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[mobichan]

Hi All,

I am pretty new to the TIG forums and was told it was a good place to get some critical feedback on WIP games.  Some info on me:  I am a games industry artist who spends his free time making downloadable games.  I miss the 8 and 16 bit days as well as the arcades and hope to create games that remind me of the fun I had in my youth.  I'm very passionate about pixel art and enjoy making it when I want to relax.  I always have a few projects in the pipeline, but since I work a fulltime job and have other things going on, I only get to spend a couple days a week making progress.  As a result, it takes me a long time to get anything finalized.  But enough about me...

Slayin' is a game I have been tinkering with for about a year.  It has been through a lot of revisions, but I am finally ready to show it around and see what a bunch of other people think.  It is inspired by a Skipmore game and ended up being a personal challenge to take their game and expand on it while still keeping the mechanics very simple.  The mechanics are simply to run your sword through the monsters and build up combos and points.  It only uses left/right arrow keys and spacebar to jump.









My hope is to get some good feedback on what is going right and wrong with Slayin'.  The game is linked on my website here:

http://www.pixellicker.com/games/games_slayin.html

I look forward to your thoughts and feedback.  ^_^

Cheers,

Mobichan

[Zack Bell]

I played Slayin, as well as the other games on your page. It was not what I expected at all, but I enjoyed it and it was fairly addicting. Plus, your sprites are awesome. I love the style and everything looks great.  

EDIT: After reading the other reply I remembered to mention the boss fights as well! They were a nice addition and it was cool to see different strategies and what not even with the super simple controls.

[Nate Kling]

Hi Mobichan welcome to Tigsource!  Slayin' is really great I love how simple the controls and mechanics were and I was pleasantly surprised to find boss fights!  The artwork and music was great as well I wish I had some constructive criticism to give but I couldn't find any fault with the game yet.  I'm going to give it another go!

[Mikademus]

Nice work! It is like an 2D arcade version of Deadly Rooms of Death. Great visuals and audio, nice play with the theme. I found the difficulty ramping up a bit too quickly, but that might be me that is bad. I don't think there is much that can be criticised: except perhaps for introducing difficulty levels the game is as good as it can be given that you want to minimise the number of controls. Adding features (weapons, items, smart bombs etc) would mean more controls.

On Opera it doesn't render very well. F.i. the screen area is very small and there are graphical glitches where the playable area is smaller than the canvas.

[Eldboll]

This is the best game ever. The game looks frickin amazing and the gameplay is pure genius.

As far as feedback goes, maybe give more visual feedback to the players when they strike the bosses. Especially for the harpy and the dragon. Their damage animations were very subtle.
Also, I think some of the fonts used were in a higher resolution than the rest of the game? Like the level and gold digits. It looked a bit off to me.
I don't know if it's supposed to be this way, but the wizard seemed a bit overpowered compared to the knight. I got like twice as far with the wizard compared to the knight.

But yeah! This is just dope, I love it!

[st33d]

Minor annoyance,

I have the following code in most of my games:

Code:

// somewhere in the init code
stage.addEventListener(Event.DEACTIVATE, onFocusLost);

// When focus is lost the game auto-pauses, protecting the player's progress and encouraging them
// to click on the screen to re-initiate focus

private function onFocusLost(e:Event = null):void{
if(!paused){
pauseGame();
}
}

Otherwise I like the simple game play and it's quite entertaining. All it lacks is a fullscreen option which only requires these few lines of code:

Code:

stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.SHOW_ALL;
stage.fullScreenSourceRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, GAME_WIDTH, GAME_HEIGHT);
stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;

[mobichan]

I appreciate all the feedback guys, please keep it coming.  :D

In regards to the wizard, I actually didn't mention this, but the Knight is the only character I have seriously balanced so far.  I did a major pass on the enemies recently and haven't gone back and tweaked the wizard or knave.  I also noticed the high scores were primarily with the wizard, but I think that will be temporary once the wizard is adjusted.  I am amazed at how high some of the scores are getting.  I guess that means some people are really enjoying it for long play sessions (which is great).  I will try and resolve the swf focus issue soon, as well as add in support for swf zooming so people can play it at 2x resolution.

Cheers,
Mobichan

[Chris Pavia]

I've been enjoying this game a lot! I agree with the comment that the feedback/hit reacts for the bosses could be much more obvious. Also, I would have swapped the first boss (fly/wasp thing) and the minotaur, as the minotaur seemed to be much easier to kill, for me at least.

[mobichan]

It's funny, because originally the Minotaur was the first boss, but I had a few people complain that it felt too difficult for the first boss due to the strict jump timing.  But the jump has been tweaked since then, so I am curious if the boss order could be changed back to Minotaur first.

Anyone else feel that the first boss is harder than the second boss?

[biomechanic]

I wouldn't say it's harder, but the first fight took much longer for me.

[Chris Pavia]

You could reduce the number of hits the first boss takes, but I think in general he requires more interactions on the part of the player to defeat relative to the Minotaur. The Minotaur is pretty straight forward, jump to dodge and then attack (maybe have a visual indicator immediately before he charges to help the player know when to jump). The first boss requires the player to dodge 2 different projectile patterns (straight and wave), has a much shorter pre-attack anim, and can require a jump attack to hit when he spawns up high.

While I wouldn't say the difficulty difference between the two is that high, the first boss definitely requires more spatial awareness to engage.

[Destral]

Wow, really neat game. Simple controls, crisp graphics and music, and it even has bosses and power-ups. Only had time to play once so far, but definitely fun!

Agreed with previous posters, the Minotaur battle felt simpler and shorter than the Imp, I was actually surprised when the Minotaur died after 4/5 hits after how long the Imp took to kill.

