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Edit:

Hey guys! Our game is now complete! Thanks for all your help! The game's website can be found right here: http://www.TheChickenBandit.com (http://www.TheChickenBandit.com)

(http://i883.photobucket.com/albums/ac40/handCraftedRadio/1024promo.png) (http://www.TheChickenBandit.com)

If you have any thoughts about the game, I would love to hear them!


Original Post:

Hey everyone!  :)


We've been working on an Android game for a little while now called The Chicken Bandit, and we finally got our game to a state where we can do some beta testing. I don't want to say too much about the game right now, because I want to see what people think about it without any knowledge of what it is supposed to be (as they would when downloading on the Android market.)

The basic premise of the game is that you are a "cowboy"/bandit who rides a giant chicken to rob trains guarded by robotic lawmen and attempts to rescue the captured chickens from your grand father's chicken farm. So it's a fairly standard western-style plot.

We desperately need some feedback at this point, so if you are interested at all in playing this game and answering a few questions about it, drop a post below and I'll hook you up with a link. Thanks a lot everyone!  :gentleman:

-SharkArm

(http://i883.photobucket.com/albums/ac40/handCraftedRadio/Train_Beta_Title.png)

(http://i883.photobucket.com/albums/ac40/handCraftedRadio/Train_Beta_2.png)

(http://i883.photobucket.com/albums/ac40/handCraftedRadio/Train_Map-1.png)

(http://i883.photobucket.com/albums/ac40/handCraftedRadio/Train_Beta_1.png)

Game Credits:
Programming/Design: curt kling (me)
Artwork/Design: Nate Kling
Music: pgil




Follow the game's development at: www.SharkArmStudios.com (http://www.SharkArmStudios.com)

I have an android phone! And I just so happen to be a chicken bandit myself. ;)

Count me in, if you wanna.

Of course! Thanks for the interest! PM with the link sent!

Hey, Imma be out the country next week but the week after I could definitely do some game tasting testing for you.

Android phone here, would be happy to take a look. What Android version is required?

Ok awesome! PM's sent to both of you.

The minimum version is technically 1.6, but I haven't tried it on a 1.6 device yet (I don't think

many of them exist.) It should work fine on a 2.1+ device though. Part of the reason I want people to play the beta is to find any issues other devices, so if you have an older phone that's great.

i dont have android phone :( :( but i cansay from screenshots i love the arts!very pretty and detailedd

I've seen the images on your page and I have to admit that I've fallen in love with your pixels!
But on the other hand I don't like the way you animated destruction. Hopefully you'll change that to the generally beloved blinking and shattering into little pieces. Also... the enemies falling downwards?! I hope for them to get a proper death animation.
Maybe that's already planned, but your site was tl;dr.

I can help with testing.

Be aware of Android Market download statistics bug  :'(

I cannot see the downloads of my game till... two weeks, since i posted it.

System: Droid X (v. 2.3.3)

Known issues:
-Pressing the home key from the map caused a system crash...  Haven't tried hitting home again though

General feedback:
-The graphics are awesome, the gameplay seems too slow action-wise (at least without the powerups) and too fast otherwise...  The persistent forced scroll doesn't feel right unless it's the chicken rescue stage
-It'd be nice to have a graphical button in the gen. store instead of using the system Back button
 -Haven't tried dying in game but if I do I won't be able to tell you if it works in real life too

Tried the home key from the map, no crash for me (HTC Desire HD, 2.3.3).

The thing I liked the least about the demo is the sound. I'd prefer realistic sound effects to sfxr beeps, as well as more sounds for whatever is happening on the screen - train wheels rolling/braking, enemies appearing, maybe this type of sound (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Vc74vAmPM) when bullets go near the player (and enemies?) but not within the hitbox, chicken steps, etc. The sound of a cylinder rotating would also be good for letting the player know when the next shot is available.

I mostly like the music, the tracks in the map and the levels 1-4 are great. But the boss stage music feels subdued, disjointed and overall not very "actiony", and the chiptune shop track feels really out of place.

Gameplay is pretty fun but can get very chaotic. When I'm rotating the phone to avoid enemy bullets and at the same time swiping and tapping to get the loot and kill the robots, I keep hitting the back button by accident, but that can be a phone-specific problem (touch buttons on a surface continuous with the screen). I haven't tried the shop consumables yet.

When you buy an item from the shop, the shopkeeper replies with something like "Thank you sir", which is a bit inconsistent with his picture. He looks like an asshole drunk who thinks he should be thanked for even bothering to serve the player. Also - three upgrade and three consumable types doesn't feel like enough.

Yeah that stuff is changed. There are death animations for the enemies now, and the window breaking was slightly modified (though it still breaks into chunks.) The falling enemies was just a placeholder before the graphics came in, because it was better than having them just disappear. The website is actually a devblog so the point is to show how the game changes during development, so most of the older posts don't have the final graphics.


Hmmm, I don't know why the home button would be crashing the game, maybe it's due to something else you have installed. I was actually using the Droid X as one of the main development devices and never ran into that problem. I also tested it on 2 other X's and haven't been able to get it to crash either.


