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[DWWilson]

drone part 1




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*update 8/3*

-added a new colour (blue)
-changed the player colour ever so slightly.
-completely changed the areas (made them more unique)
-added an easy mode
-added a new boss
-lots of minor changes

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*update 27/2*

-Changed the menu texture
-Changed the menu colour
-Changed the menu opacity
-added music
-made it so deleting the .ini file doesn't crash the game
-added a sort of achievements thing
-changing the resolution to something that won't run on your computer will no longer freeze the game
-made the walls slippery!
-made it so it doesn't install in program files.
-made the wall colour brighter and the rooms less dark.

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Hi this is a game I made over a long period of time. It is sort of an RTS combined with a shooter.

It has no plot, bad sound effects and MS paint style art; But the actual gameplay is pretty solid.

You kill things for money and then spend that money on weapons or buildings (kind of like Brutal Legend). But unlike Brutal Legend, the game is entirely playable with only weapons or only buildings, or any combination of the two.

I spent a lot of time trying to get the two balanced properly, and I'm pretty satisfied with the result; there are several strategies that you can use, and each requires mastering a different set of skills.

Conserving your money is a big part of this game.

Please look at this, and then give me your feedback.



Get it from my website http://dwwilson.info/?page_id=14

[DWWilson]

Why is no one downloading this? Lots of people have looked at it, but no one is trying it. Is it because I'm not being more vocal? Perhaps I should stop being modest and tell you what I actually think.

This game is the best freeware game I have seen since Iji and Spelunky. I'm not saying it is as good as those two games, but it is a close 3rd.

It could just be me, but please, have a look and decide for yourself and flame me if you think differently.

[deathtotheweird]

There are a lot of reasons why no one commented on your game. People are busy, some might have over-looked it, your name isnt cactus, etc. Seems like if your game has a certain flashy gimmick or is made by one of the "indie starlets" you would have 8 pages of comments instead of none. That's life for ya. The only reason I felt compelled to play it is because of your large claim of best freeware game since Iji or Spelunky.

But this is a great game here, if only you spent more time on the graphics and presentation. The GUI is kinda ugly and not fun to use (but it is functional). Having 3 pages of machines and weapons is kinda silly when they can be fit in one. The gameplay itself is pretty solid A good mashup of RTS and TD (although it really feels more TD to me) and some kind of action game. It's also fairly hard. The sound effects, I didn't think were bad. The music (or atmospheric noise) was pretty bad so I turned that off. If you could team up with a talented artist and musician this would be a wonderful little package.

Oh and one bug-After I did the tutorial I got a message that said "error finding plot device" I just hit enter and it seemed to go away...but it does it every time I start up the game. I'll try to play more tomorrow.

Oh and your avatar makes sense after playing the game. 

[moi]

Yeah if you're not a starlet your game will have very few comments, but it will have some just be patient.
Take a look around the forums, there are so many games released every day nowadays...

[DWWilson]

There are a lot of reasons why no one commented on your game. People are busy, some might have over-looked it, your name isnt cactus, etc. Seems like if your game has a certain flashy gimmick or is made by one of the "indie starlets" you would have 8 pages of comments instead of none. That's life for ya. The only reason I felt compelled to play it is because of your large claim of best freeware game since Iji or Spelunky.

But this is a great game here, if only you spent more time on the graphics and presentation. The GUI is kinda ugly and not fun to use (but it is functional). Having 3 pages of machines and weapons is kinda silly when they can be fit in one. The gameplay itself is pretty solid A good mashup of RTS and TD (although it really feels more TD to me) and some kind of action game. It's also fairly hard. The sound effects, I didn't think were bad. The music (or atmospheric noise) was pretty bad so I turned that off. If you could team up with a talented artist and musician this would be a wonderful little package.

Oh and one bug-After I did the tutorial I got a message that said "error finding plot device" I just hit enter and it seemed to go away...but it does it every time I start up the game. I'll try to play more tomorrow.

Oh and your avatar makes sense after playing the game. 

Yeah that error message is intentional, its part of the plot

Thankyou heaps for trying it out!

And yeah it is quite tower defenseish with the waves etc. But you can control units like an rts. I had a hard time trying to fit all the info on to one page, which is why I had 3 (like I could have had just buttons and put them on 1 page, but I felt the items needed more of an explanation. I also had to put the price of the things on the buttons when you mouseover them to save on screen real estate.

