It sounds like people going into the game with an expectation are the ones who came out liking the game the least.

So maybe the question now is: the game sets out to dash expectations, but why? What's the point of using a game style bait-and-switch? (Other than pissing some folks off, lol.)

For me the experience of going from a polished run and gun, with tight controls and predictable platformer cliches such as falling blocks, ceiling "spikes", enemy drops, boss battle etc. to the complete opposite was hugely refreshing.  While I thoroughly enjoyed the above ground game and could play a full multi-level version of it to my hearts content, falling in that pit while in the middle of a furious boss battle and finding myself in a completely different world really activated my sense of wonder.  

The water world is completely opposite from the above world.  The goals are not clearly defined, the map is not linear, the obstacles are not overcome with deft hand-eye-co-ordination, the controls are not tight, cause and effect are not clearly connected, the creatures you meet are not enemies and getting to the end is not a moment of triumph.  For me all those factors made this a very fun experience.  This abrupt change made me abandon my expectations.  I didn't spend any time spinning around trying to shine the light in front of me, not did I mind getting lost in the maze, I just bubbled along trying to discover what there was to do.  

This game has its flaws, but "bad design" isn't one of them.  A lot of the things I hear people complaining about all seem intentional, and in my mind positive, parts of the game.

I'm not sure what is says about someone that they did or didn't enjoy this game, but I think it certainly must.  For those of you that didn't enjoy it, maybe you should think about what you really expect to get out of a game.

Wow, people either seem to inherently enjoy this experience, or they really don't enjoy it.  Some kind of basic division of human nature perhaps?  I'm not going to say I "got it" but I certainly enjoyed it a lot. 

At first I didn't get what the light was for, but then as I first noticed the deeper sections getting darker I was totally sucked in to the feeling of wandering around these dark sunken caverns.  Fantastic atmosphere.  I hope the engine release shows off how you did that light mask because it looked beautiful.


Great work and very looking forward to playing with the engine release.

@adj

so the player only moves when the cursor is inside the circle?

@eclipse

I see how this way adds some difficulty, but that was my goal.  me bad? 

I couldn't agree more.  I just don't think it's practical to implement the other idea in flash except in full screen, single monitor mode.  Ideally I could detect mouse movement (as opposed to cursor movement) in Flash, even if the flash swf doesn't have focus.  Then even if the cursor moves to the screen bounds, if the physical mouse is still moving, I can control the player.  Either that or set the mouse position programmatically as mentioned earlier, but that seems like it's own usability nightmare in any kind of program.

The new control scheme is less compelling, maybe because it's easier, but perhaps I can tweak the variables to give it the less direct control feeling of the original scheme.

I moved to an approach where the player entity follows the mouse rather than the mouse affecting it's velocity.  The control is a little tighter, which is not what I want, but doesn't suffer from the same usability problems in flash.

I also added bullets on mouse click.  The bullets base their direction and velocity off of the player movement.

http://www.mechascientific.com/velocity/Main2.html

good point, I originally had the cursor hidden, and started to show it because I realized I could manage my mouse movement better if I knew when my cursor was getting close to leaving the flash app.  I've updated the app to toggle mouse visibility.

ideally, I would reposition the mouse to the center after calculating velocity changes, but you can't move the mouse programmatically in Flash. 

This is just a game prototype, so I'm posting there rather than feedback...

I'm having some issue with my mouse controls in this game, where the mouse controls the velocity of the player entity.  The idea is to collect all the green objects.  Because I loose all mouse info when it leaves Flash, it's easy to loose control, especially if you try and whip the player across the screen.  I've got a couple of solutions you can toggle in the demo. 

Does this control work at all or is it completely annoying?

http://www.mechascientific.com/velocity/Main.html

[UPDATE]
mouse visibility toggle added

[UPDATE]
new controls
http://www.mechascientific.com/velocity/Main2.html

They also have one that's even more low-tech.  I web-cam with the contrast turned way up, a model and a bowl of milk.  The web-cam takes snapshots as more milk is spooned into the bowl bit by bit.

i have to say, I love wordpress.  So easy to customize, and your site doesn't even need to be a "blog" for it to be useful.

thanks for posting these assets Moosader!

I guess I figured if you found some OLD stuff sitting around, you could just 'let it go'...

TUGSource!

I thought of the idea because I'm working on an AS3 Game Framework and was hoping to find some free assets to use in demos for the framework.

I'd be happy to provide free hosting, but it's on dreamhost (slooooooooow!).

made this guy today.

looks like a sprite from "Barney: True Hollywood Story: The Game: Expansion Pack: Gold" 

has anyone ever considered putting together a site for orphaned game assets? 

The idea is: you find an old unfinished game on your HD, with some nice sound/music/graphics assets and upload them to the site, pick your CC license of choice and let others use what you will not.  Lord Tigersauce's Home for Orphaned Games(.com) or somesuch nonsense.

think of classes as contracts.  When you make a class that has certain properties and does certain methods, it's a contract to all your other classes that they can rely on.  If you start using dynamic properties then there's no trust between classes and your code can get messy and buggy REALLY quick.