Yeah I think it will work out with shorter stages and more of them. I want to have secret areas or at least alternate paths. Get some of the “old school” fun back.
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Yep. I think that’s easier to manage. You can beat most retro shmups in under a half hour, those are the big ones. It goes by real fast. Reason is, I think, that people see the same pattern more than three times and they feel like that’s all there is. For old school shmups like Gradius, there was little repetition. I think shooters that pack more replay value into a shorter game are better. Branching paths are good, bonus rounds are good. Long levels are bad. That’s how I’m approaching the next game.
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I’m surprised you are releasing Meteor Crush for free on Kongregate. It seems like around here even people’s very first game… ever… is put out on Mobile with ads/IAP or sold on Steam, Humble Bundle, itch.io etc. I mean I get it in the sense it is the same thing I do. Just spend all of the effort and time then release for free. The majority of people around here don’t seem to do that though.
I think of it differently.
Their goal is to make a game, sell it… and then whatever after that who knows. It depends on the person.
I want the feedback, because my goal is to make something mind blowing. Not this time, maybe not for a while. But there’s no going from point A to point Z without going through the whole shebang.
I just decided that one day I’m going to ask for a lot of money for the games I make, and I’m going to want it from a lot of people, and so in order to do that I need to go through this process first. I need to establish a real existence as a developer, a designer. And I need to learn the skills and lessons that make that possible.
My games will be free until I get the sense that I have found an audience that wants more, and then if I’m so fortunate to find such an audience, I’ll say… imagining… hey, can’t do this for free. And if people are ready and willing to pay me to do what I want to do, then that’s what will happen.
I know that without an audience, a community, it’s not going to be the kind of thing I hope to one day find.
So no, at this point I’d rather reach into more people’s hearts than their pocketbooks. I don’t think MC will do that, so I’ll try again.
Btw the latest version with new features is live on Kongregate. Ammo, rebalanced mechanics, etc.
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That is very much the way I view this too. Even though I have a lot of experience in software dev and game dev in general I need to get my head back into game design more. Also I have spent all of my time in Unity so far just getting into using Unity establishing workflows and systems that work for me.
One day I will tackle game dev again as a way to make money and to do that I need to create a lot of infrastructure. Basically I need to connect with people who like the kind of things I will be making. I know where they are for the most part but most of them don’t know about me. After I release a few games for free more of them will know about me and I’ll be in a better position to connect with them. Basically Just following the slow long road based on “old school” philosophies. Besides all of that I have always done this stuff just for the fun of it. It is a great hobby.
EDIT: Actually thinking about it more I think I will probably throw the shmup out there for a few dollars. Just because I really dislike the race to the bottom with completely free being the ultimate destination. I think that is reasonable. The people in my target market will gladly pay $3 for the game. Because if I was looking for a “different” shmup and found this I’d gladly pay $3 for it. If I actually spend time or money on the graphics overhaul I’ll probably bump it up to $4. I might put out a free demo of like 3 minutes of the first stage.
On the other hand when I do the upgrade of Santa’s Rocketing Christmas Drop at the end of the year that will remain on Kongregate and/or my website for free. Basically every year I hope to release either a new holiday game or an upgrade to a previous game for free just as my way of giving something to the gamers.
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No I was looking for feedback.
Welcome to FF! As your first game, this is incredibly strong! I’ve read the extensive feedback about ease of play, as well as your thoughts about speeding up the meteors, where it becomes just luck. And, I think I have some thoughts that might help.
Strengths
- The graphics, music, and style work together cohesively. It’s a retro-8-bit game that plays well.
- Good controls, tight movement - it feels good.
- Pacing of levels leading to bosses feels good - not too fast, not too slow.
- Varying style between waves is fun. Well done.
- Simplicity of the game is spot-on. Press play, and start shooting stuff!
- The timers on the power ups are fine - except the fire kills the bosses in like 4 seconds, which is MUCH too easy.
Balancing Difficulty
- A balanced difficulty is the 4th ingredient of flow. It’s also the hardest to get right. And, as it’s going to be your primary struggle in every game for the rest of your career, it’s worth improving.
