TIGSource Forums

K2 Overview
(*Ahem (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=1675.75)*) Inspiration comes from Rez, Tie Fighter's combat plus some other Konjakky gesturey attacks. That is not to say that this game is going to equal the combined might of those games/auteurs, especially not when I've only worked on it for a short time. That's just where the mindset is at.  Sorry Dan Lomez. Really, really sorry for not making that clear. I didn't mean to, like, totally lie to anyone, really! That tag-line thingy was just left over from the original post. Sorry. Sorry.

So yeah. Consider this more of a prototype than anything close to a finished game.

K2 Prototype Final. Download Here! Now! Please? (http://www.bezzy.net/Downloads/K2PrototypeFinished.rar)

(http://www.bezzy.net/Images/k201.png)
(http://www.bezzy.net/Images/k202.png)
(http://www.bezzy.net/Images/k203.png)

Basic Instructions
LMB = Fire
RMB = Boost
Right Trigger = Fire
Left Trigger = Boost

To Lock On to an enemy, draw a circle around it. When you hear the confirmation tone, press fire to shoot off missles. You can lock onto as many enemies as you like, but the damage done will be spread between the rockets.

To Make a Chain Missle Attack (FireWorks) kill an enemy before a rocket you've shot off hits it. Missles aimed at a dead target will split into several rockets and go into any enemies in a radius around them.

Many thanks to C418 for the music!

Design wise, there's a lot of targets i didn't hit: directional shields and slice laser mainly. If I only had another week >_<.

Mirrors
My Mirror: http://www.bezzy.net/Downloads/K2PrototypeFinished.rar
Haowans' Mirror: http://www.deadrock-game.com/files/K2PrototypeFinished.rar (thanks haowan. Thaowan.)
(If anyone else can host this file, that'd be kind).

Stuff you may need to install if it crashes immediately
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=15fb9169-4a25-4dca-bf40-9c497568f102&DisplayLang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1A2393C0-1B2F-428E-BD79-02DF977D17B8&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=79bc3b77-e02c-4ad3-aacf-a7633f706ba5&DisplayLang=en

(I know, I know. This is the worst thing about XNA).
Still can't play?
1) I apologize on behalf of the Microsoft Corporation, despite having no permission to speak on their behalf.
2) Consolation Videos for you:
http://www.vimeo.com/1108730
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=UQZo3SUxU9A

---

Edit 2: New Videos
http://www.vimeo.com/1098057
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=byfZAyr351o
Wow that does NOT survive youtube's conversion.


Edit: Video is here (http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=9rLgfVhnwq4). Hopefully, a higher quality version is on its way, but I don't trust YouTube + Fraps codec.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=9rLgfVhnwq4
http://www.vimeo.com/1055093

Original Post:
Okay, I thought long and hard about this compo, but couldn't figure out anything particularly succinct. However, it spawned another idea: a sequel to that game I never actually finished (http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=C1iELMw4qBM). Now, this is still probably too much to take on, but I'd quite like to make this game anyway, and an embarassing misfire on tigsforums won't upset me.


Game Style (long term)
Long term, I'd like to make a space style roaming shmup / trademup, but completely streamlined interface-wise. So, one fire button, automatic/gesture based speed controls, only three kinds of cargo to ship around, and a "living" fluctuating economy. No complex controls to hide the fact that trading games are actually mechanically pretty damn simple.

Game Style (compo)
For the competition, I want to work on the core combat controls, and do a system which spawns bad guys based on how you tackle the previous wave. So if you use one style attack a lot, the next wave is buffed against that kind of attack. Hopefully, my parametric geometry is good enough that I can generate bad-guys on the fly, and their game properties feed into their ship's shape (http://generate bad-guys on the fly, and their game properties feed into their ship's shape). So yeah. Procedural in two ways, I guess.

Weapons systems:
Charging Laser: First shot does loads of damage but takes a lot out of the energy banks. Subsequent shots are weaker, but rapid fire. Best of both worlds. This was in the original K.
Gesture Based Homing Rocket: make a circle around an enemy, and then press fire to unleash a fire and forget rocket. Make a circle around several enemies before pressing fire, and lock onto multiple enemies, splitting the rockets (and thus damage) across several enemies. Special Advanced ability - Fire Works: if an enemy dies before a rocket hits it, the rocket will target any enemy within a radius. If there are several enemies, it will split off into smaller rockets to damage all of them evenly. So, lock on, fire a rocket, then kill off the guy you locked on to, and you'll get fireworks auto zapping nearby enemies! This was sort of in the original K... the homing rocket also doubled as a grapple hook.
Slice Laser: Based on my Ball'o'Doom (http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=v-w-lILCdxk&feature=user) experiment. "Swipe" your crosshair across an enemy to do damage. The bigger the swipe, and the further away the target, the more damage you do. Also gives the enemy a bit of a kick in the direction of the swipe. No buttons needed to trigger - just speed. If an enemy uses a swipe against you, it'll be clearly telegraphed, and doing a counter-swipe in time will "parry" the attack (thanks Haowan). Not in the original at all.

TODO: Figure out other ways that these weapons can interact with each other in an interesting way (as with the fireworks example).

Shield System:
Directional, regenerating shields, as in Tie Fighter. Unlike Tie Fighter, you don't have a special button to redistribute shield direction. Thanks to the aiming approach and well telegraphed in-coming danger warnings, you can just spin your entire rig around so that the damage is sapped by the correct quadrant of the shield.

Pre-emptive thanks to Haowan and Gravious for letting me bounce this idea off them.

Sounds very cool. Good luck!

Indeed!

Ditto!

Augh. I just got my work assignments for this month. I doubt I'll have the energy to get very far with this  :'(. Still... as a slow burner, it's still a cool project.

Still haven't started, but I'm getting lots of good, and rather cheap ideas.

Like the radar: it'll be combined with your shield (which you're seeing all the time from third person). It'll project all the enemy/incoming attacks onto the semi-transparent sphere/shield around your PG craft so that you can see where to turn to face enemies, or see where incoming shots are (so that you can rotate weak areas of your shield away from the attack). Sorta like this:

(http://www.geekalerts.com/u/glowing-globe.jpg)

Oh bezzy, please please finish this.  :-*

Beztain's log, Earth date, 10th May 2008. Day zero for my development. This is going to be a boring post...

