A FEW (as in one or two) of you may remember, last year I built a fighter jet minigame as a technical demo for my high school’s development team. It gained it’s fair share of local attention and vaulted me to my position as Director of Design for i3D RCS.
Now then, I have learned plenty since then, and have applied lessons to the game to make it look better, run faster, and play smoother. First and foremost, I had to implement a save system, something that was missing in the first game. Nobody seemed to notice it, but developers are their own worst enemy, I am no different, and the lack of a proper save system bugged the hell out of me. Here’s some other things that have made it stand out from it’s predecessor:
Save system (of course)
proper texturing
AI systems
homing missiles
better laser system
GUILayout (runs very well)
Split large scripts into smaller ones (runs faster)
More realistic terrains (Terrain Toolkit FTW)
Turrets (ground-based and attached to ship)
Targeting assists (green icons over targets)
and my favorite part:
XBOX 360 CONTROLLER COMPATIBLE!!!
I know the quality is horrible, but Fraps defaults to .AVI, and the raw video was over a GB. Sony Vegas is good at taking care of that issue. Also, I know the GUI is large during gameplay, I haven’t put as much work into that as I have the menus and such. Also, some cheap sound effects. I don’t have a triple-A sound studio. I don’t have a sound studio at all…fMod kinda helps. A lot.
Things I plan to implement:
Navigation Gimbal
AI Jets
Mothership (like in the first game, need to figure out some collision issues)
More mission styles
Multi-objective levels
Leave some suggestions, I’m open for criticism (as long as it’s it’s constructive, don’t spam)
Incerabley Nice, Love the audio and the effects of the wings light thingys (sorry dunno what there called). Personaly I will defiantly download the game and keep up the good work. Love it!! 10/5 stars
First off, I want to say that pulling this off as nicely as it is now by yourself is really awesome, and it’s clear you really like this kind of simulation feel. The ground looks pretty darn good, and with more detail it’ll really turn into something pretty cool.
Now, since you want to get feedback, here’s stuff that sprang to mind while reviewing it. Bear in mind, though, that without a playable demo, it’s really hard to give an accurate assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the design.
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The controls look stiff and either over or under-respond to control inputs, instead of scaling smoothly. I know it’s very difficult to get that right with digital controls; but with the xBox controller’s analog stick, it should be possible to get it to respond to input more realistically.
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The plane is so far away from the POV that about the only way I can see that working well is with a fair amount of auto-aim for guns. I guess one of my big questions here is, why is it set up that way, instead of a cockpit view? If the only answer to that is, “because seeing the plane looks cooler” then you really need to keep that POV more tightly tied to the plane’s position, and not ever let it get so far out that you can’t enjoy those details. But there you have a major problem, in that the jet is effectively eating a lot of screen space and is making gameplay work a little less well by occluding things. I’d really recommend thinking about that issue a lot more; right now the plane just feels like a fairly superfluous visual element- neither detailed enough in terms of presentation to really provide a “wow moment” or three, but it’s still eating enough screen space and is distracting enough that it isn’t justified otherwise.
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It’s very apparent that the gameplay needs much thought still. While I can appreciate that for you, a lot of the struggle thus far has probably been in terms of graphics and UI development, as a game designer I feel that the game needs a lot of thought in terms of making a game to hang all of that gee-whiz onto.
Now, it’s probably difficult (if not impossible) to get it running these days, but when I saw your game, an old title for the Mac and PC called Hellcats Over the Pacific immediately came to mind. Like your game, it was a third-person POV of the plane, and like your game, it basically felt like a “light sim”, i.e., not modeling the aircraft very accurately but still giving the feeling of flight, not just an arcade treatment. Anyhow, Hellcats had a very good game design, considering the technological limitations of the era; it had pretty simplistic enemy aircraft with basic AI and simple ground turrets, but made the whole thing work pretty well by constructing the level designs carefully and thinking about how to get as much interest as possible out of each mission. While it’s probably very tempting to just throw down turrets and stuff to blast everywhere and then just make a “mission” with some waypoints and maybe something to blow up, that’s not very good game design; I’d honestly suggest keeping the number of enemies low, but polish the difficulty carefully, so that players have to use both reflexes and some strategic thinking to win. That puts it into a category of gameplay that’s a cut above games like After Burner and its numerous clones and feel-alikes, and wouldn’t be a lot harder to code (in fact, it may be a lot easier in some respects) but you need to plan out your approach more.
Anyhow, sorry for the wall of text, I sometimes get carried away when people want feedback 
I love these suggestions. Honestly, I’d rather hear more bad things so I know where to improve.
Thanks, but I’m my own worst critic, and it barely meets my expectations…I have much higher expectations for the game.