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[ChevyRay]

My first entry was too complicated, and due to my busy schedule and the complexity of the game, I couldn't complete it by the deadline. Instead, I bring to you a much shorter game made in 2 days:


X-Bones

Play it in your browser now!
Download High-Res EXE Version (can play fullscreen!)

It's a showdown, samurai-style!

Use the Arrow Keys and Z to operate the menu (click the game to give it focus first).

Player 1 is Z and player 2 is M. Wait until the signal to STRIKE! appears; when it does, the first player to press their key wins a point! But watch out for the fake signal, or you will lose a point.

The first player to 3 points wins the duel!






For those of you who are going to be at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco next week, X-Bones is going to be playable on-location on the Winnitron 1000 arcade machine, so drop by and have some VS rounds! I will be there presenting the game, and you are welcome to challenge me to a duel

[eigenbom]

Love it.

[knight]

Ah I liked your old idea, shame you couldn't finish it. On the other hand this looks great too I'll have to get some friends over here to play!
Edit: That was intense. I love how the music adds so much atmosphere to the game.

[kavs]

Nice Chevy! :D

Perfect scope and feels super polished. I played a few rounds (against myself :3) just to get a feel for things and it all is very well done.

[ChevyRay]

WINNITRON1000 Trailer!







The Winnitron 1000 arcade machine will be at BOOTH 1137, and Kyle Pulver and I will be presenting and playing our games with people at 1:30 on March 2nd!



EDIT: The schedule + details fully explained in this post.

[Greender]

That was fun, I had a quick match against my brother followed by an epic 4 minute match. I liked the leaves in the background a lot, and the characters are pretty cool. Nice work ChevyRay!

[tzachs]

Great graphics, great animations, great music, great atmosphere! (also great engine, but that's probably not related to this thread   ).

The gameplay was very simple, it was fun for what it was, but obviously this is not the kind of game you would play forever.
And also, apparently my hand-eye coordination is not as good as I would have imagined, my gf won every time, and even kicked my ass 5-0 in one of the matches...
For a minute I thought that maybe you had a bug and the 'Z' gets precedence over the 'M' or something like that, but then we switched and she still won.  

[Reiss]

For a minute I thought that maybe you had a bug and the 'Z' gets precedence over the 'M' or something like that, but then we switched and she still won. 

Haha aww. Great game though, Chevy! The graphics are adorable, and the soundtrack's pretty nice too. Wish I could make it to San Francisco and play it on the Winnitron...

[kavs]

Love the style, and the music is absolutely kickass. For those who didn't check it, the intro track actually is super lengthy; give it a listen fully through.

Chevy, I'd recommend not fading out the XXXms print as fast. Give it a bit more life at full opacity so you can see a bit more.

Also, it feels like there is a 'draw' mode for when players press on the same frame. Is that the case? If so, I'd love to see more feedback showing a draw. I got confused sometimes as to what exactly happened.

Also, I'd suggest making a secondary score mode. I'd prefer 'cumulative' for a game like this, as opposed to doing the streaks. Pigs make you go -1 regardless of your score (can go negative), but this would remove the small sense of 'neverendingness' I had with it. Other people's milage may vary.

Anyway, awesome effort! Great presentation, and sexy sprites by Paul.

[ChevyRay]

Sweet dude, great feedback! I totally agree about longer delay-time display, I didn't actually think anybody would care about that, I just added it as a fun extra feature, but it turns out to be quite popular. I had some game designers I showed it to tell me to remove the timing display haha but it's one of gamers' favorite features, so goes to show that you can't listen to all advice that comes through.

But yeah, I'll definitely think up a way to add some better feedback for draws, as they are really awesome when they happen and it'd make it more intense if there was a big DRAWWW!!1! splash thingy or something.

Peace! SO looking forward to showing off the game on the winnitron tomorrow, it got pimped out pretty hardcore at the IGS this year and now I'm excited to see people play the game

[RSD]

Really nice graphics, i enjoyed playing it!

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

Increpare, Terry Cavanagh, Sophie H and I tried this game for a while.

We enjoyed the mechanic and the graphics, but all came away feeling the characters were way too similar. Why are they both purple? It's very unclear who wins each point, and it would have been nice to see more depth in the form of disruption or humour.

Oh, and amazing music, it really adds to it.

[Fluff]

We played this the other day and were really impressed with the presentation. We thought it was probably the work of a professional flash developer. Some of the best visuals in the whole compo. Clear, straight-forward instructions. Simple, accessible gameplay. Excellent use of movement and animation and color on the screen elements. Music was also great!

A few thoughts:

We had some trouble distinguishing between the players. We got confused who was Z and who was M. Partly because...

The feedback didn't always make the duel result obvious. Did they win because they pressed the key after the X or because the X didn't appear and the other person pressed too early?

This was also true for the false positives. Even though the feedback was different (a pig appears in the duel results), it still wasn't completely clear to us who won and why. Perhaps the pig was not distinctive enough, or it all happened too fast? Maybe we would learn to recognize this pretty quickly after playing for a while. But as someone else mentioned, it's not the kind of game you play for very long.

The suggestion to fix this is pretty simple: just make each possible outcome have a distinctive and clear result. There are 3 combinations of inputs (Z is first, M is first, tie) at 3 different times (before an X, after an X, after an X-pig) making for 9 possible outcomes.

We didn't notice the timer. I think that's a great feature. It means you aren't just competing against someone else but also against yourself. There's a reason we didn't notice it, though. It's subtle! (Not necessarily a bad thing).

Excellent job, thanks for making it!