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[Dev Note] UI



Hello, Survivors~!

It’s the UI guy here and I’m hijacking the Dev Note this week! Nice to meet you!

Let me start off by saying: The UI is completely changing!

I'm sure you're dying to know more, and unfortunately, I can't tell you too much right now, actually there is ALOT I can’t tell you... but I can say something big is coming, folks. Something so big that we had to completely change the UI....... (Winter is coming!)

So…what the heck is going on?



[h3]The times they are a-changin'... to a new interface.[/h3]
Some of you may notice the signs of change: unfamiliar tooltips or unfamiliar buttons in screenshots we’ve shared. Yes, we haven't released the update yet, but the UI has been changing little by little, right up until the moment we wrote this Dev Note actually. And the reason for these big changes is so that we can incorporate the feedback you've been giving us and fully embrace the new UX that's coming.

ːsteamfacepalmː "I have a really cool idea, but I need to make sure users know about it! Should I use an icon? What color? Will the existing tooltip work? No, is there a way to use that without a tooltip in the first place? How does it work with the other features? And I have to leave the UI to a programmer?!"

The UI you know today was created by a programmer with limited resources in the days before I was around. No easy feat! ːsteamthumbsupː It worked, but as you can see from the ranting above, new things weren't just being added. The old things had to change to keep up, and a new UI was needed for future extensibility and maintainability. We also needed to save a busy programmer from losing his mind!



[h3]Introducing the Changes[/h3]
We're excited to announce the new interface for REMORE: INFESTED KINGDOM!

...But unfortunately, it's not quite finished yet, because it's still a work in progress. Right now, Remore is like a house with rooms that are constantly moving, so if you put up wallpaper, it's going to rip, if you put furniture in, it's going to tip over. It's in a fluctuating state of construction. I'm going to decorate it, put in some pretty nightlights and fluffy dolls, and only after I've verified that there are no problems or inconveniences when I actually use it will I show the end result. It seems the work will never finish!?


[h3]Changing fonts[/h3]
ːsteamsadː "It's tiring to read because it's not very legible. I thought the D-3 on the food was 0-3 at first." - Anonymous User



Pixel fonts look great with the pixel art, so we were torn, but in a game where reading detailed text is very important, it's only right that the text looks good, as you guys have said. So, we tried out some new fonts and settled on one we liked, which is the beginning of a pretty big change, which I'll talk about later, but first I want to show you something.


[h3]일행 정보 탭[/h3]
ːsteamhappyː "I wish the character I’m selecting was more visible." - Anonymous User



Now, whenever you select a character, the Companion Info tab will bounce around and assert itself by saying, "This is the character you selected!" We're adding a lot of things like this to make the UI more responsive to your actions.

We're not just making it more responsive, we're also making it more informative, like our tech tooltips.


[h3]Skill tooltips[/h3]
ːsteammockingː "I would like to see the tooltips reorganized to make sense based on the type of information and priority." - Planner with an Iron Fist



How much "damage" you can do is a big deal. I'm sure you'll agree, but before, “damage” felt like it was getting lost amongst other information. It didn't stand out compared to “Critical Chance”, which stood alone. So, I decided to categorize and divide the information. I thought about how to make damage more visible, and decided to give it a range.

Skills also have some special kinds of damage, like Armor damage or Extra damage to stunned enemies, and if we were to label them all as damage and just lump them together, they’d get muddled. So, we decided to keep it clean and simple, designating general damage and even critical elements as "basic damage information" and making damage the big daddy standing above them all. We did this by increasing the size of the font, which was a decision we had to make after changing fonts, as it was difficult to make subtle changes in font size when we were using pixelated fonts.

We then isolated the condition and effect that happens when the condition is met. (We also added flavor text, which I'm sure some of you will be happy to hear.)


[h3]Next time[/h3]
Checking skills are now less painful and more visible, but then I thought to myself, "Maybe... we could change the way the Skill Tooltip pops up to be better..." Because right now, when it pops up, it blocks the center field of vision. It's hard to look at the Skill Tooltip and see what's happening on the battlefield at the same time.

Also, once you decide to use a Skill, it's hard to consider other Skills until you cancel it!



