I checked it out and left some feedback.  I like the feedback section in the web page.

Overall the game seems well built.  Agree with twoeyedcyclops that it felt a little slow. I think the projectile speed and movement feels pretty close, but the action on screen feels slow to develop. Would be nice to see more enemies and less hazards.  Would like to see the growing/eating mechanic played up a little more.

Good luck!

Saw these images on the ScreenshotSaturday topic, came here to check it out.  Looks really interesting.  Hope to follow this one.  Heads up though, the link on the ScreenshotSaturday page seems to be broken, had to find the games in Devlogs.

I played through the game once and here are my thoughts.

Really like the visuals.  Music really captures the mood and establishes a nice atmosphere. Although I found the music to be a bit repetitive.

Movement felt smooth, however jumping was a bit frustrating. I kept running off the edge when I felt like I was timing my jump appropriately.  Perhaps you could give the player a bit of padding to jump when running off ledges? (This is probably quite difficult to do without introducing bugs, but depending on the purpose of the game it may make since)  I did feel like there was a bit of delay between me pressing the button and the jump. Is it just my imagination?  I see you posted about performance. I was playing Stencil arcade, maybe it is just latency?

Introducing mechanics felt good, liked the red motif around objects that can be interacted with, changed. However there was no red on the platforms I could push. This was not a problem once I pushed a platform for the first time and could recognize them (though they are still hard to distinguish) but I only ended up realizing I could push the first platform by accident.  I think it should keep with the red motif.

The choice to heed the commands of the gods is interesting, but I am guessing the ramifications are more pronounced with repeated playthrough?  I like the idea of replaying multiple times to further understand the game, however I think there can be a balance between short term/longterm payoff for choices.  On a single playthrough I have no idea what the ramifications of my choices were.

Really happy things I have done do not reset when I die and restart from a checkpoint!

Not sure why I have to attack the spiders more than once?  Seems like you could play up the strength of the blade and skill of the Android by killing in one hit, or require multiple hits (while the spider is on the ground) and play up the brutality of it.  As it is it just seems unnecessary.

Really like the fact I have to kill the weak robots for health.  And when I am commanded to kill robots.  I would like to see more moments like this, where I have a choice to kill, sacrifice, torture, imprison, robots either because I am commanded or I benefit in the short term with weapons, armor, etc.

Seemed random how long of a delay there was between firing bullets. Not sure what prevents gun from firing again immediately.

Yes I wold also like to see shooting while in the air implemented.

I enjoyed it.  Good luck!

Looks really great! I definitely want to follow this. Good luck!

It looks neat, I like the idea of slightly less on-rails shmups. Good visual direction, nice effects.

I'm not sure about the music. Then again, I'm probably in the minority there.

Thanks!  The music is a bit different than what someone may normally expect in a shooter.  We like it but others have found it a strange choice for a shooter.

Hi richie,

I tested the demo now. First thing to say: well done! No, actually the first thing in order of sequence would be "WHAAAAAAaaat the fuck?", because the game kept switching resolutions at maybe 10 times a second, make both of my monitors showing unhealthy flickering. I switched to Windowed Mode, but according to some flashes of the game window I got the impression that whatever you did there kept on going.

Are you using 2 monitors.  There is a bug when multiple monitors are running.  I will let the other guy know.

The second impression was "Well done". Smooth panning and animations, nice particle work, solidly themed everywhere. The only grudge I had with the graphics was that low brightness look - everything looked as if was rendered really dark and then a steep gamma ramp tried to make it visible again. If you're serious about that 16bit look, this might even be intended, but I didn't like it. Some of the graphics looked awkwardly upscaled, too.

I will look into all of this.  There were some problems with visibility, so I added some brightness effects.  As for the upscaling, yeah I think I know what you are talking about.

Gameplay: I had fun. The ship controlling felt good, the occasional bump into walls didn't hurt anything - excellent design choice! The basic shooting was well done, even though I got the impression that it might get boring after a while. I missed some beefy shooting sounds and hit feedback. The last boss battle was really good! The other fights would gain something by better visibility of enemies and bullets. Also I found it strange that the main weapon aims at the cursor while the secondary weapons fire in move direction. Why?

