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[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (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.

[Jimbob]

Okay, I played it a bit more, and it happens every time I play. The sound effect that loops is different each time, and if I play long enough, more sound effects get stuck in a seemingly time dependant fashion (say every minute or so, I haven't actually timed it), forming a lovely cacophonous orchestra in my ears. Which is a shame, because I like the sound.

As for the game, yeh, it's really fun, one thing I found could be done be slightly better is the sense of achievement for spending less credits yet still getting 100%. I know you are caching up for the final time attack battle in the campaign, but I don't know exactly how well I've performed to get 100% on the previous levels. I suppose it could have a 'medal' type system for each level dependant on your cache bonus (you know, like in Advance Wars, where you get a grade etc...) but it's not that big of a problem to maybe warrant that (possibly complex) addition (although it could fit in with the whole 'promotion' thing you get at the end of the first campaign).

Just an idea. 

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Interesting sound bug, I've not heard that reported before, I'll investigate. Does turning the sound on and off on the stage select screen (the switch toggle) stop the looping?

I'm considering a medals system for a post-release update, but it'd work differently from what you describe. You'd get medals for certain achievements, which would then increase your abilities (for instance, if you killed 100 enemies in a single level with a Courage Point, you might get a 15% boost to the range of all Courage Points after that).

The only achievement right now for spending less cache and still getting 100% is a higher score ("New Highest Score!") message at the end of the level.

One thing I also am considering is to one day add an online high score system (so people could compare their highest scores in a level with others'), that might give more of a feeling of achievement, but I don't know enough MySQL programming for that yet.

But I'm not really going for a "highest score" feeling of achievement in the game, the main part of the game is the experience of playing through it, following the story, etc., so I think a type of "Gold Medal! Silver Medal! Bronze Medal!" system that Advance Wars has might actually cheapen the game, it'd make it feel like an arcade game, and feel less epic.

Thanks for playing the game and the bug report, but I'm kind of at a loss to explain the sound looping bug, I'll go over the code again, but because nobody else has had that problem it might also just be a sound driver incompatibility or something of that nature.

[Guert]

I'll try not to mention too much things that has already been said. I wouldn't want to make a long post talking about stuff you've already been told.
Ok so, here is what I think...

Technical
Mechanisms
Move cursor: Moving the cursor around is extremely simple. So simple, I have nothing else to say about this
Attack: Attacking was a bit confusing at first. Not that attacking is complicated but it’s just that I didn’t felt like I was controlling what and when the cursor attacked. I got the hang of it pretty fast though so it may not be much of a problem.
Boosting the attack: Boosting the attack was very simple and very clear to us. The only down part about boosting the attack is that I felt like the power of the cursor didn’t grow enough. For instance, the cursor always does a small amount of damage, even if I boosted the power up for a long while.  It may a question of taste, but I felt like the game should make the cursor get stronger with each boost, like upgrading your towers… Just a thought.

Build tower: Building towers was  a bit awkward at first. You press the button down for a while and then, as you release it, the tower is created. The first towers I created had me holding down the button until something happened.  I believe that, since the player already has to wait before the tower is actually created, you make the tower appear the second the building time is done, even if the button is down. If you want, you could also make the tower upgrade this way  too. Following this logic, I could build my first tower and hold the mouse button down after its created to upgrade it. Of course, you could make sure that no tower shoots at the enemies as long as you are holding down the mouse on them. 

Upgrade tower: Well, pretty much the same thing as building the tower.

Choose tower: I like how the tower icons in the menu are big and easy to select. I don’t think you should be able to select a tower that you cannot build because you lack the funding. Well, it’s not bad in itself because it allows use to select a tower in advance and then build it the second we got the score for it. Maybe you should make the towers you don’t have enough money for in grey. An icon in black means unavailable, in grey means available if you got the money and in color means available right now. Just a little something to tell us why we can’t build a tower that looks like we can build. 

FlowThe game flows well from one screen to another. I didn’t feel like we we’re going through to many screens for nothing. One thing you could have to ease up the flow a bit more would be the option of moving on to the next level when winning. You could have a pop-up asking : “You won! Continue?  Yes No” Loosing would automatically brings you back to the main menu. This ay, the player will be bale to play as much as it wants too before his experience is broken.

Economics
The game has a couple of nice rewards. Just enough to make you come back and play some more
Cache: The first thing you get is cache. Only thing is, during the first level, we don’t care about cache since we don’t use it   Of course, cache becomes very important once you get the first tower so it’s a good reward. Maybe you could use cache in more than just towers. Perhaps upgrades for your pointer/avatar could be interesting. These upgrades would be permanent so the player would have a feeling of accomplishment from finishing a level an from investing in himself (the avatar)
 
Towers: This is not the tower type, this is the amount of tower you can build in a level.  I’m still not sure on how you are attributed a certain number of starting towers or how you get to build more during a level. I can understand why you’d want to restrict the amount of towers built in a level but I’d make it clearer to the player on how he could get more towers.
 