You can change the color of the UI if you don't like the color, the texture is something I'll have to work on.

The game gets quite gnarley towards the end when you start getting some of the more powerful weapons etc.

I think another thing that kind of fails in this game is the levels, They each have a different mix of enemies that spawn, but it would be better if there were more scripted events.

AS far as difficulty goes, try different strategies until you find one that you like and are good at. Spamming machinegun turrets is probably the easiest way to get through the earlier levels, but it won't work against the cannon dudes.

I personally enjoy a "circumcised" base (no nodes) using myself to dodge-tank the pistol and cannon bosses.

And thanks again man, I really appreciate it.

[DWWilson]

Yeah if you're not a starlet your game will have very few comments, but it will have some just be patient.
Take a look around the forums, there are so many games released every day nowadays...

This is true, I'm just being anxious. I spent so much time working on this fucking thing, I was expecting a bigger reception lol.

But yeah, I'm a no-name, so this release is really the first step.

Thanks

[AuthenticKaizen]

a fine game indeed!  
the arena shooter / tower defense mashup works pretty well...
i havent tested all weapons and machines yet but i like what i have seen so far.

i think you could improve the game with a bit more polish on the GUI and colorwise on the graphics.
glowy neon graphics maybe?
i suggest to experiment a bit...

moreover:
-the info menu takes in the upper left too much space...a good solution would be if you arrange it horizontally (example pic)...
some icons would also be useful to save space (a dollar sign or a coin for cash for example...). it would also be more user friendly if the map would be more transparent.
-little enemies should also have some explosion animation.

bugs:
-when i click on a machine and decide that i dont want it but another one instead its not possible to buy that ting...no canceling possible...
-it also happened that i couldnt shoot sometimes (even when i had full ammo...
the left mouse button only started to work again after i clicked in the menu)

[shrimp]

Hi, I just discovered this and have played 3 (or 4?) areas. Great little game!

Here's my feedback (bad stuff first, because even though I really enjoyed it, I'm a negative critical bastard)

* By far the major problem was not being able to see myself among the throng of other robots. I was very close to ragequitting at one point because of this. Perhaps you could tint the player pale green or red?
* I really felt the 4th-wall-breaking stuff didn't work in this context. The "error" boxes are far too much like real errors. My girlfriend sitting next to me was saying "wow, there's a lot of errors in this game!" Personally I just found them annoying and clashed with the rest of the game... I was happily immersed in a neatly constructed RTSish thing, and then had this glitchy stuff flashing up. I acquired an instinctive "oh fuck off!" response after a while.
* Quite often when clicking on a button in the UI, my guy would also fire. I can imagine this being really annoying if ammo was tight or you had an expensive gun equipped.
* Some of the prompts in the tutorial (which was otherwise very nice) were out of order, i.e. you had to break down a down to get to the message that said "click to attack".
* I'd agree about the UI layout - if you can improve the layout of the tabs (all on one page, popups for info?) that would be good. I didn't find it too bad though.
* The dark corners of the playing area sometime made it possible for cannonbots to lurk out there and be very hard to deal with
* The minimal style is great, never have medium-sized circles felt so menacing
* The AI behaviours are really fun - pistolbots keeping range but being a bit dim, railbots dodging, cannonbots being temptable(?) away from their target
* On tutorials again - it might be worth having a couple of sandboxish type tutorials, for weapons and especially buildings. As an example of why I felt the need for this was that the only time (so far) that I've built a control tower was in the last wave of area 3 when I had some spare money to experiment with. Before that I didn't want to risk diverting funds from turret building.
* Could the waves/levels thing be made a bit more obvious and maybe more prominently displayed? Plants vs Zombies does this really well. As a minimum perhaps you could just make the text bigger and display it as say "3 of 4" instead of counting down to 0. Or even just "Waves left"/"Levels left". In fact I initially found the word "level" here a bit confusing. How about "tides" (bigger than waves )
* Vehicles: I only tried the buggy so far, but I think it would be nice to press space (or whaetver) to get in/out and then have the vehicle controls the same as on foot (think of Halo or Halflife 2).
* Perhaps to cancel a build/sell mode you could have a "Right click to cancel" prompt on the bottom of the screen?

