Quote: Original post by nes8bitQuote: Original post by Nuget5555Quote: Original post by nes8bit
Disclaimer: This is my evaluation based on being extremely critical.
Critical is exactly what I need right now ;)
WIth that said I'm glad you and your team didn't take offense to my overly blunt comments. You guys are true sports. ;)Quote: Original post by Nuget5555
I'm glad the first part of the game went relatively pain free for you. I
agree that the loading for the first room is very cluttered. I'll see if I
can't clean it up a bit.
Look at the movement area of the keyboard. It looks like everything is pointing to one big highlight. I actually almost went with this design scheme for the user manual, but decided it would be too cluttered just like that. One suggestion is to go with a non-keyboard looking interface. Another suggestion would be to highlight each "function" as a different color to help out with identifying what does what. Movement as green, weapons as red, etc etc. It should literally take me no more than 15 seconds to memorize the basic controls.
Also, the "press key to continue" text was hard to notice. You should have that blink or something.
I cleaned up the controls screen considerably. I'm going to put all non-essential controls on a seperate screen, so that the user doesn't need to learn everything all at once.
Quote:Quote: Original post by Nuget5555Quote: For the first few minutes I thought it was kind of neat. However I
expecting a little more. Soon after I got bored, but I did play til the next
level expecting more to happen. Once I realized the second level was the
same as the first I shut it down.
Hmm, I think I might have to change the order of the levels in the begining
or make them quicker in order to save people such as yourself from getting
board and quitting so soon. I have things layed out the way they are now
because I wanted the player to have an easy introduction into the different
gameplay mechanics, and well as the controls.
The best way to do this would be to take out some zombies in the first level along with making them closer together. Because your level has a lot of open space, you should also consider keeping them more in the center to take attention away from the edges of the void.
I've broken the first level out into a tutorial level. There is now only one 'zombie' level, And it is much less 'boring' I think. Let me know how it plays for you.
Quote:Quote: Original post by Nuget5555Quote:
Issues you should look into:
The zombies are far too easy. They also popup out of nowhere and you don't
know where the next one is. There's a lot of space in between killing the
zombies so it becomes frustrating and boring at the same time. So after I
killed a zombie I spent a bit trying to find the next one and once I got
there I got bored killing the thing. If there were either more zombies or
harder zombies then this might solve your problem.
The zombies are supposed to be the easy enemies, the cars, the bombs and the
aliens make it harder. I am going to leave the zombies spaced out in the
first level, but I think I'm going to the the second one a little bit more
dense. So you don't have to run around so much with nothing to kill.
got it. Since I was overly critical I shut the game off as soon as I was remotely uninterested. So I didn't get to see the other NPCs. ;)
You now get to see just about everybody in the tutorial, so hopefully that will grab your interest more then zombies did along before.
Quote:Quote: Original post by Nuget5555Quote: As for sound, I wasn't very impressed. In fact the music was so
awkward that I wanted to take my headphones off. There weren't enough sound
effects for the robots movement. He should be making sounds for every
movement he does because he's a robot. The only sounds I got were the
grumble from the zombie, the laser thing and the double jump. Give or take a
few sounds. Also, the directional audio was very misleading. One time a
zombie was slightly on the right side of the screen and yet I heard the
sound come ONly from the right speaker. This was rather distracting. The
solution to that would be to center the audio UNLESS the zombie is off
screen. Only then should you use it to identify where the zombie is coming from.
I think the music is awesome, but I suppose everyone is entitled to their
own opinion. I have more sound effects for the robot moving that I have not
had time to implement. I will look in to playing with the 3D audio as you
suggested, I didn't realize it was so bad using head phones. Thanks for the
good find.
When it comes to mastering audio, I listen to it in 3 or more setups.
#1 - Headphones. I always master audio on my headphones because they produce a more consistent signal than my logitech z680s. I can also hear errors and stuff like that.
#2 - The Surround Setup - I didn't test on this, but this is the setup most gamers will use: Huge sub and
small speakers.
#3 - The Car - You can't do this obviously, but if it sounds good in my car's awful sound setup then it'll sound good anywhere.
Then I test at friends houses and what not.
There was actually a bug with the 3D sound that I found out accidently last night. Apperently I forgot to update the 'forward' direction of the 3D listener, so the sound was playing as though you were looking in a different direction. Consequently, sounds that should have been in front of you were really on the right, and so on in all directions. Let me know if the sound is still off for you.
Quote:Quote: Original post by Nuget5555Quote: Some minor bugs:
* Tall pillars get clipped into the camera
* You can't get to the menu or options screen from in game
* The fire sound effect is way too loud and distracting - and it has
crackling from a low sample rate in it
*I'll try to fix this one... some how...
