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Be Concise - Who’s got time for Wall 'O Text? Less is more.
Here’s an early prototype using stock art (from the asset store)
->Controls: WASD or Arrows to move, x,space, left mouse or enter
Okay whats new
->A new score system, you get points for hitting a player, but most points for “last hits”. You can get points for knocking down trees (and you can knock down trees (75 for last hit, 25 for normal height (while enemy kart was not invincible), and 5 points for knocking down a tree – in the first area). What do you think about the new score system and I guess the game in general.
Hecka fun! It’s a cute, simple and fun idea. The action starts right away, and has a cohesive sense of silly fun with quick deaths, rapid respawns, and nice art/animations. It’s a tried and true idea and I like where this prototype is going. Here are a few considerations that might help make it even stronger:
Initial confusion - might help to have a brief ‘drive in ramp’ that helps me safely join the game. This is the 3-4 seconds of play seen at the start of Flappy Bird and other games to allow the player to adjust. Could be done with short entrance ramps, a brief invisibility, or temporary invulnerability. You could also start on a ramp above the action, so you sort of FLY in from above, making an initial decision/excitement moment right after every death, especially if you could damage opponents upon landing. Note, this delay time also provides a place for players to purchase upgrades.
Weapon confusion - I never really figured out when/how I acquire weapons. Sometimes, I had weapons that could shoot big missiles, sometimes, I had nothing. I think I would enjoy always having a starting weapon, something only moderately effective, and then weapon pick ups ADD to that.
Bombs - Dropping bombs is a common technique in games like this, and it’s also a mechanic that’s confusing to players. In this case, the active bombs, the bomb weapon upgrade, and the carrying of bombs all looked so similar that I was never really sure which was which, leading to inadvertent deaths. I think bombs might benefit from a separate button to drop them. Maybe your bombs (or other?) could be highly alpha’ed, making them hard to see or only visible, inside a certain distance.
Single player - This prototype demonstrates a fun core mechanic. Once fleshed out, might be nice to incorporate a series of single player missions, where the AI improves, and you are earning $$$ toward upgrades. This is a LONG discussion, and non-trivial design/implementation.
Mobile. I’m curious if you could simplify the movement enough to support mobile. The simple technique is to use ONLY left/right, plus fire and bomb. Though, you could simplify that further with Auto-fire. Then, you adjust car speed heavily based on how far you turn - where short turns just adjust, and long turns quickly become almost a skid out. It’s a non-trivial design process that could enable you to port to mobile.
Health/Damage - I was never clear on what showed my health/damage. After a while, I was beginning to think that the weird side-cars sticking out from my side somehow indicated that, though I was never clear. A simple UI for health might suffice and also simplify the game-field a little bit.
Kongregate - if fully fleshed out, I could see this being a fun little title for a platform like Kongregate, where you quick-join games, and fight to earn credits, which you can then use to purchase boosts for the next game, or save up to spend on car/weapon upgrades. This would require server implementations, dead-reckoning, and other networking headaches - which again, is non-trivial.
Graphics - It’s a prototype, so I hesitate to even include this. The graphics were cute, and they were also sometimes hindering my ability to understand what I was seeing. The vehicle was sometimes occluded by particles. The missiles flew too fast, or maybe spawned too far/close. Improving this often involves cheating the physics, so that missiles start out moving just a little faster than you, before quickly accelerating. You could also tweak the particles to start smaller and grow over time. In this case, they can live shorter, which allows you to have more particles. Also, the lighting/shadows could be improved (is this Unity 5.0).
Score - I never really noticed the score. If killing trees/players provided score, I was unaware of it. That could mean the feedback/score is unclear. PS - Score can be tied to coins, which players could use to purchase upgrades/boosts in game, or as part of the out-of-game upgrade cycle.
Ok I did a three second timer where the enemy karts aren’t doing anything, in the ready set go, you can drive around right away.
You pick up weapons by driving over the bomb icons. You run out when they have are empty (no ammo).
For the bombs they are actually color coated red, blue, green and some other color. So if your player one your bombs are infact red, your saw blades and walking bombs are also red.
I have an idea of where to take it, and that’s kind of mario party type fashion where each map is a different game type (elimination, point based, zone control etc). All kart based, There might be an overworld between maps so if you got 1st place you move ahead 4 spots etc and the player who reaches the goal first wins.
The weird side cars are actually kegs, or supposed to be. Whenever you get hit you drink one of them and go crazy, once all your kegs are gone your dead (maybe it would be more clear if I got rid of the extra hit point). I think slot of these are actually art issues
I don’t really see mobile as a reasonable platform to devlop for any longer with 500 new games a day. And as far Kong I don’t see that worthwhile either. So the idea is to target steam, steam machines in November, split screen local coop action was the most fun I had when I was a kid, goldeneye and mario kart, and I think we can bring that back but not be limited by the console hardware.