Tower type: Well, this is a good reward too. The more level you finish, the more variety you get. There’s not much to say except that will there be an option to combine certain towers together? Perhaps there is but I haven’t finished the first chapter so I am not sure.

Ergonomics
The game’s ergonomics are fine except a couple of little things. You can easily browse through menus and change what you want to change. The player should be able to decide the volume of music and sound effects. Sure you can turn them on or off at will, yet, the player might want to have both but with sound effects at half the volume or any other possibility you may think of.

Pressing the escape button or the x on the window should ask the player if he really wants to leave and not take you back to a previous screen. You should have a button for that. I think that pressing esc during the game and it brings up the pause menu is a good idea so I wouldn’t change that. But any other places, escape means quitting right now.

 You can easily skip through cinematics and stories, which is a good thing simply because the player might not want to read the whole thing again if he reloads the level or looses and comes back.

Stability
The game looked stable but it crashes when you load up the game after you’ve finished some level. So, if I play for a while and then I restart the application, I get a shiny

ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event
for object pd:

Error reading real.

Besides that, it looks pretty stable.

Emotional
Intuitivism
The game is intuitive except for the tower building, which I already have mentioned. The player is told exactly what’s going to happen in the level. We see the way the path is used and the story tells us a bit about the towers capacity before we actually put them in game. One thing that felt weird while playing is the fact that the pointer will fade if you hold the left button down when you can’t build a tower. I didn’t understand why the avatar behaved like this.

Immersion
The game has the potential to be very immersive. We can adjust the level of particle effects and get rid of the numbers appearing when you hit the enemy. This last option should be on when you first play the game. To help the immersion of the player, the damage on the enemies should be made clearer. The player should see the enemy slowly being destroyed, not simply explode when dead. Also, like I mentioned earlier, the player should be able to switch levels without having to go back to the main level. This breaks the feeling of disbelief.

Representation wise, the game’s simple aesthetics fits with the simplicity of the game. I would add more to the background so we can understand we are in outer space and change the graphics for the pointer to make it look more like something with feelings. Right now, you are telling house that a green mouse pointer has a split personality. If I’m the character, show me a hand or anything that’ll tell me that what or who I’m controlling as the potential to feel something.

The particle effect was starting to blind me after a while. I easily lost my pointer and didn’t not see everything that was going on in the game. The idea is interesting but the colors shouldn’t distract us that much from the pointer, towers and enemies.


Experimentation level
Lot’s of towers, lot’s of combinations, lot’s of upgrades. The only thing missing in my opinion is the ability to upgrade the arrow so it can deal more damage.  There are a lot of enemies and a lot of ways to kill them. Maybe you could try to make the game a bit easier to let the player experiment a bit more his strategies. The difficulty is so high right now that we aren’t encouraged much to explore but rather use what worked in the last level out of fear of loosing.

In conclusion, the game looks quite promising. There are a couple of things that turned me down but nothing major. Keep up the good work and keep us noticed when you get a new version running!
Take care!
Guert

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Nice reply! Thanks so much.

The bug you mention ("can't read real") comes about on Eastern European or other non-US formatted computers, it has to do with using "," for "." to indicate decimals in certain country's numbering systems. I'm working on fixing that.

Actually the mouse cursor does increase in power as the level goes on, but it *decreases* in power when you use the boost attack (back to the starting level), so if you use that super attack too much you won't see the mouse cursor gain in power throughout the course of the level. This might not be the best way to do it, but I've tried different ways and that seems to be the most balanced way that I've tried, it creates a trade-off between using the normal attack and using the super attacks when you really need to.

The mechanism for placing and upgrading towers isn't perfect, but I've also tried many ways of doing that, including the way you suggest. The problem with the way you suggest is this: firstly it makes it difficult to place a tower exactly where you want if the tower just appears from holding the button down (which is bad for strategy), and secondly it makes it easy to accidentally upgrade a tower too much (like, perhaps you only wanted to upgrade it once, but holding the button down on it too long upgraded it twice). I think those are bigger problems than the problems you mention, so I want to keep the placing and upgrading mechanisms the way it is now; so what I mean is it might seem like the way you suggest is better, but when it actually works that way it created even greater problems which you might not have anticipated.

Not being able to select a tower that doesn't exist or one that you don't have enough money for is an interesting idea. I'll try out the first of those (not being able to select towers that have 0 remaining and can't be placed), but I'm wary of the second one (not being able to select towers that you don't have enough money for) because of this situation: sometimes you are ready to place a tower somewhere after you gain just a little more cache, and want to select that tower ahead of time in preparation for placing it after you do get that cache. I think that's useful and want to keep that. But there's really no use for being able to select towers that you can no longer place or can't place yet, so I agree about that.

The idea to make the towers that you don't have enough money for a different color is a great idea, though. I'll try that out.

The idea of "proceed to next level" at the end of a level -- perhaps also with options of "retry level" when you die...), and both having a ("return to stage select") option -- is a really great idea that I never thought of. I'll do that.

