Test Discussion Episode 30: Injustice System

LOL,

You're right. If you they use the colon. Then whoever should not be using the commas.

It should look like this if colon is used.

Charged with:
a.
b.
c.
d.
etc...................................

It just looks more professional and it will make it easier for people to understand. The commas make it look lake a hot mess.

Thanks for looking into those issues Charon. I'm just trying to point out confusing issues, bugs, or things that may seem a bit unfair to the player.

The change to the bomb messaging in the Owlman fight helped out. The random group I was playing with got the disarm feat.

Regarding the Judge, Jury, and Executioner fight, the "Underground Abilities" mechanic seems underutilized and feels like it can be completely ignored in its current iteration. Players are mostly focused on the bailiffs, guillotine VFX, the highly mobile bosses, and being jailed. There is a lot of messaging about the Underground Abilities, but you just don't see it very often. During the times you do see the special abilities, they don't seem to pose much danger.

The idea behind the Underground Abilities is interesting, but it just doesn't play out very well for the version of Injustice System that is currently on Test.

Honestly, the profile abilities is more of a flavor thing to support some of the deep lore on Earth 3 (along with the items I made in the evidence locker). It may make it more difficult but it's not anything you can avoid. At best, most likely, players can figure out when each of the guys do their download and time the health thresholds to make sure they don't deal with all profiles at once. Even then, it's just special attacks that are fairly common from the Iconics referenced.

They do now happen sooner and more frequently so they will be seen more at least.

Another visual change that's been there since the beginning is that they get auras that match the profile in use (mostly, Grundy has green... for life... I guess, since white was taken for Lady Sonar).

Questions/Feedback
All of these are related to the Judge, Jury, and Executioner Fight from today's patch. All my comments/feedback will be related to this video:


1. It is possible to pull the mobs from the previous room into the boss fight. One member of the group started to attack a hallway group just as another walked in the boss room. At ~24 seconds, one member of the group immediately gets damaged to half health and knocked into the bosses.

Not a game-breaker, but I can see that issue coming up a lot. Someone starts to damage a mob group in the hallway while another group member walks into the boss room.

2. At 52 seconds, you'll see "Downloaded Grodd's profile!" appear in large letters across the center of the screen. At 53 seconds, "Downloaded Zazza'as profile!" appears in small white text. All of the profile downloads after Grodd uses the small white text. I missed everything that appeared in the small white text when I was playing. Is that working as intended? That white text is easy to miss in the middle of the battle.

3. At 1:02, the Executioner uses a Grodd attack that instantly kills our CR 224 DPS. Is that intended? That attack didn't even have a skull on it.

4. One of the problems in this fight at the moment is that you don't know which boss downloaded which ability. That can be a problem if you get multiple bosses below the 50% mark at about the same time. You can't determine which ability a boss is using until you see it do some special attacks. Can anything be done to signal which NPC is downloading which ability?

5. I don't know if the string table has been updated for the current Test build, but you can see the "We find you in contempt! Bailiffs!" subtitle at 1:01. The audio doesn't include the "Bailiff" portion.

6. Should it be possible to counter the Lady Sonar Sonic Shout? The player version of the Sonic Shout can be countered.

7. I'm liking this version of the fight more than what we saw previously. The ability download mechanic is better utilized and poses a danger to the group now. I think a couple of issues (#2 and #4) related to messaging would help to clarify the mechanics.

1) I'll look into what options there are on that.

2) I actually changed all of them to be a blue text that's larger and sticks out more than the system messages they inadvertently used before (other than the first Grodd one which was a re-use of the original messaging node). Let me know how the blue text looks when that goes up next.

3) I have to look into that. It's an old ability line and it's been used in this fight before, but as you seen, I bumped up the availability of the attacks. I'll do a pass on them and at the very least Skullify them as needed since they are all firing sooner and more frequently in most cases. Let me know which other ones crop up that you feel needs review.

4) There has always been a visual element to which profile they've downloaded. I used the only effect that can't be culled out by clients and that's an appearance item aura like players have access to. We're limited to a very base amount tho, no cool ones like you guys get. The only one that's a bit similar is the purple and violet one - Grodd and Star Sapphire respectively.

I'm going from memory here at home but it should be:

• Judge - Lady Sonar = white aura
• Judge - Star Sapphire = violet aura (some could argue purple...)
• Executioner - Grundy = green (for life as his backstory deals with sudden life instead of undeath on this Earth and Sonar had white already, I could try black if I can find one not over the type and not require a client change)
• Executioner - Grodd = purple (definitely a different hue than Sapphire but.. different models should help distinguish who has what)
• Juror - Queen Bee/Zazzala = yellow
• Juror - Q-Ranger = indigo (closest thing I could find to Quantum that we had access to for these types of models)

I had wanted to change all their swooshes to match while the profile in question was downloaded, as a stretch goal, but it was a massive undertaking. I'll brainstorm some more on it and see if it can be done.

Basically sword swooshes, bullets, etc. would have the same tint say purple for Grodd, etc. I have to say this is probably unlikely since there was no good, cost effective way to do it but I did want it from the start so will look into it again. If it requires any client changes then it's a no go for launch.

So worst case, the auras you see that don't get culled. Best case the auras + swoosh/FX tints. It just reinforces the auras however so if you know what to look for with auras, that's a start.

5) I noticed that didn't go into the build in time along with other changes. I fixed it shortly after but it'll be in the next build.

6) It's using the Iconic version from Black Canary so I'll have to check.

7) Thanks and thanks for the feedback! There is even more VO spacing coming so hopefully it'll be a bit more controlled chaos incoming.

No idea if this have been reported yet, but in the owlman fight when u need to knock him off his perch, the gargoyle statue destroys but owlman remains on his invisible perch not re-engaging the group
Edit: resetting the fight fixed this issue but I'm not sure what caused it to glitch in the first place

I haven't seen that one yet on the forums or internally. I went ahead and just added some backup measures to have the transition occur by force if it hasn't yet naturally when the gargoyles get destroyed. Thanks for the report.

Mobs in that hallway, including the drone will reset when the camera is triggered.

Put a skull on that attack. The attack also makes him vulnerable to lunge.

The Sonic Shout doesn't have a counter to it but the Sonic Spin attack now does and also has a Skull on it.

I've gone through and made sure that each profile has at least one lungeable attack.

Hey Penryn,

I think you just did.... =)

Concerning the Oxford comma, I personally use it for most of my "print" work because I can control the margins, spacing, and font on the page. However, after working in games for the better part of a decade, I have learned that depending on the size of the UI box, the font style, and kerning on the font that the Oxford comma can become messy or cluttered in some cases. This particular UI screen is one that we don't leverage often in game and have limited formatting control over, so my gut told me to test it.
Being new to the project, I haven't had access to the style guide yet, but over the next few content pieces I plan on reviewing it and possibly updating it for our newer systems.

Thanks for the concern and feedback.

Punctuation is life.

I'm a big fan of the semi-colon and umlaut. I can't get enough of them. I personally think every sentence should have at least one semi-colon or umlaut in them.