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[Paul Eres]

EDIT: Newest version: http://studioeres.com/immortal/ImmortalDefenseDemo.zip

Requirements (estimated):
- Windows 2000 or later, DirectX 8.0 or later, 256MB RAM (preferably 512MB+), 1.0GHZ CPU (*really* preferably 2.0GHZ+, as the game's very CPU-intensive, but it's playable on a 1.0GHZ CPU if you set effects low and run it in full screen), 32MB 3D videocard (preferably 64MB+).

[rz.]

great game, i played it for about an hour. i guess, at first it was a bit confusing and seemed pretty hard (so i toned the difficulty level embarassingly low). but it was fun, and i liked the spacey tower defense thing going on. the music was the shit, too. that title song is orgasmic. so yeah, good work. but, one thing: i can't really see myself paying for this (definitely not if it's the usual $19.99), however i'm pretty hard to sell when it comes to shareware.

[Paul Eres]

Thanks for the reply ^^

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the tower defense (sub-)genre, but for that genre I think it's pretty easy; compared to games like Desktop Tower Defense or Flash Element TD for example it's very hard to lose (although if you're going for 100% on every level it's pretty hard, yeah).

How would you suggest I improve it for it to be worth buying -- & out of curiosity, which shareware have you bought? I'm also hard to sell on shareware; the only ones I've bought are Shoot the Bullet and The Shivah.

[Guert]

I've downloaded the game and I'm gonna play it. I'll post back as soon as I have something with potential to say.

Later!

[Alex May]

I had been meaning to play the beta and had a go last night. It's as I expected - the game is awesome. I enjoyed reading the story sections, and thought the music and sound effects were great. The graphics were good too - remind me of Star Control a bit - and I like how things get hazy and confused near the end of a level. I will definitely be playing some more. I will play some more now in fact.

[TeeGee]

Just to say that the game is great and I recommend everyone to play it . It uses a mix of old genres to make a very unique experience. Rinku's ability to make a tower defense game have a great story, is impressive. Even towers here have some personality and that's quite something.

[moi]

GREAT game and story, but I need new eyeballs now

[Alex May]

Crit! Everyone loves crit. These are a few problems I had:

• seeing where my fricking mouse pointer was when the action was hot - I can see why you did this but it is still annoying
• quitting - if I click on the X it means I want the window gone mofo! I don't want it to a) not do anything b) go to a pause menu c) go back to the level select screen d) go back to the main menu - I want it gone!
• over the course of a level enemies seem to level up too much, by the end it's nearly impossible to stop them and at least a few get through. After several tries this is surmountable which means your gameplay is good. But I can never seem to beat my first-play scores by more than a few hundred, even when going from a 25% save to a 100% lives left save thing. Feels like the destiny of a level is written rather than under my control.
  
• the last level of the first campaign is a huyooge difficulty spike - if you wanted people to be this good by this point you should have trained them up to be that good. I can't get more than 169 points on this level and that's starting with 16k cache. Maybe I just suck but I have replayed the level at least 6 times now and not achieved much more than 150 points on any occasion. Need hints or something.
  
• The quit menu hit boxes are off  - I have to point below the text to select it.
• The level start (placement) music loops a little oddly, there's a small gap and the rhythm is thrown.
• Towards the end of a level things get too hectic and I don't feel like I have the time to split between killing space ships and and upgrading Points. I want to upgrade my Points but as soon as I take attention away from attacking, ships get through and I lose lives. Seems too hard.

Otherwise, I fucking love this game dude. Seriously. Maybe it's the old school 20s jazz in the level select screen. Maybe it's the short gameplay cycle, maybe it's the old school graphics, maybe it's the story. It's all good. I think ther eare a few niggles but even in its current state I'd buy the fuck out of this game.

[Paul Eres]

Thanks all!

In reply to Haowan (point by point)

Losing the mouse cursor in the action is not something anyone has mentioned before, but it's a good observation as I occasionally lose it too. I could perhaps make it brighter, or flash more notably... I'll try a few things out.

Good point on the X, I'll see what I can do there.

I may set the default difficulty lower than 50, seeing as a lot of people are saying it's too hard at 50 (personally I think it's too easy at 50, but I made the game and know all the tricks, it's not until 70 or 80 that the game challenges me). Currently it doesn't matter what difficulty level you beat a level on, the score carries over the same, so sometimes you can get a higher score on a lower difficulty level (but sometimes not, as lower difficulties mean lower HP which means less cache).

A good way to get a high score is spend as little as possible -- sometimes this can work very well, and sometimes it's even more important to your final score than getting 100% (although to unlock the secret campaign you'll need to get 100% on every level, note).