Just got my home computer set up. Been working on just setting up the basics of XNA. Got some bezier code left over from Dasher. Added tangent code to it, which was easy, but I just never got around to it. I found some nice quaternion based camera code (http://www.scotboyd.net/90percent/2007/05/quaternion-camera-in-xna.html), which will help a lot (because I am rusty on quaternions, and all the proj/view/world matrix stuff always slightly confuses me one way or another). Inputs are also basically there, but XNA makes that super easy, so that's not saying much. Added debugging text. Always useful. Currently struggling uphill against vertex buffer setups etc. so I can just get something goddamn displaying :). Also trying to do some primitive generation (stack and slice based spheres, though I'd prefer geo-spheres a.k.a. sub division surfaces). Gonna take a break, and then hopefully i'll have something displaying by the end of tonight. Got abstract ent classes set up, partially.

Still working. Got myself a primatives class which generates basic geometry out of THIN AIR:

Squares
Arcs (which can become circles)
Cylinders (which can become cones, spheres, or anything conic with a variable width).
Beziers!

I'd post a shot, but it's not very exciting right now.

tomorrow I will finish of spheres, and move onto the base avatar and camera controls (camera keeps behind the avatar, and chases the avatar's cursor, like in Rez, but a bit more elastically).

I'm still curious how it's looking. Post shots anyway.

Looks like a good start. You're getting the coding going and have a great concept to back it up!

One of the concepts I really like (I didn't play the original you mentioned) is the fireworks missile system. It's a neat concept that the missiles will split off when there are multiple targets, as well as will auto-home when their primary target is destroyed.


I as well am curious how it's looking. If it's at the "basic geometry rendering" stage I guess it's ok, but any first shots of ships and other media would be greatly appreciated!

Seeing you work on this makes me very happy!

Bill

Gosh, thanks for the interest already.

There's nothing particularly interesting to show yet. I'm just finishing off all the parametric geometry tools I want. Tonight I'm fixing spheres, and doing basic lines (which I forgot, somehow :/).

Got some ideas about old school graphics tricks I did with the original K, before the days of shaders doing everything. If you mess with alphablend draw order, you can make translucent craft which still have their silhouette outlines. But graphics are on the back burner for a bit. Have to get the gameplay in there.

Sprawling thoughts, no guarantee that these ideas will be in the game.

I'm not really sure how I'm going to pull the parametric geometry i have into a good looking ship... but it's doable. It'll be like lego, but with scaleable individual parts. K had some pretty nice models (if I don't say so myself = i'm not a modeller nor nothing!) I think the more interesting visual thing will be how each combine.

The enemies... I think they're just going to be these nodes, which have some hairs on them. Each hair represents an attachment point. Nodes which have no free hairs are attracted to the ends of hairs, and will attach to them when close enough - kind of like valency: you need an open "slot" to attach a hair to. So you end up with the kinda... molecules of badguy.

Only one node in a molecule (the parent, who can't be attracted to any of his offsprint) will have the ability to move, and all the others will play catch-up with their offset, so you end up with a sorta "jellyfish" motion. Shoot this one, and all the children split off into their own molecules. I can only even attempt this because of the work I did on d@sher, where I got some good face time with GraphNode code - built for dynamic hierarchies.

Question is, how does that formation affect gameplay? What's the difference between shooting nodes in a cluster, and shooting them in separation? I need something along the lines of "safety in numbers" for the molecules... allow them to transfer their shield energy between each other, perhaps, so that it's harder to kill individuals: the pain is shared.

The trade off could be that the larger molecules are no-where near as maneuverable as the individual ones. Big molecules become like capitol ships. Smaller ones are like fighters. You'll still have the tools to cut the hairs between them, however (the slice laser), so there's a way around that.

Upon killing any node, its soul goes into your soul stack (a bubble trailing on your contrail, I guess). It remembers how it was killed (i.e. the weapon it was killed with, and perhaps even the skill demonstrated - it comes back with the weapon YOU killed it with, so if you over-use one weapon, expect to see a lot of enemies using higher powered version of it/its counter) and whether it was connected to anyone (it'll grow hairs so that it can attach to any other nodes) and comes back meaner. That's the core of the procedural spawning - enemies spawn to reflect your playing style. One new node appears every wave (timed intervals) upto whatever limit the system can handle. From then on, you're destroying nodes, earning points based on the style you show in killing them, and in so doing, power them all up.

Quick Update.

Got all my parametric primitives almost 100% done. I don't think this is going to be a very pretty game for the compo (I won't have time to do all the cool outlining tricks I did in the original K), but I've got a good base for moving on after that. For that reason, no screenshots yet, sozzles.

Got the camera set up to follow the craft around from slightly behind, and with a bit of "catchup" so that your change in speed and direction is clear. The craft turns around using quaternions, which I'm glad I got to finally figure out (multiplying them sorta "adds" the angles, so I have a quaternion for the rotation of the craft, and an angular velocity quaternion which feeds directly from input. That was weird for my puny head to get around). Yeah. So. No gimble lock. Not that quaternions are the only way around that, but... Woo!

The stub cross hair is in - it's an arc which increases its arc spread the closer you are to a clean hit - so it initially acts as an arrow, pointing toward the closest target to your reticule, and then grows into a full circle when you have the clean shot. Its position in front of your craft in 3D space is determined by the distance between you and the closest enemy to the cross hair. This is a trick I achieved in K, which stops parallax error when shooting at enemies from the third person, allowing for a freer camera. Can't do any of this behavior until I have enemies, of course.

I'm moving house today, but hopefully tonight I can fix some input issues (I'm dampening mouse input, but the dampening variables are taking too long to "catch up" with the actual mouse input, for some reason - the handling is therefore currently pretty horrible, and must be fixed asap), and start to get stub enemies into the game, and have all the spatial search algorithms set up for it (return a list of enemies within a sphere, or within a cone - that sort of thing).

I have a cool idea for the menu... it'll feel a bit like the mini boss sections in Rez level 5 (with all the "who are you?" stuff flying about). You'll spawn in the center of short cylinder which has all the menu options printed on the inside, pointing toward the player. You start pointing toward the K2 logo, which is cut into the strip. To the left of it is an "X" (for exit). To the right is a right-facing equilateral triangle "|>" (standard "Play" Icon). I guess that during game play, if you exit to the menu, you need another "||>" symbol for "resume" rather than "start again".

                         i
______________________________
_____X_____KII_____|>_________
 
                         !


They'll have to have "hover-over" graphics, as well as tool tips as a backup (though I'd love to do a text-less game, it always requires more effort, and is never necessarily understood), and to activate them, you use your standard gun - so you're using your base game controls to interact with the menu. And this could be a useful thing in the final game, too, rather than loads of separate menus for trading etc.

