With release now less than 24 hours away, I wanted to sit down and write up a “state of the game” post so players know exactly what to expect from the build tomorrow. We feel that transparency with players, especially during early access, to be a paramount factor in our success. Hopefully the only surprises you have will be pleasant ones. :)
If this post doesn’t answer any of your questions - please feel free to hop over to the forums and ask! I’ll be monitoring the forums and will do my best to answer whatever questions come up.
If you’d like to skip the text and just see some previews/streams of the game in action, I’ve included several links at the bottom of this post. Go check them out!
Networking
- Networking is in and functional. We currently suggest a ping of 120ms or less between players in a game. Given the frantic speed and nature of the game, and the volume of active players and enemies We are optimizing for those ping times. This unfortunately means that games that go across the ocean will generally have a degraded/poor experience. There’s only so much we can do to fix this, but we will continue to make improvements where we can.
- Networking currently uses a standard matchmaking/lobby system where you create a party pre-game and play from there. We currently do not support hot joining games in progress, although we would like to get that in at some point in the future.
- Voice chat is currently not supported, a task for investigating initial support is tagged for the first release.
Gameplay
- Basic gameplay, both single and multiplayer have been in for a while now and we’re pretty happy with the core. We will continue to tweak things where we think it’s necessary but what you get in the initial build is solid. (e.g. - we’re looking at is adding a damage state animation to make player damage more evident, and reworking how gun overheat is signaled to try and make approaching the limits more clear.) How this evolves over time will also partially depend on your feedback!
- “Looping” is still in its initial form. If you successfully loop now the levels stay the same but the enemies increase in difficulty and drop increased rewards. Over time we want to improve this by changing enemy compositions and adding additional challenges/objectives.
- Levels have a fairly small number of objectives right now - we’re working on adding more variety in the first update.
- EDIT: I forgot this in the list originally but it's worth adding - the first version does not have a UI for keyboard/mouse configuration. It's *not* hardcoded, there is a file you can edit to change your mapping. But it's certainly not an ideal process. This is tagged for being fixed in one of the first updates.
Content
- Full Zones: 3 - These zones are complete in the sense that the level generation, enemy sets, and bosses are complete. There will be additional things still added to these levels over time was we incorporate new mechanics (e.g. secrets, revisions to enemy behaviors, new enemies/objectives), but they are fully playable in their current state. It’s worth noting that all of the current bosses will definitely evolve over time - we have plans for additional attack states and mechanics to make them feel more dynamic.
- Guns: 21 - These run the gamut from the starting revolver to big guns like the firebuss to sillier guns like the tea gun. This is by no means the final set of weapons, we plan to add more over time.
- Items: 9 - The 9 items currently in the game were a first test to see if non-persistent items made sense as a mechanic at all. We like how they change the game and our testers have as well, so they are now an official mechanic in the game. We’ll be adding more of these going forward, as well as the concept of an “active item” that you press a button to trigger.
- Relics: 23 - The relic system will likely have an overhaul before too long to make relics more interesting as an element of metagame progression, but the existing relics are still perfectly usable.
- Secrets: 0 - Why am I listing this? Two reasons: 1. I want you to know that currently there are no secrets in the game. 2. I want you to know that there *will* be secrets in the game, but we won’t necessarily talk about them in update previews/release notes. They wouldn’t be very secret if we did. Keep an eye out.
Mods
- We’re still working on user mod support, we do *not* consider the game user moddable in this first early access build. We’re working internally to pull more and more data out of the unity/game engine side and into the mods folder, and also doing work on making tools to build mod data more easily. Going forward we will likely start enabling mods in a piecemeal fashion (e.g. character mods, gun/bullet mods, loot mods, all coming online at different times). We don’t currently have an ETA for this - it will partially depend on the demand relative to all the other features that people want in the game and the load of bugs that we get post-launch. But work will continue on it no matter what internally since we are starting to use it for content development.
Gameplay Videos
- Stumpt: Monsters & Monocles #1 (4 local co-op) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuJL-L_qu04
- Sleepcycles: Monsters & Monocles Playlist (single player) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gueic4T478g&list=PLZk-lEc-XW-IYIzujBfFsgTgnitd046vj&index=1
- Wanderbots: Let’s Play Monsters & Monocles (3 player online co-op) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N8s8H7iWqY
Previews/Reviews
- Hey Poor Player: http://www.heypoorplayer.com/2016/08/12/monsters-and-monocles-preview/
- Big Boss Battle: http://www.bigbossbattle.com/preview-monsters-monocles/
- The Insatiable Gamer: http://theinsatiablegamer.com/monsters-monocles-early-access-review/
- Brutal Gamer: http://brutalgamer.com/2016/08/12/monsters-and-monocles-preview/
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the game tomorrow!
- Ryan