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[Shadowspaz]

It took about 7 months longer than it should have, and I really don't want to work in Flash again after the headaches this gave me, but the game is finally finished. It's a very minimalistic game, and my goal with making it was to create something without sprites. Meaning I used procedural animations, as well. And I must say: Circles are fantastic to work with.

The game is technically a grow game: You eat things to get bigger, and avoid things bigger than you. But I've pitted many things against the player, and while I can't say much here (I wanted to see how quickly people pick up on the rules from trial/error), I will say this: There IS a win condition.

Anyway, the game is playable here: http://www.kongregate.com/games/Shadowspaz/zero-d

[Pinqu!]

Not sure if you did this on purpose but due to the speed and size of the small circles it is really hard to separate the different colors for someone like me with (a small degree of) color blindness .. It makes my eyes feel like this ->

[Shadowspaz]

Oh man, I didn't even think of that. Any recommended fixes, or would a brighter red work fine?

[Pinqu!]

Bright red might do the job or blue. Any color would do, as long as it not to dark. I can see the big circles just fine actually, but the smaller ones are almost impossible to separate.

[migrafael]

Not even a little screenshot to seduce me into clicking the link? I'll click it anyway, but just this once!

[Shadowspaz]

Alright, I tweaked the colors, there. Lemme know if that's easier to see, Pingu.

And I added a screenshot for your viewing convenience, migrafael.

Edit: Wow, I really said absolutely nothing in that post... Fixed that, too. The whole thing was a pain to finish, and I just wanted it posted when it was done. So I kinda rushed all of that. lol

[MrBlockers]

really love the minimalism. the controls felt a little slippery for me. (but that might just be because all the games I've been touching recently are rather slow paced) also, what kind of issues were you running into with flash? i kind of want to give it a shot sometime but i'm trying to decide if it'll be worth it.

[Shadowspaz]

really love the minimalism. the controls felt a little slippery for me. (but that might just be because all the games I've been touching recently are rather slow paced) also, what kind of issues were you running into with flash? i kind of want to give it a shot sometime but i'm trying to decide if it'll be worth it.

The major roadblock for me was all environment-based: I couldn't get the text to appear. The reason was that I had embedded the font, but not the specific characters I wanted to use. That issue could be summed up with "inexperience," but it really feels like that shouldn't be necessary.

Another weird one was dealing with the preloader (Which wasn't too necessary on a 65Kb file, but it's still good practice). If it preloaded straight to the gameplay, without the intermediate 'start' screen, it ran fine. But after adding that screen, and having the button run the same exact chunk of code, it just froze up. So I really don't understand how Flash handles preloading classes, or initiating objects. I'm still not sure how I fixed that issue.

All of this being said, if you're looking to start working in Flash, it isn't all that bad of a starting point. I've always relied on the timeline in the past, and did things rather visually. With that, there weren't nearly as many problems. I'm only running into these now because I'm working my way towards lower-level languages. I've been working purely in actionscript, and I've been trying to get away from using the timeline as a crutch.

But I've also heard that the native Flash compiler isn't the best, so I'm switching to FlashDevelop for my next project(s). But again, this is all out of a desire for lower level stuff.

[Pinqu!]

Much better

[crazyfingers619]

Hey, big fan of growth games! Lots of polish here, fluid movement and all that. But I found the game very frustrating. Part of that was not knowing what the  end goal was. Do i just survive long enough? Am i supposed  to get bigger than the  red blob  and eat it? I did just  that a couple times but i'm not sure what conditions allowed me to eat the red blob, felt  sorta random. Most games just  felt like a futile effort to grow as  the red blob spiraled ahead at a pace you could never recover from. Generally speaking in growth games a lot of the satisfaction is  reaching a size you can more or less mindlessly run around at and  eat everything and this game just never captured a sense of "satisfaction" that comes with growing, just a constant  state of tension.

[MrBlockers]

All of this being said, if you're looking to start working in Flash, it isn't all that bad of a starting point.

ah, thanks for your insight on your issues. i usually use C++ or a language with some binding of openGL for my games; mainly interested in flash for the portability and easy prototyping capabilities

that is quite interesting though with the pre-loading issues; i wonder how ASX(1,2,w/e) handles garbage collection..

[Shadowspaz]

Hey, big fan of growth games! Lots of polish here, fluid movement and all that. But I found the game very frustrating. Part of that was not knowing what the  end goal was. Do i just survive long enough? Am i supposed  to get bigger than the  red blob  and eat it? I did just  that a couple times but i'm not sure what conditions allowed me to eat the red blob, felt  sorta random. Most games just  felt like a futile effort to grow as  the red blob spiraled ahead at a pace you could never recover from. Generally speaking in growth games a lot of the satisfaction is  reaching a size you can more or less mindlessly run around at and  eat everything and this game just never captured a sense of "satisfaction" that comes with growing, just a constant  state of tension.

Awesome. Thanks for the feedback. Regarding eating the red blob, it's just whichever one is bigger, which I tried to illustrate with the gradual growth/shrinking of the respective blobs. I'll add a smaller red one to the start, both to show what can be consumed, and to give the player a bit of a head start.

Regarding satisfaction... Well, when you work on a game as simple as this for as long as that, you tend to lose track of difficulty. So thank you very much for that external feedback. I'm going to tweak the scaling of the enemies' spawn size, so that they'll get gradually smaller in relation to the player the larger the player is. Right now, they always spawn larger, which I did to prevent it from being too easy, but I guess I underestimated how challenging the beginning would be. Hopefully the scaling will flatten out that difficulty curve as you reach a decent size.

Right now, though, I've got other plans, but I'll implement all these changes when I get back. The new version will be up tomorrow before noon.

[Shadowspaz]

The game is updated now. I also changed the enemy blob color.

I also found that the hit-detection only works if you are not screen-wrapping, but fixing that is going to require redoing a bit of how it's wrapping, so I'll tackle that at a later date. Until then, please let me know of any other bugs/desired changes.

Edit: Ah, dammit. I thought it was updated. Now it really is. I promise.