Hi Spoon. I’ve been thinking about your big post. And now I have one for you
Overall I’m warming to the idea now. The idea that you can make Wings of Dawn 1 be the best it can be with the new skills you’ve learned. I expect then you’ll go back to WoD2, but I would hope if not you would release anything that would not be seen, artwork, story work, ships, etc. Maybe you could even merge the two and the JGASF suddenly gets a load of new Cyrvans. It seems the Cyrvan females seem to be the warlike ones, doesn’t it. One Cyrvan male to 11 Cyrvan females seen so far.
At first I wondered if you could just pull off a quick and dirty fix by hitting the Aestivals with the nerf bat, but I can see you’ve got bigger plans than that, and especially if you built the campaign to pretty much revolve around the Ray III, that would still, even if the Cyrvan nerf took care of the immediate problems, have the potential to rear it’s head as a problem later, so root and branch rebalancing is for the best if you want to fulfil your ambitions.
I have recently been looking at the Diaspora stuff, and it sounds like you might be doing similar to them. And really that seems a great way to go for a standalone. It’s not good for a normal campaign, because it means cluttering up your limited space with many pilots, I’ve already had to make a folder to store excess pilots because I’ve maxed out my pilot limit. But for a standalone, that probably won’t be a problem even if we have to create double digits of pilots because the pilot folder is clean and you get to start over. And back to my original point it allows the creator to get instalments of praise and motivation to keep going, and also feedback to potentially discover flaws or perhaps agree with and implement suggestions which otherwise would be missed. And of course, we also get to get our hands on stuff earlier.
On making it easier, since I had to scrape through the last few missions on very easy, I’m not going to complain. However, there’s a way you could do both. There’s a game on PS2 I have called Battle Engine Aquila that has a great concept I’ve only seen in that game, you can unlock “Evo” (Evolution) missions, which are essentially rebalanced versions of existing missions. Basically there’ll be a lot more enemies on the battlefield, they’ll probably have taken some of your allies out as well, and might even have tweaked the mission objectives in some, I can’t remember. So if you did that, you’d have the best of both Worlds. If the way you made WoD is the level you like to play at, you wouldn’t have to lose that experience that way. Great game by the way people, I’d recommend checking it out.
I will certainly be glad to see the back of that final mission!
On the Ray III’s single primary bank, I always thought that was precisely because of the armour types! I figured you had to choose, figure out which gun would be most useful, and take it into battle. That the armour types were precisely why you couldn’t have two guns. And also the fact some guns chew shields way better than hull and vice versa. There were some missions where I did plenty of deliberating over which gun to take.
I basically thought the Kaze and Caliburn sucked. I didn’t take either of them. Pretty much for the reasons you say.
Maybe you can also get that Hazel bomber into the game. I did some testing with that and I see why you left it out, it just obliterates everything. Kit out the JGASF with Hazel bombers and the game would be a cakewalk.
So you’re going to redesign all the missions. Will there be any new ones? Or will they be redesigned so much that they actually feel new?
I am looking forward to the development of the minor characters. I actually preferred from what information I had, the personalities of both Kunoichi and Axe to any of the main characters. So I’m looking forward to seeing them the most. I will certainly jump enthusiastically into the visual novel sequences. There will be no skipping from me there. Yet at the same time, in a repeat play through, the skipping may become welcome.
Unique opponents is something that can especially spice things up. I take it you mean aces and commanders to contend with who have faces and talk to you?
Fun. I like fun. Games should be fun above all else. WoD is fun
I’m not so keen on branching storylines in FS2, because of the inflexibility of the pilot system. In order to see everything and replay changed missions/new missions I’d have to keep creating new pilots in order to do so. If you could fix that somehow, bring it on. If not, you might want to think about it a bit. I would normally favour branching paths if not for the reasons I stated.
Morale system, if you implement it I hope you would let us know what state of morale the people are in, rather than leave us to guess. I really don’t like hidden stats like that.
The stuff for WoD2 that you showed us really makes me want to play it…
Could you tell us anything about the Cyrvans? At least what their names are if nothing else. It looks like you would have played as Isa, is that right? Or might you have played as several, as in WoD1?
On the wiki and Tvtropes, that doesn’t have to be overwritten. Treat the current WoD as a separate game to the new one. Maybe give it a tweaked name, to separate it from it’s predecessor. A bit like how the Dynasty Warriors games use the same story every game but are a different game.
Well there we go. I’ve said my piece. Good luck with it Spoon. I hope it goes well for you and becomes everything you want it to be.