Glad you like the gameplay.  Yes there were some reviews of the XBLIG version about the basic gameplay getting a bit old by the end.  We are trying to come up with some ways to keep it exciting and fresh.  As for missiles firing in the direction of the ship, it is a design choice, the missiles are extremely powerful but require more skill to use.  Some people like it, some don't...

Oh, and the whole "controlling by mouse/keybord", but you already wrote somewhere that you're on it. Acknowledging tutorial pages by '3' is strange enough, but I also didn't find the key to skip animations. They're quit slowly paced, I always felt the urge to accelerate them a bit to see what's next.

Not sure what you mean here.  Are you talking about the pop ups in the tutorial?  I think I see what you mean.

Overall impression: nicely done, but a few usability details might need fixing. And the aforementioned "gamma ramp" look together with the piece-wise level design and the very low-count particle effects made it look cheap to me. But that's just my personal impression.

Thanks for taking the time to play through the demo and all of the feedback you gave! 

Nice art direction.  I look forward to a video!

I like the graphics style! It's so refreshing to see something which is not driven by 16-colour-huge-square-pixels. Will try the demo when I find some time. Thanks for posting!

Thanks Schrompf! 

I got an email saying the status bar was not updating on the installer.  Can you post back (when you get a chance) about whether you had success installing the demo.  Anyone else, please let me know if you had success or failure with the installer.

Much Obliged. 

I have spent the last few days emailing press sites.  So far I have sent about 15 - 20 emails and had 3 replies.  It has taken me a few days to write all of the emails because I want to make sure every site I send an email to covers indie games for PC. 

I also try to make the email at least somewhat related to the individual I am sending it to.  Since very few gaming sites know me or my studio, I figure taking the time to write a specific email to them may increase our chances of at least getting looked at.

Here is a nice resource by pixel prospector about contacting press: Pixel Prospector - How to Contact Press

I read through it and am now reading through the links.  It has some great stuff.

Just finished the demo.  It has a very polished feel about it. Very nice game! 

Thanks, I'm glad you've found my DevLog useful.  Something I haven't really talked about much is how making and releasing an indie game is an absolute emotional roller coaster - Richard Garfield's write up was definitely one of the high points for me!

We released our game on XBLIG back in May.  It is our first game and man has it been an emotional roller coaster for us as well!  I think getting praise from Richard Garfield is awesome!  Mark that on your "cool stuff achieved in life" list.

I definitely recommend you write a DevLog, it doesn't take much time and it may generate a little buzz, lead to some useful comments and perhaps help you to reflect on what you're doing as well.  Send me a message when you start it!

edit: I've found your DevLog!

Yeah I was inspired

I looked at your Greenlight page a bit, I am going to check it out and your game more this evening.  Looking forward to it.

I also want to include a link to a thread I just finished reading with some great insights about one guys efforts at marketing and PR. 

You can find it here: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=27113.0

Compromised is a top down shooter that myself and another guy have been working on for over a year now.  We released the game on XBLIG back in May but have been continually working on the game.  We are releasing our beta PC version in a few weeks on Desura and IndieCity.  

I would love feedback here on everything from the demo, to the website, name, screenshots, etc.  Any and all feedback is welcome!  I will try to post info about game updates, lessons learned and our marketing success/failures on this page.  

To kick off here is the trailer we made for the XBLIG release of Compromised http://www.youtube.com/embed/yZgdKmNztIU

Our website has a download to the demo: http://compromisedgame.com/

Some screenshots:

Thanks!

I just finished reading through the thread linked below.  If you haven't check it out, it has some great insights into one persons attempts at marketing. It includes using adwords, facebook, sending reviews, etc.  They don't talk about too many novel ideas, but hopefully it is a worthwhile read.  It was for me.

Check out the post here

Wow, this has been a great read and incredibly informative!  Thanks so much.  We are starting marketing, PR and the ilk for our game.  There are some great insights here and I suggest anyone who skips to the end to take the time when you have it and read through the entire thread.

