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Hammerwatch Discussion / Some comments
« on: January 11, 2014, 04:28:12 PM »
Hello guys,
I absolutely adore this game as I really wished for something like this to exist back when I was younger and now I am finally able to play my childhood dreams, so thank you Hipshot and Myran! It has been two weeks since I got the game and I still cannot get enough of it, it's oddly meditative and relaxing so most of my free times goes into playing Hammerwatch now.
Now, today I played the game on my laptop to test out how it is with the keyboard. Until now I had been playing it on a 24" monitor with a gamepad and enjoyed it completely but seeing how much people complain about the keyboard controls and the game not starting up on their laptops, I was worried that it might not work on my laptop once I'm at work.
The results... Well, I am amazed that the game runs flawlessly on my nearly 6 year old laptop that lags on its own already, so you guys have achieved quite something in backwards compability!
Now, to the comments. I tried the keyboard controls for the first time myself today and I have to say they work well, but I prefer a little rebinding. When I played the game locally with a friend, he had the keyboard to himself and he never complained about the controls, but I have to agree with some people that the keyboard controls are a bit unintuitive. For example, I was weirded out by the directional movement keys being mapped to WASD on default and not to the arrow keys as most of the games of the era that this game owes its legacy to used arrow keys for movement and it felt a lot better. WASD came around when the mouse was integrated to gameplay mechanics for more convenient control, but the mouse is not used in this game so may I ask why did you map it to WASD by default? This game is much more comfortable to play with the arrow keys for movement and in instance z, x, shift, space, alt, ctrl and tab for the attacks, strafes, potions etc... This might be personal preference but I would suggest towards setting the default direction mappings to resemble an old game's keyboard layout and less like a gamepad's as the arrow keys are not that comfortable to use for attacking (as others have stated, the finger strain is quite bad that way).
My second question is whether you have any plans of implementing steam cloud to the game in order to share saved games between computers. Since I work far away from home I forgot to take my saves with me manually and regretted it later on, but it is not that big of a gripe. Steam cloud support would be nice for saved games but then again implementing it would take away that old school feel of having to transport save games!
All in all, I admire the work you have put into the game and I take my hat off to you guys!
~Keppler
I absolutely adore this game as I really wished for something like this to exist back when I was younger and now I am finally able to play my childhood dreams, so thank you Hipshot and Myran! It has been two weeks since I got the game and I still cannot get enough of it, it's oddly meditative and relaxing so most of my free times goes into playing Hammerwatch now.
Now, today I played the game on my laptop to test out how it is with the keyboard. Until now I had been playing it on a 24" monitor with a gamepad and enjoyed it completely but seeing how much people complain about the keyboard controls and the game not starting up on their laptops, I was worried that it might not work on my laptop once I'm at work.
The results... Well, I am amazed that the game runs flawlessly on my nearly 6 year old laptop that lags on its own already, so you guys have achieved quite something in backwards compability!
Now, to the comments. I tried the keyboard controls for the first time myself today and I have to say they work well, but I prefer a little rebinding. When I played the game locally with a friend, he had the keyboard to himself and he never complained about the controls, but I have to agree with some people that the keyboard controls are a bit unintuitive. For example, I was weirded out by the directional movement keys being mapped to WASD on default and not to the arrow keys as most of the games of the era that this game owes its legacy to used arrow keys for movement and it felt a lot better. WASD came around when the mouse was integrated to gameplay mechanics for more convenient control, but the mouse is not used in this game so may I ask why did you map it to WASD by default? This game is much more comfortable to play with the arrow keys for movement and in instance z, x, shift, space, alt, ctrl and tab for the attacks, strafes, potions etc... This might be personal preference but I would suggest towards setting the default direction mappings to resemble an old game's keyboard layout and less like a gamepad's as the arrow keys are not that comfortable to use for attacking (as others have stated, the finger strain is quite bad that way).
My second question is whether you have any plans of implementing steam cloud to the game in order to share saved games between computers. Since I work far away from home I forgot to take my saves with me manually and regretted it later on, but it is not that big of a gripe. Steam cloud support would be nice for saved games but then again implementing it would take away that old school feel of having to transport save games!
All in all, I admire the work you have put into the game and I take my hat off to you guys!
~Keppler