Welcome
Hey guys, today we have another public beta release! There are a large number of changes (its been almost a month since our last content update), so to look at the Releases page to see the full changelog! Among other things, there is:
- Major Quality of Life improvements for the launcher
- Somewhat major changes to global engine mechanics
- Targed changes/reworks for a few characters
This time around however, the developer blog is primarily an update on the status of our balance and design, by Black Calculus. Read on to see! But first…
Developer blog (Black Calculus)
As you all may (or may not) know, HDR started as a fun project for me to mess around with my friends in a Melee-like engine with Ult’s cast. The entire goal of HDR was for me to blend what I liked best from Melee, Ult, PM, and other fighters/platform fighters I’ve played into a fun explosive experience. This scope has been constantly changing ever since I agreed to form a dev team with Gryz and now that we’ve released publicly the project is basically out of my hands and my original vision scope wise. Now while that’s not a terrible thing there are a few things I need to note:
This game is BIG.
Most of the extremely stupid busted tear your hair out stuff (or things that are even just mildly broken) has come from there being 90 characters in this game and me overcompensating with crazy attributes on moves to give characters tools to deal with most matchups reliably since for the longest time it was just me making those changes. As stated before I was prioritizing making characters fun over making them balanced and part of that was giving them crazy attributes on moves, frame data, gimmicks, etc., which led to an overall more exciting and fun experience than my pitiful attempt at balancing early on. It’s easier to balance a cast like this without having the time to meticulously tune every single thing about this giant mosh pit of a roster by giving everyone very potent options so that everyone can contend on a similar level at the very least in advantage so that once you land a hit you’re able to swing the game back in your favor with good play, or to make it easier to land a hit in the first place. Clearly though this is a product of times past and now that we’re trying to present ourselves as more of a solid experience the more egregious stuff needs to be let go or tuned down to an actually reasonable level. Additionally, some characters have clearly gotten more love and attention than others, again tying back to the time when it was just me making changes to 90 characters. I’m sure you all don’t have an idea of the amount of time and energy that takes even for a single character, but let me tell you it is mind rending. We’ve accrued more experience and knowledge as a dev team over the past few years and now that we’ve come to the point we’re at we’re able to identify what needs to be addressed now that we’ve settled in to a more consistent rhythm, the mod itself is closer to where we want it to be than it ever was before, and we have a more clear idea of the direction we want to take the game which has been an endeavor we’ve been continually iterating over and striving towards over the past three years. The game engine and making sure characters feel good within it has been top priority since if those two things aren’t achieved then there’s no business going through and making more meticulous tweaks to something that’s not fun. Obviously we’re not infallible in that aspect, but we’ve been going through and starting to readjust as appropriate recently. Keep in mind that this is an iterative process. We’re not going to get everything perfect the first time around.
This project is not complete, and you shouldn’t treat is as such.
As far as the new tools/mechanics that I’ve been giving characters or that they have been given, it’s a mixed bag as to how well they work or the reasoning behind them.
Some of them like Bayo’s cancels were to preserve the spirit of the character and allow them to retain a similar playstyle while being able to compensate for the engine changes in HDR with good enough execution/smart play. Others were to make an otherwise absolutely boring tool on a white bread kit actually interesting to use as in the case with Palutena reflector.
One thing I’ve noticed is that when I have time to balance something new that’s added appropriately before it reaches the public people seem to be much more accepting of it than if it reaches a build in a state that I either wasn’t happy with or didn’t have time to fully tune properly in which case people start clamoring for it to be tossed in the bonfire never to be seen again which is really frustrating because most things I know can be tuned to a level that’s fun to play as and against to a reasonable degree. Obviously there are some things that are too ridiculous for what we’re trying to be now and I have no attachment to keeping stuff like that, but seeing some people clamoring for stripping away actually interesting tools for the sake of “lol remove gimmick” (to a certain extent this is obviously hyperbole) kinda pisses me off without valid discussion around why it’s unhealthy in ANY form at a purely fundamental level without considering other balancing factors such as how accessible it is, the potency it has when it actually hits, etc. This is the biggest reason that recently while I’ve been giving new tools to characters I’ve been posting in the channels, specifically to spark discussion so that things can be in a reasonable state before they hit an actual build.
