Devstream 30

Devstream #30 aired on June 6, 2014, @ 2pm ET
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Rebecca is joined by animator Scott J., programmer Paul R., senior programmer Dan B., and designer Tom G.
==Announcements==
*Upcoming Enemies
**Infested Moa (Slow Bomb Moa)
**Infested Drone (Poison Drone)
**Pus Ancient
**Diseased Ancient
**Infested Devourer
**Juggernaut (Contest Winner)
**Nanite Moa (Possibly Infested Moa)
**Riot Moa (Contest Winner)
**Grineer Beastmaster
**Grineer Manic (Contest Winner)
*Bosses Up For Rework
**J3-Golem
**Tyl Regor
**Nef Anyo
**Derf Anyo (Part of Nef Anyo fight)
==Q&A Summary==
PLATINUM WINNERS
AngelitoCruz51
K3nny550
Drejzur
*Issun135: Progress on new J3 Golem?
**Tom: It's moving along nicely. A lot of different components, some of which we're gonna show today. A lot of enemies are in concepting, some are being modeled. I'm prototyping the behaviors and attacks, then once it's rigged Scott will do the animation and Daniel and Paul will do the behaviors.
**Rebecca: I know you guys have been reworking all the bosses, so is he next?
**Dan: Yeah, from what I understand. When we launched, our bosses were just big enemies with lots of health, shields, and an ability or two. Now we've had time to go back in terms of arts and design and create more fleshed out characters.
**Tom: We have a progression of the Golem here over time, through a few pieces of concept art. From initial to final concept, the Golem underwent a huge change. We even have some renders of the final model. The actual Golem is part Corpus ship, and partially just infested weirdness. It should be coming within the next 6 months.
**Scott: To give a sense of scale, the Tenno will be about 1/3 of the height.
*When are we getting more colossal-sized bosses?
**Scott: We'd love to make more. There are some concerns, like having enough space for it to move around, which means having sort of arena.
**Dan: We want it to be that epic moment, and feel rewarded for reaching the bosses and beating them
*Do you have any ideas on how he will be implemented, like how the player will reach him?
**Tom: We don't deal with that as much as the Event guys. We're pretty excited for this guy; he's going to be unique, different, huge and badass.
*Enemies of the Tenno: Juggernaut, Manic Grineer, RIOT Moa
**Dan: It's great to see such a response from the community. We're always coming up with ideas, and it's always interesting to see suggestions that are similar to things we already made.
**Rebecca: I think that was the case with the Grineer Beast Master?
**Paul: He's almost ready. He's going to spawn in with a Kubrow buddy, and he'll use a sort of glaive weapon, and try to steal your rifle or pistol to use against you. You have to kill him to get your weapon back. It's kind of a riff on the capture target, where you can give them your weapon.
**Dan: We've got the feral Kubrows all over Earth, and the Grineers have found a way to domesticate them, much like the Tenno.
**Tom: [The winning submissions] are all really cool enemies, and they fit in line with our design ideals, which involves making enemies that do more than just shoot you. We want more enemies that engage the players or their teammates in interesting ways. The Juggernaut is a good example, with some good ranged attacks that will definitely mix things up in combat. It'd be cool if they were a bit tougher, a bit more rare...
**Dan: Kind of like a mini-boss. You're not going to meet hordes of these guys, but you'll encounter a couple during the mission and change up the fight?
*Fabpsi: What future "mini bosses" (like stalker, harvey, g3) can we expect? And furthermore, will there be some kind of special boss/stronger enemies if you survive long enough in a defense/survival mission?
**Dan: Yes. We'd love to make more, but it's just a matter of time management. We'll start with these community designs and make them more special than the occasional grunt. That's a good place for them.
**Tom: The Juggernaut is so big, that we can't just put him down everywhere. He's going to be too large for some spaces,
**Rebecca: Will the infested Corpus ships be permanent places on the star chart?
**Tom: I think they will, yeah. It should be going into Eris, which is where the Golem is going.
**Rebecca: Phorid is currently the boss there, will he still be around?
**Tom: He should be. Scott sent us some ideas that are crazy.
**Scott: Not a charger anymore. Blank slate.
*Apsinion: Since Orokin Derelict have a boss how about a boss for the Orokin Towers?
