Hornet Leader - PC (DVG)

My new computer game “Hornet Leader - PC” has just launched!

http://www.matrixgames.com

This is a turn-based strategy game that gives you command of a squadron of F/A-18 Hornet strike fighters. You select a campaign, then fly missions. The game focuses on decision-making with the weapons you select for your aircraft and how you attack the target. Each of your pilots has unique skills and gains experience (and fatigue) as they fly missions.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

-Dan Verssen
Dan Verssen Games (DVG)
www.dvg.com

This game looks pretty intriguing… and it’s actually priced reasonably (for matrix games).

Can you bring your same squad into different campaigns? How involved is the pre-planning… do you actually make waypoints for ingress/egress? Once the sortie is underway, what level of orders/control do you have over the flight group?

Is the campaign random or scripted? Persistent as well, such as you take out some SAM sites, and they are gone the next mission? Or is it a “smoke and mirrors” faked campaign, where it just branches to another mission? Basically, if I replay the campaign, am I getting the exact pre-designed “mission tree” every time?

EDIT: Sorry, it looks like a few of my questions were answered in the bullet points, so I modified them.

Awesome! I have been looking forward to this one for a while.

Now, get Matrix to update their homepage with an announcement. :)

Can you bring your same squad into different campaigns?

–Not yet, but that is on the list of future free updates.–

How involved is the pre-planning… do you actually make waypoints for ingress/egress? Once the sortie is underway, what level of orders/control do you have over the flight group?

–You get to select the pilots for the mission, and then arm their aircraft on a weapon by weapon basis. There is a chance of both target-bound and home-bound events popping-up (some good, some bad), but you don’t need to plot your course. Once over-target, you get to move your aircraft, select specific sites, the target, or bandits to attack, and the weapons to fire at each. When attacked, you can choose to try and suppress the attack (by expending weapons), and/or evade the attack (which builds up pilot stress), or simply resolve the attack (which costs you nothing, but is the most risky.)–

Is the campaign random or scripted? Persistent as well, such as you take out some SAM sites, and they are gone the next mission? Or is it a “smoke and mirrors” faked campaign, where it just branches to another mission? Basically, if I replay the campaign, am I getting the exact pre-designed “mission tree” every time?

–Each campaign has 18 targets. You can choose from 3 durations of campaigns ranging from 2 missions to 15 missions. If a target is destroyed it does not re-appear in the campaign. When a target is destroyed it has a lasting affect on the campaign by decreasing the enemy’s bandits, sites, target hits, or giving you more targets to choose from each mission.–

When you select a target for the day, you’ll need to weigh between your pilot stress levels, the victory point value of the target (used for winning the campaign), and how the target’s destruction will affect the remained of the campaign.

For example, let’s say that when you selected your pilots at the start of the campaign, you went light on guys with air combat skills. During the first mission of the campaign you get 3 targets to choose from:

1 - Airfield - Destroy it, and you really hurt their Bandit presence for the remainder of the campaign. This would be good to destroy, because your squadron doesn’t have many air combat skilled guys.

2- Carrier Defense - Destroy the enemy strike aircraft and score big VPs. This directly moves you toward winning the campaign.

3 - Supply Depot - Its only worth a few VP and campaign adjustments, but it’s a short-range mission and pretty easy. Just right to give some of your inexperienced guys some experience toward boosting their skills.

Hmm… What do you do?

This is the kind of decision-making you get to do throughout the game.

When selecting weapons to pound a target, do you can go with iron bombs which hit hard, but are short-ranged, or stand-off weapons that don’t have as much hitting power? With iron bombs you need to suppress, jam, or brave their defenses, with stand-off weapons you can launch from afar. Or, do you dip into your limited Special Option points to use a few cutting edge weapons?

During that mission, how many planes do you equip for air combat, ground pounding, multi-role?

Should you take your good pilot on one more mission before giving him a rest and risk losing him for several missions as his stress goes down, or take a less skilled, but rested newbie?

I’ve written 2 AARs that are posted on www.wargamer.com that go through the missions in detail and provide a bit of story for feel and flavor.

Hope this helps,
-Dan
www.dvg.com

Wow, yeah, that does definitely help. It sounds more of a “lite” type game, with more emphasis on managing the squadron. Interesting… no demo?