Overall though, as I've already said, it is excellent 
Did you suggest somewhere else that there might be a expanded part 2 version? I'm looking forward to it if so!!

Can I request some kind of (unlockable?) open-ended survival mode if one isn't already planned? 
(Oh, and maybe also a repair bot, somewhat like the money mite?)

[DWWilson]

a fine game indeed!  
the arena shooter / tower defense mashup works pretty well...
i havent tested all weapons and machines yet but i like what i have seen so far.

i think you could improve the game with a bit more polish on the GUI and colorwise on the graphics.
glowy neon graphics maybe?
i suggest to experiment a bit...

moreover:
-the info menu takes in the upper left too much space...a good solution would be if you arrange it horizontally (example pic)...
some icons would also be useful to save space (a dollar sign or a coin for cash for example...). it would also be more user friendly if the map would be more transparent.
-little enemies should also have some explosion animation.

bugs:
-when i click on a machine and decide that i dont want it but another one instead its not possible to buy that ting...no canceling possible...
-it also happened that i couldnt shoot sometimes (even when i had full ammo...
the left mouse button only started to work again after i clicked in the menu)

-It is possible to dismiss a building before you place it on the ground by pressing the right mouse button.

-The bug with the not being able to shoot even with full ammo happens sometimes; and yeah it has to do with the buttons disabling firing when you're buying stuff and not properly enabling them again. I'm working on trying to fix this.

-Yeah moving the UI on the right to be horizontal would be good, I'll have to do that at some point.

-the menus are a tiny bit transparent (95% opacity) at 80% the text was too hard to read, and at 90% It looked weird during the tutorial, but if I were really pro, I'd put in a button so you can choose how transparent you want it.

-Originally, the little guys did have explosions and left marks on the ground, but the instance count gets too high at the later levels and I needed to cut out some unnecessary animations.

-I absolutely suck at picking colours. I tried a whole bunch of things, but they all looked really odd. In the end, my gf suggested that I make them the colour of metals (because they're robots) so I got pictures of metals off the internet and eye dropped colours out of them. That's why they have the names of metals in the game. What I should do, is make it so you can edit the colour values to whatever you want in the .ini file. It would be just be two RGB values.

glad you enjoyed it

[DWWilson]

Hi, I just discovered this and have played 3 (or 4?) areas. Great little game!

Here's my feedback (bad stuff first, because even though I really enjoyed it, I'm a negative critical bastard)

* By far the major problem was not being able to see myself among the throng of other robots. I was very close to ragequitting at one point because of this. Perhaps you could tint the player pale green or red?
* I really felt the 4th-wall-breaking stuff didn't work in this context. The "error" boxes are far too much like real errors. My girlfriend sitting next to me was saying "wow, there's a lot of errors in this game!" Personally I just found them annoying and clashed with the rest of the game... I was happily immersed in a neatly constructed RTSish thing, and then had this glitchy stuff flashing up. I acquired an instinctive "oh fuck off!" response after a while.
* Quite often when clicking on a button in the UI, my guy would also fire. I can imagine this being really annoying if ammo was tight or you had an expensive gun equipped.
* Some of the prompts in the tutorial (which was otherwise very nice) were out of order, i.e. you had to break down a down to get to the message that said "click to attack".
* I'd agree about the UI layout - if you can improve the layout of the tabs (all on one page, popups for info?) that would be good. I didn't find it too bad though.
* The dark corners of the playing area sometime made it possible for cannonbots to lurk out there and be very hard to deal with
* The minimal style is great, never have medium-sized circles felt so menacing
* The AI behaviours are really fun - pistolbots keeping range but being a bit dim, railbots dodging, cannonbots being temptable(?) away from their target
* On tutorials again - it might be worth having a couple of sandboxish type tutorials, for weapons and especially buildings. As an example of why I felt the need for this was that the only time (so far) that I've built a control tower was in the last wave of area 3 when I had some spare money to experiment with. Before that I didn't want to risk diverting funds from turret building.
* Could the waves/levels thing be made a bit more obvious and maybe more prominently displayed? Plants vs Zombies does this really well. As a minimum perhaps you could just make the text bigger and display it as say "3 of 4" instead of counting down to 0. Or even just "Waves left"/"Levels left". In fact I initially found the word "level" here a bit confusing. How about "tides" (bigger than waves )
* Vehicles: I only tried the buggy so far, but I think it would be nice to press space (or whaetver) to get in/out and then have the vehicle controls the same as on foot (think of Halo or Halflife 2).
* Perhaps to cancel a build/sell mode you could have a "Right click to cancel" prompt on the bottom of the screen?