*A limitation of my own home brew engine(this is my second 3d game, so I'm
still learning alot)
*Do you mean the sound of the red projectile?, or the red gun shooting? The
fires themselves in the second level actually don't have a sound.
The first bug might not be fixable. So you can probably just waive it. If you have the time then you should do what they did in tomb raider... make it go semitransparent once its close enough to the camera. That might reveal a hole in the ground though.
The second bug I guess isn't fixable. Its no biggie then.
The #2 gun on the first level. Try shortening the duration of the sound. It might be too distracting to gameplay. I haven't really messed with it enough.
I don't have replacement sounds for the other projectiles yet, but John Ervin, the person doing the sound and music for my game, is working on them, so they should be in by monday.
I changed the default camera height so that the pillars getting clipped shouldn't be so much of an issue.
Quote:Quote: Original post by Nuget5555Quote: Outside of being extremely judgemental and critical your game is
pretty good. Its pretty solid also. I actually tried to break your game and
I could only find C class bugs. I bet I could crash your game if I spent
enough energy, but thats besides the point. ;)
The A bugs are in there... they are just hiding really good;)
A question for you Sir nes, using your checklist, what score would you give my game if you were a judge?
Its hard to say, but you should certainly put together a checklist based on that. I would say you have a good chance of placing pretty high though.
Also, if you're interested I'd like to work with you on a project in the near future. ;)
Thanks for the kind words sir. Thanks also for giving my game a run for its money. I worked fulltime as Game QA here in San Diego for a year, so I know what its like to play a buggy game ;) Needless to say, solidity has always been a priority for me.
As for working with you, or working on anything after this contest... I'm going to need at least a good long month of game developement vacation ;) Spend a little quality time with the miss and what not. I've been putting in 14-19 hour days with college, work, life and gamedeving for the past few weeks, and I could use a break...
But when I'm done putting my life back together, I'm going to continue work on Toy Robo, and turn it into the game I really want it to be. At which point, I'm going to open up development on it to anyone that is interested.
Quote: Original post by Naxos
The game freezes up at the main menu each time I tried.
AMD 2000+
GeForce FX 5200 ( yea yea ... )
1GB Ram
Dx 9.0c
Aug 2, 2005 nVidia Drivers
Log:Toy RoboAuthor: Raymond KallmeyerBuilt: Oct 24 2005 22:49:59Ran: Wed Oct 26 18:18:26 2005 18:18:26:0995: DXGraphics:: Setting Device Mode : 800x600 : 16 bpp : 0 samp : 0 hz : Fullscreen : SVP
seems a bit.. short. Then again, it did freeze at the main menu. My settings are "800 600 16" "0" "0" "0" "0"
-- I guess those are the defaults. Anyway, have any guess to what I need to make this puppy run?
Thanks for trying out the game.
I've put a new build up (see the OP) with many bug fixes and detailed trace enabled. If you wouldn't mind trying the new build out I would appreciate that very much :)
Quote: Original post by Klora Jardi
FPS 87ish to start
p4 1.5 640mbram nvidia ti4200
I liked the animation/graphics/music/ambiant sounds(except the "you cannot kill this critter with this ammo" sound, but I think that was because it was also my death bell :) )
I did not like zombies spawning on walls and not dropping down, and the massive difficulty curve between stage one and stage two.
3 red zombies constantly spawning around me and no matter where I jumped more kept spawning til I died several times as I couldn't get more than a few steps without dieing I gave up. No red batteries in sight, but I like the idea of specialized weapons.
Having 5-10 zombies spawn at the same time knocks my fps down to about 30.
If I were to give you advice I would suggest ramping up your zombies to that type of load, don't expect your player to be able to dive right in after they kill 10. Or if you insist on loading in zombies give me a bomb to clear the area :) Oh and it took me a really long time to figure out that I could click on an enemy to fire at him rather than fire the direction I was facing, I don't know why but it wasn't obvious to me, even though I play rgp.
Just as a note I don't play your type of game much so my coordination likely has something to be desired. I play mostly rpg/strat when I do play action it's on console. I like joysticks :)
Oh one more thing make sure the dll is packaged (I think this was said before) I don't like getting files just to play a game, it would turn me off if I were a judge.
It's still seriously cute, I like your style.
Signed, one of 3 chicks on Gamedev :D
Zombies succumb to the forces of gravity thanks to many-a-suggestion here in the forumns. I have changed the mission structure substantially from the last build, and created a tutorial level, so I've been playing around alot with the difficulty. It's really hard for me to get a good idea of how a new player is going to react right now since I've been playing the game for 6 months, I could really use some more feedback on the difficulty of the tutorial level + the altered existing levels.
