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[JMickle]

[Alex Vostrov]

Hi JMickle,

I tried out your game.  I even beat it; whee!  Here are my thoughts:

• I thought that the slot system was something interesting.  It didn't quite work in the game, but I think that you could tighten it up to be a compelling mechanic.  It reminded me of card games.
• The coin gathering mechanic is evil and gives players RSI.  Is there a point in making the player wiggle the mouse back and forth?  It's not challenging either intellectually nor manually, so it's just tiring.
• The game was too easy.  It's all too simple to hoard tons of coins and max everything out.  A game is a sequence of interesting choices - what interesting choices do you want you game to present?
• You probably should implement a main menu to take the player back to if he loses.  Kicking them out to desktop is not nice.
• There should be an in-game help system.  You have plenty of screen space to display all of the information.  Making the player look at a .PNG file in the game directory is not a good solution.
• I had black boxes around all of the enemies and targeting rings.  Is this a bug?
• Pressing F1 takes you to a black screen with "GAME PAUSED" written in a windings font.  I'm pretty sure no human can actually read windings, so it's just confusing.

[JMickle]

Hi JMickle,

I tried out your game.  I even beat it; whee!  Here are my thoughts:

• I thought that the slot system was something interesting.  It didn't quite work in the game, but I think that you could tighten it up to be a compelling mechanic.  It reminded me of card games.

Ah thankyou. I think this game is basically just a group of little ideas I have had, I just wanted to get them out in a short game since I don't appear to have the patience to create something big.

• The coin gathering mechanic is evil and gives players RSI.  Is there a point in making the player wiggle the mouse back and forth?  It's not challenging either intellectually nor manually, so it's just tiring.

It was an idea I had a while ago. I could only test on my laptop nipple mouse, so I can only assume this is wildly unbalanced. If I were to spend a lot of time on this game, I would make sure to balance this and maybe add more squares that were randomly chosen, which could add an extra interesting element to it.

but point taken.

• The game was too easy.  It's all too simple to hoard tons of coins and max everything out.  A game is a sequence of interesting choices - what interesting choices do you want you game to present?

Yes I didn't spend much (read: any) time balancing this much, but by the end of making it I didn't have the heart. It is much too unpolished.

• You probably should implement a main menu to take the player back to if he loses.  Kicking them out to desktop is not nice.

Good point. As I said before, this is a consequence of not properly finishing it.

• There should be an in-game help system.  You have plenty of screen space to display all of the information.  Making the player look at a .PNG file in the game directory is not a good solution.

Ah I thought the png readme was genius  but yeah it wouldn't do much harm to stick it in the game as well.

• I had black boxes around all of the enemies and targeting rings.  Is this a bug?

This is a game maker problem and I can't fix it.

• Pressing F1 takes you to a black screen with "GAME PAUSED" written in a windings font.  I'm pretty sure no human can actually read windings, so it's just confusing.

Uhm I didn't put it in windings, but I have a feeling I used a font not many people will have, which I didn't consider at the time. Thanks for pointing this out.

[/list]

Lovely crits.

[JMickle]

ok i'll admit i think this game is terrible, but listen to the music i spent ages on the msuic 

[handCraftedRadio]

Nah, it's not terrible, it's a good prototype version to what could be a good flash game or something. I actually thought that the coin collecting mechanic was pretty cool and original, but I don't really play too many of these types of games so I could be wrong about the original part. The first time I played, I had no idea what to do and just clicked around and lost. After that I looked at the readme, and still lost a few times before I figured out that I had to right click to attack, which I'm not sure why since left click doesn't seem to do anything while on the screen. The game was imbalanced in the sense that you could gain coins too quickly and the powerups were cheap. I never really fully understood the slot powerup system while I was playing the game. Maybe you could add a button to pause the game and bring up the readme, that would help a lot.

The laser beam from heaven attack seems a bit overkill to stop bikers, since you could just as easily put a stick in their spokes and send them flying over the handlebars. 

[FiaStarta]

Super MSPaint art!
you won't see EA or Microsoft with graphics as neat as this

almost

[Alex Vostrov]

Are you sure that the black box problem is a game maker issue?  Other games work without this problem for me.

With regard to the coin gathering mechanic, ask yourself this.  If you replaced it with a constant coin income per unit of time, would the game get better or worse?  Is it an interesting thing to have in the game?

[JMickle]

Are you sure that the black box problem is a game maker issue?  Other games work without this problem for me.

yeah other people have that problem with other game maker games. its quite commonly known.

I think constant income would make the game less interesting. The whole point of game mechanics is to be interesting, not easy. i'm sure people would prefer not to have to do it, but i'm also sure that people playing assassins creed would prefer to have a machine gun, ya catch my drift?

[Alex Vostrov]

I think constant income would make the game less interesting. The whole point of game mechanics is to be interesting, not easy. i'm sure people would prefer not to have to do it, but i'm also sure that people playing assassins creed would prefer to have a machine gun, ya catch my drift?

Well, what's interesting about wiggling the mouse between two boxes?  How does it enrich the player's experience of the game?

[JMickle]

Think about it like this- whats more interesting: playing a game where you move your mouse over 2 points to gain points, or a gain where you just watch you points grow.

I'm not saying it's the best mechanic in the world, but I'd rather it be something rather than nothing. My game isn't too fun anyway so it's a bad example to use, but it adds to the hectic feeling of defence games, where your having to manage between upgrading your base, killing enemies and gaining income.

But yes, its a badly thought out mechanic.

[Alex Vostrov]

Think about it like this- whats more interesting: playing a game where you move your mouse over 2 points to gain points, or a gain where you just watch you points grow.

I'm not saying it's the best mechanic in the world, but I'd rather it be something rather than nothing. My game isn't too fun anyway so it's a bad example to use, but it adds to the hectic feeling of defence games, where your having to manage between upgrading your base, killing enemies and gaining income.

But yes, its a badly thought out mechanic.

I'm not going to belabour this point much further, since I think both of us understand it pretty well.  This is a test game, so it's unfair to rip into it to the full extent.

I will say this; if removing a boring mechanic will make the game feel empty, that's a sign that you need to rethink the core design.  You should understand what your game is about.  The most important question is "What does the player DO?"  Every single part of the game must aim toward that purpose.

In your case, it sounds like you want a game that's focused on reflexes and fast resource management.  That's a decent thing to focus on, so let's imagine possible ways to do this.  There are many games that use time as a resource - many puzzle games are timed.  Tetris, for example, would lose its charm if you had an hour to think things over.  The key is giving a player a problem that he barely has enough time to solve.

If you want resource gathering to be constrained by time, I would suggest thinking of something more challenging as the resource gathering activity.  How about a simple skill-and-action game, or some sort of spacial puzzle?  For example, you could create random wandering creep monsters that the player has to click to beat coins out of them.  That way the player's brain is engaged at all times and the action will feel MORE hectic. 

I don't know how far you want to take this, but I would encourage you to tune and balance this game.  It's not going to win the IGF prize for design, but it will teach you how to polish a design into something interesting.  The basic elements are already there - you could make it into a fun 10-minute clicker.  Anyway; it's your choice, obviously.  Maybe you have the next IGF winner as your next idea .

I should learn Flash; then I would be able to throw something together quickly as an illustration.  C++ is too cumbersome for these things.