Overall though, as I've already said, it is excellent 
Did you suggest somewhere else that there might be a expanded part 2 version? I'm looking forward to it if so!!

Can I request some kind of (unlockable?) open-ended survival mode if one isn't already planned? 
(Oh, and maybe also a repair bot, somewhat like the money mite?)

- The whole error message thing was kind of a last minute decision when I realised that often reviewers review a game based on gameplay, graphics, sound and storey. Here I am thinking "oh fuck, there's no plot, that's 25% of the grade right there." So I haphazardly retrofitted the only plot that would make any sense: that you were playing a video game about playing a video game. I might take the plot out entirely if enough people complain about it. I thought the whole error messages thing was pretty funny. Originally, right at the end, there was a cascade of errors while your dvd-drive was opening and closing randomly lol.

- Yeah I might tone down the darkness a bit, I was trying to make the whole thing feel bleak, might I might have overdone it.

- The whole button thing with firing while buying stuff and not firing when you need to fire is fucked. I need to redo the whole system for that. Just the other day I was testing it and fired a rocket when I wasn't supposed to and got really pissed off.

- The whole menu is a bit of a mess, I hate making menus.

- The player is hard to see, I gave it a faint glow which none of the other bots had, but I think it needs to be darker. Also, making it so the player is always on top of everything else would be good. Currently, they go underneath the tops of turrets and the arms on the factories. I think it was to give it a sense of depth, but in reality, it interrupts the gameplay too much. Originally, I had it so you couldn't walk through buildings (like real life) but it sucked so hard I had to take it out.

- The reason the vehicles work the way they do is because I wanted to try something different. If you want to keep the same movement controls but just be stronger and have special abilities, you can equip armour. Like the light armor makes you move as fast as you do on the buggy, but fire your own gun and be able to teleport using the spacebar. But yeah, the buggy is way cheaper and can be healed with the spanner and will fire even when you're not in it. It's like the difficulty in being able to master it's controls make up for it's low cost and increased speed. The Juggernaut is a prime example of this. If you drive it once, you'll die and be angry. But if you keep trying, and figure out its strengths and weaknesses, you can do the last 4 levels of the area 5 with it (the hard bit).

- Yes I should make the levels/waves thing say "remaining" or "waves left" instead of just wave. That's easy to fix and will do it right away.

- I did make an endless level, but there comes a point (around 10 levels of 20 waves each) that you just have too much shit going on for the computer to handle it. You also end up too rich because of the inflation thing. In order to try and fix this, I made an area that is exactly 10 levels long, but has an enemy in the middle that is particularly good at destroying large, fortified bases. The enemy juggernaut rocks up at level 5 and smashes your base to bits (and destroying all of your assets) so you have to rebuild in the middle. It also gets a little easier at that point before getting harder again towards the final 10th level. This area also has a highscore that is based off how much money you have. This was going to be the addon bit that I asked money for, but it still needs a lot of tweaking and I need to add more than just that to call it $5 worth.

Thanks heaps for the in depth critique man. Getting info out of my beta testers was like trying to get blood from a stone. Fucking useless friends! Of the eight dudes I had test this shit for me before I released it, 4 didn't even respond to my e-mails, and only one of them made a real job of finding bugs.

I'm also happy you enjoyed most of it I didn't bother to put this game in the "works in progress" forum because I was too busy making it. Now that I'm calling it released, I have the time to go around and make posts in places. It's great!

[AuthenticKaizen]

in my opinion it would be better to take the error screens away.
also the opening dvd drive would put many players off...
and because of that it could be classified as a harmful program.

as said the game is really good and therefore taking those things away would only benefit the game i think.

[shrimp]

Totally agree with AuthenticKaizen. I would have been properly angry if the DVD drive started randomly opening as my PC is in a confined space and it might have broken something. You're saying you already took this out before the current version right?

As for plot: Tetris doesn't have a plot and no-one complains about that!