Good point on the boss level of campaign 1, it's supposed to be harder but not extremely such; I actually can win it just using Strategist Points, although it depends on which points Aa places and how he (randomly) chooses to upgrade those points; I'll consider making that level easier.

The detection for the quit menu things is a known bug that was discovered just after zipping and uploading v0.9 -- I'll fix it soon, should be simple.

The small gap in the loop I'll see what I can do about, perhaps it'd just be a matter of editing the ogg in Audacity and removing the last second of empty time.

I think I like the hectic part at the end of a level, but one thing I can consider (though this might make the game too easy) is increasing the rest time between the waves of the enemies, to give more time to upgrade. It's balanced with the current rest time however, so doing that would mean less enemies and easier levels, so to compensate I'd have to make them come out slightly faster during the period when they do come out -- which might break the balance (which I just spent about 2 weeks working on), but I'll experiment.

Thanks for the complements!

And, looking forward to your response Guert, especially considering how in-depth your responses are to other games :D

[Alex May]

OK, nice. I don't think it's necessary to experiment with the spawning, to be honest - you've spent two weeks on making it this way and I've only played for a few hours. I agree that the hectic part at the end of the level is good, but I think my problem is that once it gets to that stage I don't have any recourse to stop the bastard things getting through my defences - as I say, this is probably due to a lack of experience.

Also, when I talk about the last level, I'm talking about the time attack level at the end of the campaign - I actually found the level prior to that quite easy and passed it with flying colours the first time I played it. The time attack level seems to be jolly hard and I have a hard time scoring over 150 points on it, meaning I start the next campaign with perhaps 300 cache. Not a good start...? Anyway, it is fun to try a few different techniques to try to get better scores but in general it seems like I can only alter my score by less than 1k on the normal levels, and only by about 20 points on the time attack level.

The mouse cursor issue is hard because the light effects are really nice and the feeling of being blinded by your own achievements in a strange environment is very evocative. Very much so. But I do want to know where I am pointing. It's a tough call because I would also want to know at what I am pointing, so the mouse curse and also the Points would also have to be visible.

Anyway. I will play more, for sure.

[Paul Eres]

I think I still want to experiment with it -- if not for v1.0 for release, then definately for later versions (I plan to continue updating the game even after release, with some challenge levels, a level modification feature, etc. etc.).

Oh, that level! What you should realize is that the enemies become weaker again in Campaign 2, so you don't need thousands of points of cache to play well in it, a hundred or two (or even 0) is enough, because the first level of campaign 2 again has weak enemies; the Raberata in the final level of campaign 1 mentions that (that it's a fresh start).

I don't think it'd do too much harm to make the cursor brighter, maybe I could even give it a glow effect... although also notice that if you turn the effects meter down (it defaults to 50) there will be fewer effects and you'll be able to see better.

[Derek]

Without having played it (and I will try to very soon... I'm in a bit of a work crunch atm), I would say that the graphics are good, but could be bumped up a notch to make it a "must buy" (assuming that the gameplay is really solid).  Right now it has the kind of heart that I love seeing in indie titles, but lacks the kind of polish that people expect when they shell out money.

I might suggest seeing if someone on this forum can help out with the pixel portraits and UI... use your existing designs as a base and just smooth out the rough edges.

[harlockhero]

I might suggest seeing if someone on this forum can help out with the pixel portraits and UI... use your existing designs as a base and just smooth out the rough edges.

Actually, all the portraits have been replaced by redrawn, much higher-resolution counterparts already. The jagged quality of the ones you're looking at is the result of a miscommunication about what size they would be viewed at, and the reason the new graphics aren't in the game file you're downloading is due to YET ANOTHER miscommunication. It's a bit of a disappointment to me that the first anyone sees of my graphics in this game are old outdated things, but I'm glad the responses have been more or less positive in spite of that.

[Paul Eres]

Harlock, because Derek said he hasn't played it, by portraits I'm assuming he means the bottom GUI bar, not the intermission portraits you refer to; and the GUI portraits and GUI to which he refers aren't the ones that have been re-done, unless you've replaced them all without mentioning it.

Derek, thanks, and I agree that some of the graphics need to be improved for it to compete with your Aquaria graphically (haha), but also, others have said that the game looks much better in motion than it does in static screenshots, so I'll be happy to see what you think of the graphics & polish after you've played it. But also, sprite graphics aren't its primary focus, it's not meant to be a pixel-based game, but rather an effects-based game, more in the style of Fl0w or Geometry Wars.

[Jimbob]

I can probably write a lot more later, but I'm enjoying the game and I just came across a bug where a sound effect gets stuck on loop and I've no idea when it starts because I'm engrossed in the game. The only way to stop it is to exit the game unfortunately (sounds continue normally underneath it though, and I can still turn music on and off in the main screen). I'll try and figure it out.