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[brog]

I'll play the game when my computer's fixed, but this just made me go "ugh":

* Can't skip the death screen.

Well, you need some kind of punishment for failing.

You don't need to punish the player for playing your game!  Please, please can everyone just learn this already?  Failure is its own punishment, be like VVVVVV and let me start again straight away (not necessarily from the same position, depends on the game).  Especially in a single-player game - in multiplayer (or other games where death is not the end of the game) you generally want there to be a cost for death or a reward for killing, but to be clear: a cost is not the same thing as a punishment.

[DWWilson]

You're quite welcome, I will play more and offer more feedback as I think the game is promising!

I didn't get past the tutorial as I was playing in work (day job) time which I shouldn't do really. FPS was totally fine, etc. No technical errors apart form that 1280x768 didn't work on this 1600x1200 monitor (just got a black screen which I had to kill from task manager - XP SP2, GeForce 7900GS, 3GB RAM; 800x600 worked ok scaled). The screenshots make me want to play more though.

Just based on the first 5 minutes of play + screenshots + the fact that Ed likes it, I think you could get people to pay money for this, once you fix up a few comfort issues (many of which you say you've fixed - any chance of a new build? ).

Ok I fixed lots of stuff last night:

- made the walls lighter and reduced the darkness around the edge of the screen.
- made it so you slide on the walls instead of stick to them.
- Changed the teleport sound (still sounds kind of feedbacky, but not so shrill)
- made it so the ini file can be deleted and it still works.
- made it so if you set the res to something your computer won't run, it doesn't fuck up.(you can set the res to anything from the .ini file if you really want to with the Vres and Hres keys)
- I managed to get some music out of my friend which is now in the game(only one 4 min loop though)

I added these things a few days ago:

- made it so it installs to where ever you want. (originally there was a plot that had spoilers if you went into the directory where it was installed which is why I tried to bury it in program files, but I have since removed the plot entirely so you it doesn't matter).
- the menu is now less opaque
- the menu has a less lumpy looking texture
- the menus are permanently white

I was one of the guys that played dyson back when it was called dyson. I loved the look of it, so clean and simple. I was trying to emulate it to some extent.

If enough people complain about the death screen I'll fix it too, but I'll wait a bit before doing that. It pisses me off when a game doesn't punish you for failing (and 5 second pause isn't that much for a punishment, you shouldn't be dying very often). I couldn't play Fable 2 because the punishment for dying wasn't severe enough to justify powering up my guy to avoid dying in the first place.

Give it a go if you have the time, I'd like to hear what you think of the improvements and what other things I could improve 

[DWWilson]

Also, the sticky walls thing (and enemies failing to path around walls) becomes totally irrelevant (in a good way!) in the main game, because there are no walls.

Yeah that's exactly why I hadn't bothered to fix it lol.

I will get the latest build and have a got in arena-shmup style like I said I would...

It's pretty fun using 1 guy to do as much damage as an entire base, but you gotta remember that everything has a cost. Some of my testers complained about this because it's a bit different to normal shmups in that you have to conserve expensive ammo. All the weapons generally fall into 2 categories: cheap to buy weapons with expensive ammo, and expensive to buy weapons with cheap ammo.

The former is intended to be accessible to all play styles, as a sort of "oh shit button" in case something goes horribly wrong and you need to kill a whole bunch of guys really fast spare no expense.

The latter is more a "bread and butter" weapon that is expensive to buy because it is more efficient over time and therefore should only be accessible to players that conserved money buy not spending it on buildings early on.

Like I might have already said, I would actually be disappointed not to be able to spend $5-$10 on this, assuming some (not necessarily all) of the rough edges were smoothed off.
Only one copy though

Thanks man, that really cheers me up if I can't sell this 2nd part, it would be the third time in my life that I've wasted a stupidly large amount of time on something that went no where. First was my degree and the second was a mushroom company that me and a friend spent 3 years building.

[DWWilson]

You don't need to punish the player for playing your game!  Please, please can everyone just learn this already?  Failure is its own punishment, be like VVVVVV and let me start again straight away (not necessarily from the same position, depends on the game).  Especially in a single-player game - in multiplayer (or other games where death is not the end of the game) you generally want there to be a cost for death or a reward for killing, but to be clear: a cost is not the same thing as a punishment.

Well it's not a big punishment and it actually does have some function. When you die, the game pauses for 5 seconds and displays a message like "flamethrower fuel is very expensive" or "a spanner can be used to repair buildings" things like that. The other thing is that if you jumped back to the last checkpoint instantly (like it used to be), sometimes you don't even notice you died until you realise that half your base is missing.