The zombie's teleportation Mechanic has been changed, so hopefully they won't gang up on you as often. I also reduced the cost of the red projectile substantialy, as even I was running out of energy too often using it.
Let me know if you still run into the same problems with the new build.
Hopefully the new mission structure will ease the transition from a few enemies to a ton of enemies, but let me know if it still gets to be too much.
The tutorial level now has you moving around and jumping all over the place in an attempt to develope your coordination with the controls before you have to worry about dying. I removed the stress from learning by adding a new 'coin' mechanic, where you have to collect coins to advance to the next round.
The dll is now packaged with the install file, I left it out before on accident :)
Thanks for testing my game, your feedback was very helpful, and I look forward to hearing more of it.
Quote: Original post by Toji
Well, I'd like to congradulate you on a very professional looking game! It's a fun idea and looks great, but there were some gameplay issues I found.
Thank you very much. Praise right now is very helpful in keeping me working strong at it.
[qoute]First: I too, had the floating zombie problem. It seemed to me that they got there by trying to follow me off of a ledge and got stuck. A quick suggestion might be to have the zombies fall off of the ledge rather
than simply stand there (they're supposed to be stupid, yes?) I had a screenshot, but my FTP server seems borked >_< sorry.
Floating zombies should appear no more. If they do, I'm going to assume your monitor is also floating... and gravity as a property of the universe has reversed itself... and I won't be able to fix that... ;)
Quote: Another little thing: I like the idea that you can jump on everything, but in certain cases it doesn't make much sense. For instance: It looked a little od for my big bulky robot to be standing on a skinny little lamp-post. Another instance is when I jumped onto a torch. Sure, it was big enough that I could stand on it, but it may be a cool little addition to make it slightly damage you.
Aggreed that the robot shouldn't be able to jump on thin objects, but my collision/physics system isn't really designed to handle an alternate action. I basically have to choose between letting the robot stand on top of
1-inch-thick poles, or walk right through them. I picked stand on top of them because it seems less buggy.
As far as fire damaging the robot: it would be a nice feature, but I think I'll have to wait until after the contest to implement it.
Quote: Let's see, what else... Well, I was a little dissapointed that the zombies didn't react much to my attacks. They just keep walking without flinching till they die, then "Poof!" gone! Same for damage delt to the robot, though at least we have sounds for that. This is disorienting for the blaster (Am I hititng him or not? No idea) but I'd almost consider it a fatal flaw for the sword. If I whack someone with a lightsaber, undead or not, I expect them to react ^_^ One thing that occured to me while playing is that it would be cool if the sword was able to knock down an enemy, especially some of the stronger ones. It would lend some variety to the gameplay and give me more of a tactical reason to use the sword (as it was, I found very few times where it wasn't simply easier to use the blaster)
Complete agreed. First off, the sword does have a light-sabre'ish' sound now, thanks to the very talented John Ervin who is working with me on this project. The sword is a bit different then the gun in that in that it requires more energy, does more damage, and causes the player to slide forward a bit. But I agree that it should be more. In this case, its really just a matter of not having enough time to do everything I would like to do.
Quote: One other minor complaint that comes to mind is in the second level (the one with the four big columns in the center) I frequently would jump up onto one of the columns (which barely has enough room for the robot guy anyways) and suddenly have 2-3 zombies spawn right next to me. In a way it made the game more challenging, but also quickly became a frustration. May be a good idea to make sure that zombies must be a certain distance from the robot before they can spawn.
Good idea... done. :)
Quote: Other than that.. I loved it! I know the above stuff sounds whiney, but I really did enjoy playing with your little demo (I've been watching your progress closely on the 4e4 screenshot thread) The game is fun, and
feels very "solid", and I LOVE the effects that you've worked in. (Especially the level opening/ending "blur".
That's just awesome!)
Hope I've been helpful, and keep up the awesome work!
Once again, I appreciate the feedback. Thanks for all of it and hopefully the changes I've made will suit your fancy as well.
Quote: EDIT: Ooh! Oooh! One more thing! It would be really cool if the robot faced the direction you were firing while running. For example: spinning around and running backwards while faring oppisite the direction that you're running. (I just think it would look a lot better than bullets coming out of his back.) Also, it may be nice to be able to use the sword in mid-air, but that's not critical.
Agreed, unfortunetly my animation system doesn't support the "locking" of bones to different sets of animations. I've been thinking about a good, easy way to do this and I think I've got it, but It won't be in game for at aleast a few months after contest.