**Tom: Good idea. The more, the better. We're currently working through the existing bosses
**Scott: Phorid, Ambulas, Tyl Regor, Lephantis. We have a design for Tyl Regor ready to go, which we can show now. We kind of designed him around using Melee 2.0, and made him as ninja-like as possible. He's really melee-based using a sword and board, as well as detachable forearms, so he also uses a set of power gauntlets. Tennos will have to find a way to get him into a state to damage him using Melee 2.0. We'll be adding in new bosses occasionally as we revise the old ones.
*Should bosses appeal to all play styles? Or be more specific about how to beat him?
**Tom: We don't have any one specific design philosophy. We'll usually go in with one crazy idea and work against that. We generally want to keep it as open as possible, and if the players can find abilities that work well, then that mixes it up a bit.
**Dan: We don't want them to be a big bag of health and special attacks. We want them to be unique and have that sort of epic spectacle. Having multiple ways to beat a boss is good, but we can also get players to change their loadouts to compensate certain resistances.
*PLAT: AngelitoCruz51
*Se05239: Corrupted. Having any plans on expanding this faction of misfits?
**Tom: Yeah, I think so. They're all corrupted versions of Infested, Corpus and Grineer, so as new AI show up, we'll add a corrupted version if it can enhance that gameplay.
*Morec0: Corpus - WHY DON'T YOU HAVE ANY DIFFERENT BASIC PROXIES OTHER THAN MOAS AND OSPREYS!!!???
**Dan: We have the Zanukas and Hyenas, but they're more unique. We'd love to do different things, including a bunch of different configurations for MOAs, maybe the same bipedal design with different things on top. The RIOT MOA is a good example. We will expand the basic set of enemies, it's just a matter of time.
*Is the J3 Golem related to the Suspicious Shipments, and what is the fate of the Corpus within that area?
**Tom: I guess we'll have to wait and see!
*Corpus and Infested enemies?
**Scott: We have some concepts we can show. Here are some infested MOAs that we're working on currently. Not only has the infested taken over the ship, but also it's crew.
**Tom: You can see the infested drones are based on their Corpus counterpart, and it's interesting to see how the art team fleshed out the idea.
**Rebecca: Will there be new attacks?
**Tom: Yes, all new moves from their old counterpart. We can even show you some of those today! This guy should be going into the game pretty soon.
**Scott: We'll use the same skeleton as a Corpus drone, but a different mesh and moveset. For the infested biped, he'll be shooting blobs of infested goo. We tried to give him a different walk style, which is pretty creepy. They'll hopefully be jumping around the map instead of just walking, to make them a harder target.
*BloomerScott: Will we see any enemies that are unaffected by certain utility powers such as Vortex or Radial Disarm?
**Dan: We do have some enemies that are immune to Radial Disarm already. It's kind of on more of a case-by-case basis. Since we don't know the procedural level layouts ahead of time, we try our best to make the AI work everywhere, so that you can continue using the same tools and tricks that you know work against them. We try to make everybody have their own resistances, then we'll make one unit immune to a damage to make him stand out.
*Why don't we try to do more in terms of enemies working together to survive? (notionphil's thread)
**Dan: That's one of the big challenges that we face; the amount of damage that players do. We do skim the forums from time to time, but we're often too swamped to respond to everyone's concerns. His point that smarter AI is a waste of time is a good one, because they'll be dead almost instantly anyways.
**Tom: A lot of the time, more complicated enemies will look dumb because they're spending so much time trying to look smart!
**Scott: It's just that the Tennos are so fast and so good, that everybody dies almost instantly.
**Dan: Feeling powerful is a big appeal in Warframe, so most of the enemies that we create are going to be that kind of fodder. We want that sense of empowerment. Going forward, we do try and change it up. With enemies like the prosecutor, they'll parry bullets as well as elemental resistance. QA would come to us and say that the enemy isn't killable, but they were just approaching them from the front, or not using the right elements. Mechanisms like that also add a lot of difficulty for the solo player.
**Rebecca: Even the elemental resistance adds that, but every Warframe does have a primary, secondary, melee...
**Dan: Even sentinels. Specters as well.
**Dan: We need to be able to connect more with the clans, and make it feel like you're really defending or attacking these rails. So we designed some specters that had some basic behaviors and Warframe abilities, and extended it from there.
**Rebecca: Those will be coming on PS4 whenever Update 13.3 comes out.
*Can you customize your specter to be offensive or defense?