In VVVVVV you die all the time, like once every 5 seconds, so it makes sense to not have a punishment like that. But in drone you shouldn't be dying more than once every 5 minutes tops.

There are heaps of games that punish you way harder than mine that are mega successful, like spelunky and demon's souls, but if enough people complain about the difficulty then I'll change it. Maybe make the death screen like 2.5 seconds long or add a skip button.

[brog]

There are heaps of games that punish you way harder than mine that are mega successful, like spelunky

Spelunky doesn't waste five seconds of my time.  There's a screen that can be skipped, then immediately I'm interacting again, then a second or so later I'm playing the game proper again, with my bombs and ropes restored.
(Haven't played Demon's Souls because it's not available on any real system, so I cannot comment on that.)

[DWWilson]

Spelunky doesn't waste five seconds of my time.  There's a screen that can be skipped, then immediately I'm interacting again, then a second or so later I'm playing the game proper again, with my bombs and ropes restored.
(Haven't played Demon's Souls because it's not available on any real system, so I cannot comment on that.)

Fair enough, I've added a skip button. No delay, straight back in.

[Noisefever]

I think the most have said so I can't give you much feedback here. I would prefer the player in another color, because I have really problems finding me when there is much action. But that was said too The glowing didn't help me much.

Aside from that I REALLY like your game! It's a great work!

[DWWilson]

I think the most have said so I can't give you much feedback here. I would prefer the player in another color, because I have really problems finding me when there is much action. But that was said too The glowing didn't help me much.

Aside from that I REALLY like your game! It's a great work!

Thanks man, I appreciate it:) I might try and make the glow bigger or the colour brighter or something. In the mean time I guess you could buy armour if you really wanted to stand out

[AuthenticKaizen]

I think the most have said so I can't give you much feedback here. I would prefer the player in another color, because I have really problems finding me when there is much action. But that was said too The glowing didn't help me much.

Aside from that I REALLY like your game! It's a great work!

Thanks man, I appreciate it:) I might try and make the glow bigger or the colour brighter or something. In the mean time I guess you could buy armour if you really wanted to stand out

i think he meant that the color should be permanent to distinct the player from the other objects and enemies... and that the glowing doesnt help in that case since it comes only when you dont move for a few seconds.

[shrimp]

Yeah, actually when I think about when I had lost my robot amongst the other stuff, I was running round in circles (maybe to try and pick out which one was mine) panicking as the next wave came in. Haven't really replicated the situation with the big highlight so not sure what would happen. This is why I suggested a different color. Howver if it's technically hard to change the colour, a permanent alpha circle on top of the robot might do the same thing? Not sure how it would look though.

BTW the badges are a really nice idea. Would be nice maybe to have a third "find the combined optimum" type badge, or just a highscore tracker or something to also encourage the "middle ground"? Just an idea...

I have played a bit with weapons-only: The weapons are very satisfying, especially the railgun, RPG and pipebomb. This was mostly on the axebot-only level, so there was a lot of furious backpedalling (to be expected I guess), but getting the following bots into position for a bomb blast or rail shot was good. Another random low-priority idea: If (some?) axebots had some spreading-out behaviour so they came in a line abreast it would add a bit of variety to that level, but no big deal.

Oh, and since I was playing weapons-only the "fire a bullet whilst clicking a menu button" cropped up quite a lot. If I can reliably reproduce it I'll let you know.

AND finally... would it be possible when buying weapons and armour to automatically set it as "selected" in the inventory panel and (perhaps) set it as the current weapon/armour?
It seems like if you just bought something, you intend to use it pretty soon, you don't want to be switching tab and clicking stuff in the menu when the next wave of enemies is coming.

Glad to hear you removed the forced delay on death, I felt that 5 seconds quite a few times...

[DWWilson]

i think he meant that the color should be permanent to distinct the player from the other objects and enemies... and that the glowing doesnt help in that case since it comes only when you dont move for a few seconds.

Here's the situation, each colour you can choose is actually 2 colours, a lighter one and a darker one. I used the darker one for the larger parts of the buildings, and the lighter one for everything else.

I was trying to make the buildings look less flat. I could however just make everything that isn't the player the darker colour, and the player the lighter colour. Although I'm not sure if the difference would be obvious enough, and I don't want to make the buildings look too flat.

Alternatively, I could just make a 3rd rgb value for the player that's even lighter than the other 2, although that would be the most time consuming way of fixing it.

Another alternative would be to make it so the player is always one colour, and changing the colour in the menu only changes the units/buildings.

