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[mihai]

Hello,

I am new to this great community (although I have read stuff on the forums before), but now, as I try to join the indie scene as a developer, I thought I should post here my work and ask for some feedback on it. The game is work in progress, there is a video tutorial how to play it and a roadmap on my website about what's planned.

The link to the game's page on my website is this one. Also please look at the roadmap to see what's comming next.

The game itself is hosted on sourceforge as a packed zip (links to other possible location also on my website) and also full source is available under the zlib license (which is in major refactoring now btw, so don't get scared about it .

Any feedback is welcome as I'm trying to improve it.

[FrankHorrigan_GC]

Played the game for a bit this morning.

I'm wondering if you could explain any strategies that you've found successful or whether you had any strategies in mind that you hoped would be emergent.

I mostly found while playing that my success was based on luck. If a vortex appeared on either robot, it was Game Over. For the most part, I played until the vortexes didn't appear on a path between the two robots and then watched them inch towards each other.

[mihai]

I'm not happy about it neither, but it is better than the version 1.0, which was crappy because of bad collision handling and infinite number of beacons available.

The challenging part about this game was to have the player focused on both characters at the same time while having to control both of them with only one beacon (initially you had more beacons but it didn't work).

Because the beacons have a linear influence (the closer you get to it, the faster it drags you to it), you can choose which character to influence more by placing it closer to that character.

The strategy would be to establish a meeting point to which both characters can get to without intersecting with any vortex, and then get them there safely. If at some point the way gets blocked, the player must quickly react and decide upon another meeting point to which there is a free way to go for each character.

While playing the game myself over and over, I noticed that while the randomness creates this feeling of "omg, a vortex just got in the way, I have to change my mind fast" (at least to me as a player), quite often the randomness makes the game impossible to be won. Sometimes it is fun to outmaneuver a vortex that spawned near you, but sometimes will make you lose the game without any real chance of evading that. I think I have several choices here:

1. Make less vortex spawn or make them spawn less often (but it might not work as they can spawn under the player).

2. For now, the vortex positions are decided at the start of the game (but they are hidden). I could decide the position while playing and make sure they spawn at a safe distance for both characters, so they have time to maneuver out of their range, but also giving the player a sense of danger.

3. Decide certain spawn points at map editing time and choose randomly between them (while also taking care not to spawn under the characters or not placing such spawn points near the starting positions of the characters, which are fixed).

If you have any other ideas or think one of the above are good, please write them down

[FrankHorrigan_GC]

"Any other ideas":

1) Maybe there's one attractor beacon but multiple repellent beacons. That way you could say, "go here, but avoid these halls along the way." Not sure if that would work...

2) You're probably right that beacons should appear in pre-determined locations. But there should probably also be some heuristic so that they don't spawn in instakill territory of a player character.

3) Vortexes that don't instakill, or other placeables like powerups.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

I think if you continue to tune the puzzle element, it could turn into something really cool.

[mihai]

Thanks for your tips. I think I will go probably for the predefined locations or at least predefined areas for each vertex. However, that has to wait a bit until a map editor will be up, since marking those areas manually would be a pain (like it was with the not passable areas on the map ).

LE: Hopefully this weekend or early next week I will have a new release available, with improved traveling for robots, improved gameplay, gameplay parameters tweaking (through an .ini file) and a map editor for adding custom maps of your own. This should be quite closer to the final version from a technical point of view (not from a gameplay one of course).

[mihai]

Hello,

I have released another version of Vortex Arena today:
Here is the announcement..

The post includes also links to two videos, one as a short tutorial on how to tweak gameplay parameters, also some info about the new game modes, and the other one about custom map making with the new map editor.

Please give me as much feedback as you can, all appreciated.

[mihai]

Me again, kind of quiet here, I hope it won't be the case after this release:) So a new version of the game is out, featuring Box2D integration and some new mechanic, also two new maps that emphasize the puzzle elements, while the old maps have been removed. You can also add new maps and tweak with the parameters of the game, there is also a short video tutorial about it.

See features and video here.
Direct download link from sourceforge here.

Please read the instructions first, they have been changed, and don't give up on the maps as they are way harder to play now (I had a win ratio of about 10% on them).

Thanks for testing this.

[increpare]

Hey - welcome to the forums.

This thread needs pictures!

Also, you can set the thread icon (if you edit the original post) to say what operating systems your game is for.  People like me (on a mac) appreciate it

[mihai]

Thanks for the advices, I've made the OS changes and here is a screenshot of one of the two maps, which doesn't look too good as game is still pre-alpha

[mihai]

Hi, it is me again.

I have worked on a new version of Vortex Arena.

The character has changed and so are some of the visuals (looking better now ). There are three new tutorial maps with instructional text to help you out and a test map. Also some game mechanics have changed a bit and hopefully the game is more playable now.

Tutorial video and features.
Download link.

Again, code and maps are open source under zlib license and you can find them on the same page as the download link bellow on sourceforge.net .

Any feedback is welcome!