Feedback on VZfit Play

[emalafeew]

Your pedaling will still propel you forward when gliding, the A button just attaches your pedaling to lift from flapping. Knowing this is actually important to Gate Race strategy, because gliding does not consume flying energy. You therefore want to fly high quickly when crossing gaps then let go of A button to glide to other side, while still pedaling hard to keep forward velocity.

[Superlith]

Thank you for good explanation! it is important to know. Now I will be peddling while I’m gliding with the A button off. Previously I did not know if I’m getting any benefit peddling while gliding

[Officespaced]

I played a 30-minute session of Thunder Bowl this morning on Quest. I had no "Time Left" value displaying until it hit the "1 Minute Warning" chime and then the seconds displayed/counted down as expected.

[emalafeew]

That's odd, we'll look into after the Bruins game tonight

[CrashFu]

As mentioned in the Play Updates thread, I find that running out of ammo in Winterstan can result in wasting a lot of time looking for an ammo supply. Not so much a problem in Thunderbowl, because the map is small and the ammo resupplies are never far away..

But in Winterstan, you can end up so far away from the ammo supplies that their light beams aren't even visible, in which case it could take minutes to find the nearest one, and more minutes to actually get there. At that point, it would probably be more effective to earning score to just sacrifice your multiplier and let the nearest AI kill you, so you can restart the wave, which is a fairly counter-intuitive strategy.

I guess the easiest solution would just be to put a lot more ammo supplies on the map, right?

An alternate idea, though, would be Small Ammo Boxes added to the powerup pool. Each containing just a few shots. But that might make the large boxes redundant, right? You wouldn't want the player to be able to just sit in one small area and wait for tanks (and ammo) to come to them, so I guess these would have to be rarer than the other power-up types.. IE, if each box had say 3 shots in it, you would want it to take an average of 4 kills for each one you'd find, or something like that. Or even better, if technically possible, the chance of finding one could scale based on the player's current ammo count when getting the kill. Above 50% ammo, it could be a 0% chance. On the player's last shot, it could be a 100% chance.

A third idea is that if the player goes X amount of time (a full minute, maybe?) Without any ammo, it could trigger an ammo box to spawn somewhere close by. If you don't mind the extra work, it could look cool to have the River Run chopper fly overhead and literally drop it off.. but simply poofing one into existence (with a small UI or audio alert) would probably be good enough.

[emalafeew]

I’ll tell you the quick way we had planned to solve this, which is to replace the bonus wave gems with ammo. It’s more thematic than gems and relevant for gameplay.

[Superlith]

I think it is very good idea to replace Gems to Ammo. Thanks CrashFu for constructive input! I just put a positive review for you.

[emalafeew]

Yeah thanks for bringing this need up CrashFu! We should be able to release this quickly to see how it works, or one of your other ideas if it doesn’t.

[spyder17]

Glad Winterstan is back. Like the idea of extra ammo vs Gems as the way the game is now with waves makes it harder after about wave 10. Was one of my favorites in the old version. Just wondering if you have any completely new games in the works? I know that have been discussions and recommendations, and am hoping to see something new coming down the tracks in the not too distant future.

[emalafeew]

The bonus ammo is in now, let me know if it's enough and whether getting all 10 should give you an extra bonus!

As far as new games, we're organizing all the ideas and have begun a few prototypes, but also see a lot more depth that could be added to existing games.

A big question is how much to prioritize multiplayer and social features, for players online at the same time by happenstance or planning. We know that multiplayer can greatly enhance gameplay and motivation to stay exercising. It's still early for VZfit so there's not a lot of online overlap yet but we want to be ready for it.

One of the promising prototypes we started is a Rocket-League-like mode for Tank, which would be team vs team but require a lot of online players and more complicated matchmaking. But it's too early to devote ourselves to something like that before we're even seeing a lot of head-to-head plays. As an incremental step soon, we'd like to notify all online players and watchers of vzfit.com when someone is waiting for a head-to-head match.

We're also looking to expand our appeal beyond pure gamers to casual exercisers interested in technology, who want to give VZfit a shot for being fun, transportive, and convenient. So we're considering games with more direct outdoor analogies, for instance racing a Regatta, skiing, even surfing.

In the short term we think Explorer has the most to gain, by making it even more comfortable for anyone (we're now looking into auto-braking and auto-steering), more game and training modes, and multiplayer. Simply riding with a friend along the same path being able to see and talk to each other could make it twice as compelling, and turn into group rides and spin classes where a leader chooses the path.

That's our current thinking anyway!