- You have two difficulty components: 1) your ship can’t get hit, and 2) meteors can’t touch the ground. The first is good. The second is where the trouble lies.
- Remove the ‘meteor hits ground’ death counter, ENTIRELY. Instead of missile-command, go for a galaga style game - where as long as YOU survive, things will be okay.
- With ground no longer a concern, you can add LOTS more meteors, and make them LOTS faster.
- A way to keep some of hte danger of missing a meteor, is for them to leave a pool of fire, for 3 seconds. If you miss one, you won’t be able to move that way for 3 seconds. This in turn creates a mini-game that adds tension … OMG! Fire.
- With the ground no longer a primary concern, you can up the difficulty of the bosses. They can drop way more bombs, have shields, etc…
- Also, bosses MUST have a health-gauge or some other form of feedback.
Upgrades
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Once you get difficulty balanced, you’ll want to consider what else players can do. This game is fun enough that you could add lots of upgrades.
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Again, with a better difficulty, waves can be longer, and a longer boss battle.
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Along the way, drop coins that hte player has to MOVE OVER to get - this creates another mini-game, that increases tension.
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Have a simple shop that appears after each boss.
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After a boss battle, present a simple shop.
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There’s all kind of possible upgrades such as additional lives, extending timer on power ups, movement speed boosts, base weapon damage, fire rate, and access to weapon types (ex fire spewer can be locked at first).
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RPG mode - if difficulty was significantly increased, you could make it a progressive stage game, where you might have to play each stage several times to get enough coins to upgrade your ship, to be strong enough to beat the next wave/boss. In this mode, the shop would also be available before/after a game.
Fantastic work! Welcome aboard.
Gigi
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It’s the “Mystery Box”. We are driven by curiousity, and as you say, it matters less what is INSIDE the box, then there is a box for us to wonder about. When you change graphics after each wave, it creates an anticipation, wondering what the next wave will be like.
Gigi
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Beat it? I got the high score ;). Well done @Master-Frog . Thanks for the shout out in the credits ;).
Gigi
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You are something else!
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I will use these tips to make Super Meteor Crush. Thank you. Glad to be in “the club”. Haha.
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Well I know what I am doing right after my workout after work today!
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Well, I won the game. That last round was something else. Got the feeling you wanted to make sure it was challenging. lol!
And the end of game final boss battle with Meteor Master was very cool.
Interestingly, @Gigiwoo scored over 7 million and yet when I won the game I scored 6,324,494 so that tells me there must be some scoring tricks that can be put into play. I may check it out again after the workout. I decided to use my lunch break to play it now. lol It is a heck of a great game. You took it far from our humble beginnings when we played around with a first-time collaboration and made a prototype. In fact, it is not the same game at all. It looks and feels like you have completely redone much of it, added a ton of new stuff and in general made it at least 10 times better than the original prototype in every way. Well done man!
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Yep.
The original challenge for me when we started this was to make an old game, but try to make it fun, to see if it would hold up by today’s standards. I didn’t want to completely copy another game though. You got the prototype functional and then moved on to work on another game. Then I spent every night trying to figure out how to make it cooler. It turned into where I spent more time on it than I care to admit and I didn’t like the end result, it wasn’t (artistically) the best. So I figured, if I spent weeks on something, I want it to be something I can be pretty proud of. So I started redoing little things, then I got more ideas and eventually just spent 3 weeks steamrollering across the entire codebase so that I could tweak and change things quickly, which proved invaluable when I was trying to balance the game. In the end, it looked like a completely different game. At its core, it’s still that same little pea shooter game with falling rocks… just jazzed up a bit.
I never want to try that experiment again…
So, you get bonus points for:
Getting powerups (1000)
Killing UFO’s (5000?)
Completing stages with “perfect”
Collecting a power-up that you already have (5000)
100,000 for each extra life you have at game completion
and everybody gets the same points for beating the bosses.
…I don’t know how Gigi got the amount of points he did, though. I’m not saying you hacked the game.
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Why not?! Think of what you accomplished from this exercise. lol
Inspired by this:
You created an awesome game in Meteor Crush!
