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.

I enjoyed this game. I ended up taking over the whole asteroid belt after a few tries. I don’t even remember how ships or bugs I had at the end of the game, but it was quite a bit. I don’t know if they were supposed to be bugs or ships, but I will call them bugs for the remainder of this post.

The game is fun, but I do feel that there could be some work on the interface. For example, on the first play through, I didn’t realize the strategy in building up bugs from different asteroids would yield bugs with different strengths. The color indication shown when selecting or mousing over an asteroid only became apparent the second time I went through the tutorial. Some sort of icons representing the different attributes of the asteroid may have been better than a scrolling color bar and it would have been nice to be able to glance back at the tutorial for a quick refresher, it either wasn’t there or I missed it. Either way, a clear way to bring the tutorial back up and review would be helpful to first time players.

One thing that felt hacked in was the sending of a certain number of bugs from asteroid to asteroid. I think the reason for this was because clicking and dragging an entire asteroid of bugs was very smooth, where as dragging a set jumped directly to the planet instead of dragging. This may be fixed in a newer version, the version I played was from a few days ago before the new patch. If it is fixed, great, if it isn’t, I think it should be. It seems to break the interface by changing the default feel of deploying bugs to something more jumpy that kind of takes away from the smooth interface of this game.

Other than those few interface problems I found, I think the game is nice. I would like to see it developed further, maybe different Dyson trees you can plant, some that can perhaps be like “auto torrents” to help protect against swarms of enemy bugs or the ability to upgrade trees to produce more bugs with different attributes. I think Dyson would benefit from some improvements to the game to give it more depth. Good work.

Dan

I absolutely loved this game. The simple design and art style coupled with enjoyable and challenging gameplay. I do hope that the game is developed further though as I feel that there is something missing from this game, I can’t quite put my finger on it though. I felt somewhat constricted from the size of the playing field. I did see in a previous post the designer was thinking of showing a grid that didn’t look good.

I don’t know if this version had the grid he was talking about, but if it did I could see the game greatly benefiting from an actual grid so a player can accurately predict when to turn and snake their pieces around. I found it hard at times to line up pieces, but that could be me.

Like I said, excellent job and I hope you continue developing it. This is a game I would purchase for a cellphone in it’s current state, I hope it gets even better. Excellent work!

Dan

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