To improve them, we're making increasingly big changes. The font change opens up a wide range of options, and as a result, most of the main interface will undergo more changes than we've covered here...! We're running out of space, so I'll leave you with a sneak peek at some of what's coming next, as it would be a shame to leave it at that.



[h3]Until next time[/h3]
In this Dev Note, I wanted to let you know that we're listening to you as we make changes to the game. It's because of you that we're able to take the next leap forward, and we hope you'll stay tuned for more.

Thanks for sticking with us and as always we’ll see you next time!!ːsteamthumbsupː
REMORE

[Lab] The Art of Constructing Maps #3



Hello, once again Survivors!

Over the past two weeks, we've talked about how we've been experimenting to create a new standard for making maps. We talked about how we tried to make "Outdoor" style maps to further reinforce the theme, but the playtime was overly long, and how we went back to "Indoor" style maps, but there were divided opinions on the difficulty level.

One of the key things we wanted to deliver in the Early Access combat experience was to "encounter a large number of enemies that feel intimidating" and then "be able to kill them all if you understand and utilize the game's mechanics well enough" - in other words, the "excitement of getting through a seemingly difficult situation" was one of our main goals.

In our earlier experiments, we removed the Caught Mechanic, which made it much easier for players to navigate situations, and the concept of surprised and surrounded increased the amount of unit firepower available to player characters.

While we all agreed that we had created a "simpler, more fun" system, we were divided on what kind of combat experience we wanted to build on it.


[h3]The Battle Debate: “Bland vs Difficult”[/h3]
The argument from those who felt the combat experience was bland was that unless the number of enemies you encountered (assuming you understood the system) was 1.5-2x that of the Early Access version, you wouldn't feel really threatened.
  • Due to the damage bonus of the surprise system, mobs such as Knawers will not have a chance to react if they are successfully surprised.

  • High HP enemies can still be killed within the same turn if they are surrounded by pushing, pulling, etc.

  • Since there is no caught mechanic, if you don't think you can finish an enemy off, you can simply move out of their line of sight and end the turn.

The argument was that given the combat environment above, it's not that hard to clear a stage without taking a single hit with a full understanding of the system, and it's hard to call it "fun" if that's the base experience.

So, the argument was that in order to feel thematically "Threatened" in this situation, there should be a quantity of enemies that you can't possibly take out in a single turn, and that the main combat experience should be how to evade their pressure while still accomplishing your mission objectives and escaping (in fact, the gameplay of the board game Zombicide is close to this feeling).



On the other hand, the "it's still hard" side of the argument was also well-founded.
  • Removing the caught mechanic and introducing the surrounded/surprised systems was to lower the barrier of entry, so making the level design harder to compensate just seems like going back to square one.

  • It takes until mid to late game to fully understand all the mechanics behind surprised/surrounded/out-of-sight to not feel threatened, that shouldn’t be set as the “Standard experience.”

So, we decided to expand the number of testers to get to the bottom of these two issues!

We had limited testing of our experiments to those directly designing the combat system and content, but we decided to bring in others from narrative design and art teams to test the “Real-world” difficulty of our “Threatening" indoor maps.

Since all of our new testers had beaten the Early Access version all the way to the Manor House, they had some idea of what the game was going to be like. We decided to use their ratings as a baseline to see if they thought it was "too hard" or "too bland".

And all 3 testers declared... I wanna throw my pc out the window!

More precisely, the feedback was that there were too many enemies in too small a space, and that the system descriptions they were given in manual form (assuming the place of a tutorial), were not enough to reasonably deal with these battles.


The system for evading enemies once you're out of sight was not intuitive to use (even though it was in the documentation), and even then, you had to create space on the map to utilize it, which was not easy to do when you had a large number of enemies to deal with.

We agreed with the argument that enemies should be less dense and started making a number of maps for "continuous play" based on this.


[h3]The question remains: Is this good enough??[/h3]
Reflecting the shocking (?) results of our last test, we've started mass production of the map with a similar enemy spawn density to the Early Access version.

In total, we created three “Small Size” indoor maps and one “Large Size” map to test the sense of “continuous play” with new character skills and meta-games.