Definitely want to play this some more and give some more feedback. Next obvious question right now is are you going to port this to mobile phones?

[s0]

Graphics are absolutely top notch, the chain scoring is satisfying and fun and I like how much variety you're getting out these very simple mechanics. The 2 boss fights I experienced were nice too. It's a neat time waster that doesn't feel cheap or slapdash, just what I expect out of a good flash game.


I can only think of two small criticisms right now:

The way the game pauses for a short time on every level up is a bit jarring. You should probably just display the message over the main character's head and play the sound effect without interrupting the flow of the game. Also, I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if it's my browser or whatever, but the shop controls felt really strange and unresponsive to me. Like, there seemed to be huge input delays both for the movement of the cursor and purchasing stuff with the space bar.

[Destral]

Managed to get to level 45 - man it gets crazy.

I'd suggest looking into what C.A. Sinclair mentioned about the pause when you level up, have a few folks try out both versions and see what feels better. I likely need to play a few more times and try out the different weapons more, but so far the longer sword that increases your speed seems to be way better than the other options (then again I haven't tried the bone cleaver).

Definitely want to play more, so far it's really really fun. Can't wait to unlock the other two characters and try them out.

[mobichan]

Version 1.29 is live now.  I have added a game pause if the swf loses focus.  Also cleaned up some of the wizard's spell code that was causing the rotating spells to jump to odd orbiting angles.  The wizard's knockback now does not affect gravestones, spectres or unicorns.  :D

I am planning to do a big pass on the wizard and knave next.  I am leaning towards giving the knave some combo chaining advantages.  And the wizard is going to be a bit weaker on the defensive side.  I also need to make the later levels (above 70) have some more difficulty, since it seems some people can get their level up in the 160's.  I never thought that was even possible. 

[ddv85]

I think this is a great game - I had played the game this was based off (the "Skipmore" game) some time back, but that game is really more like a toy than an actual game.

Some critiques:

• The sound will *not* stay off, this is a huge problem and is the top comment on the reddit thread (http://www.reddit.com/r/WebGames/comments/ksad9/slayin_2d_sidescrolling_action_kill_enemies_and/):
  
  

  Am I the only one that still gets music even though I turn the music off?

  That was so annoying, that I quit playing. I lost health so many times while I was trying to mute it repeatedly.

  
   To reproduce this "bug", mute the sound as soon as you enter the game, then level up, the music always comes back on at a level up (but the sound effects stay off).
  
  
• The game doesn't save. I made it past level 25, then figured I'd come back to the site later to play as the wizard, when I came back the wizard wasn't active. To create "flash cookies" (shared objects in flash) see: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/net/SharedObject.html
  
  
• The wizard is way too easy once you get a fireball / lightning protective orb circling you.
  

Great job! And I love the pixel art.

[I_smell]

Get to the first boss faster. It only feels like it takes a minute if you've already played it, but on my first go I was startin to get dissapointed and thinking that was the whole game.

Jumping ontop of enemies should count as killing them. Otherwise I just feel helpless in the air.

The wizard sucks. Enemies spawn underneath him while he's invincible, and then hit him when he switches back. He can't hit enemies in the air, and I couldn't buy any of his unlockables cos I spent all my money tryina heal him. Going from the Knight to the Wizard feels like I'm just playing a broken version of the game where I can't do anything properly and get destroyed.

I think you should make the graphic of the Minatour boss explain more why you can only hit him from behind. He looks like I can hit him from the front just fine, but then I can't.

I thought the number in the bottom-left was money, but it's points? Who gives a shit about points? Forget points, drop more big coins. Give me an item that increases the chance of big coins. THAT'S what I wanna collect from enemies. Also randomly drop a pickup that makes me invincible for a sec, and a pickup that kills everything currently onscren.

It took me a while to figure out where my health and everything was- I don't know what's goin on in the top-left, but it's not health.
Oh and the noise when you kill something is crap. It sounds like someone using a lighter or ripping a piece of paper- the other sounds are all good.
I think this game is good, but has a few downfalls.

[mobichan]

It might be a day or so to check out the sound issue.  I think I know what is causing it, but am not sure how to fix it yet.  Thanks for mentioning it.  As for saving, I need to add in cookie support so it saves locally.  Again, it is on the list for the next update.  ^_^'

As for the difficulty, I think the knight is an example of how I expect the game's difficulty to feel.  The other characters are meant to be more advanced as well as offer a different way to play.  Since the wizard has not been balanced, most of the spells are the result of fun ideas I wanted to try out, but some of them are horribly unbalanced.  It's good to hear how people are interpreting the game.  I hope to make it better and better.

Another missing element is an faq.  I sort of left it out on purpose for now to see if anything was unclear or confusing.  The bar in the left corner represents when another chest is going to spawn, but I feel like too many people confuse it for the health bar.  So it may be removed to just clean up the ui.  Another tip I can give is that gold coins actually restore a sliver of health.  So collecting gold is very advantageous for staying alive. 

Thanks for playing,

Mobichan

[Glyph]

Good game and very good pixels, but a few concerns:

When paused, certain objects will continue animating, and, crucially, the Imp's fireballs will keep moving.

The minotaur should definitely be before the Imp, simply because his pattern is simpler. Either that, or introduce another non-punishable attack for him that doesn't make him such a lightweight and bump up his hp.

I didn't like how running into bosses kills your combo meter. Unless you intentionally did that, you could make it stop during a fight.

Anyway, really fun, and now I'm off to give it another go!

[I_smell]

I didn't read any of the text, so don't trouble yourself with an FAQ.