Initial critique

[Indigno]

Right off the bat I'll say that I've only been playing this game for about a day, now. It has a lot of potential, and I am already addicted. There are, however, several issues that are significantly impairing user enjoyability. I understand that the overall point of this game is to be somewhat tedious, time-consuming, and frustrating (in a good way) in order to stress survivalist theme, and I like it for this reason. However, there are several issues with the controls, GUI, and overall interactivity that seriously inhibit the enjoyability of the game that I have noticed just in the last 24 hours of play that is likely turning away a lot of potential new players (I have not been turned away, btw, I enjoy the challenge, but there is an important difference between a challenging game and flawed gameplay) [Also, know that these notes are coming from a mix of both the original as well as the Ender client]


1) Interaction between the player character and environmental objects is far too precise.

By this I mean that the distance that the player has to be from an object such as a fire, a storage unit (basket, crate), or a construction site (or construction sign post) is set too short to be fun. While dying a few times when first starting this game is part of the fun, it isn't fun to finally get past that point where you consistently die 3 minutes into the game, but instead manage to triumphantly catch your first rabbit, snap its neck, butcher it, and get a roaring fire going right when you are at the brink of starving to death only to have the game tell you in angry red text that you can't cook your meat without a fire even though your character is clearly standing next to one.

This is an issue that gets a little less frustrating with more play time, but it seems like one that really shouldn't need to take any sort of adaptation on the players' part, especially since the environment is tile-based. Now, I get that you may want to keep the player from feeling like they are restricted to any kind of grid system, which I can agree with, but you can allow free range of the player's avatar while still maintaining the isometric environmental grid.

In other words, you have a tile-based game, make the tiles work for you, not against the player. Make it so that things such as fire pits are automatically acknowledged by the game as being within range of the player. If the player's avatar is within the 8 tiles surrounding the tile that a lit fire pit is placed in, then have the variable for whether or not fire is available be set to "yes" (or a positive boolean or however it's coded) and then either animate a few extra sprites for different angles or even just have the player's avatar jump to a set place for the cooking animation until it becomes feasible to start concentrating on things like smoother graphics. At this point, some jumping sprites would be far less jarring and would disrupt the immersion of the game less than the player having to alt-tab or log out of the game in order to check online guides several times just to keep trying to figure out how to approach a fire at the right angle to cook a rat.


2) Construction issues

The interaction between the player and construction sites is also somewhat strenuous, as the new player will often times attempt to build a new object (a leanto) and will place a sign. Now, the first time the player plays through, a simple pop-up at this point would be helpful to tell the player that they need to shift-click items in their inventory top add to the construction site to start the build, but unfortunately, they get no such cue. So they will try to click-drag, right click-drag, double-click, etc... until they go to the forums, and even here the instructions are very vague and it takes a bit of digging and reading to figure it out. But even without throwing in a pop-up tutorial, one thing that would help greatly would be to not make the construction sign disappear immediately if they don't have any building materials shift-clicked over right away. I understand that it's not wise to let these signs be permanent in order to prevent griefing, but even setting a 5 minute timer on construction sites without building materials would help the new player understand that they need to somehow bring pieces over, especially if there was some sort of timer and/or label that appeared over the materials list when the player avatar right-clicked the construction sign. It also would help the intuitiveness a great deal to label the "x/x/x" system as "required/ received/ built" as right now it doesn't make hardly any sense to the new player.


3) Pathfinding AI needs to be implemented

I know the game is in alpha, so I won't really harp on this one too much, but it does hamper the immersion a lot when the characters gets caught up on every little corner of every stump, tree, and rock tile in their path. Even just having the characters attempt to wiggle up or down a bit around corner obstacles would help instead of just stopping in their tracks would help a great deal.


4) Cliff edge-detection

This one may just be me, but I have had a hell of a time trying to build fences that end along cliff faces without leaving gaps. The fence subroutine obviously seems to detect that it is possible to build another segment in the direction leading right up to the cliff face, as it offers to do so (south, north, east, west), but as soon as the character tries to walk up to it, it hits either the fence or the cliff and then the hit detection kills the construction. I've tried this from every angle, in different spots, from both sides, I've tried ending it in corner posts, and even tried going through the regular build menu and just dropping the starter 10-branch corner-post in these locations to close off these cliff faces with no luck. No matter what I do, I seem to be able to slip in around the edge of the cliff's edge. The only option I seem to have left is enclosing the entire cliff face. In my case, this isn't a huge deal, as it's a fairly small one, but some of these suckers can go on pretty far. This is on a flat edge, too, so this tells me that the hit boxes for the cliffs are either too big or too small. They either don't leave enough space for the player to construct a fence segment without their hit-detection cancelling it, or they leave too much space that allows intruders to breeze right on through.


