Some issues Thread - Alpha Squad

Hey guys,

Been watching the release of this game for a while, and have been waiting anxiously for it. Got it as soon as I found out it went up.

I'm just going to skip all the networking issues since they've already been mentioned. My main concern is how a lot of things just have to be figured out by playing. For example: I've killed many friendly NPCs before realizing that I'm supposed to talk to them. And I still have no idea what the Survival Pack (or most of the guns) does. Minor things, but they do frustrate. Also, playing multiplayer is strange. When I was playing with a friend, each time he entered a new square, I would randomly spawn away from where we are supposed to appear, oftentimes surrounded by enemies. I'm sure there's some technical reasoning behind it, but you can understand why this is frustrating. And I think there's some issue with switching the party leader when the party leader died... My friend died, passing me the party leader, and I ended up killing the first boss on my own. However, after reading all the dialog, there was no apparent way of ending the level, whereas when I played on my own, it worked as intended. Also, getting to the Armory is a little clunky, especially when there's no way to pause the game. Having a button mapped to the Armory would be extremely convenient (unless there already is one...). One last thing; I don't know if this is on purpose, but the enemy pathfinding is odd. They pretty much continually walk in a straight line towards the players, regardless of what's in their way.

I did have fun with the game when I was playing on my own, but I had really gotten it with the idea of being able to play through it with a friend. I'm rooting for Alpha Squad (and you guys) to do well, as this is one of the more high quality indie games on XBLA right now. Looking forward to Wednesday's patch

Hey Lobstain, let me address each of your issues and see what we can do by the next patch. The networking stuff right now is priority one before the rest.

1. There probably does need to be a bit more of a tutorial to the game. My main idea was to use the website as the instruction manual. Such as this for the items: Dragondivide.com.

2. The spawn issue was fixed before then unfixed, then fixed, etc. What should be happening is the other party members should be spawning within a small distance away from where the party leader spawns, but right now what is happening is the other party members are spawning in stange locations but seem to be all on the correct side of the screen. I'll put the player spawn on the 'to-fix' list.

3. The current party leader is the only one who can activate interactions or activate doors. To end a stage a player needs to stand on a gold door to trigger the end of stage sequence. Once returning to the overworld map, the party leader crown is passed back to the host player who started the game.

4. The Armory is another thing to improve, especially on the Arena mode where there is not much time to react. The pause screen will only work locally so perhaps some kind of hot key should be enabled OR at least make the armory transparent so you can shoot and move at the same time.

5. The online issues kind of surprised us since we played for weeks without running into these issues in testing, only to have them all come up at once. For now it is possible to have a perfect multiplayer experience by doing a local game until next Wednesday when Microsoft allows us to do another submission.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Excellent! That's great to hear (read?) . I'll be sure to mention anything else that I might run into.

DragonDivide,

Does this mean that we will have to delete and then re-download Alpha Squad on Wednesday when you release the patch? I'd kinda hate to have to start all over on the campaign...

Hey TrueWarrior,

After the update goes live you will be prompted asking you to download the update (you dont have too) when you next start up Alpha Squad.
Saved games will not be affected by this update.

Hope this helps,
Evan.