[Feedback Friday (FF) has changed! See here for the community discussion. TL;DR - Devs need more time, reviewers need a gap - FF will be open for 2 weeks, then closed for 2 weeks.]
NEXT Feedback Friday BEGINS JULY 17th
Want design feedback for your new game? Then you’ve found the right thread! Post here to get precious player feedback. Discuss until next Friday, when we’ll lock the old and start anew.
How To Ask For Feedback?
Show - Pics, videos, or best of all, a playable game!
Be Concise - Who’s got time for Wall 'O Text? Less is more
How To Give Feedback?
Be Positive - Finding redeeming qualities in the worst of games, is in itself a game
Focus On The Design - Not the designer
Be Specific - “Your game sucks!” is for nubs
What To Show?
Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play >>> everything else
Back with another update on my shmup experiment. Another 8 hours of my time putting this project at 50 hours now. I like tracking the time I spend on projects because it provides a way to measure improvement in development well at least as far as efficiency is concerned.
So… What’s New This Time?
First, I play tested and tweaked things a bit here and there including adding a bit more feedback on the Shield and Armor status.
Next I added an asteroid zone. Then I added a ground-based enemy. More play testing and tweaking of the asteroids and the new enemy.
The Screenshots
Welcome to the asteroid zone! Fortunately, I already had these images from a shmup I made several years ago so was able to just plug in the images. It is actually a 3D model with the rotation frames rendered out. So the rotation here is image-based. I will probably update it so when the asteroids hit the ground they rotate around the z-axis using Unity’s rotate command instead of continuing their current image-based rotation. I think that is how they should rotate at that point.
Here is the new ground-based enemy. Three are already up and firing and a fourth is just rising up out of the ground. Obviously, for this one I just made a very simple rectangle which is all that is needed at this point.
Other Stuff
Thanks to the feedback I received from my last update two weeks ago I decided to turn what began as just a little experiment into an actual game. I am working towards that goal now. AI and interaction will still be high on my list.
However, I think there are several things needed for a great game and one of those is variety. This means I will be working on different enemies and challenges for a while. Looking forward to adding a mini-boss soon. I think the stage is currently long enough it can use a mini-boss to keep things interesting. Not sure how much longer I will make this first stage. It takes a little over 7 minutes to play through it now. Thinking at about the 4 to 5 minute point is a great spot for the mid-boss and then 8 to 10 minutes have the end of stage boss battle.
Your Feedback
At this point, anything you want to say is fine. You may hate it. You may like it.
I guess if you played the earlier versions you can let me know if you like the changes this time around: the shield & armor feedback (when low), the asteroid (probably better named the meteor) zone and the first ground-based enemy.
If it is your first time checking it out just share your thoughts in general… good or bad.
Controls
This is all explained on the How to Play screen. However, you can probably use a controller as well. I added support but cannot guaranteed that all of them will work. Just try it and see. D-Pad or left stick moves and of course the action buttons fire your weapons and use the ray.
@GarBenjamin - The asteroids need to be potatoes or big spinning turnips or something like that.
I really like the shield and armor feedback. It helps a lot, especially for a reckless player like me.
Did you make more improvements to the AI of older units? They seemed to be doing additional things this time which made it a little harder but a lot more surprising and interesting.
At some point down the line in your development, a little more narrative window dressing might be nice – such as if the boss appeared at the very beginning, flashed a brief taunt text, and then retreated. Kind of like how there’s already some narrative stuff when you rescue someone.
Ha ha! I had the exact same thought! All of these graphics are just whatever I can find that I created in the past or can knock out in about 5 minutes or less (except I actually spent about 30 minutes… no actually an hour or two with the revisions… on the background parallax imagery - mainly just to get the design right). Eventually, they will be large spinning veggies or perhaps even acorns falling off a tree. Something that fits in. I will worry about that stuff once I have an actual game. Then it will be simple to focus on all of the real graphics and swap them in.