I think option 2 is probably the best thing to do; I'll give it a go over the next couple of days. I might add some other colour options while I'm at it.

[DWWilson]

BTW the badges are a really nice idea. Would be nice maybe to have a third "find the combined optimum" type badge, or just a highscore tracker or something to also encourage the "middle ground"? Just an idea...

I was trying to add a "no weapons OR turrets" badge for shinanigans, but it wasn't working particularly well. "weapons and buildings" would be easy to implement, but not really challenging to get, unless I made it like "a 2nd tier weapon and a 2nd tier building" which would actually be pretty cool, but then how would you describe that in a text box under the the portal? I'll have to think about this.

I have played a bit with weapons-only: The weapons are very satisfying, especially the railgun, RPG and pipebomb. This was mostly on the axebot-only level, so there was a lot of furious backpedalling (to be expected I guess), but getting the following bots into position for a bomb blast or rail shot was good. Another random low-priority idea: If (some?) axebots had some spreading-out behaviour so they came in a line abreast it would add a bit of variety to that level, but no big deal.

I'm not sure if you've encountered the tanks with the doors that spew regular axebots all over the place, but I could make those things show up in that level. They don't engage following your guy for a few seconds after they leave the tank and they have a larger turning circle, so they look a bit more natural then a big line of dudes following you.

Oh, and since I was playing weapons-only the "fire a bullet whilst clicking a menu button" cropped up quite a lot. If I can reliably reproduce it I'll let you know.

I just can't figure it out, it seems to do it randomly. I will figure it out eventually.

AND finally... would it be possible when buying weapons and armour to automatically set it as "selected" in the inventory panel and (perhaps) set it as the current weapon/armour?
It seems like if you just bought something, you intend to use it pretty soon, you don't want to be switching tab and clicking stuff in the menu when the next wave of enemies is coming.

Yeah I had this mentioned to me before during the alpha but forgot to put it in. I'll also add this in next version.

Cheers for giving it a crack in shooter mode, people don't seem to want to do this as much as I thought they would for some reason lol.

[ADDatWork23]

Yeah if you're not a starlet your game will have very few comments, but it will have some just be patient.
Take a look around the forums, there are so many games released every day nowadays...

It's kinda funny, the internet has made everything so instant and quick real time that we just want results now.  It's painful sometimes to see how little patience we all seem to be having.  There's no time to really savor everything anymore 

I'll check out Drone when I get a chance 

[AuthenticKaizen]

i have just recorded a

[DWWilson]

Ok I fixed some stuff:

- FIXED THE MENU. (it should no longer screw up your firing)

- There are 2 difficulty settings now. (Normal and Hard)

- The red thing that appeared when you stood still now has a button that can be used to turn it on and off permanently.

- Made the red thing look better. (3 instead of 4 triangles that now move in and out as well as round in circles)

[siegarettes]

played the game for quite a bit. beat area 2. i enjoy the cross between shooting and building. i'm actually doing something that combines the a little RTS with shooting, though more shooting than RTS... its interesting to see someone else working with it.

just so i know, do you unlock more weapons and buildings? it seems to be so. i have to play it later to find out.

some comments:
-even with the arrows its easy to get lost. i would subtly change the player's color.
-i felt no need to use any weapon but the machine gun.
-the axebots seem to have no priorities. im guessing they just attack the nearest enemy, am i right? i personally would like them to fight the larger enemies first, although i know that might get them killed faster...

i'll play it some more and get back to you. but it seems these guys have given some good comments.

[DWWilson]

played the game for quite a bit. beat area 2. i enjoy the cross between shooting and building. i'm actually doing something that combines the a little RTS with shooting, though more shooting than RTS... its interesting to see someone else working with it.

Yeah a few people have made sort-of combinations of the two things before, like the flash game anamorphus, and the bowmaster series. Both great games by the way, but in both games, shooting is necessary. So in this game I made it so that neither is more powerful than the other, and equal amounts of both weapons and buildings. Actually, cortex command is a bit like that as well, but still very different.

I look forward to seeing what you make :D

Whatever you do though, don't do what I did and become obsessed with adding in new items, it'll take forever, and is just not worth the time.

I think it's a better idea to just do 1-2 mechanics well, then a shitload that no one will use or appreciate. (although my new level design might have fixed this problem)

just so i know, do you unlock more weapons and buildings? it seems to be so. i have to play it later to find out.

You don't so much unlock them as you have more money to buy bigger stuff with. There are several pages of items in the menu, the next page icon is that number in the top right of the menu, the "1/3" thing. It isn't the most well labelled button.