I am going to start a devlog, when I do I will certainly link to this.  Good luck and congrats on the Richard Garfield write up. (Pretty sweet)

Nice graphics, great effects and carnage!  Sound effects and music seemed fitting as well.  As for the characters, I have played a lot of zombie games with people, but how come no one ever goes for the tank?  I would in a zombie apocalypse.  Plus you don't have to animate a human 

Why not go further and have zombies driving cars?  Everyone assumes zombies cannot drive...

Seems like you are off to a nice start.  I did not play the first game, I did look at some screenshots.  I guess tanks and driving zombies may not be part of the universe from the first game.

I did notice that the zombies behaved a bit strange sometimes when close to the player in groups.  They did not seem to be very intelligent.  Are you using path finding at all times?


Good luck!

Hey Zeredek, here is my feedback from a first time player.  Hope it helps

Menu FPS ~730
Game ~480
Macbook Pro running Windows 7, Intel CPU @ 2.4 Ghz processor

I Agree with ludist, it takes too many hits to kill enemies, especially since I was usually on wave 1 or 2.  Would be nice if some enemies only took 1 hit, then I could have some level of offense. As it is now I just seem to be constantly running backwards and attacking.

Not enough feedback when damaging enemies.  If enemies are not killed in one hit, it would help me if they flashed to show the enemy is taking damage.  It is not so bad for the projectile weapons, as they disappear and I see the effect and hear the sound.  But when playing with melee weapons, there did not seem nearly enough feedback when damaging enemies.

You seem to be off to a good start for the menu system. The simple slides and animations add a nice touch.  I think a lot of added effects and polish can be added later building off the behaviors now.

The graphics are bland.

I found it very difficult to survive for much more than 1 or 2 waves. 

There is no limit on map size, so I input a crazy high number and crashed the game.

No controls info screen.

I found the characters that shot projectiles to be the most enjoyable to play.

Viera was my favorite character.  I liked the standard attack, nice effect and sound, nice feedback when it hits enemies.

I like the different specials for characters

There was no music.  Is there supposed to be?

I can see the game as online co-op, would be fun, especially if there was progression kind of like the old gauntlet games.

Good luck.  Hopefully my feedback can be of use!

Hmmm... well I am interested to see what happens.  I think there is a good chance the Kongregate game will not have enough plays to impact anything and end up sufffering from the same lack of exposure as the original game!  Here is to hoping though.

For now I am going to go track down your Kongregate game 

I am wondering the same thing.  I just read through and posted on another thread on the same topic.  There are some interesting ideas there: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=29257.0

We are about to release a game on Desura.  When we released it on Xbox Live Indie Games we emailed a lot of the blogs that covered XBLIG games and some that did not.  We ended up getting a good number of reviews and some nice reviews, but it did not really translate into sales at all.  I have heard that XBLIG is weird like that, (I cannot say about other stores/platforms, it was our first game, so you may have much better success with reviews generating sales), but I am trying to think up ways to get people to know about the game outside of reviews. 

One idea I had was that you could give the game slightly cheaper if ten of the person's friends put in a redeem code. Like MMO's, where they give bonuses if you spread the game. Just thinking...

I like the idea of giving away/reducing the cost of the game if someone helps raise awareness.  Even if it does not increase sales much, creating a fan base is probably great in the long term to help with sales and promotion.

We are about to release our game 'Compromised' on Desura for alpha funding.  I developed a small game in Unity for the web that advertises Compromised at the end of the first play of the session.  We are going to put the game up on Kongregate.   We may also put the game on iOS and Android as a free download. (Since it should be pretty straightforward, it is in Unity and a fairly simple game).

I am curious if this will help get exposure for Compromised.  I will post back here in a few weeks to let you all know the results.

My intention is to have a free game, relatively short but which stand on it's own. Then pu a link to the sequel in the game itself.

Sounds like we have a similar plan.  The free game I developed is not actually related to our Desura game.  I have a hunch it will not be as successful as it would be if it was in the same universe or world.  I would like to know how your endeavor works out.