I tweaked the AI slightly on a couple of the enemies. I am glad you noticed it. That is the main purpose of the AI in the game. Not so much to make it more challenging (although it does to a degree but probably not as challenging as a bullet hell or making the enemies super fast or super armored and so forth) and exactly as you said to make the game more interesting. The simple pretty much fixed flight paths of enemies in most shmups is quite boring to me having played so many of them over the years. I always wondered why no real thought & programming is put into them.
I agree completely on the very simple narrative bits. I see that as feedback which is a great thing. Anything that might have been seen 20 years or so ago is fine with me. I just don’t want to get into the movies, hint pop ups and all of that foolishness.
Thanks for taking the time to check out the game again!
Feedback Friday is changing. The community discussion was pretty clear - every week is too much. So, after we close this Friday, we’ll have a break until Friday July 17th.
Really great progress. The game is becoming quite fun. The continued evolution of the monsters is really engaging - I like figuring out their behaviors, and the updates to both the graphics (ex background parallax) and audio (ex music) are nice evolutions. I also like how some of the enemies look the same, except with different colors (light red vs dark red) which maybe indicates more health or different abilities.
Below are some thoughts that might help make it even stronger.
Shield - I’d prefer if shield was a special bonus you picked up. Maybe like temporary invulnerability. Starting out with both shield and armor is confusing. Later, the shield is gone, and it’s entirely about armor, which is more intuitive.
Humans - I do not like using a separate key to pickup humans. It adds complexity, in a bad way. I feel VERY strongly that this would be more engaging if you just had to hold NEAR the humans, for a short time (ex 1.5-2 seconds).
Humans - the way the humans/carrots fly up looks like a missile - the first few times it happend, I thought I was under attack. It might be more clear if they just jump, bounce, and pulse a few times, before turning into points that fly up to your score.
Forward limit - Many times, the human/carrot appears, and I’m prevented from moving forward to them. There’s no bad guys, and it’s stressful - in a, ‘I don’t like this’, as opposed to a ‘I gotta get the timing right’. I would prefer that you balance the release of hte humans, or consider allowing me to fly about 10% closer to the right edge.
Waves - Right now, some of the bad-guys seem to come in ‘waves’ or ‘clusters’. And, it might be more engaging if when there were clusters of certain types of enemies, if I would get a special score bonus for killing them all. Otherwise, I can mostly just sit there and dodge/ignore things. Other ways to address this is with killing streaks - though I miss lots of enemies in your game, so this would require LOTS of balance.
Active Weapon - I’d like to see a special indicate at the top showing which weapon is active, with a time-bar showing how much time/energy I have left. Then, when I pickup a weapon, it could fly up and pulse when it lands on the icon. (Use icon, not text). As in [XX] (-------------- ). This is me trying to use ascii text to show a current weapon icon, with a timer/energy bar counting down.
Health low sound - is a bit annoying. I like the visual and audio feedback that I’m near death. I don’t like how annoyingly loud it is.
Death - once I died, the game just kept going. I never respawned, and I’m not sure what I was supposed to do. I pressed all the keys I could think of. If that’s the end, take me back to a score screen or something. If I have more lives, consider having me respawn automatically after a few seconds.
@Gigiwoo Very solid feedback! A few of the items are on my list such as the bonus for destroying all enemies that are part of a squadron. Others were not on my radar and will definitely be considered.
Thanks for taking your time to have another play and provide feedback!
Very good. I like the random vegetable characters. Fast-paced, challenging, solid shooter. The enemies have very unpredictable movement patterns and it was keeping me on my toes. Good balance/distribution of bullets and targets on the screen. I saw a lot of repetition in the baddies, would like to be challenged by some variation of monster patterns here and there. I got to the yellow boulders then I died. Too bad because they looked new and different. For the distance I flew, as a player I expected some physical obstacles to avoid. Fly over this, under that, shoot this to clear the path, etc.
I never did like weaker power-ups overriding better ones. I lost my spread shot that way. I love spread, so I’m still trying to cope.
Pretty cool. Can’t wait to fight the cabbage death star.