Above and below the logo are two symbols - "i" and "!". The idea is that when you try to look at them, you'll have to use your Y axis, and thus, find out whether you've got the right "inverted" setting. If you don't, you just shoot either icon to toggle the behavior. The "i" spins to become a "!" and the "!" spins to become an "i".

I now has bullets and bullet collision. No explosions yet - i'd like to pull off the original ones from K, but there are rendering issues at the moment (see below). Plus, it's more important, at this point, to chase game play stuff. Visualization is important, but not as important as being feature complete at this point.

Fixed a cross hair problem (wasn't taking into account the parent matrices' scale change, so it got projected out 3 times farther than it was supposed to. That was confusing the hell out of me). Fixed/tweaked various other issues.

We have no internet at home, so I've come into the office to research why everything is being drawn over everything else based on draw order(seems like there's no depth checks??). I do want that property so that i can draw transparent innards of ships, and only display the silhouettes of the back-shells. [Edit] This article  (http://blogs.msdn.com/etayrien/archive/2006/12/07/alpha-blending-part-1.aspx)sums it up nicely... check out the pictures at the bottom, and you'll see the effect that draw order has on alpha blending - I'm trying to use that perceived "error" as a visual trick. I think the problem has simply been that I haven't set up my source or destination blend settings properly i'm pretty sure that destblend is just at its default, which is Blend.Zero, when it needs to be Blend.InverseSourceAlpha.[/Edit] That's my main aim for today. If I can get that sorted, I'll move on to homing rockets (complete with "loop de loop" lock on system and bezier paths).

Sounds like you're making good progress; I'm very psyched to play this. I hope you keep up this level of commitment after the compo, because your long-term plans sound awesome.

Yeah man, this sounds like it's going somewhere. Somewhere awesome. ;D

Thanks guys!

Yeah, I'm surprised at how quick it's going (<3 C# and hacking aggressive code production - seriously, I just make everything public right now. Saves a lot of time instead of doing public Get()/Set() funcs), but regardless, I'm still not sure whether I'll have anything nice for the compo. I doubt I'll keep up the pace, either, because I'd like some amount of a life and time to play other people's games... but I will stick at it.

Last night I got in an almost-done radar system (as described earlier). I need to find an easy way to convert a normalized vector into a quaternion rotation before it works properly. Oh wait. I think I just figured it out in my head... guess I was kinda tired last night. One thing I HAVE to get right is the camera - so that it keeps the player in the same locus on the screen, or it's hard to follow the radar while it's flying around on the back of your highly move able ship.

Also added a sorta "sky sphere". Couldn't be bothered doing anything special with the colors, so I just set the colors (RGB) to the vertex positions (XYZ), and after making sure each was pushed into the range 0..1, it turned out looking really pretty nice! I'd screen shot it, but we has no interents at home!

I also tried to get the crosshair to point toward the closest target to it, but again, it requires some pretty tricky math as soon as it's a 3D crosshair. I have to find the angle, relative to the player's ship (i.e. direction to ship = Up, ship's Up = north/0 radiands), and then the angle from the crosshair to its closest target (player's ship is equidistant to crosshair and best target), then subtract the "north" angle from the angle to the target... urgh.

Still struggling with the draw order stuff... Anyone know if you have to draw opaque stuff from back to front, or from front to back, or should it not be a problem with XNA's default RenderState settings?

If I can fix those things quickly, I'll move on to the loop-de-loop rocket locking system.

Got the radar working. I think I used Matrix.CreateWorld to do it, and had tried that previously, but had forgotten to rotate my model so that it was in the x/z plane before rotating toward its target.

Tried, and failed, to do some projection of points onto a plane, then rotate the plane and points back to normal = up, and then figure out the angle between these points (so that I can get the crosshair to always point at the closest enemy target).

Added contrails in about 15 minutes by adapting my line primitive to take arrays of points rather than just 2 points. Also did a bezier style colour blend along the line, so you can put in three colors (one at the stat, one in the middle, on at the end) to blend between. Just as the fixed backdrop help you tell which direction you're turning in, contrails really help you tell which direction objects are moving in, so it's not a purely fanciful endeavor.

I had a toothache during the night. I may have a night off tonight if I can't figure out the point/plane projection stuff (I know, I know. It ought to be pretty easy... I'm just getting a bit confused about what dot product does what, and how to rotate back... set up a Matrix.CreateWorld, and then multiply the points by its inverse?).

Uploading a video now. I don't think YouTube will help it much. Will edit and add.
[edit]
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=9rLgfVhnwq4
[/edit]
Yesterday, I mainly did lots of little fixes and tweaks. Still can't get my head around the problem above.

Gave the crosshair its own trails, which helps a lot to explain space well. Got auto-speeds working. The more directly you aim at someone the more your thrust will activate in your current direction - but, if you're close, and still facing, you start to back off. It works out pretty nicely. The game still only needs one button. You can also "jig" in the direction you move the mouse, if you move it very suddenly. Needs a bit of tweaking, but it should be useful for strafe-dodging incoming bullets.

I barely slept last night because I have a tooth ache. I've set up an appointment at 11:40, and may have my wisdom tooth out.

It's already looking great. I'm glad you decided to finalize this game because K video was jaw dropping. Keep up the good work!

 :-*

Looks very impressive!

Loving the style of this, Bezzy. Good luck!

When you say trade-em-up, do you mean like Elite/Privateer?


If so, I'm sold.
If not... I'm sold.

Lookin' sweet sir, keep up the excellent work!

K2 is also the name of some martial arts thing.

And the second highest mountin behind everest.

Also looks fucking sweet dude.

And probably the name of a robot, probably.

Fixed the crosshair angle issue yesterday. Also added the lockon mechanism, which has one slight bug, but then I had to sleep.

Turns out my teeth aren't rotting, but my upper left wisdom tooth is growing at a weird angle, and it cuts the inside of my cheek, and this has given me an infection. Today I am on antibiotics and painkillers. Next wednesday, I have a filling elsewhere.