5) Overall Hit-detection

A lot of the terrain's hit detection just needs work. Felling trees will often lead to logs falling in places that are damn-near impossible to reach, such as parallel to cliff-sides or stuck through boulders. It makes sense if they fall into places such as deep water, but if they fall onto a cliff edge, then they should roll down to the low ground beneath it, not just balanced on edge, and if they land on boulders, then the same should apply. This is a minor complaint, but is still frustrating if you just spent time dropping a tree just to have the logs fall somewhere that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

More than this, though, is just that I often find myself fighting between a game that is clearly tile-based and one that has hit-boxes, which I think anyone will understand if they have tried running away from a bear only to get caught up on the tiniest pixel of stump root and have had the character stop in their tracks, decide to ignore the player's commands to move, and have a picnic while they wait to be eviscerated by a bear. Which would be fine, except that then you realize that everything your suicidal character just spent 9 hours building has to stick to a strict isometric grid.


6) Grabbable/ pickup-able/ equipable items on the ground

You are starving, walking through the forest. suddenly, you spot a rat. Not much of a meal, but it beats a taproot. You go after it, and as you get to it, it walks behind a tree. Well, fuck. You can wait for it to come out, but come on, this is an mmoRPG, the rpg standing for ROLE PLAYING GAME. It's a bit of an immersion-breaker to have something go behind another object and suddenly become completely inaccessible. I have Ender's client, so I can still SEE the rat's outline behind the tree, but I still can't really click it. So I'm stuck right clicking over and over at the general outline, just hoping that one of the clicks will hit the rat, or else I'm waiting for the bastard to come out in the open. Even more frustrating if it's a rabbit, which doesn't really afford you the opportunity of waiting it out, as it will take off outrunning you as soon as you right-click it in such a way that startles it.

The worst, though, is if you happen to be standing behind something like a basket, crate, or something else in your base while you're butchering or otherwise breaking something down in your inventory that breaks down into something that takes up more slots than the item being destroyed (rabbit, wood block) or if you just have a full inventory, since the current system can't yet handle replacing current items with new items on the fly for some reason), and then all this stuff drops out of your inventory automatically and is stuck behind the large item you were standing behind. Now, you can click like hell and pick this stuff up after a bit, or if it's furniture you can move it and get at it, but it's still annoying.

The worst is if you are standing in a pile of stuff on the ground already when you have this happen. You drop something valuable in the middle of a pile of logs or soil or something. Now the only way to get your item back is to right click every single item back up, move over a few tiles, drop it off, and repeat until you find it again.

This is probably the only case where I will ever say that Runescape got this part right (this is me remembering from circa 2007-ish) Overall, their RPG system is pretty crappy, but their point-and-click system is fairly straight-forward when it comes to their drops. In RS you have to right click the drops, and then a small drop-down menu pops up with a list of all the items on the ground available for pick-up, as well as a "pick-up all" button. You are already part-way there, as you have your players right-click to collect drops and items on the ground, adding a simple drop-down menu to help specify between options would help greatly, especially since this system is basically already implemented already in the way that players interact with the environment (trees), just in a more elliptical, "the sims"-style menu. The problem of items being stuck behind large items could also be solved this way, since a menu pops up, anyways. Large objects such as trees already take up much more space than the tiles they occupy, so there must be some sort of hit-detection going on, so if they are over-lapping, then it wouldn't take too much more code to add an additional menu option on top of items such as trees and boulders to access items on the ground behind them.


7) Overall controls

I know by now that this will be a moot point, as there is already a decently dedicated fanbase, and I know that I will be ripped up for this, but really, these controls are awkward as hell. I mean, the basic point-and-click is fine. What gets me is the odd inclusion of the ctrl and shift keys. I know that the ctrl is largely optional, but it's very tedious without it, which means that basically the only real required button is the shift key. Why? I mean, I may be mistaken in this, but as far as I can tell, the only way to add construction materials to a construction site is to hold shift while clicking them in your inventory (next section for elaboration). but my question is this, why have an entire game be point-and-click based with the exception of one button? It's a common theme I'm seeing here:

The hit detection is all over the place for a point-and click, but if the controls were [WASD/ up, down, left, right] + mouse - based (or at least optional) then having those kinds of obstacles would make more sense. The item pick up is awkward, but if the character movement was directionally-controlled (keyboard/ D-pad) it would make more sense, too. Same thing for the fire pit problem, if this were a game controlled by a D-pad or a keyboard, where the computer had to decide which areas of the screen the player is attempting to interact with based on which direction the character is facing, even though this game is mouse-controlled.