Upgrades for the Pointer using cache are an interesting idea, I'll consider that, but I'm not sure what the interface would look like, how the mechanism for "upgrading yourself" would work. Any suggestions? One possible problem with this is that I wouldn't want this to carry over between stages, because it'd then be possible to exploit the system (upgrading yourself as much as possible with a low score, then going back and getting a higher score -- because only the higher scores carry over to the next level, it'd be an easy way to cheat), so to avoid that I'd have to make the mouse cursor start at level 1 every level (and perhaps have 7 levels of upgrades, like the Points). I'll try this out if I can think of a good mechanism for how these upgrades would be handled in the user interface.

In the fifth or so level, the Courage Point describes the manner of gaining bonus towers; he says that you'll get a bonus Point of the same type as the Point that kills the most enemies in a wave of enemies (you get this a few times per level, for the first few waves, how many depends on the difficulty level). It's also described in the manual. I'm not sure how to make it clearer, but I agree that it's hard to understand at first.
 
I'm no sure what you mean by combining towers together; if you did that it'd probably be extremely time-consuming to code (there'd be 11*11 -- 121 combinations, so in effect I'd have to code for 121 new towers). They already are useful in certain combinations as it is, and some of them wouldn't really "combine" very well, so I don't see what it'd add to the game to do that. There's already a good variety in towers, and the different upgrade levels of each also often vary from one another in the way they attack, so I think that's already a lot of variety, and adding the option to combine towers would add needless complexity.

The idea to independently adjust the volume of the music and the sound effects is on the wish list, the problem is it'd take a long time to set up and I'm not sure it's worth days of work just for an option that's mainly of use to a few people (most people just use the default levels anyway when separate options for this are available, including me). However, I'll consider doing it at some future point, it's a nice option even though it might be more work than it's worth (e.g. I'd rather use the time to make extra levels or polish other things that would have a higher time spent vs. quality boost return).

The "Do you really want to quit?" message for the stage select screen (or perhaps even when you press X in the window) is a good idea, I'll put that on the wish list.

The reason the pointer fades when placing a tower and you can't build a tower is that the red lines indicate *why* you can't place a tower, and if the pointer was at full brightness you wouldn't be able to see why you can't place the tower (you'd cover up some of the lines telling you why you can't). It's probably not the most elegant option, but it's all I could think of doing. Another option would be just to put the red lines above the mouse cursor -- I could try that.

I'm not sure about getting rid of the numbers indicating the amount of damage by default -- although it speeds up the game and makes it cleaner, it makes it impossible to tell how much damage you're doing to the enemy. Of course, most TD games don't indicate the damage numerically and have no problems, so you might be right -- I'm just more used to the Final Fantasy style system where numbers appear indicating the amount of damage. I'll ask a few of my dedicated playtesters what they think.

Making the enemy slowly being destroyed is an interesting idea, and I want to do that some more (right now all that happens is their shield graphic becomes progressively more faded as they're damaged), but I'm not sure how better to represent that graphically. I don't think it's necessary to draw a new sprite for each enemy to indicate different damage levels (I don't know any game that does that, besides Final Fantasy Mystic Quest), but it's possible some type of effect could help. There's already a mini health bar on an enemy showing how much HP he has left, so it's not too difficult to tell which enemies are weak and which are strong, but if you have any ideas for how to graphically show damaged enemies I'll consider that.

I might add more to the background at some point, but I might not, I like the idea of it being all black personally. Also, you are *not* in space, that's actually part of the story, you're in pathspace. So if I showed like a star field in the background it would go against the story, the idea is that you're in a higher dimension two levels above space, you aren't in space, so you wouldn't see stars or anything in that space, just the beings that live in that space (the things that float around the screen in the background). There's also Indra's Net, those green lines connecting things far from your mouse cursor; so overall I think the background is interesting enough as it is, but if I come up with a good idea for another background effect I could use that too.

Another problem here is that Game Maker is very sensitive to drawing time, the more I draw on the screen the slower the game will run, so I want to keep it as simple as possible (it's already a game that runs slowly on a lot of computers).

I'm not sure what you mean by the green mouse pointer having a split personality?

But that's an interesting point about making the mouse pointer more characteristic of the player. I'll think about it, but I also like the idea of the player being unseen throughout the game, it adds a bit of mystery to it. But you also have a point that the green triangle is a bit boring, so at some point I may try to replace it with something more interesting to look at.

I plan to reduce the effects for the next version, yes, since more people are annoyed by it than find it pretty. I also plan on making the mouse pointer brighter so that it's not as easy to lose it among all the special effects.

I plan on making the default difficulty 30 or 40 instead of the 50 it is now, so the next version would be easier if you play on the default; the adjustable difficulty level is there though, if you find the game too hard, try it out on a lower level. There's no penalty for doing so, you don't get anything special if you beat the game on the default difficulty as opposed to an easier difficulty.

Thanks for the responses again!

[TeeGee]

Just to say that I really respect you Guert, for your habit of giving a really in-depth  and insightful feedback. You are one of those great people who make posting on forums worth it. I really see that you take lots of time and consideration into writing all this.

Cheers .

Sorry for the offtopic.