Not for the compo, but probably in the long run. It'll have less resources to trade, but those resources will be physical objects in the world, rather than abstract numbers in your hull (so, a bit like mana in Magic Carpet in that respect). The economy will also be properly fluctuating based on supply and demand, so taking loads of RED to a RED starved system is going to get you more money, but each sale gives diminishing returns. So yeah. A stripped down trading model, but done in order to focus on what's interesting about trading models, rather than what is just obfuscating detail. And in fact, there's no money. You directly trade resources for upgrades/other resources by flying through rings which have slots which the resources fit in. The upgrades allow you to do more damage, get new weapons, and travel faster and further into the universe, meeting increasingly tough enemies the further you move out (so, like Mount & Blade, in that respect).

Worked late at the office tonight... so probably no progress in tomorrow's post (might just fix the minor lockon bug, and start, but not finish, rockets), but I may do another little video. No promises, though.

After rockets, I have to work on enemies loads and loads.

Have to get some things nailed at the office today. But last night I got most of the framework for rockets going. After locking on (by drawing a loop around one or more enemies) and pressing fire, a fancy bezier spline path is generated from your craft to the enemy craft. Just have to add actual moving rocket entities and collision on the weekend.

After that, I have to get enemies started. That's going to be interesting... assigning them the weapons that the player already can owns etc.

Hi Bezzy,

Nice to see some details of your development process.  Feelings I know too well!  I'd love to know what language / SDK you're using.  I'm looking forward to your entry sir.

This is in XNA.

Holy crap. Just saw some of the stuff you posted for your compo - our games look somewhat similar!

This is the first time I saw yours though! Looking great!

This is good stuff Bezzy, you are getting alot done on what is not an easy entry.
Keep it up man.

I saw the video for the first one and wondered if it would ever be finished. Now your making a new one! Yay!

Thanks. Yeah. Things are going alright.

Over the weekend, I had down-time on saturday, but on Sunday I worked hard. I got in proper shields, proper rockets, and proper fireworks (but with a slight limit, or you get chain-fireworks which wipe out everything in the current wave), and made various other tweaks to graphical cues (although they're still all pretty ugly at the moment). Still have to fix the lockon angles, or people are going to confuse the lockon ring for a health bar.

With one week left, I have to prioritize, and I realize that the main procedural generation hook (apart from parametric geometry... which isn't so procudural if I'm honest) is missing! As well as higher level gameplay like scores and enemies who shoot back! There is not even a menu, or any way for the player to be killed!

Last night I started working on the waves. When an enemy is killed, it goes to the sin-bin, and remembers how it was killed. Next wave it is re spawned with upgrades based on how it was killed. The idea is that it may grow weapons, or simply connections with which it can attach to other bad guys to form a WarningForever style boss mashup.

That's going to be a fair bit of work, I have to say.

Felt really exhausted last night, and didn't do any work.

Going home now to get the basic waves working. From there I can start to flesh out the enemies a bit more (returning fire etc... though that'll still be a serious amount of work).

Eh. Deadline approaching. At least I have the weekend free.

Okay! Waves work. Kinda. Just need tweaking.

There's now a basic menu in place, but it needs fleshing out. Joystick is now supported, but given the choice of joystick and mouse, I'd go for mouse for the time being. I can do more for the joystick controls at a later date (some aim assistance, and allowing you to aim and steer slightly independently).

It seems to play pretty well, although I introduced a bug which stops the fireworks working consistently.

And I missed a dentist appointment, which means I have to have a filling next week, on my birthday. But on the plus side, we got internet at home, finally!

I don't know how it plays, but this is beautiful to look at.  I love the colors in the background.  My only concern is that, from the video, the enemies look a bit small/hard to hit.

I'll be waiting to try this one out.  Keep it up!

Thanks!

Yeah, at the moment, enemies are small, but the bullet collision is very forgiving, so it's not that tough to hit stuff. Bullets seem to explode like flak when they're close enough to an enemy. That's the write-your-way-out-of-weirdness explanation, at least.

I've increased the FOV since the video, so stuff is smaller on screen, but everything now has a shield around it, which helps visability, and makes the forgiving shots more believable. I might mess with easing the FOV in while you're aiming in one direction for along time, only pulling it outward if you try to turn fast. That might be a luxury idea for the compo, though. Time is running out, and I still need ball squids and enemies which fire back! And a menu!

http://www.vimeo.com/1098057
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=byfZAyr351o
Wow that does NOT survive youtube's conversion.

Man that looks awesome Bezzy. Can't wait to play it.

Do it Bez!   :-*

What you have so far already looks freaking awesome! I love the way everything seems to be drawing little lines everywhere it moves. Such a neat aesthetic.

Thanks guys!

I haven't really been focusing on the aesthetic too hard in terms of things like palette, so it's a bit all over the place in that respect. JP calls it "The Debug Aesthetic".

After the compo, I can get it reigned in a little more... more concise, less all-over-the-shop.

Yeah, picking the right colors takes a while.

Good luck.

Just played around with it... fantastic stuff man.  Very easy to discover what everything means / does just by futzing for a while.

I'm liking the XYZ->RGB sphere as an orientation device more and more.  Question is, do you mind having the screen be a rainbowy rainbow for 100% of gameplay.  It raises the Minter Quotient somewhat :)

Wait, this is in XNA?

Well, count me out of playing it then. I'm simply unable to make my computer install .NET 2.0 properly and I'm fed up with it.

Augh. I'm really sorry about that, melly. Don't imagine you'll be missing much, though.

Rest assured, that after the compo, I'll be moving it to Tao, or something with less silly install requirements than XNA, at least.

Okay. Here's the demo for anyone else who can do the XNA thing.

http://www.bezzy.net/Downloads/K2Prototype.rar - 7.94megs.

If someone could do me a sweet favour and mirror it, that'd save me. I'm going to bed, now.

http://www.deadrock-game.com/files/K2Prototype.rar

 :-* :-* :-* :-*

Thanks for the mirror, Haowan!

So far, the main bug seems to be that XNA is a pain in the arse to install. I'm really sorry about that, everyone. Should have learned my lesson after D@sher... but XNA is the thing I was most familiar with, and fast to use, so I didn't have any other choice.

Any other bugs/feedback would be highly desirable so that I can polish off anything outstanding tonight.

Bugs so far:

*Second time you play, at game over, the "next wave time" is huge, and you have to exit manually.
*Score on HUD doesn't catch up to regular score fast enough.
*No sound/graphics for thrust (last minute feature).
*Game is a mere shadow of what it was supposed to be.

It doesn't work for me, and I'm not sure; either I failed at installing XNA or XNA simply doesn't work under x64.

Seems that my problem really is with XNA itself, as most games that aren't XNA but still need .NET 2.0 work, like Dyson.