I had slowed the action down a bit for this first 'world' (there will be 4 total) based on feedback of the game being too hard from others (more casual players I assume i.e. not part of online game forums.) I will probably end up making it a little easier yet (as the other worlds will get harder.) I wanted the difficulty to come from the balance between greed of money/upgrades and completing the level. So it's not all that hard to beat a level if you completely ignore collecting the items (but you won't have as much money for items/upgrades) in the future. Other players mentioned that they felt the levels were difficult until they learned to be less greedy with the extra cash, so it probably depends on play style. I think a classic/good/easy solution to a difficulty problem is different difficulty options, which I'm considering.


Some other players mentioned that as well and I completely agree. I overlooked that before, but I now added a back button in (as well as some other screens that were missing the button.)


SharkArm Studios is not liable for any real life fatalities that may be linked to playing this game.




Agreed. I wish I could figure out a way to get some good sound effects, but the only realistic option I have at the moment is sfxr or similar sound creation tools. I basically consider it 'good enough' for the moment, and probably the standard android player will not be able to pick out the sfxr sounds like we indie game players have learned to do so well.


Yes unfortunately it is almost impossible to take every device into consideration when designing the game. I guess that is one of the drawbacks of having the platform on such a wide variety of hardware.

As for the 'consumables', they aren't actually 'consumables' as they normally are in games; you can actually equip up to 5 items and use each once during the train robberies You can use each of them again during the next mission, so they are never permanently used up. I definitely need to find a way to make this more obvious because I think it is the reason why people are reluctant to by the usable items. I also think they should be a bit cheaper than they are right now.


Ha I agree here too. That's a good point. I typed that text out before the character portrait was in so I didn't even really think about that. I'll try to change the dialog to something more fitting.

As for the items, there will be more. There are a total of 6 usable items in the game at this point, and 4 or 5 upgrades. There will be more stores in the game with different upgrades (at least one store for each world) and you will be able to upgrade your stats farther as you progress.



Thanks everyone for the comments about the game! Especially those who tried it out!  :gentleman:

Hi, Im trying to write my own 2D engine for android and I would like to ask some questions :
(this may be a little bit offtopic, sorry)

Are you writing using JNI ?
Are you drawing using opengl ?

How many sprites can you draw?
I am currently working on a fast sprite drawing thing and I got it from
(samsung Galaxy mini)
rendering GL_POINT_SPRITES :
~200 sprites on 10fps to ~5k sprites on ~35 fps :)
Im working on full rotation/scale/texcoord sprites, and im hoping to get 512 on 30fps.

Judging from the screenshots this game reminds me a lot of that one sequence from "Express Raider" :)

I own a Samsung Galaxy S and would love to help you out with some testing.

@Eiswuxe: thanks! pm with link sent! Hmmm I've never heard of Express Raider, but I'm going to look into it!

@nospoon: My engine uses OpenGL for drawing. Most of the game is standard 2d stuff, but there are some minimal 3d effects like cards flipping over. I'm not sure how many sprites I can handle (512 sounds like a lot and I'm not quite sure why you would need that many things on the screen at once.) I don't know what the GL_POINT_SPRITES is (I pretty much only know enough openGL to handle what I need to do for my games), but I draw my images using two triangles.

I didn't know you guys were brothers, sounds like a dream team to me.
BTW I have a ZTC Blade if you're still looking for android testers.

@handCraftedRadio :
Thanks for reply.
GL_POINT_SPRITE is bassically a rectangle, that you can define using 1 vertex, and it is textured with 1 texture. It doesnt support tex coordinates(so it just shows the whole texture), and rotation .
Its generally good if you want to draw lots of not-animated bullets or something like that.

Heres 1024 at ~71fps
http://imgur.com/098lB (http://imgur.com/098lB)
(the white rectangle is AABB for occlusion culling or something)

Yep, it makes it a lot easier to make sure the other person gets their work done whenever you can tell your mom on them.

And yeah, it would be awesome to have you test the game! PM with link sent! :gentleman:


Nice that seems pretty fast. I tested mine drawing 512 sprites and got about 10 fps on a droid X, but I doubt I'll ever need that. I guess I'll have to optimize if I ever want to do something like simulate every individual grain of sand on a beach.  :)

Finished up the game and entered it into IGF. I'm not sure how well it will do, but it was nice to have a deadline! We are still planning on taking another couple weeks to fix some stuff up and add in some extras, then we will release to the Android market.

Game features so far:

-20 stages
-4 separate 'worlds'
-16 different enemies (including 4 bosses)
-11 types of upgrades
-Options Menu (complete with customizable sound options (on or off))

If anybody would want to do some testing for the (mostly) full version, let me know! I still need to figure out a lot of the difficulty and money/items balancing.

Thanks again to everyone who tested the earlier version!

 :gentleman:

I'd love to play the fuller version.

Hey guys! Our game is now complete! Thanks for all your help! The game's website can be found right here: http://www.TheChickenBandit.com (http://www.TheChickenBandit.com)

(http://i883.photobucket.com/albums/ac40/handCraftedRadio/1024promo.png) (http://www.TheChickenBandit.com)

If you have any thoughts about the game, I would love to hear them!

Thanks again to everyone who helped test the game!