- The whole button thing with firing while buying stuff and not firing when you need to fire is fucked. I need to redo the whole system for that. Just the other day I was testing it and fired a rocket when I wasn't supposed to and got really pissed off.

- The whole menu is a bit of a mess, I hate making menus.

Rather than enable/disable the fire control when entering/leaving the menu, how about having the menu consume the mouse event if the pointer is inside the menu area and pass it on to the player controls if not? I think this is a fairly standard way of doing it.

- The player is hard to see, I gave it a faint glow which none of the other bots had, but I think it needs to be darker. Also, making it so the player is always on top of everything else would be good. Currently, they go underneath the tops of turrets and the arms on the factories. I think it was to give it a sense of depth, but in reality, it interrupts the gameplay too much. Originally, I had it so you couldn't walk through buildings (like real life) but it sucked so hard I had to take it out.

I'm not at all convinced either of those things would make the player much easier to see. You need something bolder, like a different colour, or an arrow. The problem is that if the player has been doing other stuff (I'm not sure what I was doing, maybe even just watching the moneymite picking up coins), and then the next wave starts, they need to *instantly* see where they are. Seriously, this was a major frustration.

- The reason the vehicles work the way they do is because I wanted to try something different

Fair enough. I hadn't tried the armours yet as they seemed expensive and I was happy just building stuff. I hope the anger at dying the first time I try the juggernaut doesn't put me off the game... 

- I did make an endless level...

Yeah, I see your points here. That 10-level area + highscore sounds like a good alternative.
If you hit technical limits, how about increasing health of the enemies as the game progresses, rather than adding more?

I'm also happy you enjoyed most of it

I made it sound like I enjoyed it less that I did - I could happily play it a lot more, although some of the bugs might eventually drive me away. As it is, I'll wait for a little while and hope for a patch!

[DWWilson]

in my opinion it would be better to take the error screens away.
also the opening dvd drive would put many players off...
and because of that it could be classified as a harmful program.

as said the game is really good and therefore taking those things away would only benefit the game i think.

Yeah I didn't put the opening and closing thing in the version I released, in fact I took it out after trying it once on my computer. It was funny to watch though.

[DWWilson]

I'm not at all convinced either of those things would make the player much easier to see. You need something bolder, like a different colour, or an arrow. The problem is that if the player has been doing other stuff (I'm not sure what I was doing, maybe even just watching the moneymite picking up coins), and then the next wave starts, they need to *instantly* see where they are. Seriously, this was a major frustration.

Yeah I didn't put the opening and closing in the version I released; I might remove the errors entirely, fix the menu a bit, and add some sort of more obvious indication of where the player is and upload it tomorrow night.

Maybe a big crosshair on the ground around the player. That way I wouldn't have to mess around with rgb values for the player object (which would take a while). I just hope it doesn't clash with the other player units to much.

I'll let you know when it's done, you can tell me if you like the improvements

[shrimp]

OK, failing colour, I think something moving would be best, like a spinning ring or something. I died once just now because I was getting axed and couldn't see where I was...

I was playing around with Juggernauts after selling all my buildings at the end and found a couple of bugs:

First, after selling all my stuff, I clicked the button to buy a juggernaut. Then, when I placed it, I was still in "Sell" mode, so it immediately exploded when I placed it!

Second, after driving around the 2nd juggernaut, opening the front and letting out the axebots, I tried to sell it and got this crash:

Code:

___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event
for object PlayerVehicle0307:

Error in code at line 22:
               if (distance_to_point(Target.x,Target.y) > 250)
                                            ^
at position 43: Unknown variable x

I tried the vehicles in general a bit more this time, and I'm even more sure there should be an enter/exit button. Also the way the vehicle always follows the cursor means it drives round in an out-of-control fashion if you're going to click something in the menus. Maybe hold right button to drive?

[DWWilson]

First of all, I've removed the entire plot from the game (the error messages). It was surprisingly difficult to delete essentially 40 hours of work, but there you go. I hope no reviewers bitch about the lack of any kind of plot, but I doubt anyone is going to review it anyway lol.

OK, failing colour, I think something moving would be best, like a spinning ring or something. I died once just now because I was getting axed and couldn't see where I was...