The focus of this build wasn't really on level design or combat experience. Rather, it was a situation where the standard experience of level design needed to be determined quickly in order to test other elements (more on those elements in a separate post!).

The enemy spawn density was scaled down to avoid the "unreasonably large number of enemies making progress seem impossible" situation and was expected to be an appropriate level of difficulty for the maps we would initially offer, with playtime of around 20 minutes for smaller maps.

However, there was still a sense of "is this really going to be good enough?".

The initial approach we tested was "kill as many of the enemies as you can, then move out of their line of sight and avoid attacking this turn", and the problem was that giving players this many enemies right from the start felt too harsh if not used to it.

The problem was that if the game starts with only enemies who are simple to kill, there was no guarantee that they would learn the patterns by the time we got to the mid- to late-game.



This raised a more fundamental question: "Isn't the rule that you can't be attacked no matter how close you are, as long as you're out of the enemy's line of sight, counterintuitive in the first place?", which led us to rethink our system design direction and enemy population criteria.

Then, a simpler solution was proposed: "What if we made the enemies appear in large enough numbers to be a threat, but easier to kill?"


[h3]Let's make lots more come out, and lots more die![/h3]
Up until now, the HP of the most basic monster object in our level design, the Knawer, has changed a lot. Let's say a one-handed ax with WP 1 has an average damage of 3.7,
  • To make them even more zombie-like and difficult to beat, there was also a version with a base HP of 40 (!), so you had to really hit them with all your might or run away,

  • In the early access version, the “Despair” difficulty had a base HP of 15 (which could be killed in 5 attacks on average),

  • After several tweaks, the final "threat test” (version that was deemed too difficult for inexperienced players) had a base HP of 9.

As we watched the testing up to this point, our level designer thought, "Why don't we just make the number of enemies greater and shrink their HP to make them easier to kill?"

The new maps were based on the following principles.
  • Bring back the concept of the abandoned Outdoor Map and organized it into something closer to Medium size

  • Re-utilize elements such as "roamers" and "windows”

  • Introduce as many enemies as the “Threat Test” version, but adjust the HP of the Knawer to 4.

  • "Roamers" will have the same health as the original Knawer (HP 9), with some additional stronger enemies (HP 25+)

  • Varying spawn behavior across buildings, with some buildings spawning tons of enemies and others spawning a small number of stronger individuals

When we removed the out-of-sight evade system from maps designed with the above philosophy, the game surprisingly(?) became much more fun.

  • Enemies are more numerous but easier to kill, making them less unfair.

  • The ability to kill two or three Knawers simultaneously with an AoE skill without necessarily surprising/surrounding them has increased the number of options in combat.

  • At the same time, the value of surprise has increased, as it is now a guaranteed way to kill a Knawer.

  • The threat and risk of not getting the kill has increased, as enemies still deal the same damage and cannot be evaded.

Since it brings the pros of the outdoor theme while greatly improving the drawbacks of being "time-consuming and frustrating" (the average playtime is around 30 minutes, which is longer than the existing "indoor" maps, but a difference of 10 minutes or so would be a more fun experience), the consensus was that this direction was better suited as a standard.

We also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just people who were already familiar with the system that were giving us positive feedback, so we asked people who had dropped out of the initial "Threat Test" version to test it again, and we were pleasantly surprised to get a "100x more fun than last time" rating.

The art team also told us that the outdoor theme was much more appealing and had a lot more room for expression, so we were able to unanimously set the standard for the new map.

This is the end of a long journey of experimentation that we went through to set the standard for our new maps. There were many points along the way where we wondered, "Do we really need to go this far?", and it was hard when the feedback wasn't great, but I'm proud to say that the results were worth the time we invested.

After this, it's time to introduce other elements that build on this standard combat experience, and after this post, I'll be adjusting my posting frequency to every two weeks instead of once a week for the time being.

The first and foremost reason is that the parts I'm going to be talking about are the meta-game and character parts, which are ongoing trials and errors that we've been going through alongside the map changes.

We’ve been enjoying sharing these posts, but now as we get cracking on putting all these changes into the game, there’ll be less time to dedicate to the dev notes. But fear not! We'll return to a weekly post once we're more organized enough to focus on parts of the game outside of the combat experience.

