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[Quicksand-S]

That looks pretty cool, actually. Reminds me of the game, inFlux, quite a bit.

[quigibrough]

Hi. I played for awhile, I finished levels 1 and 2 and had difficulties on the rest. I used a controller.  

One thing that was super annoying was that I don't play inverted so the camera controls were very painful for me.

On level 3 I just got frustrated after trying to jump through the hoop a bunch of times. The camera should really spawn facing a direction you can travel and not off of the level. This in conjunction with inverted camera sent me over the edge. As soon as I joined level 4 I saw the hoop and jumped in it and then the screen was all black or something so I restarted the level. Eventually while in Level 4 I started falling through the level a bunch after about 47 stars or whatever the things I collect are. This kept happening a lot and then I left the level and went to 5 where it kept happening. I had to restart the application but then the problem was resolved.  

One main thing to help new players get used to your physics would be to maybe make walls up until level 3 or something so you don't fall off as easy. If I can't take risks without having to spawn back at a checkpoint, I can't figure out how to go faster which made me start going slow but I eventually got used to it on level 5.  

The entire thing felt pretty good. It's all been done before though but there's nothing entirely wrong with that. Felt kind of generic though but I think with the right theme you can have like an armadillo rolling through a trippy grass land picking up flowers and it could be pretty neat. If you fix the camera for us non inverted users I'd be happy to do feedback again at a later date.

If you want to help me out a ton, it's so hard to find controller testers for our game(Link to TIGForums post. Link at top.). If you want to play it until you get bored and leave some feedback it would greatly be appreciated. We just finished redoing all of the single player levels and are wondering what the difficulty progression is like but also you can leave general feedback about what you like / hate about it. It has local and online multiplayer but the link at the top of the post only has single player in order to make the build small. Thanks!

[ThemsAllTook]

I gave this a try, and made a video of my playtest if you're interested in seeing reactions in real time:



Overall impressions: Core gameplay feels really good. I'd have designed some of the levels a little bit differently to really make it shine. Several bugs and techincal issues that need to be worked out.

Gameplay: Excellent feel overall. It was enjoyable just to move around the level. I had a little bit of trouble going any speed other than really slow or really fast...maybe a different acceleration curve could smooth out the experience? There were a couple of places where I was aiming my camera down and trying to jump from one platform to another, and the jump didn't seem to work as I expected. I'm not sure if aiming the camera down makes your jump shorter, or if it's shorter while accelerating quickly, or if I was doing something else wrong...you can see it in the video when I'm playing level 3.

Level design: I played the first three tracks (maybe the only three? Forgot to check if more were available). To be honest, the first track was my favorite. A big enclosed environment where I could roll around freely was more enjoyable overall than narrow platforms over empty space. Second track was perfectly fine. Third track kind of dragged on for longer than I felt like it needed to... I'd say this sort of game works better with shorter, more focused levels. Track 3 could have been half the size or less and still get the point across.

Technical issues: The main thing that caused me trouble was the way the application handled the mouse. Sensitivity on menu screens was extremely low, even when I cranked it up to 100. If I'd alt-tab to another application, the game was still moving my cursor around, which is a pretty severe problem; it means I can't do anything else on my computer while the game is running, including using the task manager to kill the process if necessary. The cursor kept resetting to the upper left corner for no apparent reason in between menu screens.

Something was strange about the way fullscreen resolutions were handled. When I first changed the setting to 1920x1080 fullscreen, the game's viewport wasn't updated until I exited the settings menu. Even after that, the resolution wasn't right; on quitting the game, I'd briefly see my desktop at a lower resolution (not sure what exactly) before it changed back. In-game, I could tell it definitely wasn't running at 1920x1080. I ended up playing in windowed mode with the same size, which worked OK, but my task bar covered up the bottom part of the game window.

Exiting full screen mode placed the game window in such a position that its upper left corner was in the center of my screen, and the bottom and right portions were offscreen. Since my cursor was always being warped, it was impossible to grab the window and move it elsewhere onscreen. Had to restart the game to fix it.

A couple of finer points in the settings menu: When adjusting a 0-100 setting (volume, sensitivity, etc), I'd really like to be able to hold the arrow key or joystick in one direction rather than having to press/move it for each individual increment. Making the 50 separate keypresses to increase the sensitivity to 100 took way longer than it needed to. Even worse was when I was messing with the volume controls, trying to get the ambient sound on the menu screen to stop; none of the three settings had any effect on it whatsoever.

I'd like to be able to remap the game's controls - both in terms of changing key bindings, and reversing the direction of the Y (and possibly X) axis for camera movement. The default orientation isn't what I'm used to and it was hard to move the camera the way I wanted.

