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!
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