**Dan: All you can really change right now is your loadout. So that would definitely play a role. I'd love to be able to have the players tweak their behavior and adjust to their play style.
*Will we see that level of customization for the Kubrow as well?
**Dan: Yes. Me and this other programmers have been working on some Kubrow behaviors, but I don't know how much I can reveal. You want to be able to train your Kubrow the way you want, in a more defensive or offensive style, guarding you or capturing targets, etc. We're very early on right now, but I think it will be cool to teach the Kubrow these tricks and then see them in play.
**Scott: There are lots of very cool animations going on, like the ground sniffing/tracking.
*Infested-based assassin enemies?
**Tom: There currently aren't any plans for that, but that would be cool.
**Scott: There are so many fantastic ideas that the community has come up with. There have been a few boss threads, with ideas that are brilliant. Some we could definitely implement.
**Tom: There's an awesome community design for Derf Anyo. He's going to come in and give Nef a break, riding in on a hoverboard. I love his helmet too. This is an example of where we take inspiration from the community.
*Do we have anything for Nef Anyo's redesign?
**Tom: I don't want to give away his attacks because he's still in prototype, but he rides around on this platform. We took a magnetic approach to a lot of his powers, like the Mag. We really want to make bosses that are unique and interesting; you won't just be able to point and shoot at this guy for 5 minutes to kill him. We want to encourage cooperations to find the bosses' weak points. Nef should be coming after the J3 Golem.
*Ronin_warder: Can you guys give us more multi-staged boss encounters?
**Tom: Yes. We love breaking it up, because it gives more of a sense of progression.Instead of just waiting for a health bar to hit zero, we want to make it feel like you're accomplishing little chunks at a time. That also makes it more of an exciting spectacle, like Vay Hek reaching his robotic form. J3 is going to has stages, Neff has stages...
**Dan: It's something we're trying to work into every boss we've redone. Even Kril has stages. He was the first boss we did.
**Rebecca: Will you go back again and bring him up to that standard?
**Dan: We'd love to, but it's a matter of fitting it in.
**Tom: Definitely low priority.
**Dan: A lot of the problem is that the stages aren't very well defined. Bosses like Lephantis and Vay Hek are a lot more defined in their stages, whereas Sargas Ruk is more subtle, powering up as you take out his weak points. We'll have to try and work something out to make it a lot more evident, but also maintain the flow of the fight.
*Lardoklespin: Will there ever be "Bystanding" mobs like the cargo MOA from the submissioned enemies, for atmospheric addition, tidbits of lore or looting? (with looting I am referring to something like the loot-loaders from Borderlands 2)
**Rebecca: The wildlife has kind of filled that need.
**Tom: It would be nice to put enemies like that into all tilesets. I really like the idea of a Cargo MOA, but he'd be difficult to fit everywhere with a big load behind him, so he'd be great as a bystander.
*What about the Sentients?
**Tom: They're still trying to figure out the narrative and the lore behind them, so we haven't started working on them yet.
**Scott: I've seen a little bit of art, but that's under wraps
**Dan: If we make another faction, they have to feel very different from the 3 we already have, which is quite challenging.
**Tom: The Corpus run n' gun, the Grineer take cover and the Infested use melee. So combining those or finding something new would be awesome.
*Raid-style bosses?
**Dan: 4 player only bosses would be cool. I think the nightmare bosses do that.
**Tom: One of the challenges is finding a reward structure. We have to find a way to reward our players without destroying our content team.
**Scott: One of our bigger challenges is balancing it for differen't leveled players. I understand the appeal of having nightmare bosses that are really, really hard, and we want to give it to them. We first tried scaling the difficulty with Vor, and it didn't quite work as planned at first. There's also a matter of balancing the matches, where people are around your level, so it's fair.
**Dan: We also have to account for groups of all sizes, as well as solo. I saw a forum post about how Vay Hek is too hard, because he can't be solo'd. We wanted him to be more on the difficult side of things, but people still kill him in no time at all.
**Tom: We usually start by working with the level of the mission. Then we look at the players' conclave ratings, where we scale up the shield, health and damage resistance. Then we just do a bunch of testing with 4 player groups using their most OP builds.
*RahuStalker: Steve mentioned some devstreams ago the inclusion of already planned female Corpus. Anything we could see on that? What new varieties for enemy types would you like to work on for the existing factions?