Truthfully, that is part of the appeal of older games to me. They were kind of like games in their purest form because they had no resources to waste on foolishness. I often look back and think of what games would be like today had things went differently and the whole “let’s build them like movies” philosophy hadn’t been adopted. By going back in time to these old gems and using them as inspiration for something more we can try to answer that question. lol 
So… no sense in stopping now! Imagine if you had something like this to work with as your base 1-pixel worth’s starting point:
Who knows what you would end up with! But I bet it would be very cool. 
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Maybe… but the problem I experienced is that games have simply evolved far too much from those days. These days, people want upgrade systems. Seriously, it’s an entire meta category on Kongregate… people want to play games specifically that have extensive upgrade systems. You could do it, but the whole game would have to be built from the beginning with the intention of making you be able to upgrade all aspects of your submarine.
If you did do that, made it upgrade focused and put treasure and stuff, and used the oxygen meter as a way of allowing the sub to go further and further depending on the upgrade level, and thus get better treasure… well, there’s your game.
Lol, I proved myself wrong.
Upgrade submarine game is a great idea.
What’s crazy is that Gigi specifically mentioned that upgrades and cash would have made MC more playable and yet, I didn’t even think of it. It wasn’t part of the original design. And what’s funny is as I was looking at all of the games that get way better reviews and way more plays than mine… they all have some kind of RPG/upgrade element. Games without that element don’t get NEARLY the number of plays.
I don’t think people have stopped caring about old school classic game mechanics, I just think they expect something that evolves as they play to give them a better experience throughout their playtime. It’s like a product life-cycle for that specific game. Static games don’t really stick, anymore.
Infinite runners seem to be big as well, for the same reason… you upgrade, you get further, you upgrade, you get further… and that’s just the way it is.
My next game will be focused entirely on the upgrade aspect of gameplay.
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Ha ha! Yeah that is the beauty of going with a very old game. Not thinking of it as a boundary but as a basic concept and challenge. Staying reasonably true to the original while bringing it up to something gamers in 2015 will appreciate.
The thing is many of those games were/are fun. The very basic play mechanics are solid they are just very limited. They’re repetitive. Mainly out of necessity for the time period. However, they focused on being games and only games. So to evolve them and expand on the core of gameplay is where the fun is at.
These days if a developer (particularly a AAA studio although I doubt they’d ever touch such a thing) were to look at those old games and say hey let’s do something inspired by this you’d almost certainly end up with something very different. Like your M.C. would likely have a 3 minute opening video. Plenty of voice acting. More videos between each area. They might have added all of the gameplay stuff you did but it is just as likely they would not have. Maybe they’d add a powerup or two. Everything would likely be in 3D probably with photo realistic graphics. They’d also have to make sure that everything was kind of realistic which means the motion of things would likely change, probably ending up at least a little slower. Player movement would probably have noticeable acceleration & deceleration because they’d want that gun vehicle to feel heavy. Just a bunch of stupid stuff really. The way you evolved it seems to be completely focused on fun. Making a great game.
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True, but their game would also have online networking and lots more content… the game would evolve to an almost epic experience as you progressed. I see that being a major thing that today’s games do that old games did not… although when you look at (for example) The Legend of Zelda… that’s exactly what they did. You upgraded your swordsman. Holy cow I’ve been blind!
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I’ve always liked upgrade systems too. Any kind works for me. Temporary power-ups or “permanent” ability acquisitions. It’s because we are used to that I think. Our whole lives we are used to growing and becoming better. For games there is the added benefit of altering the gameplay to quite a degree as Miyamoto did with SMB3. Sure he may not think much of it now (“embarrassing” I believe is how he sees it now lol) but what that game did very well was show how to use powerups/skills/abilities to provide a pretty diverse gameplay experience.
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& having slightly different power in the power ups so players spend just as much time avoiding power ups they don’t want as they do trying to get the ones they do want. They also want to get more powerful about 1/2-2/3 of the way through the level, struggle then beat the boss, then having that new strength start at the next level at a lower power base I.e. The enemies just get tougher/smarter so the player has the higher power from the previous level but need to think before fighting again so the power peaks part way through each level but the skill needed is almost the opposite bell curve
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