New, final version up. Refer to the first post!

Or if you're lazy: http://www.bezzy.net/Downloads/K2PrototypeFinished.rar

404 :-\

Fixed, thanks!

X   N   A     >:(

This game was trippy awesome!

As for XNA... I'm wondering if I should start converting my games over to C++/OpenGL posthaste. Do I really care if it runs on Xbox if nobody can play it in PC? Is this really going to become the "youtube of games", or will we all be horribly disappointed?

I think I really like C#, and would probably lose a lot of productivity going to C++ (also, that's my day job).

but yeah, I'm moving out of XNA after this... or maybe keeping the stubs, but making my own wrappers for graphics, sound, and input, so that I can switch between OpenGL and XNA's directx easily.

Plus, with OpenGL, I can probably get back that intentional alpha draw-order error effect which I didn't manage to nail in XNA (though it's probably due to a weird render state setting somewhere, which I couldn't find in time).

But yep. This game will slow burn for the time being.

I think the biggest issue with XNA is the way Microsoft handles it. They are basically integrating it with their other similar practices to try and force people to use all their products and install 300 applications in their computer that they'll never use for much else. I really did try to install everything in order to play XNA games, but alas I was unable.

Thank god I can at least make .NET 2.0 work. KIND OF. <.<

mirror:

http://www.deadrock-game.com/files/K2PrototypeFinished.rar

I love C#, mainly because it is productive for me also. But, I didn't really get into it until after the Mono project let me use C# on Linux. Then, I could use Emacs and had my precious tools.


Making things OpenGL friendly is always nice. Makes it easier to port to Linux or Mac. At least, that is what I was trying to do with BooGame and my own libraries, though I suspect I still have a long way to go on those.

Third page? Screw it.

BIRTHDAY BUMP

Hey, after some DirectX-not-installed-foolishness, I managed to have a decent play on this last night. I really like the look and the missile mechanics.

My one complaint is that I felt a bit sick after playing for a while, but that might have been mainly due to the fumes from the noxious chemicals being applied to our kitchen floor  ??? (or maybe it would benefit from a mouse-look deadzone? i'm not sure...)

I'd really love to play a post-compo version with all the trading and upgrading stuff in it. Don't be discouraged!

Bezzy I really wanted to try this as we've obviously gone for a similar feel, but I can't seem to play any damn XNA games, even after putting all that stuff on. :'(

Make sure you have the absolute latest DirectX even if you already have 9.0c.

Make sure you get the latest XNA 2.0 redistributable.

Make sure you have .NET 2.0 framework redistributable installed.

I don't know why Microsoft have made it this hard, but if you have all of these things and a video card that can do shaders (I guess a late 4-series or 5-series onward Nvidia card will do?) then it really should Just Work.

Also note: If you don't have .NET installed when you install DirectX, it seems it doesn't install the managed components which XNA needs, because that's the obvious helpful thing to do. Everyone probably has them by now, because .NET1.1 at least has been part of XP for so long, surely a new version of DX has been released since then? But it's worth checking.

Someone (I don't recall who, I'm afraid) confirmed the other day on IRC that the XNA installer helpfully doesn't bother to tell you when you don't have these prerequisites installed, so it's probably worth reinstalling DirectX if you're having XNA issues you can't seem to pin down, just in case.

Mmm... lemme try that.

EDIT: No dice, and I have XNA installed already. :(

I played it and liked pretty much all of it except for the steering, it sort of confused me. What was going on? Was it the inability to brake that confused me? I don't know. Everything else was great. I did find a bug where I used the trust for too long (2 minutes in one direction) and was unable to turn afterwards.
Great job anyways!  :)

after some xna dx and other installs I finally got this running and there are some good and some bad about this game. i will start with the good: the look of the game is pretty cool, and the game is original i never played a shooter like this before except for maybe rez that had the same feel. now the bad i think the game needs much more work to be playable. the controls are jerky there is no clear indication of a lock with missles, missle locking is hard, and it is difficult to aim at enemys with jerky controls. it is supposed to be a shooter and it plays too slow for a good shooter. the look is cool but the original video looked a lot better, like this is the prototype and that is the finished game
Tehere is lot of potensal with this game but as it stands now it seems to need more work on the design for it to be fun. good effort, but try to make it more fun and so you can understand what is going on better

Thanks for the feedback, everyone, and especially haowan for clearing up what's needed (cos I wasn't even sure :/ ).

The lockons: Yeah, they're not perfect. The "front edge" of the lockon arc doesn't line up with the crosshair (a bug I described earlier but didn't manage to fix in time). Also, the icon might be confused for a health bar. All fixable though.

As far as jerky controls go, yeah, there's some issues some people have been having. Might be a combination of mouse sensitivity and frame rate... I'll have to try it on crapper/better/more machines.

I was playing with the idea of "dodging" by jerking the controls in a direction. It kind of works, but it needs a lot more tweaking before I can write it off, and it depends on a lot of other things than just control implementation: You need more telegraphing of the bullet path to be able to dodge it. I guess I'm experimenting with a "tie-fighter meets bullet hell" mechanic... maybe it's impossible, but it'll be interesting to try it.

But yeah. I didn't have enough time to polish everything. Sorry about that.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=1750.msg47815#msg47815

:gentleman:

Kind sir, I long to play your game.

Unfortunately, <PlatformTarget>x86</PlatformTarget> is already in the project files. Checked last night.

Once again, I am really sorry it's not working. I've already started looking into SDL.NET, though.

All I do is leave waves of disappointment behind me  :'(

Bezzy, I got it working man!

[RANT]God damn if I didn't have to install and re-install everything at least twice...  I understand the appeal of XNA, and I've looked into it, but support from Microsoft is bloody useless.  Endless nondescript downloads with no explanation as to what they do or why you need them, arcane files with impenetrable names , serial packs, updates...  And that's for the end-user, never mind the developer!  It's a good thing I've done a degree in CS, because I needed it to figure out which serial packs and redistributables I might need.  I mean who, outside of geek-world, knows what any of it even means?  They've obviously only designed it for the Xbox, or they'd have just included all that crap in their Windows packages.  So if
I'm looking to go that route in the future, I'd probably end up doing the home computer version outside of XNA, just to increase my potential players.[/RANT]

Anyway, here's my feedback sir:

The good
========

- I love the hud, the various reticules and indicators.  They look slick ad they're intuitive to follow.
- The style is nice and consistent.
- The mouse gestures are interesting, but not obvious yet...  A tutorial's needed really.
- It has a calming feel.
- I love some of the effects, especially the wavy lines following the craft.
- The control I think is nice and smoot, I don't have any issues with it really.