We'll do our best to bring you more polished content and a more compelling look at what we've been working on as soon as it’s ready to rock.

Thanks so much for your patience and trust in us, and we'll see you back in two weeks for another installment!
REMORE

[Ended] Seeking Legendary Survivors - Fiercest Combatant



Greetings Survivors,​

Do you have what it takes to become a Legend?
To have your name etched into the annals of Remore history?

We are seeking Legendary Survivors that have traversed Remore and are capable of pulling off amazing feats. This time we seek... the Fiercest Combatant!

The Legendary Survivor with a Cleared Video of Manor House without using a Single Tool will be Crowned, Fiercest Combatant and will have their Name proclaimed in the Credits of REMORE: INFESTED KINGDOM! Show us your big brain moves!

Become a Legend, Become History!

[Event Period]
Apr 9 ~ Apr 23 (PT)​

[Winner Announcement]
May 2

[Submission Form]
https://forms.gle/iZ9h4TR4xBPDresA9


[Event Details]
Clear a map without using a Single Tool​ (Pebble Tutorial do not count)

[How to Participate Event]
  1. Record a Video of clearing Manor House without using a Single Tool.​

  2. Upload the recorded Video to a server where it can be viewed (YouTube, Google Drive, etc.).​

  3. Fill out Event Submission form (https://forms.gle/iZ9h4TR4xBPDresA9).​

  4. Check that there are no missing or corrected parts in the application before submitting it.​
[Rules]
  1. Please ensure your Video Link is correct. Any issues with the Video Link may cause your application to be void. ​

  2. If you edit the Video in any way to "deceive" the rules, your application may be considered Void.​
    • You may include an Intro and Outro in your Video, but Gameplay Footage of the Event Requirements cannot be altered in any way. ​
  3. The Video should start from the part where you run the saved file. (to check your difficulty)​

  4. Game difficulty should match with submission form.

  5. Winners will be determined in the following priority. ​
    • The higher the difficulty, the more points awarded.
      • Vengeance < Suffering < Despair
    • The higher the map, the more points awarded.
      • Blackthorn Village < Monastery < Tavern < Barracks < Grocery < Manor House
    • Taking fewer or no damage will increase your points.
      • Armor is not calculated.
  6. In an event of a tie, Winner will be chosen by Development Staff.

Thank you,
REMORE

[Patch Note] 0.12.3 Fix7



Greetings Survivors,

We have just made Hot Fix to the build, please check following details

[h3][Change Log][/h3]
  • (User Bug Report) The game freezing after moving "Edwin"(Militia) in a barracks mission.

  • (User Bug Report) An issue where if the player closes the Inventory with the C button while the Weapon Modification UI is active, they may use the materials but the enhancement has not occurred.

Thank you,
REMORE Staff

[Lab] The Art of Constructing Maps #2



Hello, Survivors!

In last week's post, we showed you how we were experimenting with maps for "Outdoor" spaces, and while there were some positive elements we talked about like "Windows" and "Roamers", there were also issues with an overlong playtime and fatigue.

This first version of the outdoor map, dubbed the "X-Large Map", was tested by a group of designers who were familiar with the game's logic but despite that, not a single person besides the level designer himself was able to complete the map (!), the average playtime for testers who were "close" to completing it was over an hour.

The problem was that this version we were testing was not trying to be some high difficulty boss fight, but rather a "standard for general level organization" for a game that would be procedurally generated, so we decided that no matter how thematic the experience, it would be hard to set this as the “standard.”

Solving this problem wasn't straightforward so today we’re going to show you the rest of our experimentation.


[h3]Second Attempt at Outdoor Maps: Reducing Space Size and Adjusting Difficulty[/h3]
The first impression of the “Outdoor” map was definitely a good one, and it fit the tone and theme we were going for, so we started looking for ways to keep its strengths and fix its weaknesses.
  • Reduce the space by about 70% to decrease playtime.

  • Reveal mission objective locations at the start of the map (in our first attempt, we hid mission objectives altogether to give a sense of "exploring uncharted space", unlike in EA).

  • ● Enemies are now more spaced out and have less HP, reducing the amount of time spent in combat.

We named the second outdoor map "Large Map" and made the above changes.



