The best way to make a big improvement with your game is to get others to playtest it and give you feedback you can use!
Did you know that the wildly successful Subnautica used a player feedback system during early access so they could find out what their players really wanted, so they didn’t have to guess what would make people want to buy their game? The most successful games are not developed in the dark!
If feedback is what you want, you’ve found the right thread! Feedback Friday runs from Friday to Monday every week.
What To Show
Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play > everything else
Post a link to a playable game, preferably WebGL. If you don’t have a playable game, post something substantial, not just text.
How To Ask For Feedback
Be concise.
Specify what you want feedback on and what you don’t.
Resist the urge to write an immediate defense to feedback. Take the time to understand their points. Remember that your friends here are taking time out of their busy schedules to help you for free.
How To Give Feedback
Be positive. Every game has some redeeming quality.
Focus on the design, not the designer.
Be specific and constructive. Don’t like something? Explain why.
Well here, I just released a new demo for feedback on my facebook group. I figure I can post it here too.
It’s a bit rough. Don’t expect it to be a complete experience or anything. It still needs lots of tuning and adjusting. The demo was mainly to see what people in my group thought the new stuff I added.
Here is a dropbox link to the demo and a screenshot. I don’t need any specific feedback, just general thoughts.
This is an old screenshot. I don’t feel like taking a new one yet. Today is supposed to be my day off.
By the way, this is a solo project I’ve been working on for last few years (although a lot of that time was spent learning stuff!). This is an RTS type of game.
This game was inspired by older RTS games like Age of Empires 2, so tried to make the overall look a bit nostalgic, but at the same time still push the graphics where ever I could.
I’m primarily an artist who just started learning programming in the last few years, so I do focus a lot on art.
Awesome, please keep in the that the difficulty, game length, balance, and all that have not yet been tuned. I was just wanting general feedback at this stage to get an idea if I’m on the right track.
I’ll be spending time tuning and tweaking once I see what people think. I could easily spend the rest of the year just playing with numbers, but I wanted to get some feedback as soon as I could. So far, I’ve already gotten good feedback from my sound guy (I did contract out a few things here and there like the music).
Additionally, the screen hold a lot of information without it being too cluttered, as some strategy games seem to fall to.
My one feedback on the look is that some of the units do not stand out enough from the background. If you convert the screenshot to grayscale, it becomes more obvious. The guy in orange by the blue tent is hard to see in the original image. In the bottom right corner is a guy standing a tower who I did not even see in the color image until I was purposely counting figures to decide who to give feedback on.
The shadows help with seeing the figures. (Except for the guy on the tower, whose shadow blends in too.)
Yeah, that’s one of the issues I ran into since I’m going for more of a realistic style. During the game, the animations make the units stand out a lot more. So, if you have a chance to download it and see it in action, let me know if that helps. Although, saying that, I use Substance Painter for the character textures, so I can easily change outfit colors (though I have to update the icons as well).
One easy fix you can try is to make an alternate material that just has albedo plugged into emission and toggle this via key input for characters. This can help player quickly find dudes without going as immersion breaking as helper UI.
I haven’t played yet game. But If units are moving / are animated when standing, or even walk, I don’t think color is not an issue really.
Specially if opening full screen on monitor, not on mobile. It makes difference.
Setting right colors for dynamic objects may be difficult, if they move from one scenery to other.
I am sure, experiance will be different by playing in comparison to screenshot.
What about a some short play video, for us, who can/don’t have time to play? We got only few days for feedback here.
At least we could comment from that perspective.
@DrewMelton - Well done! You pulled off the Age of Empires aesthetic well.
Is the game based on an actual historical period?
Is there a way to assign groups to hotkeys?
I didn’t think to try queueing commands. Is that possible?
I only tried one tent color. Does your choice of tent color affect the color of your units? I was able to distinguish units fine. But perhaps each unit could have a distinct color silhouette to help differentiate them further. For example, spearmen could have colored shoulders, archers could have a thin vertical stripe on their tunics, etc.
I do have a highlighting outline asset that I use. It outlines the characters and some of the buildings when moused over. Also, the group has the ability to highlight various units. I could easily rig it up to highlight all characters with a button press or something.
Here is an older video if it helps. It can give an idea for the animations and movement if nothing else. (oh, and this is pc only, so I am optimizing for full screen on 13" or larger monitors.) Let me know if this video helps, otherwise I can make a new one.
Thanks, it’s only loosely based on the medieval period. I wanted some creative freedom. Plus, this period has been done a lot, so any chance I get to do something unique, I take it. I tried to give the game a bit of a unique style which still staying within the realms of what people would expect in this time period.
I have only one group at the moment, and I don’t have hotkeys. I have experimented with groups in the past. To be honest, a lot has changed in the game this year, so I’m sure I’m going to add stuff for controlling groups or things like that.
I don’t have queuing commands available yet. It’s something I can look into, but this game is already getting complicated for me as it is, so I don’t want to have to rewrite a bunch of stuff. We’ll see how it goes.
Tent color is just for looks. It was an easy thing to add. Since all the units have unique colors, and their upgraded versions of the soldiers have all new outfits, I don’t know how much I want to change anything. I tried to make each unit stand out in a group enough for easy identification. It more is needed, I’ll work on it.
I have no problem with unit visibility, and especially in video. And this is on my phone. I just throw suggestion out there. There is quite a few older gamers with bad eyes who play games like this so something to keep in mind. But I don’t get impression individual characters are really even important here. No need to track individuals anyway.
One critique I can make on the art is to consider adding slight worble and natural irregularities to your building and prop models. The wooden fort, for instance, has that impossoblr video game straighrness look. Breaking that up can lend some character.
You mean the wooden fort in that last video? It won’t be in the final game. It’s an older model. If you look at the first screenshot, I made the wooden posts more irregular. The forts I make from now on will be rougher since I’m making them more like ruins to tie into the story. Some of the props will be tweaked as well.
And yeah, if I get a bunch of complaints from gamers (or older gamers) saying they are having trouble with unit visibility, then I’ll definitely fix it. At the moment, I haven’t had any complaints of anyone actually playing the demo, so I haven’t worried about it too much.
The motion and animation does help bring out the characters. The only one I had an issue with was the fully armored knight standing to the right of the gate; his armor blended too well with the stone behind him. The red plume drew my eye though, which helped a lot.
Overall, I think you did a good job with the characters and how they are moving around that set piece. They felt appropriate to the game genre. I’ve seen a lot of games or WIPs where characters standing around looked … just off somehow. Unfortunately, I do not have the language or animation education to describe the difference; I can only expres that you got the feel down well.
As a side note: The incoming attackers made me laugh. The guy in front has his club high in the air, probably shouting a war cry, and runs right past the nice soft civilian targets and straight into a hail of arrows!
I am probably not your typical RTS player, but the first thing that crossed my mind when I read this was that using different tent colors would be a great way to organize my units or differentiate what I want a settlement to focus on.
If nothing else, even the small touch of having different colors available helps reduce the “samey” appearance some RTS games have.
Yeah, at the moment I have it set so that they run for your base (the tent anyway), because you lose if they get inside.
Now, if they run into someone, they will attack. I changed a few things since that video. I had it so they would ignore civilians, but now that you can build small camps for them to drop off stuff, you can keep them out of harms way, so I set the enemy to attack them if they run into them.
Also, if is the enemy is hit by an arrow or otherwise are attacked, they will target the nearest person and attack.
