Re: Announcing Expanding Known Space from Valiant Galaxy Associates
Snow,
As Michael suggested in his post, this was a conscious decision, primarily to limit needless input to the player. My largest game of EKs involved over 5,000 ships, and I was having usually a dozen battles a combat phase in that one.
We could have handled it in the way you suggested, however, we consciously chose to go with a sparser sound environment.
A second reason to have used this method was just to improve performance. The more sounds you add, the more ships you add, the more calculations you add, the slower and less responsive the game grows. One of our concerns was to make sure the game was as responsive at the beginning as it was near the end of a long and large game.
Third, you say it might as well be a text game as if that is a bad thing. All computer games in the world started with a text game, and that game is still fun and playable 45 years later. My favorite rpg game of all time Fallthru was a text game and had 0 graphics.
That said, I get why people are disappointed in the sound scape, but with strategy games, my focus is on the decisions the player has to make, not the bells and whistles. In a long game of EKS as noted earlier you can be managing upward of 40 or 50 fleets, watching 20 planets to make sure they don't get overwhelmed, and trying to find or destroy a capital planet. In a situation like that, some players find extraneous noise a distraction and a bother. Rather than fool with having to make a lot of optional switches and other things to avoid that for those players, we chose a sparse audio environment.
We had considered adding more sound, and when we release an update to the game, it would not be difficult to add in sounds, probably with toggles. I don't promise this, but it would be possible.
Keep the comments coming, we like constructive feedback. Take care,
Jeremy
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