The not-so-good
===============

- First thing I need to really get into it is a slightly clearer way of navigating to my enemies.  An X-Wing style radar would really help here, even though you have the arrow-like indicators on the HUD.
- I'm not gonna be harsh because it's clearly unfinished, but I think it needs a general balancing.  It feels.. I dunno... slow?  I want more action, more of a feeling like my life's in danger, that the odds are against me.  It has a fairly sedate pace at the moment.  Maybe the enemy AI needs to be more aggressive?
- I know you've gone for the 360degree shooter, but I think if you're gonna stick with it, I need more reference material in the background from which to navigate.  Planets perhaps?  Or just abstract patterns?  As it stands I can't get a feel of which corner of the arena is which colour.
- Putting death / gameover screens would really help it feel like more of a game.

Anyway, I really like what I've seen so far, and I hope you keep developing it. Good work Bezzy!

Thanks for all this feedback!

The shield doubles up as your radar, but it needs some clarification, and since the ship moves all over the shop, it doesn't keep a very good locus. I'll experiment with it, and the x-wing style radar will be the safety net.
Yep. I just ran out of time on those kinds of things. So much set up work, and no time to tweak those things. The enemies, in particular, were going to be a bigger deal wrt upgrading themselves... it just didn't come through in time.
Yeah. It's a little bit spatially agnostic at the moment. Plus, the automatic movement doesn't immediately click.
There is one! I must have worked on it (and scoring systems) for AN WHOLE HOUR!

Thanks! I'm also annoyed at the XNA issues, and a little embarassed at what I put out, considering how polished everyone else's stuff is. But I think it's alright as a rough first stab at prototyping the game play. Not really a competition contender, but it was a good experience for me overall. And that's what matters. Says a loser.

Mate down be down-hearted... I admire your ambition, and think you did brilliantly considering the complexity of the project.  I think more people played yours than mine!  Anyway, we both have lots of tech issues that mean lots of people couldn't get them working.

I know what you mean about not having much time because of all the setup stuff, 3D + C++ is a lot more work than a pixel joint. I got to the same stage and felt like giving up.  But a couple of days just concentrating on playability and pace definitely helped.  It's not too late!  I'd still love to see the next revision.

I hope to see you in the next compo at the very least.

Take care,

Jasper

The tagline “Rez meets Tie Fighter’s combat plus some other Konjakky gesturey attacks” is an extremely ambitious description. It seems that this game is the victim of “It’s great on paper, but not in implementation” syndrome. Granted, it is a prototype but to be honest I cannot see the connection to Rez, Tie Fighter or anything Konjak has ever done. It seems like the designer is a little better at marketing and talking up the game then actually developing it to the specs presented. Yes there is the gimmick of circling around an enemy to lock on which is kind of like Konjak and you are in a ship, so that’s kind of like Tie Fighter, the reference to Rez is lost on me. The missile lock on, when it works, seems to do it’s job, but it seems like more of gimmick so the designer can feed off the popularity of saying “this game uses gestures like Konjak’s games” to wet the palette of a potential player by relating this game to a more popular and well put together game to make up for short comings in design rather than something that is actually useful or intuitive.

Aiming is difficult, shooting is slow, and the feel of the game is extremely sluggish, not in frame rate but overall feel. I’m on an AMD x2 with a GeForce 8800 so I know it’s not frame rate, the game “runs” perfectly. With the amount of geometry and the fact that it is written in XNA it would be difficult to make this game framey, the sluggishness comes from the rate of fire in the game. In shooters you fire tons of bullets, this you seem to fire one bullet every half second or so. It’s hard to accurately aim because the ship is constantly jumping around almost like there is no sort of deadzone or any sort of dampening of mouse movement. There needs to be serious work done on the controls.

The art style is almost annoyingly minimalist not offering the user any actual recognizable feedback to teach the player exactly what to do and what mistakes they are making while playing. Any indication of award or failure is lost due to the overly “different” approach the designer took to user feedback. The shield / radar, again sounds awesome on paper, but in game it would be more preferable to have a radar where a first time user could accurately see where enemies are and in which direction the player should turn to fire on them.

The menu irritated me to no end, it’s almost like the designer wants the user to get frustrated and give up by not knowing exactly what to do. Pausing in the middle of the game brings up a blue ring that you must navigate to the center of to get back into the game if the controls do not immediately show up in the center of the screen. The menu is original, and I complement the designer on the fact that he is trying to get away from the everyday menu, however original is only good if the implementation is intuitive and well done. There is a reason menus are text based with options to select, because it’s the simplest approach to getting in and playing the game. Not to say that this menu didn’t allow for quick pick up and play once you got the hang of it, but it was irritating not being totally used to it at the beginning. I don’t think a player should have to learn how to work a menu.

Maybe when this game is finished it will be everything that the creator has hyped it up to be, but as it stands now it’s far from being. I offer this criticism after playing the game around 6 times, take it or leave it, it is my opinion. These are all extremely obvious problems with this game that everyone seems a little too nice to put out there. People aren’t helping the designer any by being overly nice. People learn from criticism, not from saying everything is “Great and awesome” when there are glaring short comings in the game. This isn’t to try to knock the designer or the obvious hard work he put into developing the game, but to offer an honest outside opinion that can help and inspire him to further develop the game to make it better. I applaud the effort as I realize the work put in to developing a prototype. I think the main problem is the designer is trying to make a very familiar game, a shooter, and take out everything that makes a shooter easy and enjoyable to play and replacing it with an obvious overcompensation in design to make up for the fact that under it all this is a basic game. Be proud of the basic game, don’t try to mask it with gimmicks and supposedly “clever” systems that add nothing to the game other than a layer of confusion. This game is a shooter, for all intents and purposes, but as it stands right now it is not a good shooter. In the future, I think it can be a decent game, but as it stands right now the design and overall feel of the game needs to be carefully reconsidered. Bezzy, I hope you continue working on the game and make it live up to the ambitions you have posted in this thread.

Dan

Yes!

Inspiring!

/me picks up teeth, and tries not to choke on his own blood.

It's "palate" btw

Full disclosure: Bezzy's an old friend of mine, and a big influence on my career as a designer.