**Dan: We'd love to see more genders available.
**Tom: We don't have any designs, but we can talk to the character guys.
*PLAT: K3nny1550
*Show and tell! (Gameplay demonstration)
**Tom: These are some basic AI that we've been prototyping. I'll usually start by cobbling together a bunch of different elements using existing assets and make them functioning, then our team will go ahead and flesh them out. For example, here's a MOA that hides behind a shield and launches Jackal missiles. We'll really use these to make sure the enemies are fun before exploring it further with the animators and AI guys. Here's the Juggernaut, a quadruped that creates a sort of poison rain around him. And here's the infested drones, which would bring crawlers into the battle. Once he's out of those, he'll fly by you and fart out a sort of poison cloud. Speaking to that thread mentioned earlier, we want to create some enemies that interact with their teammates, creating a bit more of a challenge. For instance, this MOA fires infested goo balls that covers big sections on the ground and slow you down. Alone he's pretty harmless, but in a group he can be a problem. Next is the Nanite MOA, which has these sort of nano-clouds that latch on when players get close, hurting them and obscuring their vision. It can even spread to other Tenno if you're not careful. The next one is an Ancient called the Pus Disruptor. This guy is big and gross, so as you shoot him, he'll create spawn pods that create more units if they're not taken out fast enough. This last diseased enemy is another Ancient, and he'll spawn some crawlers when close by ripping open his ribcage. They can also latch on, and the more you have, the slower you move. Rolling will remove them, but not kill them. It should be possible for friendlies to shoot them off of you.
*How will these enemies be incorporated and balanced for different game modes?
**Dan: As more enemies are created, we might have to start throwing more enemies at the player. The crawlers likely won't count towards kill total. It's still a work in progress.
*PLAT: Drejzur
*Value in tweaking existing AI
**Dan: We do still want to improve the AI that's still there. There are different bugs that we need to fix, a lot of which has to do with stealth gameplay.
*Stealth 2.0
**Dan: It's really hard to do a stealth game in an action environment. We also don't know how the level is going to be structured ahead of time. It'd be great to have a more systemic approach we can roll out everywhere, but we will get there. One of the biggest challenges with stealth is making it challenging, because if you slow down the enemies' reaction times or make other changes, it can make the game very easy.
*Devourer
**Tom: We want to make it more about fighting an environment, so we came up with this devourer. It has several attacks, but my favorite is the proboscis that will grab players. If they're not saved in time, it'll eat you and spit you out somewhere else in the level. So this will be part of the J3 Golem fight, so you're dealing with more than just this one enemy.
**See a video in action here: http://youtu.be/fLKzn3WBIjk?t=1h2m40s
*Orokin enemies?
**Tom: I haven't been working on any Orokin designs, the original Orokin.
*Update 14? What is first on the menu.
**Tom: I think the drone and one of the MOAs are first on the menu.
*Boss lore?
**Tom: I think so. Ryan does such a great job, and he loves writing entries for our new designs.
*Modding Kubrows?
**All: In a way, there will definitely be customization for the Kubrow. We will see how customizable we can make them!
*More infested Grineer?
**Scott: I think a number of the current infested are Crewman, but the Charger is a Grineer if you look closely. Ultimately will make more if we have time!
*Will we get a boss back on earth/boss combinations?
**Tom: A double boss would be a good way to get a boss on Earth, it’s safe to say we will have a boss back on earth.
**Dan: With bosses, we always want to have them be these difficult moments, so we can't put them in everywhere.
*Lotus AI?
**Dan: I touched on this in the design council... We actually have two layers of AI, which includes the director AI, which overlooks the entire level. So we could do something with that for Lotus. It'd be great to get more lines and dialogue options that take into consideration the player’s history and familiarity with missions for more diversity.
==Gallery==
PusAncientConceptArt.jpg|Pus Ancient Concept Art 1
PusAncientArt.jpg|Pus Ancient Concept Art 2
DiseasedAncientConceptArt.jpg|Diseased Ancient Concept Art 1
DiseasedAncientArt.jpg|Diseased Ancient Concept Art 2
DerfAnyoThroneSketchs.jpg|Nef Anyo Concept Art 1
DerfAnyoConceptArt.jpg|Derf Anyo Concept Art 1
265e763643a178695093a3a8e9d23666.png|Derf Anyo Concept Art 2
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