There were two times where the game seemed to crash, or at least get stuck: Once while loading a track (I'm not sure which one, unfortunately), and once after finishing level 3 and waiting for the leaderboards to come up. The latter happens during the video; it eventually recovers, but not until I accidentally click off of the game and then activate it again.

Losing control after winning a level feels a little bit weird. Falling off the stage because I couldn't stop myself doesn't seem quite right for having just won the level. Some sort of victory animation would be a nice touch.

Anyway, really nice job with this overall - if some of the technical aspects were smoothed out, this could be a real gem!

[gerbotha]

I gave this a try, and made a video of my playtest if you're interested in seeing reactions in real time:



Overall impressions: Core gameplay feels really good. I'd have designed some of the levels a little bit differently to really make it shine. Several bugs and techincal issues that need to be worked out.
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@ThemsAllTook (Alex) - I’ve been out of action for a while over Christmas and thereafter and had been quite surprised to discover the game has been play-tested by means of a video review! Thank you very much for doing so as well as for taking the time to give detailed feedback!

I’ve taken your suggestions to heart and will do an update as soon as is realistically possible. Most of those pesky bugs you mention have been ironed out but there are still a few other fundamental issues which requires attention. I’ll post an update as soon as is sensible to do so.

Thanks again, much appreciated.

[gerbotha]

Howdy all! So after months of distractions and projects I'm finally able to give attention again to Dexterity Ball 3D! Hopefully I can keep the ball rolling for the next few weeks...

I recently took Dexterity Ball 3D off the shelve, and decided to gave it a bit of a dust off. It now features linear space lighting, deferred shading and cascaded shadows as part of the most recent updates.

I'll add more levels sooner than later but what I would really appreciate is for people to play it in order to test it's stability etc.


The latest build (0.9.3) can be downloaded from IndieDB,



At the moment the minimum GPU requirement is DirectX 10.1

[gerbotha]

Added loading screen music and fixed intermittent sound issue for 'Replay Leaderboard' mode.

The latest build (0.9.3.1) can be downloaded from IndieDB,


At the moment the minimum GPU requirement is DirectX 10.1

[gerbotha]

Uploaded new update.

Changes includes,

Relaxed minimum requirement from DirectX 10.1 to DirectX 10.0

The deferred rendering pipeline as well as shadows now supports anything from xs_4_0 and upwards. I'm still considering shader model 3 (DirectX9.3) support.

Best performance is achieved on DirectX 11 due to the use of hull and domain shaders during light accumulation. There is a slight performance drop when using DirectX10.1 or lower. On shader model xs_4_0 (DirectX 10.0) there's a further (very slight) potential performance impact due to the shadow's cascades requiring individual shader resource views for each slice of the Texture2DArray holding the cascades. This is due to ps_4_0's inability to sample from 2d texture arrays. However, everything said is purely academic for Dexterity ball as it only uses sunlight with accompanying cascaded shadows.

The latest build (0.9.3.2) can be downloaded from IndieDB,

[gerbotha]

Uploaded new update

• Fixed an issue where players complain about load screen delays when the game server cannot be reached
• Removed prototype levels and replaced them with 4 basic play levels
• Added in-game menu in order to access settings whilst playing a game as well as other minor menu changes

The latest build (0.9.3.4) can be downloaded from IndieDB,

[gerbotha]

Added extra level as well as in-game sound

The latest build (0.9.3.5) can be downloaded from IndieDB,



At the moment the minimum GPU requirement is DirectX 10

[gerbotha]

Added extra levels as well as in-game sound. Added back the DirectX 10 and 10.1 shaders which accidentally got left out in previous version (which only had the DirectX 11 shaders)

The latest build (0.9.3.6) can be downloaded from IndieDB,



At the moment the minimum GPU requirement is DirectX 10 (best performance on DirectX11)

[gerbotha]

The latest build (0.9.3.7) can be downloaded from IndieDB,






At the moment the minimum GPU requirement is DirectX 10 (best performance on DirectX11)

Changes:
Added VSync option to video options
Added dynamic VSync (in order to increase performance on integrated graphics and lower-end graphics cards
Removed replay play mode (prototype stage)
Removed replay telemetry acquisition. Will consider adding it back if dedicated cloud server becomes available. It simply slows down things too much for people without broadband.

[gerbotha]

Fixed frame stutter which occurred when switching between menu screens
Fixed physics cache error which caused collision detection problems.

The latest build (0.9.3. can be downloaded from IndieDB,