Pretty much all of this feedback was substantive and useful, but there was probably a more constructive way that most of it could have been delivered.  The influences list was just that, games in the vein of, not a litany of PR promises.  If you applied this vector of criticism to every relevant post in the forums, you'd get a lot of apologies and ruffled feathers.  Unclear to me what the value in pointing it out was.

As for the other crits, again the substance is useful but the tone isn't.  Anytime someone does a game, a prototype no less which is dev speak for "timid first dip of toe into water", that isn't instantly classifiable and tries to re-think some established assumptions (whether or not it is successful at all) it's going to come out more awkwardly than if you'd stuck to a more known design... unless you're someone like Cactus whose modus operandi is constantly surprising everyone :)

Basically I really hope indie is a place where people can do less polished re-thinks as well as really polished stuff in a very established design space (eg puzzle games, top-down shmups, etc).  The more off the beaten path you go, the more there is to criticize... that's pretty much a given.  Discouragement of that is the last thing we need more of.

Full agreement here. Essentially Dan's post fails the


test.

Not very gentlemanly way to feedback, is it? :gentleman:

You know, this may be considered adding complexity to fix clarity, which in principle is dubious, but I'm realizing just how much tougher being 3D makes everything to get across.  2D shmups pretty much never need position and distance cues, it's already all there on the screen for you.  Ideally in 3D you can read an entire space instantly, in practice it's really tough.

The enemy positions registering on the player shell is a start.  You've got the star lines which make your direction and velocity pretty easy to read.  One thing I'm remembering about TIE Fighter et al is that capital ships often served as landmarks... a big star destroyer 10 klicks away would become a reference point, you could reorient yourself by them more easily after a twisty dogfight.  So maybe some big masses with distinct shapes further off in the background?  Or something completely different that accomplishes the same purpose.

Aside from that, a lot of feel tuning and perfecting the feedback channels (you know, that nontrivial stuff that makes every game go from okay to great).  I can drill into that more if you want, but it sounds like you have some ideas about where to take that already.

Yeah! That's really the central challenge I've been trying to tackle with both K and K2. I want that simplicity of a 2D game, but in a 3D world. Perhaps that's trying to square the circle, but I enjoy the process of trying to work it out.

Obviously, I am not winning this yet (and may never win), but there are a few places I think it's coming together - the crosshair, I feel, does its job very well. The spatial-sphere of game play is broken down from 3D to 2D, auto-correcting depth for you. That works.

Spatial awareness is something I've barely touched on with K2, but had a bit of success with in K - (multiple shadows helped you to understand clearly where your craft was relative to the ground, but K2 has no such relativity - it's currently spatially agnostic, as I mentioned before). The background sphere is too much of a blur (needs more landmarks) and orientation is anyway kind of irrelevant at the moment. Seems like even in space combat games, people are more comfortable with the game if a game-flow line/plane is defined by two/three major celestial bodies. It's interesting how we ultimately want to be able to break down 3D space into 2D components so that we can get our heads around it.



Hah, yes. I'm in complete agreement. As the game develops, I'd like to work toward large bodies in space, doing just that - setting the flow of the scene. Things like capitol ships, definitely, but also planet/planetoids looking more like K's landscapes. The enemies in the current prototype were supposed to combine together to create sort of... lego capital ships, like Warning Forever's system. Obviously, with the lack of optimization, i couldn't get too many on screen, and just didn't have the time to do more complex snap-on upgrades.


Thanks, yeah. I have a big list of various things which need better feedback. Interestingly, I'm not ignoring the feedback which has been put to me in a polite fashion.

In response to DanLomez... your post has had me feeling pretty down all night. The feedback itself is fair, and useful, but gains nothing from the tone in which it's given.

In addition, I'd like to point out that since games are my day job, I like to use my homebrew time to try things that are too risky or inappropriate for work hours. I like to experiment. Before someone leaps down my throat saying "innovation isn't everything", I should point out that I have no problem what so ever with people trying to make established tropes really cool, especially if the can re-invent them in interesting ways. I find it enjoyable to explore off the beaten track, and try new ideas (or new takes on old ideas), even if they're not guaranteed to work. I want to learn why they turn out the way they do, whether or not they are successful experiments. It's a personal choice of what I do in my spare time, and I'm not sure why I feel the need to justify it.

Trying anything vaguely new brings your face in immediate proximity with the hundred mile an hour, obvious-in-hindsight problems which you encounter far less if you're sticking to a pre-defined template. While it's not particularly hard to point out what went wrong, it's very hard (though not impossible) to foresee problems without trying them out first, hence prototyping. It's not like I'm in any way married to any errors of implementation I make - decisions will change, or be revoked entirely should a better solution not emerge out of the exploration. A verbal kick in the teeth makes me no more or less aware of the problems in the prototype.

And yes, the game probably IS better on paper than in practice. That'll be something to do with the limited time, experience, and man-power available to me. Ropey, unpolished, unfinished builds are sort of de rigeur when it comes to prototyping. I confess I've been more concerned with trying out these various experiments for my own personal curiosity than to living up to your subjective expectations. Perhaps you should ask for your money back?

Go Bezzy!  Spoken like a true :gentleman:.

Part of doing any kind of creative work is dealing with bad and downright insulting feedback. Part of becoming an artist/designer of any medium is growing thicker skin. When these kinds of things happen you have to learn to laugh it off.

Here, I'll fetch you a beer. :beer:

To be honest, i think Dan was just upset he couldn't get the cock missiles to work.

Cockrocket!

Had to say it.

Uh... wait.. so everyone is offended at Dan's post?

Well, it's not really the fact of him talking about what wasn't good in the game, but his attitude and tone were pretty rude.

Don’t mistake my criticism for any sort of attack on you, your person, or your development and design abilities. I did not intend to ruin your evening either, but that’s more your fault than mine. You chose what to take from my post, I didn’t choose for you. As I stated in the post, which you chose to overlook, was that I respected the amount of work put in and I hoped that you developed it further. Had my intentions been to only attack I would have said “Stop working on this, move on”. I didn’t say this because I don’t feel that way, not because I forgot to mention it.

The reason I attacked your tagline was because I saw your tagline as nothing more than fluff that you would see on a movie poster, not inspiration. You described K2 as “Tiefighter meets Rez meets Konjak”. You used the word “meets”. Meets implies that all of these things came together to form K2. Some could argue that is the definition of inspiration, I would not. That does not imply inspiration in my opinion. Had you worded that line “K2 is a game that is inspired by TieFighter, Rez, and Konjak” then I would have said nothing. I’m betting, based on the reaction to my initial post, you’ve already changed it in your first post. Tell me you weren’t trying to hype and I’ll tell you that you are now trying to distance yourself from an obvious exaggeration of your game after being caught by the only person willing to call you out on it. That’s not to say you shouldn’t hype your game, you should be proud of what you accomplished, but expect someone to say something when the hype doesn’t match the game. Had the creator of Dyson said “Dyson - StarCraft meets DigDug meets Supreme Commander “, I would have called him out as well.