Right, it’s very much a resource management kind of game with immediate and long-term effects.

No demo yet. I’m not sure how Matrix does demos. I’ll ask.

-Dan
www.dvg.com

A demo would really help! When I first read through all the stuff you posted I assumed that the player got to be a pilot as well – which is totally wrong. I like the idea behind the game (sort of an X-Com in the sky, if I’m reading things right), but I’d also like to take it out for a test drive first. I’ve got to know if this is lust or love before I commit :-P

I played the original solitaire cardgame (some time ago, I should caution). Assuming the computer game is much like it we’re talking more about an abstract strategy game rather than anything like a simulation. In a way, X-Com isn’t a bad comparison. You’ve got strategic elements you track but the real action is the tactical interplay between your craft and the events you encounter (and how good your intel is - sometimes a mission isn’t exactly what you were led to believe).

So wisely shepherding your resources through a string of rather fast playing encounters is the core of the game. If I’m remembering correctly.

Brian,

Nice summary!

-Dan
www.dvg.com

Ok, I bit the bullet and bought it.

First impressions: It’s one of the worst programmed games I’ve played in the past 4 years. Was this thing created in visual basic? The game is just -clunky-. Every time I go to a new phase, a standard blank windows UI window pops up over the game area for about 2 seconds, then the game grinds into the next phase. Clicking on an icon doesn’t select it 50% of the time. The phase resolving itself is extremely slow for what little it is doing.

Then, onto the interface. It’s really bad. First of all, when setting up your attack run, you have several jets with different loadouts. Where you place these in the attack grid is integral to their loadouts. However, there is no way to see what each jet’s loadout while doing this. The only way to do it is to click on a “view squadron” button, look at the list, then remember from the name of the particular jet what loadout it has.

Next, in the “move jets” phase, if you click on a jet, and then decide not to move it, it seemed at first there was no way to unselect it. It turns out you have to click this small “movement locked” icon over the jet’s picture on the right side of the screen. Why can’t I just right click to unselect?

These are just a few of the many terrible aspects of the interface that come to mind.

Buried deep under the embarrassingly bad programming seems to be a decent game. Unfortunately, the whole point of the game seems to be in the simple systems and quick gameplay… which the game falls flat on it’s face trying to deliver in given how terribly unpolished and unfriendly it is.

Sorry Dan, but this thing shouldn’t have been released in it’s current state. I’d almost say the whole thing needs to be redone from the ground up.

We had over a dozen testers and none of them had any complaints about interface issues (or had the “blank UI” pop up during phases you mentioned at all) really, and they greatly varied in computer game and wargame experience. I think it’s efficient and does what its supposed to do, which is the point. Most said it was smooth and slick, and greatly automated the board game itself. It isn’t perfect admittedly, but it isn’t as awful as you make it seem, and numerous other opinions during testing bore that out.

With that said, occasional slowness does happen with slower systems we did notice. 2GHz or higher systems with a decent video card will get the smoothest experience.

I had a reaction similar to flyinj to Dan’s Down in Flames game: great design, hurt by presentation and interface issues. However, I’ve heard that DIF was gussied up nicely after a few patches. There’s no reason to expect that, over time, Dan won’t tidy up some of the Hornet Leader stuff flyinj was complaining about.

-Tom

Not to insult you or to claim more experience or anything, but beta testers definitely are not the best place for interface testing. As you are no doubt aware, they’ll generally be more positive towards a game (because, umm, otherwise they’d not be your beta testers), and more willing to overlook interface issues. Plus, they learn how it works as the game develops, so they don’t experience that “wtf do I do now” moment new customers go through.

And don’t forget that they can just ask you straight up when they don’t know how something works. It makes a big difference when someone knowledgeable explains how to do something and the rationale for doing it that way.

So while it is definitely natural and normal to jump to the defense of your game (hey, everyone loves their own baby), and while you should definitely take his comments with a grain of salt, you shouldn’t think that referencing your (by now) experienced players and their lack of interface issues is an acceptable response.

I’m not against anything flyingJ said but there is another Matrix game I play which was razzed heavily by some hardcore wargamers for the UI which I, and many others, thought was totally fine after a few minutes of getting used to it.