I've added a giant red spinning cross that pops up when you stand still for 5 seconds, I think it looks pretty good. If it's on all the time, it looks fugly, but when you're moving it goes away so it doesn't interfere. I think it's a good compromise between being able to see your guy and it not being ugly.

I was playing around with Juggernauts after selling all my buildings at the end and found a couple of bugs:

First, after selling all my stuff, I clicked the button to buy a juggernaut. Then, when I placed it, I was still in "Sell" mode, so it immediately exploded when I placed it!

Yeah that happens, it's a bit of a prick but having the sell icon disappear after you sell something would get annoying if you wanted to sell multiple things at once, and making some sort of auto dismiss if you buy something could be a pain in the ass. I'll see if I can find a nice workaround and add it to a future version.

Second, after driving around the 2nd juggernaut, opening the front and letting out the axebots, I tried to sell it and got this crash:

Fixed.

I tried the vehicles in general a bit more this time, and I'm even more sure there should be an enter/exit button. Also the way the vehicle always follows the cursor means it drives round in an out-of-control fashion if you're going to click something in the menus. Maybe hold right button to drive?

I just get out of the drivers seat when I want to buy something and hop back in afterwards. Have you tried some of the armours yet? I don't really want to change the vehicle mechanics, I'm happy with them and the no-button control scheme.

Thanks for finding that bug too, I can't believe I didn't notice that before.  

I still haven't fixed the menu button disabling the firing bug. Its one of those "can't easily replicate" sort of bugs. I'll get it one day though.

[shrimp]

Sounds like good work... just to clarify something regarding selling:

Yeah that happens, it's a bit of a prick but having the sell icon disappear after you sell something would get annoying if you wanted to sell multiple things at once,

I'm not suggesting it disappearing after you sell something, just being much more obvious you're in "sell" mode (cursor not going underneath things, text prompt at the bottom, whatever). Even bug-free modal UIs are dangerous beasts.

Haven't tried the armours yet - I might have another go at some earlier areas in arena-shooter mode and try them then.

[DWWilson]

I'm not suggesting it disappearing after you sell something, just being much more obvious you're in "sell" mode (cursor not going underneath things, text prompt at the bottom, whatever). Even bug-free modal UIs are dangerous beasts.

Yeah I noticed the sell symbol going underneath a tank the other day, I thought to myself to fix that, but then forgot about it completely. I screwed up all the depths from constantly changing them around without writing anything down.

I have to fix them menus, add music and make a video. That's my homework for the next couple of weeks.

I'll make the sell symbol larger and stop it from going underneath things. I think I might also take that "hammered" look off the menu texture in favour of something smoother.

[Alex May]

Thankyou for playing it and having the decency to let me know what you thought. I can't fix things if no one tells me what is wrong with it.

You're quite welcome, I will play more and offer more feedback as I think the game is promising!

And yeah I *could* try and sell it for $15, but no one would buy it. With all due respect, You're Alex Fucking May, Eufloria got nominated for a IGF award that's the big time right there.

Come now, nobody had really heard of Notch (no disrespect to Notch) or many many other developers who randomly started to sell their games. Yes, I think Eufloria would not have done at all as well if we hadn't got on Steam due to IGF, but we were planning to take it to commercial release either way at that point, due to how many demo downloads we were logging.

What did you think of the actual game though? Or did that sound scare you away? How was the fps?

I didn't get past the tutorial as I was playing in work (day job) time which I shouldn't do really. FPS was totally fine, etc. No technical errors apart form that 1280x768 didn't work on this 1600x1200 monitor (just got a black screen which I had to kill from task manager - XP SP2, GeForce 7900GS, 3GB RAM; 800x600 worked ok scaled). The screenshots make me want to play more though.

Just based on the first 5 minutes of play + screenshots + the fact that Ed likes it, I think you could get people to pay money for this, once you fix up a few comfort issues (many of which you say you've fixed - any chance of a new build? ).

[shrimp]

Also, the sticky walls thing (and enemies failing to path around walls) becomes totally irrelevant (in a good way!) in the main game, because there are no walls.

I will get the latest build and have a got in arena-shmup style like I said I would...

Like I might have already said, I would actually be disappointed not to be able to spend $5-$10 on this, assuming some (not necessarily all) of the rough edges were smoothed off.
Only one copy though