I am honest and I call things how I see them. Some people can handle honest criticism, others can not. I figured with all of the one line “this looks awesome” comments and the overwhelming support from friends you had in this thread, that you could handle, benefit from, and were ready for some real criticism. You, obviously could not handle it and chose to brush it off with a juvenile and sarcastic “Perhaps you should ask for your money back?”. The only thing I would ask back is the time it took to post my original opinion, because it’s painfully obvious that you can’t take criticism if it isn’t peppered with complements and reassurance. I was blunt because I figured a mature adult, the kind of professional that I thought made this game, could take the straight forward observations I made about the game with out having to frost it up with happy complements. You posted your game, on a public forum and offer a public download, then get miffed when someone posts something that doesn’t complement you more than criticize you. You bring up prototyping, isn’t part of the purpose offering a public prototype to get feedback? Instead of focusing on the feedback in my post and ignoring something as trivial as my tone, you focused on that because you didn’t want to read anything bad about your game. I thought people posted their games in these forums because they didn’t want to design in a bubble and wanted to get outside opinions on their creations, and to use those observations to inspire them to improve their creation. I don’t expect you to be thankful, it’s not easy to hear criticism on something which took hard work, I don’t even expect you to react or act on the criticism, but I would hope you would take it like a professional.

I’ll end this post the exact same way I ended my first one and leave it at that. Bezzy, I hope you continue working on the game and make it live up to the ambitions you have posted in this thread.

Yeah I mean after reading through the criticism post, there are a few choice words that I might take away as rude, but at the same time I wish someone would take the time to write me an essay on how they think I could improve my games.

I have to be honest, after reading Dan's review I didn't find it particularly rude.  Having read tons of genuinely rude reviews and having regretfully written plenty myself, his seems fairly straightforward in comparison and I believe he posted it with sincere interest in improving the game and wanting to see it (and Bezzy) succeed.

Especially after reading the other reviews Dan has written here, I don't think his intention is to hurt anyone's feelings.

That said, Dan, these compos are pretty light-hearted, so it can be jarring to read a harsh review that goes as far as to critique the way a developer hyped his game in a forum thread.  I think the first paragraph of your review is mostly unnecessary within the context of what the competition is about and it sets up a bad vibe for the rest of it.

Anyways, let's take this as a learning experience from both sides?

Bravo sir.

If you want to believe I'm ignoring your feedback, that's fine, but I should re-iterate that it's your tone I found offensive - not the actual content, which I've already said is fair and useful. I haven't ignored the feedback because I couldn't take a harsher tone. I've taken on the feedback and found the tone irritating.

And perhaps I should grow thicker skin - I guess that takes time, but this caught me unawares. I just didn't expect this kind of thing for something, as Derek says, as light hearted as this competition.

I'm glad you liked it, and thanks for the confidence boost.


A few people have said they really didn't like the steering. I need to look into this. I think it's one of three things:

• A mouse sensitivity issue, between computers
• The affect the mouse movement has on the ship movement (i was trying to use "jerks" on the mouse to make it dodge to the side, and differing sensitivities could have a huge impact on that). Either way, I need the ship not to shift around so much relative to the camera.
• Simply a marmite way to do aiming. I originally had it inverted (since I invert for most games), but the controls are so close to being like a cursor that I went back to normal (did the same for FlashPoint, which has a similar scheme).

Rez as inspiration is more shorthand for saying "stuff's going to look abstract", and *ideally*, some things will lock timings with the sound track. Most likely, I'll drift back toward K's aesthetic, rather than drawing a bead on Rez's style.

I just finished reading Dan's crit and I thought I'd drop my two cents since it's a topic that interests me... I agree with all that Derek said so it's just some extra stuff from my behalf here...

Note: the following are general thoughts and are not aimed at anyone precisely...

First of all, I didn't feel like the crit was all that rude or offensive. Doesn't mean it was fantastic either. Dan raised some interesting issues but failed as a constructive critic. Being constructive is not "You fail, do better next time". It's "I think you failed because of this, next time I think it would be better to do that". When picking up a title, sitting down and then feeling like telling the author the weakness of his work, respect and tact is always required if you want the critiqued to be opened to the message you want to communicate. You don't usualy step up to a stranger and say "Hey you freakin' moron, can you tell me what time it is?" and expect an answer. It is no different in critics. In fact it's a lot more delicate. A creator, whatever the skills or interest in his creation he may have, has poured time and his soul into something he felt proud enough to show the rest of the world. It's easy to forget that you are talking about the work of a human being because he's not physicaly there and in the end, it's just a name on some online boards but the people behind these games are real and are usualy working alone on it. Games that are posted around tigs are not multi-million dollars game with a team of 100 paid talent. We're talking about small teams ranging from 1 to 5 motivated members with the budget of jack sh*t here. Whatever you say about the game, you're saying it about the creators too. If you want them to get better at what they do, you have to be honest and explain why you didn't like it.

To be a critic is to be a creator. If you want to write a constructive crit, you first have to go through the creating process yourself. It's one thing to say that an element didn't work; It's another to say why and what could've been done to make it feel right. For example, if you didn't feel like the menus worked, you have to tell why, use solid examples and then say what you think the creator should've done instead. This will help to open the communication and will show your full point of view to the critiqued which will allow him to understand your opinion. And there's no point into going in your life details if it's not directly linked with the topic. Who cares if you showed Miyamoto how to design a game; what matters is what you think of the subject at hand now, not what you may have done about something else in the past. Well no, that didn't happen in Dan's crit but I felt like I had to say this here.

So anyway, if you get critiqued, don't feel bad about it. Just analyze what is being said and if the critic doesn't tell why he wrote something, ask for the reason. The best way to recognize if you are dealing with someone who's just bitchin' around is to ask the question "Why". That usualy demolishes whatever argumentation they have. And if he does tell you why, just listen, take notes and try it. You got nothing to loose when trying something that may enhance your work.

Anyway, that's enough chatter from my side. Keep workin' on those titles and crits people.  :beer:
(That post almost made me want to crit again! :) )