There was a consensus among the dev team that the smaller maps were much more "doable" than the "X-Large" version.

The average playtime for the Large version was between 40 and 50 minutes, and many of our testers were able to complete it with ease. Compared to the X-Large version, the reaction was much more positive.

Except... It was still longer than we were aiming for as the “Standard Experience.” Beyond the simple issue of playtime, there was a lot of feedback about fatigue – “I don't think I'll be able to get through this and then do the next map.”

So, we thought, "What about reducing the size even further?".



[h3]3rd Outdoor Map Attempt: Smallest Size Attempt[/h3]
Actually, before moving to the outdoor maps, there was nothing particularly problematic with the “Indoor” map. The playtime was a decent 20 to 30 minutes, but we had decided to try the outdoor version simply to bring a little more variety and just see how it felt.

After two rounds of testing, the thematic benefits of outdoor maps were clear, but there was a lot of concern: "Are we making the game too inaccessible to keep these benefits?"

So, we tested a version of the outdoor map shrunk down to a similar size as the indoor map, to see if we could reduce playtime and fatigue, while keeping the thematic strengths.

Unfortunately, after testing this version, codenamed “Medium,” we concluded that it was the worst of both worlds.



We needed at least 3 squares per grid to give the outdoor map a "street like" feel, and 5 squares to give it a "spacious" feel, and if we reduced the size of the map while maintaining this street feel, we would end up with too little space for meaningful gameplay/combat.

The way we dealt with “Roamers” was that you had to take risks to get around them, like entering a building to end your turn, which became overly restrictive as the overall space was reduced.

The play of looking through a “Window” to see what's going on in a room and deciding whether or not to enter also felt pointless in a small space, as you'd have to enter every room anyway.

Eventually, we realized that the "Outdoors" theme would not allow us to use small-sized maps, so we wondered which direction we should go.


[h3]Back to the “Indoor Map”[/h3]
We’re summarizing the process here, but in any case, experimenting had already gone on for so long that we were nervous about continuing in uncertainty.

We knew that we wanted to use a combat system centered around the "Surprise" and "Surrounded" systems, but we needed to decide quickly on "What kind of combat experience do we want to provide through that system?" so that the art team and other parts of the team could work smoothly.

So, we tentatively decided, "Let's just say we never tried an outdoor map," and started designing the final experience with an indoor map style in mind.



The overall room size and design philosophy was similar to the first indoor map, and we experimented with removing the “Windows” and see if we could keep the “Roamer” element.

Also, the first indoor map had a level design that assumed mid-to-late gameplay for a moderately skilled player, with a "very large number of enemies" to navigate through, so we experimented with reducing the number of enemies, as feedback from the first version suggested that the experience of being trapped in a small space was frustrating.



The first indoor maps were designed to encourage players to take advantage of situations like the one above, where there were a large number of enemies that were "virtually impossible to defeat" and you had to "minimize your route" to get to the mission objective and then escape. We added the "stay out of sight (to avoid being attacked next turn)" rule to encourage players to take advantage of this.



On the new indoor maps in contrast, we've adjusted the enemy placement to a "I can kill them all" density compared to the initial build, assuming you're not yet familiar with the game.

At this point, once the combat experience was finalized, we planned to start commissioning full-fledged map objects from the art team to match the new narrative.

However... while the actual playtime was at the targeted level of 20 minutes and fatigue was not an issue, the feedback that the combat experience felt flat after reducing the number of enemies was too much to ignore.

The opinion was split between "this is appropriate for the early stages when you're not familiar with the game" and "it's still a problem if the game feels boring early on".

Again, we had to make a decision, whether the issue was "the team members who are constantly testing new maps are too familiar with the game and suffer from the curse of knowledge" or "we haven't yet found the right balance between tension and difficulty” ...

Fortunately, we've come to a pretty positive conclusion on this issue, but this post is already longer than intended, and there are a few more episodes that I don't want to skip over, so I'm going to save the final conclusion for next week.

Looking back at this post, we went back and forward a lot, but it's an important part of the process, so I think it was worth explaining in detail.

We'll be back next week with an introduction to our finalized map criteria!

Until then!
REMORE