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[Kinaetron]

Hey guys, I threw together a game for the experimental gameplay jam this month called Twin Freeze and I was hoping you could give me some feedback on it as this game is my first complete project. It's a twin stick shooter, when the bullets hit an object it freezes the object in time. Survive as long as you can.

Instructions for installation and controls are included in the zip  

FIXED FLASHING ISSUE IN GAME
https://rapidshare.com/files/3610950690/TwinFreeze.zip

SCREENSHOTS

[michaelplzno]

The dimmer of the two options in your menu is the selected option. That confused me and I quit the game the first time I ran it. Also my joystick didn't respond. I have a playstation 2 controller with a usb adapter. It works with many programs and emulators.

You should make it so that there is a radius around the triforce that the guards can't spawn in.

You need a new font for the 3 menu options and the timer. Something that matches the thin outline style of the guards, triforce and notes. I would change the game over text to read:

[time]
Enter

Also I would get rid of the word time before the timer in game. Just have it be digits counting forward.

Gahhh, no wonder the music in this game is spectacular, its from the people who did the soundtrack for fez! I assume you do not have the rights to use this track. Poor form to not explain that if its the case. I'll continue to write this feedback under the assumption that you have permission.

It crashed for some reason, I switched my mouse focus to my other machine so that may have done it.

So, since you are such good friends with disasterpeace, I would rename this game to "Guards of the Gate." "Twin Freeze" is actually a good name but it doesn't represent your game as well. What you have is really a "music video game" a game version of a music video. You just didn't finish designing it.

Twice now when I've been playing this my entire screen has flashed despite the game being in windowed mode. I have no idea what is happening there and I've never seen anything like it. Its a very brief pulse, but I feel like my monitor is gonna go out. Maybe its a hardware issue on my end.

I can't beat it! So depressing it just keeps getting harder and I can't get to the end. The end obviously being the 3 minute mark when the song is over.

The player's instrument has an odd sound effect. It sounds like a gun. I actually like the fact that it is pretty much useless in the first section.

To make this game complete I would make the environment react to the overt changes in tone in the music. In the first part the guards don't spawn in sync with the music so I'd tweak that. I wouldn't keep spawning guards after the 28sec mark. At that point you should make a dramatic change. It could be as simple as assigning every guard a new velocity vector at random. It could also involve visuals, like each guard sends out a concentric ring. I'd do this at each of the dramatic chords that follow. Then at the 1 minute mark you again need to make a change. It starts to get hazier here because there are many options and ideally you would do this with as few elements as possible. Hmm, now I'm just sitting here trying to design a game for you.

Well that should give you something to read at least. IDK if you want to continue with it but I think you could make quite a good game here. You've made an interesting gameplay music paring and if you could keep the match for the length of the song it would be cool.

[Kinaetron]

Hey MSilver,

I've sorted out the issue with the screen flashing in the new build.

I did ask Diasterpiece for his permission before allowing people to download it and he give it me, as it was made for a jam and I have no plans on selling it anytime soon.

In terms of controls, I only designed it around the USB port version of the Xbox 360 and the only way to get it to work with other controls is through another piece of software like xpadder, I'm really sorry about that.  

Finally in terms of the overall design I was just thinking of a novel way of using time manipulation in a small scale game and I thought the idea freezing the objects in space for a limited time was an interesting concept. I honestly didn't even consider the ramifications of the music in the game as it was added during the last day of development. But yeah I do agree it would be a pretty neat idea to get the objects in the game to spawn along with the music and further integration would elevate the game further, but I disagree with the game being primarily about the music.

Looking back on the text on screen I didn't give it as much consideration as I should of and yeah I should make the dark text the unselected version and the light text the selected version.

I'm pretty sure the objects only spawn near the player not on him but I will double check that

In terms of winning though I would have to disagree, I think it makes the game every engaging and on top of that it gives you another time to beat, much like classic arcade games like Missile Command.

But yeah thanks for the feedback it really did help quite a bit and once I get some more feedback from the gamejam I'II may will probably take this game further.

[michaelplzno]

That's cool that they were nice enough to let you do that. As a result I'm probably going to buy some more of their music so they were wise to let you use it. Good luck with it, its a cool first project.