[Feedback Friday #10] - January 9, 2015

[A new year is a time of new beginnings. Good luck!]

Want design feedback for your new game? Then you've found the right thread! Post it here to see what others think. Discuss to your heart's content, until next Friday, when we'll lock the old and start anew.

How To Get Folks To Checkout Your Game?

• Show - Be Interesting! Pics, videos, or best of all, a playable game!
• Be Concise - Who's got time for Wall 'O Text? Less is more.
• Read This - More great guidance in @superpig's post.

How To Give Good Feedback?

• Be Positive - Finding a few redeeming qualities in the worst of games, is in itself a game.
• Be Respectful - Whichever side you're on, play nice or don't play.
• Focus On The Design - Not the designer.
• Be Specific - "Your game sucks!" is for nubs.

Good luck!
Gigi

[PS - Feedback Friday #9 is here]

 

So...it's been a while. I was challenged a while back to do something a bit more concrete than throwing low-level tech demo after low-level tech demo, and I'd like to show some progress on that.

Sara the Shieldmage - Basic "Thin Slice" Prototype

Controls:
WASD - Movement
Enter (Keyboard) - Open Menu
Use The Mouse For Buttons

What's In The Prototype
This is a "thin slice" prototype - that is it has a really basic version of most of the key aspects of the game (a town with an available quest, world map, minidungeon, random battles.) You could go directly to the Crystal Cave northeast of the Castle City of Nuuria, or you could go into Nuuria and pick up a small sidequest. Either way, in the Crystal Cave you'll find an Antique Shield that appears to have been stolen! You can return to Nuuria to turn it in to get a reward that I just realized I didn't actually implement.

There's some problems too. First, on the world map, do not go in the water. You'll have to refresh the page; I haven't set down the invisible walls that stop you from falling through the water, and off the world just yet. Next, the battle system has no Run mechanic if you don't want to fight. The Cave Slimes you'll fight aren't at all tough, and Sara has Mediguard, which gives you temporary HP and regeneration for 10 seconds...but it's something that in my cursory testing I found myself wanting. So, that's a thing. I haven't written a state-reset if you die in a battle, so please don't die to a Cave Slime. Finally, the sidequest doesn't have its reward - Guard's Armor, which gives +8 HP - implemented.

What I'd Like Feedback On
First, everything in this is rough. Like, really rough. While I don't doubt I'm going to get constructive critique on numerous things, I'm wanting feedback on the general flow of the thin slice. Are battles in the cave too frequent? Not frequent enough? What will improve the battle system? Finally, is the minor sidequest in this demo OK?

...On a side note, this sort of Thin Slice is the sort of thing I think I need to do more often. While small technical demos might be OK for certain things, I definitely think that a Thin Slice demo is more suitable for the Design thread than anything I've attempted in the past.

 

@Asvarduil - the thin slice gave a much clearer idea of the core experience that I think you're going for. It plays like a classic JRPG, which is great.

In combat, a little more spectacle would be nice -- although part of the distraction for me was that Mediguard caused "The ability needs to create a self-destructing 'battle effect'" to spam the dev console. The combat interface itself is simple and intuitive. The name "Holy Shield" isn't as intuitive; I associate the word "shield" with defense, not offense. It felt a bit off to shield an enemy to death. The overall mean frequency of battles was just about perfect, but there was a frustrating stretch where I got hit with a battle every couple steps and couldn't make any progress down the hall. Can you impose a minimum duration between battles?

Also, speaking of steps, please add diagonal movement in the next version, or at least let newer key presses override the direction of movement. If I hold the up arrow and then hold the right arrow, I'd expect to go diagonally up and right, or at least right.

When I transitioned between levels (e.g., world map to cave), there was a pause that worried me for a bit that the game had crashed. If you can add a "Loading..." message, it will turn this worry into eager anticipation instead.

The world map was nice to explore. Wandering the world felt a bit like the classic Ultima games. The whole playthrough felt like a nice bit of nostalgia. Nice work on it!

 

Okay I played it.

->In town the walls can block the view of your character.
->In the feild there are some z-buffer issues.
->The slime never attacked me so the battles were boring though I did like the interface
->I was able to walk across the water sometimes.

->The random encounters seemed to happen too frequently, personally I dont like random encounters myself and would prefer something like a xenosaga (where you can actually see the enemies walking around the level -- so there's only a finite to kill -- if you skip to around 1:30 in the video).

 

Dude. Excellent feedback.

First, a question - how do you see the Dev Console in a webplayer build? When I build a PC/Mac/Linux version of the game, there's a popup in the bottom that appears; I've not seen that in my webplayers, ever. Is it the F12 console that those messages are appearing in? This could be useful for me later on (even though I'm hoping it won't be, I know otherwise. I've done software for too long.)

