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[Jimbob]

Okay. First off, this isn't my game, but a friend of mine's.

He's kinda lost that 'spark' that you get from the beginning of an idea and is unsure what to do with it, or why it doesn't feel as fun anymore. The main reason (I think) is that he hasn't got enough decent feedback about the game so incidentally, I'm posting it here for him (because I love the idea too but I can't put my finger exactly on what could make it better).

Now the big turn off for most people is that it's made in XNA, so it's a bugger to download all the dependencies. But here is a good guide for what you need to download for this to work.

Now on to the game...


Full Screenshot 1
Full Screenshot 2
Menu Screenshot 3

Anamorphosis is a action/strategy game where you play a multi-cellular organism within the confines of a petri dish. At the beginning, you have four cell types at your disposal - Attack, Energy, Defence/Shield and Thrust/Speed - with which to build (and subsequently grow) your organism.

You can grow in two ways, by absorbing a mutagen, which will effectively trade whichever cell hits the mutagen into four cells of a chosen type, or by collecting food, which you can then use to customise your cell with an editor.

There are obviously enemy organisms to defeat, cancer cells, viruses, a few other new cell types to discover within your microscopic world.

There are also five game modes:
Story - where you begin small and follow the lab scientists comments to essentially learn all the aspects of the game.
Melee - A multiplayer battle mode where you fight in multiple rounds.
Survival - Organisms repeatedly spawn and attack you till its over.
Simulation - A more relaxed freeform experience where you can just use the level as a test piece (there are some weird controls here but I'm not sure what's going on)
Duel - A single round battle, where your favourite organism designs can be saved/loaded

It supports 1-4 players in all modes, and XBox/Keyboard controls (XBox pads recommended). It's a shame that you can't try it on the XBox360 because it works pretty damn smoothly on hardware, as it is, the required specs might be too high for some (although shaders can be turned off in options for a little speed boost).

Download (~23Mb)
XNA Dependencies

My thoughts are that it is maybe too slow paced for some (with the exception of the survival, which is just insane) and maybe a better progression in the story mode would make it more interesting (we were also thinking of adding some scientist voice overs for the lines ).

Cheers.
(We're from Warwick Game Design btw, a little society set up at our university for this stuff - and an excuse to have console socials )

[Menace]

He's kinda lost that 'spark' that you get from the beginning of an idea and is unsure what to do with it, or why it doesn't feel as fun anymore.

I hate to see threads like this with no replies.. Sadly the game does not appeal to me - but don't let that worry you, I only really like very few game types (FPS, Football and Guitar Hero + platformers).

Its good to see something different, and I hope he gets the spark back!

[Melly]

Personally, I prefer when games are download-and-play types, or install everything you need to start them right when you click the .exe. Maybe I'm a lazy person, but sometimes I can't bother to look for and download extra stuff in order to play a game.

I'll try it eventually, but not right now.

[Alex May]

OK, I tried this. I have a few comments. I was trying to make a similar game once, actually.

I think it's going to be a great game, the potential is there, but there's too much stuff in there right now and it needs to be pared back massively.

I find the organism building to be slightly tiresome. It seems to be based on a hexagonal grid which feels too rigid and unrealistic to me. This whole aspect of the game needs looking at in my opinion, as it affects a lot:

* The interface for building the organism is a little clunky. Moving a cursor around on a hexagonal grid doesn't feel natural - if it's grid-based anyway, why not allow the user an analogue cursor and point the target cell at the nearest grid location?

* Simply from an aesthetic viewpoint, my organism doesn't feel gloopy enough. If you look at videos of amoebae on youtube, you see the blobs moving around inside a sort of goo. I realise that this level of simulation is unnecessary, but the rigidity of the hexagonal system makes it feel less like an organism and more like a construction.

* The centre of the organism feels too fixed around its construction. I realise that this has probably been done to force the player to think about where to put different types of component, and I'll come to that in a moment as I think it's a bad idea as implemented, but simply from a movement perspective, the axis around which the organism rotates feels fixed like a pin, which exacerbates the feeling that this living organism is anything but.

* Given that the user has no direct control over the rotation of the organism except by ordering movement (and particularly because this is not a defined movement method as the speed components can be placed arbitrarily), it's unfair to make the player have to rely on this factor for both construction of the organism in the field and for tactical play. This is made more acute by the fact that the weapon components cannot shoot through other parts of the organism.