As far as some things feeling ‘tacked on’ this is more along the lines of things being added long ago without proper compensation in other areas the character’s kit before it reaches a build simply because again there’s 90 characters in this game and for the longest time I was the only one making changes to them for the most part. Back in HDR’s infancy I frequently got bored of tuning one character for so long and thus I moved on to making other characters have interesting stuff, but that’s not to say that any character’s current combination of tools and attributes is final. After three years of this I can generally tell when things are absurdly broken or feel stapled on and most of the time when that’s the case it’s because it’s unfinished in one way or another like 80% of EVERYTHING here.
We want this game to be FUN.
This is moreso surrounding discussion of redesigns and I’m glad there’s been a lot of discussion on that front but I do want to be careful not to strip away a character’s identity unless it’s been actively proven or there’s concrete evidence that the identity or the tools they have are too toxic for this game.
There’s no reason to remove fun and interesting options before at least attempting to actively retune them down to a reasonable level because then you both alienate your players and give the character less of a reason to be played at all which is the exact opposite of what we want.
The whole point of HDR is to give everyone unique and fun tools that fit their archetype (and change their archetype to be more interesting where desired). No reason to completely kneecap a toolkit without due reason.
Finally, remember, we are a small dev team with a giant cast of characters. Before voicing your complaints or raging about the state of this game please keep both this in mind and the fact that we’re nowhere even close to being finished with the state of this game. Both Rome and PM weren’t built in a day, and expecting a project this massive to be even near close to the polish that some of the longer standing mods for older games are, especially considering both the scope of this project as well as the decades of work that have been put into those other projects, is unreasonable even after three years of HDR development especially with a fluctuating and small dev team such as ours. Combine that with the fact that this game is humongous in scale, and that Ult is a brand new game with much less time to develop modding capacity and capabilities for compared to Brawl or Smash 4, and we’ve got a steep mountain range to climb. Don’t be afraid to voice your concerns, but be patient with us. We are human, and saying our game is absolute garbage directly to our faces does in fact hurt, especially when this project is done completely for free as volunteer work and it’s the kind of stuff that makes us want to just up and leave. Keep in mind that we’re students/engineers and we have plenty of better things to do with our time than sit at our computers and slave over a project for ingrates who don’t fully appreciate the amount of effort that goes in. Of course not everyone here is ungrateful, there’s been a ton of support, but extreme negativity is very much unpleasant to see, and it helps nothing. You can absolutely criticize the current product, that’s how we grow and improve, but keep in mind when forming your feedback that we are human and we could stop development at any time should we so choose if we’re not having fun anymore. It’s okay to be frustrated with the game and speak up, it’s not okay to insult us or the work we’ve done. Give things an honest chance before turning around and dismissing the changes we’ve made. Once you do, we’re all ears because you’ve got the hard evidence to back up your claims from your own playtime and experience within HDR itself.
If your character hasn’t gotten the attention they need yet, don’t fret. They’re coming. Feel free to voice your concerns and anything you find that needs addressing but don’t bother us about the same issues constantly just because we haven’t looked at your character specifically just yet. There’s less than five people adjusting a roster of 90 characters (though that is slowly improving thanks to our new contributors!), and so some are going to have to wait longer than others as a sheer inevitable fact. However, we are slowly getting there, and as our infrastructure improves and our team grows it will only go up from here.
Final Remarks
As always, remember that this project is first and foremost supposed to be fun. Fun for the players, fun for the community, fun for the contributors, and fun for the devs. Our definition of fun involves a certain level of balance and power levels that are reasonable. We know that a lot of this project does not currently meet our own expectations to the fullest yet, but there is only so much that can be done at once. So, sit back, have patience, and enjoy the ride.
If you have the skills to make serious contributions, get involved with contributing! Fix some bugs! Look at our open issues and help resolve them. If you don’t want to contribute code fixes, you can still help! In the near future keep your eyes and ears out for more information for getting involved with testing. We love when people test Pull Request builds before we merge them, so that we can be sure that they work as expected and as written. We love when people play the nightlies and give early feedback. All of these things help us put out better betas with less issues overall. Problems that get found during nightly or, even better, during a PR, make a huge difference. Since one of the updates to the launcher makes it easy as pie to switch between beta and nightly, take the opportunity to play some cutting edge features between now and the next beta! If you have any issues, as always feel free to reach out for help and support from the commiunity. Have a blast!