There are also games like Schwerpunkts games which I played for an hour or two and I was so annoyed by that UI that I uninstalled and just never gave it another go.

I liked Down in Flames and will probably try this but people can get a bit too excited one way or the other over UI’s and sometimes, people’s opinions of them need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Ok, I just downloaded the game…played a quick 1st campaign game…got creamed. The UI needs a bit of polish. I didn’t encounter any 2 second blank UI window. Again, I got creamed, which I like, as I now can work on figuring out the game and then the strategies…granted, I’m easy when it comes to UI’s… I rarely complain. Armegeddon Empires was improved greatly after release and I’m sure Mr. Vessen will improve things in this game also.

Armageddon Empires had rough edges, but this game is sandpaper.

I have no idea how you could have overlooked how difficult it is to set up an attack run when the load outs of the jets are not shown. It’s the most integral part of the game, yet no one even mentioned it?

And why on earth did you decide to “lock” a selected aircraft when moving it, making the user click on a tiny icon to “unlock” it if they decided not to move? It’s completely counter-intuitive. Click on another jet and it should be selected. Right click and you unselect. But “locking” the selection?

Everything I try to do in the game is a chore, except for setting up the inital loadouts of the jets themselves. And even then I have to open up a separate page to see what any of the weapons’ functions are. Descriptive tooltips are definitely needed on mouseover for the load outs.

This game needs lots more work.

On a related note, what was that turn based modern jet game that came out in the early-mid 90s? It was hex based, I believe. Flight Commander? I’d love to play that game again… I wonder if you can still get it anywhere.

You’re doing yourself a disservice here. When someone says the UI didn’t work for them, they’re always right. It didn’t work for them. If it worked for your testers, then you didn’t have a diverse enough group of testers.

There are only two correct responses to someone complaining about your product: Figure out what they don’t like and fix it, or regretfully decide that they aren’t your target market. Telling them that they’re wrong, and that they should like it is madness. Or possibly Sparta. No, definitely madness.

Flyinj,

First, thank you for caring enough about the game to comment on it in specific terms that can be looked at and addressed. It would have been very easy to simply post a “this game sucks message” and move along.

Two of your points jumped out at me…

“Then, onto the interface. It’s really bad. First of all, when setting up your attack run, you have several jets with different loadouts. Where you place these in the attack grid is integral to their loadouts. However, there is no way to see what each jet’s loadout while doing this. The only way to do it is to click on a “view squadron” button, look at the list, then remember from the name of the particular jet what loadout it has.”

Viewing the loadouts of all aircraft on a mission, all at the same time doesn’t work for screen real estate reasons. However, maybe we can look at a mouse-over effect that would instantly display the loadout of one hornet. As you mouse-over a hornet, its loadout would appear somewhere on the screen.

“Next, in the “move jets” phase, if you click on a jet, and then decide not to move it, it seemed at first there was no way to unselect it. It turns out you have to click this small “movement locked” icon over the jet’s picture on the right side of the screen. Why can’t I just right click to unselect?”

We had thought about using a right-click to de-select, but decided on the icon approach instead. This was because no where else in the game is right-clicking used and it seemed odd to use it just once. I don’t know about you, but if an interface uses a control even once, it gets added to my brain as a general control and I try to use it all the time. Each time I then try to use it and it doesn’t work, I get frustrated.

Once of the hardest aspects of computer game design is interface. Not only is there always more information to be displayed than there are pixels to display it, but everybody likes their information organized differently. In the end, we choose what we thought would work best most of the time.

-Dan Verssen
www.dvg.com

Damien: I didn’t say anyone was “wrong” here; just that we did actually have a fair number of people play the game, grognards and non-grognards too, and didn’t have nearly the “sandpaper” reaction to the interface that flyinj did. Some of the issues were system related I think (the “2 second” thing, icons not always being responsive), and most said they learned the interface pretty quickly.

None were “fanboys” that I knew of, in fact only a few had ever played the board game version before. So we did sorta do a little homework with this and didn’t ignore issues or just release it being a mess. :)

Showing loadouts during placement was a space issue, and will probably be addressed with a patch at some stage (a popup when mousing over the pilot maybe?).