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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperPlaytesting!i (Not I)
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Oddball
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David Williamson


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« on: July 27, 2010, 06:37:10 AM »


A game by David Williamson
Featuring music by feeblethemighty

Description
!i, pronounced Not I, is a classic artillery game with a twist. Literally! Each team exist in the inverted space of the opposing team. When a shot blows a hole in the terrain of one team land is create in the other's space. The aim is to angle your shots in order to destroy the oppositions team.  It is intended for two players, but there is a one player mode.

Screenshots [click to enlarge]


How To Play
You can hold down [H] or [F1] at any time for on screen help. Hit [F] or [F10] to zoom in, this is useful when playing on a small monitor/laptop but will cause minor graphical glitches. Select one [.i] or two [!i] player from the title screen to start playing. Drag the grey targeting node to set the angle and power of your shot. Press [FiRE] when you are ready to shoot. Press [FLiP] to rotate the screen 180 degrees. Gravity always goes in the direct of the ground the current player is stood upon, even if the screen has been flipped. Select [EXiT] to end the current game. The primery control system is the mouse, but basic key controls are included.
Exit: Escape
Flip: Enter
Power up/down: T/G
Angle left/right: C/N, V/B
Move left/right: Arrow keys
Fire: Spacebar
Colour scheme: On the menu screen press; 1, 2, 3 ... 8, 9, 0


Downloads ~1.1MB
Windows XP/Vista/7 | Mac(intel) OS X | Linux

Website
www.GooeyBlob.com



Feedback
I'd like as much feedback as possible please. I'd like to know what systems people tried it on and whether it worked or not. If you encountered any graphical or audio glitches. What you make of the concept. How the game could be improved. And anything else you care to mention.

This is a concept I've been knocking about for a while, and I finally decided to try it out. My intention was to attempt something new with the artillery game genre without just adding different weapon types.

Thank you. Gentleman
« Last Edit: January 27, 2011, 08:24:54 AM by Oddball » Logged

kiwi
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« Reply #1 on: July 27, 2010, 07:25:22 AM »

I'm on an Acer Aspire 3810T with windows 7, I got a BSoD right after I quit by pressing esc if that makes a difference.

Also a control scheme using the keyboard would be nice
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Oddball
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David Williamson


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« Reply #2 on: July 27, 2010, 07:51:01 AM »

Oh dear. I didn't even know Windows 7 still had BSoD. Does it BSoD when clicking the exit button too? It only use the standard app. closing code I use on all my games. That's puzzling. Whenever my games have issues it's alway the Windows version. Is anyone else having the same issue?
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maxwell
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« Reply #3 on: July 27, 2010, 11:33:38 AM »

BSoD is always an OS, driver or hardware bug, it happens when there is a crash in kernel mode (ex. kernel dereferences a bad pointer). It might be possible to work around the bug in your game if you can figure out what triggers it, though.
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Oddball
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David Williamson


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« Reply #4 on: July 27, 2010, 11:41:11 AM »

I think it may be something specific to kiwi's setup as I can't get it to BSoD on Windows 7 or Window XP.
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Mr.Flibble
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« Reply #5 on: July 27, 2010, 12:14:36 PM »

Hi Oddball.

I tested the game out earlier on Windows Vista 64bit with no problems.

I really like the idea took me a while to get used to it but once I did it was fun and quite tactical.  I have a only have couple of suggestions.

Allowing the projectile to travel above the screen like in worms.  When you only have one player left and the opponents are on the oppostite side it hard to get the bomb to go over obstacles without hitting the top of the screen.

A better indicator of who is next to control.  The aiming line is really hard to spot so it isn't always clear straight away which of my players I am in control of.

Thats it really I'm going to have a few more goes later and see if anything else comes to mind.  But I really like the basic idea and execution.
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Oddball
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David Williamson


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« Reply #6 on: July 27, 2010, 03:49:22 PM »

Thanks for the feedback. I deliberated a long time over allowing the projectile to leave the play area. In the end I wanted it to feel as though the whole world was contained within the play area. I think if you play long enough it becomes much easier to judge the power needed to stay in bounds. I don't have much trouble spotting which man is next, but that's probably only because I had to test it so much. I'll look into making it a little more obvious as to who is the active man. I don't really want to break my three colour rule so it'll probably be some sort of flashing or moving animation solution.
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kiwi
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« Reply #7 on: July 27, 2010, 09:35:41 PM »

Seems to have been a one time only thing, probably had something to do with the fact that I played it by double clicking the app while in the zip.
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Crackerblocks
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« Reply #8 on: July 27, 2010, 11:19:37 PM »

Here's my crazy suggestion:



Black and white feels so sterile. I like the concept though. One other suggestion: jumping!
Also, why not have the flip affect gravity? It might add a strategic element.
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Laremere
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« Reply #9 on: July 27, 2010, 11:52:33 PM »

Played AI:
-The fact that the ai would flip the screen was very annoying.  I ended up playing upside-down despite not wanting to simply because I got tired of hitting flip every time it flipped the screen.
-I ended up with both me and the ai having only one person left both on top of towers on opposite sides of the field.  This made it pretty much impossible to hit each other without plowing through the terrain.
-The boxy terrain is rather...uninteresting; I'd prefer a more organic terrain, but that's your choice.
-It'd be nice if they remembered their last firing configuration.
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Oddball
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David Williamson


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« Reply #10 on: July 28, 2010, 01:07:12 AM »

@kiwi: Thanks. Hopefully it was just that it doesn't like being run from the zip file.

