keep watching the stream to see the game that comes after zero-K.
Interessting to see how they "get" that game much quicker. Ofc such 2D game is not as complex as an RTS but the creator also seems aware of how to design games so they are easy to pick up.

The Attack move thing is quite a problem. I tried to swap A and F to "Attack Move" and "Force Fire" a while ago but there was some sort of backlash with the implementation.

I don't think they were stutter stepping the Warriors early, that was the Unit AI.

In the first mission they attack grounded next to the turret that they were meant to kill when I think they really wanted Fight.

There is actually no way to rotate the camera without changing something in settings. This is intentional.

Car you are dead wrong about Starcrft, shift queuing structures in Stacraft is something you NEVER want to do because it reserves the resources for structures you have not yet started. Also I doubt they were from Starcraft.

My impression of their impression of Chickens is that it was a tower defense. They expected factories to just automatically pump out and use units. They were playing in 'avatar' mode where they only use their commander. This mission was actually quite confusing to someone who does not know what is going on because they have an AI ally yet never realised it.

Also this was not a common use case. Remember that they had one person using the mouse while the other used the keyboard.

I think FPS games are at their core very much alike. You have a single guy with controls which are mostly coherent across the genre so no explanation is required.

Yes, shift queue is ok for Protoss structures because the structures are started about as fast as you can queue them. It's also irrelevant for Zerg. Technically any use of shift queue in Starcraft is suboptimal so people are still in a mindset of avoiding it. If you queue up a base for a Probe to build halfway across the map then you are playing poorly. Shift queue is still relevant for Protoss non-gateway units, if you queue 3 Tempests then you're down a lot of resources.

My point about shift queuing is that Zero-K construction is most like Terran from Starcraft. Our workers stay with the construction until it is finished (sort of).

Oh what a world Starcraft has wrought in which players are trained not to use their UI.

CarRepairer I've re-written your page.

GoogleFrog while I feel your rewrite has completely correct information, you've fallen back to just writing a summarized newbie guide. The purpose of the page is to really contrast the differences between ZK and Starcraft in quick one-liners so that people have a point of reference. It should just be short read of "quick facts" like

In Starcraft you can select only 12 units, in ZK you can select as many you want.

In Starcraft your units stop to attack, in ZK nearly all of them can fire while moving.

and so on. Make it really basic and list-like.

At the very least, start out with my quick list and then your existing summary of how to play can follow it once the players have now formed the contrast in their minds of the two games.


The reason it needs to be short is there are many players who will not read newbie guides because they are too long. I read and love them, but many people won't, or simply can't because they don't have time (maybe they have only 30 minutes and are in the middle of a broadcasting a streaming video?). So something really short and quick would be better than nothing at all.

CarRepairer this is not a simple unit guide. It basically tells people the control mechanics that differ from SCII in ZK. People train muscle memory to play games and SCII strongly rewards this. People get into the habit of whacking "A" and clicking when they want to move their army around. I think this page should basically be a quick "muscle memory which is wrong" page. If I had to narrow it down to 3 points it would be these:

• The Attack-Move Hotkeys is F
• Give Attack Orders rarely
• Right+Drag to give Move Orders

These points effectively tell them how the UI is meant to be used. The page does not need to say things which are either easy to discover or completely superfluous for actually playing the game.

The extra sections are much less justifiable. If I had to put one extra thing it would be "Queue Construction". The rest is too gameplay focused. People tend to ignore the economy and just build a bunch of structures. The two 'Game Flow' tips are there because SCII is (at least naively) about discrete expansion, large quick confrontations and dropping the base. Zero-K is quite distinct in that you expand gradually, raid continuously and rarely go for the kill on the base before the game has already been decided by map control.


I have structured the page such that the dot-points are in bold and the nearby text is a short explanation of the points. When you glance at the page you see the bolded points as if they were in list form and then later you can read the explanations behind each.

quote: In ZK, units have a Smart AI that tells them to automatically kite enemies they outrange.

Technically incorrect and does not tell people how to enable/disable.

quote: In ZK, nearly all mobile units can fire while moving.

Easily discoverable and does not give any idea how to control units.

quote: In ZK, the fight command is the same as the attack-move in Starcraft.

You do not define these terms or how to use the hotkeys.

quote: In ZK there is virtually no unit cap (technically there is a hard limit in the range of about 1000 - 5000 but it can be modified by the game host, and it is almost never reached).

This is irrelevant. As in why do they want to know this? It does not actually tell them how to play the game differently or how to control their units.

quote: In ZK you can select as many units as you wish at one time.

SCII has unlimited unit selection. Nobody assumes limited unit selection. This fact is also easily discoverable.

quote: In ZK, you can continue to extract metal and generate energy forever. You are only limited by your storage capacity. The map will never get depleted of metal.

Irrelevant.

quote: In ZK, you can start building any unit or structure at any time without having to have the resources for it in advance. It will slowly drain your resources as you build, and if you run out, the building progress will pause until you have the resources to continue building.

About as lengthy as what I said.

quote: In ZK, you can reclaim corpses to gain metal. Doing so can be just as important to your economy as using metal extractors.

Somewhat irrelevant. This fact will not get them into a game and playing somewhat coherently.

quote: In ZK you can zoom in and out as far as you wish.

Pretty easily discoverable and irrelevant.