I'm currently working on re-doing all the areas, I've been working on it since last week and I'm nearly finished. I made all the areas feel more unique in the sense that the same strategy won't work in every area.

You should check it out if you have the time, I'll make a post about it when it's finished. Should be within the next 5 hours.

some comments:
-even with the arrows its easy to get lost. i would subtly change the player's color.

I think I know a way to do this (keyword being subtly), I'll add it tonight.

-i felt no need to use any weapon but the machine gun.

Oh you will later on

-the axebots seem to have no priorities. im guessing they just attack the nearest enemy, am
i right? i personally would like them to fight the larger enemies first, although i know that might get them killed faster...

Yes and yes, they do target the nearest enemy, and they also get killed very easily by bigger enemies. A way around this is to use the command tower to move them to where you want them to attack. It requires a bit of practice to get used to, but once you understand how it works, its very easy.

The idea is that your units will become fixated on the centre of the circle when they touch the inner circle, you then have to guide them to where you want them to attack. If they leave the outer circle, they return to normal. While under the influence of the command tower, they also move twice as fast and attack twice as fast. So you can use it to buff weak spots on the fly.

You'll find that if you have enough axes (10+) and charge a boss axebot, you can do enough damage to kill it in 1-2 hits before the boss has time to cleave all your small guys to bits.

Or alternatively, get a group of pistolbots and use them to kite the bosses to death.

I should make a video of how to use the command tower effectively.

i'll play it some more and get back to you. but it seems these guys have given some good comments.

It would be much appreciated, I'll have this new version up tonight which has the colour changed and the improved areas.

The idea behind changing the areas is to force the player to do different things, rather than just sit there spamming machine gun turrets.

I also added a new boss. (It has 7 moving parts!)

[DWWilson]

Ok, I've totally re-done the areas.

Every wave will now only spawn one type of enemy instead of a mixture of all available enemies.

The values for the enemies is now different per area.

Wrote an introduction for each area to give you an idea of what strategies might be most useful.

The idea is to force the player to try different things, but not too much otherwise it would defeat the purpose of being able to choose.

So there's: axe area, gun area, explosives area, no bosses area, all bosses area, and everything area.

Anything goes in the axe area, so it's the first place you start.

The gun area now favours bases with nodes around the outside and the player with a gun or a tank.

The explosives area is highly anti-base.

I added a new kind of unit that periodically drops money. You start with 2 of these, but you can't rebuild them if they die.

In the area with no bosses, these things move around the place so you want to follow them with either a tank or on foot. Alternatively, building a cluster of long range turrets in the middle might also work later on in the area.

In the all bosses area, there are two of these money generating units, but they don't move. However, they are placed far apart, so you can try and keep both alive by building 2 small bases around them (hard mode), or just one of them (normal).

In the last area it's all the enemies together with a mega boss at the end.

I'm going to have to tweak these changes a bit over the coming weeks, but I think they feel pretty good at the moment.

[shrimp]

Sounds like some interesting stuff going on! I haven't had chance to play the recent versions but should have some free time soon.

[Crimsontide]

Haven't read through the whole thread so I apologize if I repeat something that's already been covered.

I played it more as a RTS, didn't really like the whole buying weapons/ammo part.  Maybe if the enemies dropped ammo/weapons (in addition to money) I'd be more inclined to venture out of my base, but for the most part I found I was too squishy and slow and pretty much just sat there...

The game pace was pretty slow.  It took ALOT of waves for things to pick up.  It could take easily an hour or more to make it though an entire area, and only about 5 min of that was actually engaging or interesting.  This was my main complaint, as it just got boring.  One problem to that end was launching the next wave early didn't give any advantage, so you almost always better off letting the nodes heal up than moving on to the next wave.  At the very least if I shave 10s off the current wave, I should get 10s worth of 'repair' for the nodes.  It'd also be nice if I could start a new wave before the last one was finished, as the early waves were so tediously easy.

Most of the buildings weren't repairable, which kinda sucked, they really needed some sort of repair mechanic.

The tower options seem kinda limited for a tower defense game, and the action gameplay I found kinda boring (or whatever you would call the part where I chase them down with my axe/gun/whatever).  There didn't really feel like there was a sweet spot between the two.

I'm not trying to be overly negative here.  I like tower defense games, and action games, this seemed like it could be an interesting mesh between the 2.  I really wanted to like this game.  It just didn't seem to meld.  Neither of the parts were particularly engaging on their own, and they just didn't seem to mesh.