@Cracherblocks: I like those colours. It's fairly simple for me to change the colours of the game, and I agree that black and white is a little uninspiring. I think my initial intention was for it to look very minimal. I'll look into adding a few colour options. There's no jumping on purpose as I wanted to limit movement. It's intended to force you to fire from distance instead of just moving over to your opponent and shooting straight down. As for flip not affecting gravity, that's because I get bored of flipping the screen and end up playing upside-down.

@Laremere: Ha, I get bored of flipping the screen too. The idea was meant to be that it made you feel like you were playing against a real person, but in hindsight it might have been a mistake. I think all artillery games suffer from having to plough through lots of terrain at some point. It's probably a little worse in this game because you only have the one weapon option. I'm open to suggestions on that one. The skyscraper terrain was for two reasons, I wanted to limit how far the men could travel, and to make the game look different from the majority of other procedurally generated terrains. The reason the game doesn't remember each mans shooting config. was simply personal preference. I like having to start a fresh each go and not being able to just make little adjustments each go to find your opponents range.

Some great feedback there. it's given me lots to think about. Beer!
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Oddball
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David Williamson


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« Reply #11 on: July 28, 2010, 01:41:47 AM »

Sorry to double post, but Warpy has very kindly compiled the game for Linux. See first post for download.
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Oddball
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David Williamson


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« Reply #12 on: July 30, 2010, 08:03:45 AM »

The game was featured on the Indie Games Weblog which is pretty awesome.
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/07/freeware_game_pick_i_david_wil.html

I have updated the Windows and Mac versions with new features to address some of the great feedback the game has been getting. Downloads in the first post. The active man halo now zooms in towards the active man giving the player no doubt as to who is active. Angle and power are now reset to vertical/half power each turn. The winning team now does a victory dance. I have added rudimentary keyboard controls;
Exit: Escape
Flip: Enter
Power up/down: T/G
Angle left/right: C/N, V/B
Move left/right: Arrow keys
Fire: Spacebar

And final I added a few colour option. On the menu screen press; 1, 2, 3 ... 8, 9, 0
« Last Edit: July 30, 2010, 08:13:36 AM by Oddball » Logged

Stele
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« Reply #13 on: July 30, 2010, 08:57:13 AM »

"Exception_Access_Violation" error message when starting the program.  Sad

Running on Win7 64-bit.  Tried compatibility mode, run as admin, same deal.  Any other ideas?
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Oddball
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David Williamson


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« Reply #14 on: July 30, 2010, 02:18:31 PM »

Hmm... I'm running 64 bit Windows 7 here and I'm not having any issues. You shouldn't need to use any compatibility settings. This might sound silly, but did you extract it from the zip first? Other than that I can only suggest driver updates. I'll have to investigate more. Which graphics card do you have?
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Stele
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« Reply #15 on: July 30, 2010, 08:03:58 PM »

Hmm... I'm running 64 bit Windows 7 here and I'm not having any issues. You shouldn't need to use any compatibility settings. This might sound silly, but did you extract it from the zip first? Other than that I can only suggest driver updates. I'll have to investigate more. Which graphics card do you have?

Yeah some of my other friends have x64 and said it was ok for them.  Must be something else.

AMD x2 5200
4gb ram
ATI radeon 4670 1gb
realtek hd audio

Yeah just extracted the .exe to desktop with 7-zip, double-click and get the Exception_Access_Violation message.

Checked windows updates and drivers.  Everything is up-to-date.  Just got the new ATI drivers and tried again.  This time I actually got the game splash screen, and then the same error message.

Also I turned off my virus protection and redownloaded the zip earlier as well, just to make sure it wasn't doing anything funny, although there wasn't anything in the logs.  That's all the basic stuff that usually works... drivers, anti-virus, administrator, compatibility modes.  No luck so far.

EDIT: Also noticed that after the error message, noti.exe stays in task manager.  Have to manually kill the process.
« Last Edit: July 30, 2010, 08:13:15 PM by Stele » Logged
Oddball
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David Williamson


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« Reply #16 on: July 31, 2010, 02:31:54 AM »

Thanks Stele. I have compiled a debug version of the game. If it's the game throwing the error then this will give a proper error message.

http://www.gooeyblob.com/temp/noti_win32_debug.zip

The only other thing I can think of is putting the exe directly in the root dir (C:) and try running it from there. Shrug
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Stele
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« Reply #17 on: July 31, 2010, 07:45:22 AM »

Thanks Stele. I have compiled a debug version of the game. If it's the game throwing the error then this will give a proper error message.

http://www.gooeyblob.com/temp/noti_win32_debug.zip

The only other thing I can think of is putting the exe directly in the root dir (C:) and try running it from there. Shrug

Thanks.  Getting the same error message with that version.  Although it seems I can alt-tab into the program still, it doesn't go away from the taskbar.  But it's just a white screen, apparently frozen.  When I click anywhere in the window it says it is "not responding" and windows offers to close the program and "search for solutions."  Roll Eyes  But I don't see any different error message or log file or anything from the debug version.

Had the same thought about the Users folder, as I've had an error with Steam before where it could not access the My Documents folder for a Steam backup file.  Tried running in C: and C:\Program Files but nothing changed, exactly the same error and behavior with both .exe's. Huh?
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Toeofdoom
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« Reply #18 on: July 31, 2010, 09:28:08 AM »

I like the game so far, and while simplicity can be cool... I reckon a 4 player version and/or some additional weapons/effects would be interesting. For example, each player gets the chance to turn the battlefield once, switching the direction of gravity for each player. There are plenty of interesting ways to work out the collision with 4 players, too.

As for the current game, it would be great if each unit retained their last aim.
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