As it stands, it just feels weird to have my pinky on the ctrl key and the ring finger on the shift key at all times while playing without much else going on. Even if the WASD keys just panned the camera around a limited ways around it would be nice just to balance out the way the game feels on the left hand. Between the controls, the UI, the hitboxes, and the overall interaction, I just get the general impression that the game can't quite decide what platforms it's working off of and what sort of control scheme it wants to settle on.


8) Documentation

It's an alpha, I know. But, listen, when I'm required to dig for 20 minutes in a forum just to figure out the basic keyboard controls, there's a problem. Listen, Fan-based documentation can be done very-well, look at Minecraft. However, even minecraft has the controls listed right away in the options menu. Not having your basic control scheme simply laid out on your main web site (not posted on your forum by your fans, the forum is a good place for a fan-posted beginners guide, not fundamental game controls) or even included somewhere within the game itself is inexcusable. You don't have to include an encyclopedia with the game, but a simple, one-page control layout that pops up the first time the character creation screen comes up along with a simple button that leads to it from the options menu is all you need. Again, minecraft is a good format. Just tell the player how to move, navigate menus, start a construction project, pick up items, etc. not even a tutorial, just an optional control help page. Basic stuff, and make it easy to get to right off the bat.



These are all just some suggestions. I don't want to sound like I don't like Haven and Hearth, I really do so far. If I didn't like it, I would have deleted it and moved on. I'm only typing this up because it's so very, very close to being outstanding. I also understand that it is very much in the alpha stages of development, and I know that some or all of this stuff may already be in the works. I think that the game has fantastic potential, and that all of the key elements are already there, all it really needs is some polishing of the UI and implementation. Keep up the good work, I'll keep getting my ass kicked on the server.

[NOOBY93]

You're just supposed to rightclick the lit fire, not stand next to it.

[bitza]

also there should be bridges

[GrapefruitV]

While I agree there are some problems with basic actions and simple kind of tutorial in game would be great for beginners, you need to know that atleast to improve your current experience:

1. As Nooby already said, you supposed to right click it, you can do it from any distance as long as you can see it.
2. It might be annoying, but you're getting used to it fast, besides pretty much all custom clients show material required to build/craft something. There is a small bug allowing you to place sign without materials and it widely exploited in combat, would be only worse if staying for 5 minutes was intended.
The best way to operate materials is shift+wheel, some custom clients also allow to place all the materials of one kind in one click.
3. Pretty much all custom clients have pathfinding.
4. Cliffs aren't walls, don't build by the cliffs. Also you can hide cliffs to see hitboxes (not sure about ender, but in other clients you can)
5. You can see outline in standart client too and you can interact with objects behind other objects, it's just often turning into pixel hunting, when more than 2-3 objects are involved. You can hide trees in all the custom clients.
I didn't really get how you imagine replacement old items with new ones should be working (and why), but the best way to go with butchering and such is fill your inventory > stop > put everything in the container > start butchering again. When you'll get merch robe and sacks it won't be so annoying, since you're inventory will be almost a cupboard size. Again - you can hide logs.
7. Some clients have WASD and/or arrows control, just saying, doesn't change much what you've said.

And check this out.

[Indigno]

The issue isn't lighting fires, the issue is having the client recognize that you are standing near enough to a fire when you are attempting to cook with it, a fix which could easily be fixed by either increasing the threshold detection radius or making the engine detect how close you are to a fire based on your tile location rather than the current clunky system.

As to the other specific responses, GrapefruitV, I know that most of these are issues that quite easy to get used to, my point is that many of these reflect clunky coding and design that is to be expected in alpha-stage game development, which is why I'm pointing them out. I am getting used to them, I also got used to making automated minecart systems using the side-by-side minecart booster glitch in the beta versions of minecraft. I'm not saying that any of these issues make this a bad game, I'm just saying that they are issues that should be addressed. Saying that some of these issues are fixed in a few different custom clients is an OK temp fix, and I like that the developers are taking an open-source mentality to all of this, but it still doesn't fix some of the fundamental flaws with the game. Custom clients should not be the default way to play a game, the default way to play the game should be the developer-supported client and should be broadly user-friendly. EIther that or the main web site needs to be clearer to an outside audience that the only real centralized coding takes place on the server, with the fans being left with the responsibility of putting out decent clients.

It's done to a certain extent, now, except that the main site resources really only refer the new user to click the banner to start the game. The forum stickies link to the custom clients, but if I hadn't heard about this game from someone who was already a part of the community, then I probably would have fumbled around with the standard client for a lot longer than I did.