In addition to these points, including all sorts of different modes is fun for experimentation but I think it's more important to get the core gameplay right. I think addition of allies and an RTS element is unwise, as it complicates what could be a really great, simple mechanic into something unweildy and frustrating, devalues the idea of constructing the organism with a sensible strategy and distracts the player from concentrating on manipulating his own organism's rotation.


I would suggest

* remove or relax the bonds between organism components or remove rotation completely to allow players to either focus on balancing the organism in the former case, or focus on strategic organism construction in the latter
* remove the organism building stage and have it all occur in the field - I don't see the point in having two mechanics to do essentially the same thing. Or, remove construction in the field and force a building stage to spend any collected components on construction, if the player is supposed to focus on strategic organism construction
* remove the allies
* remove other game modes and focus either on arcade gameplay or strategic gameplay
* rework motion to emphasise either an arcade or a tactical bias. At the moment it feels arcadey, but the strategic element isn't easy to control while being core to the gameplay. I would suggest having all 'speed' components group together and having those be the core of the amoeba, and then having loose spring bonds from the centre of the organism to each component for constructing complex entities.


When I was trying to make a game like this, I had the player shooting at enemies, which would die, and then you'd pick them up and they'd become part of your entity like in Tumiki Fighters. The player was a loose collection of balls all attracted to a certain location, so they kind of followed you around. As you collected more balls, the entity would become bigger and more powerful, the view would zoom out to compensate, and the player would be able to take on larger and more powerful entities. Play was confined to a circle until the player could defeat the "nucleus" of the cell in which it was confined; the nucleus would release enemies for the player to fight (and subsequently absorb) until the player was large enough to defeat the nucleus. The player would then be allowed to exit the cell and penetrate another of similar size, until the cells the player was penetrating became enemies themselves, and so on. I didn't get too far with it, and this game seems to have nailed a few things nicely, so I look forward to seeing more from it, but I've had projects like this where I've added and added and added when what I needed to do was take away stuff. So I'd suggest making it simpler to play before making it more complicated.

Good luck!

[Jimbob]

Maybe I'm a lazy person, but sometimes I can't bother to look for and download extra stuff in order to play a game.

Heh, yeh, I agree, it took me a while to pluck up the courage to download all the stuff so even I could play it. That's why I put the link to what you need up there. Makes it at least marginally less hasslesome.

@Haowan: Cheers for all the comments! I'll pass them on.

[Alex May]

FYI, you can make an innosetup install script to download XNA redistributable or include it with the setup as it's so small. They are probably around on the net. You can also make it check the DirectX version and download and install the latest version of that. Then you will have an installer, which Melly will hate, but at least it will all be in one file and you won't have to provide instructions.

TBH I think Game Maker hobby development has ruined things for people developing using commonly distributed libraries. I always liked installation because it helps keep track of what you have on your machine, and most indie games are just hastily put together in a zip file so this is now what people are used to - it's a step back from a more organised approach towards the old DOS era where you had c:\games and just unzipped stuff into there. And frankly, I find it slightly pathetic when people complain about having to install a measly library or two, but if that's the way people feel about it what can you do?

[Melly]

Like I said, I also like when the game has an easy to use installer that downloads/extracts/whatever everything you need onto the folder you choose. I never said I didn't like installers, I only said I didn't like having to go through different links and websites in order to download extra stuff just to play a small game.

[Guert]

I agree with melly on this topic. Once I download a game, I don't want to download anything else, except for patches. I believe it's the developers responsability to deliver something that works, not the responsability of the player to make it work.

Anyways, I'll download the game later and give it a spin. Judging from Haowan's great comments, I dunno if I'll have anything to add tho!

[Alex May]

Like I said, I also like when the game has an easy to use installer that downloads/extracts/whatever everything you need onto the folder you choose. I never said I didn't like installers, I only said I didn't like having to go through different links and websites in order to download extra stuff just to play a small game.

Sorry, I misread your post. I apologise for putting words in your mouth.

[Melly]

That's okay. here, have an extra doomrang. *flings it to you* Erm... you might wanna duck.