Yeah, the "Holy Shield" thing was based on vague memories of the Paladin moveset in WoW...at least I think it was Holy Shield that caused you to fling your shield a good distance. Either way, the name of the move sucks, you're right. I was thinking something like "Shield Bash" or "Bash" or something. What sounds like a good name for Sara's last-ditch attack to you? And, do you think it's necessary that she even has one?

The way I've got Sara (the character) planned, shielding things to death is a valid, and designed-for strategy. Two of her moves that I've got working, but that you can't see, are Restorum, a party-wide heal, and Thornguard, which gives temporary HP and guarantees a counterattack for 10 seconds. I might move Restorum onto another character later, though - I really want Sara to be a tanky mage who enables the party to shield things to death in interesting ways. Unlike some other characters who are far less subtle.

As for the freeze thing, I'm going to be posting in Scripting soon. I'm having issues getting a proper fade-out to work. It's especially bad from the Cave to the World Map; see, the World Map has a metric crapton of UV skinned cubes that get combined in the Start event into a single, huge mesh that all uses the same material/texture. On my mid-range machine, I've noticed a significant load time that I'm not entirely sure I can do something about. So...that's a thing, too.

I'm glad you like the direction my work is heading in, though. I love old-school JRPGs - they're the reason I got into game development in the first place. My first three crappy projects are finally starting to pay off! This isn't quite the uber-awesome project I originally wanted to make all those years ago, but I'm finally seeing how I'm going to be able to reach that lofty goal. I'll post again in a couple of weeks with fixes to the stuff you said. I know that Aiursrage2k wants diagonal movement as well, so I'm probably being an antiquity-fart about that one. (Back when I was young, we didn't have diagonal movement; if you wanted to get to a tile at an angle to you, you had to press two different buttons!...and we liked it! In fact, I still do, but the point remains not everyone does.)

More great feedback!

The screenshot you gave is going to have a larger house there at some point; I intend for the Inn to go there. That said, I think you're right, the walls are too tall. I can slice a layer of bricks off and lower those, and add some things that prevent the player from getting hidden.

As for the Z-Buffering issues, that's a tougher problem. Back in the sidescrolling version, the problem used to be worse, until I forced anisotropic filtering on, even on the lowest qualities. I'm not really sure how to fix it, either. See, most of the game world (world map, caves, town, etc.) are created by a bunch of UV skinned cubes that, as noted above, get fused into a single massive mesh at runtime with a common texture (thus, there's super-mesh for sand, a super-mesh for dirt with grass on top, etc.) It's getting away from design and into implementation, so I'll chill for now and figure out how to ask this question later...but I'm interested in how I'd go about getting rid of those visible seams at distance from the camera.

The other things, though, I can easily solve. I'll increase the Cave Slime ATB speed so it actually gets a turn in. I'll add collision cells to the parts of the World Map I've got, so that some water causing you to plummet to your death and some water being walkable is no longer a thing.

 

In my first battle, I selected Mediguard as my first move. The dev console popped up on its own, and it stayed visible during every battle after that. After battles, I could close it by clicking the console's Close button.

"Shield Bash" sounds good to me.

Fading would be great. Are you giving the coroutine enough time before calling Application.LoadLevel()?

That's what I did -- pressed up and right at the same time. Say I press-and-hold the up arrow. Then, while still holding the up arrow, say I press-and-hold the right arrow. Ideally, Sara would move diagonally "northeast". At the very least, the game should acknowledge that I pressed the right arrow and change Sara's direction to walk right instead of up. (Again, diagonal would be even better than that.)

 

Bubble Gum Robots - Its a rogue like FPS shooter.
http://inanegames.ca/r/r.html

Controls:
->WASD to move.
->Tab to use slow mo (if you have 50 mana).
->Space to jump
->Left mouse to fire guns
->E to use vending machines

Red orbs are health, blue mana, green money

What I'd Like Feedback On
How far you got I guess.

 

@Aiursrage2k I got to the third floor before my pinkie couldn't hold down shift any more. Faster, it needs to be faster. Doom levels of fast. If the player clips through the walls, they still aren't going fast enough. That would probably help me to pick up drops too.

Other than that, I'm really not sure about how high most of the enemies are. The little shield generators on the flying saucers are probably the worst.

 

@Aiursrage2k - If enemies are going to be so high up, it would be nice to be able to aim all the way up.

What's the theme or context of the game? It doesn't need to be elaborate, but what's the reason for running and gunning? When I think roguelike, I expect a way to "level up" and get lots of different loot. But if I think something like Wolfenstein 3D, it's more about running around shooting enemies and finding secrets as I race to the end of the level.

 

Good points about the speed of the game (too slow right now), ill try making him faster movespeed and lower the height of the enemies as well as being able to look all the way up.

You do level up and you get tokens which you can buy upgrades from the shop (which is kind of barebones at the moment).

For theme/narrative i do have a loose idea but right now i am not sure if it has the legs to go all the way (Im working on floor5 which changes things up and uses rising lava and I think it will either make or break the game).

 

And another week comes to a close. Feedback Friday #11 is here.
Gigi