I guess I’ll add some floating text for when you get points.
When you figure that out - especially if you do using UGUI - please, leave some technical notes. I’ve been trying for a while to figure out how to get flytext into my game, with no luck.
And, I’m going to have another demo up soon, just not for a bit. It will be much improved over the last one.
Really? Shouldnt be too hard just make a canvas set it to world space, then add a text to it, make it move up. Might have to do something with the rotation to act like a billboard. Ill look at it later today
If in world space, you’ll need a billboard effect. And, you may have issues with tweening based on proximity to the player. For example, three obvious boundary cases are: dead trees will actually be behind you, exploded cars might be off screen, and points earned may be far away/occluded! World space will make it VERY difficult to make the font size and rise-up tweening appropriate based on player distance. Personally, I would do it with the new UI, in 2D. Here’s how I do my floating tweening score stuff:
(Up front stuff)
Write a UI_Tween class (Google ‘Robert Penner’) - I reuse this across projects
Create a pool of UI ‘flying-text’ controls from prefabs
Create a UI element showing the player’s current score
(Per score instance)
Grab a flying-text from your pool
Determine where the score originated, convert it to world space, convert that to UI camera space
Setup your flying-text to fly up toward the UI element showing player score.
Set a count-down timer that STOPS updating your actual score UI element (ex 0.8 seconds) (while > 0.0, don’t update)
Tween it (every frame), moving toward your UI player score
When tween finishes, use a call-back delegate for FINISHED. Release flying text back to pool.
In finish delegate, change color of your score UI, and start a new UI-tween that PULSES it.
When pulse delegate finishes, change color back.
I do this kind of stuff a lot. Yes, it takes a bit of coding up front, and YES, it also makes the experience more juicy. This kind of movement guides the player’s eyes to what is changing, from where, and why. Without any words or tutoring, it provides perfectly clear feedback. For an example of this in action, knock out a couple rows/cols in Block 64 (see sig).
I remember one time. One of my instructional designers didn’t understand what was happening in one of my games. I listened to her confusion, and opened my mouth to explain. Then, I paused. And thought. And paused. And I came to the conclusion anything I had to say in response was meaningless. Cause, if she was confused, then other players would be too and, I wouldn’t be able to explain it to each and every one of them. So, we went back to the drawing board, and changed the UI. We provided movement, limited the chaos, and used bars instead of numbers.
Over time, I got better at listening until now, I pause first, to give myself time to think about HOW the game is failing. I look for improvements in the UI, I throw out things I thought were ‘cute’, and I simplify-simplify-simplify, until the feedback is clear. I put in the extra coding time to move points, flash scores in different colors, and design my way out of the chaos.
((Sometimes, people say my stories are too subtle. If it wasn’t, in this case, then skip this paragraph. If I was a little too subtle, then perhaps consider this. For 3 specific features, your instinct was to explain HOW what’s in the code is actually working, if only the player understood to look in the right place, for the right thing. Which, when you think about it, is a flawed kind of logic. As the player, I looked where the game told me to look - BIG PUFFS OF SMOKE MOVING EVERYWHERE IN VERY BRIGHT COLORS. If the game wants me to be aware of points for trees, then it needs to make that clear. If it wants to use an unusual convention of barrels-attached-to-my-car as health indicators, then it needs to work unusually hard to make that seem intuitively obvious. And if it wants me to know that I’m picking up weapons, then it needs to show me, in no uncertain terms. Show, don’t tell. For though the player is not always right, their confusion is always real.))
This, one hundred times. Seriously, the new GUI is easy to work with. It requires a minimal amount of getting used to, but when you do, it’s great. When I re-did the UI to Sara the Shieldmage in the new GUI, stuff got awesome. Also, in my opinion it’s easier to understand what’s going on when you can see the hierarchy of GUI elements to each other, but that’s a nerdy programmer-thing that the end user won’t really care about.
Okay I got that floating text working, i posted the code if anyone wants it. You would just need a floating text prefab called FloatingText in the resources folder (all that is text that has a floating script on it). Add the scoreflasher to the text if you want that, and pass that to the endtext, and once it gets there it will activate the flasher.
A few things from the web player in your first post:
Game: I didn’t know what to do at first. It didn’t tell me a goal, try to tell the player what to do like, “DESTROY THE OTHERS!” or something, if that’s the goal.
Physics: Car physics… they were really really strange and kind of difficult. This should work fine on mobile, I have a game running with full realtime deformation and vehicle damages on every traffic vehicle and player vehicle in the game, so, much more intensive, all on an iPhone5(and Galaxy S3).