As for "you really shouldn't build next to a cliff" well, yeah. That's my point. There's no reason for that, the hit detection and fence-building mechanics just need to be tweaked so that you can. Things like not being able to seal a fence off against a natural wall is not a gameplay mechanic, it is an issue that needs to be tweaked. This MMO prides itself on realistic survival and resource management, well, taking advantage of things such as natural barriers is something that absolutely falls in line with that idea.

Also, I know that I can pixel hunt and click around to try and find items behind others. I even mentioned being able to see the outlines in my client. I said that doing this was annoying and that a fix for this was fairly easy and suggested a way that this could be implemented. Me mentioning dropping items was just me setting up the scenario of why I was accidentally dropping items. I'm still finding new items in this game, and some items break down into items that take up more inventory slots than the items that they started out as. I wasn't complaining about this aspect, I was complaining about the pixel-hunting and the awkward item pick-up system.


Basically: Yes, I am getting used to these things. I know there are outlines, I figured out how to cook, I have a custom client. I'm not asking for help, here. These are all issues that I had and found my own work-arounds or got used to, what I'm saying is that from a coding and design perspective, I shouldn't have had to. I know this is an indie game in the alpha stages, I'm just trying to give a bit of constructive criticism. As for the good things, I love the moderator-free atmosphere, the permanent death system, the resource scarcity, the survivalist theme, the way that your character starts out so completely and utterly helpless, the way that the ants make the same sound as hydralisks do in starcraft when they attack, the way that crime is not only tolerated, by actually coded into the game, and so much more. That aside, if you are going to say that your game is in the alpha stages, then that means that the creators know that there are still problems and want them to be pointed out, and just pointing to custom clients isn't helping the game become any better overall.

[Tonkyhonk]

That aside, if you are going to say that your game is in the alpha stages, then that means that the creators know that there are still problems and want them to be pointed out,

what you should realize is that this game being alpha doesnt mean they are asking every new player to point out the same already discussed tiny issues over and over. i dont really mean to discourage you, but there are just too many new players trying to "teach" devs what have already been discussed repeatedly without checking out what has been said in the past, although we are all aware that there are just too many that it would take you ages to actually browse them all.
sometimes it is nice to revive some already discussed issues, but please remember that most things have already been pointed out years ago and been talked about. devs are still pondering on some of the oldest suggestions made in the past, like in 2009 :p (because most of the important things brought up were already brought up back then.)

and just pointing to custom clients isn't helping the game become any better overall.

im sure they know that (to be fair, they never officially point you to custom clients, they just dont condemn them) and we all do too, but still, the bigger priority has been the game contents - right now recoding the whole game from a scratch for some fixes they feel they need before adding anything big up - for many players and we would rather want devs to work on contents than messing with ui or tiny clicking issues, unless they are going to release it as an official game soon.

[Oddity]

then have the variable for whether or not fire is available be set to "yes" (or a positive boolean or however it's coded) and then either animate a few extra sprites for different angles or even just have the player's avatar jump to a set place for the cooking animation until it becomes feasible to start concentrating on things like smoother graphics.

Why do people feel the need to be specific about implementation details?

More than this, though, is just that I often find myself fighting between a game that is clearly tile-based and one that has hit-boxes

Hitboxes are necessary to prevent mobs/players from walking through other objects, by definition. The problem is that your character won't automatically move a few pixels to the side and continue walking on their path.

I have Ender's client, so I can still SEE the rat's outline behind the tree

That's a feature in the default/official client.

as far as I can tell, the only way to add construction materials to a construction site is to hold shift while clicking them in your inventory

You can hold shift and use the mouse-wheel to scroll them in, as with all containers. (Hold Ctrl+Shift to sort by quality)

[overtyped]

also there should be bridges

[Massa]

also there should be bridges

[NOOBY93]

The issue isn't lighting fires, the issue is having the client recognize that you are standing near enough to a fire when you are attempting to cook with it, a fix which could easily be fixed by either increasing the threshold detection radius or making the engine detect how close you are to a fire based on your tile location rather than the current clunky system.

You're supposed to rightclick the >>>>>LIT!!!!!!<<<<< fire, not stand next to it. Goddammit. I shall say this only 2 times.
Also, I think cliff jumping was a pretty cool bug, most people can climb up or down a cliff IRL. Not sure why you should be able to use it as a wall... Considering you can't break one, it's the same as using statues as walls I think.
And those villages got nuked. :3
(yes, even some "legal" ones that had one tiny spot in which you can place a ram, lol)