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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperPlaytesting8BitMMO - (combat & construction)
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Sim9
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« on: September 10, 2011, 03:58:03 PM »


Play here, no install required.

8BitMMO is a multiplayer game where you fight NPCs (and possibly players), and build in a persistent world.  It is still very early in development, but you can see the basic gameplay.

I am particularly looking for feedback on your first sixty seconds of play - I see a lot of players leave in the first minute or two, and I am wondering what scares them off.  I have many theories on this, but I won't post them as I don't want to bias your answers Wink  If you want to play for longer and give deeper feedback on what features/content/improvements you'd like to see next, I also welcome that.

Thanks in advance!
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PiJoKra
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« Reply #1 on: September 11, 2011, 03:15:49 AM »

The reason I stopped after playing 2 minutes, was that the game is very slow in loading objects, and that my computer was making weird sounds. Also, the fact that I have te press "E" before I could read the signs was anoying, because of that I didn't read that, and didn't understand what I had to do, what makes the game boring... Tongue
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« Reply #2 on: September 11, 2011, 10:37:46 AM »

I like the concept!

In the first minute or two, the things that hit me hardest were the low framerate and high ping (with a decent rig and broadband I was getting 8-20 FPS and around 200 ping.) I think because of this, the signs were really hard to read -- I had to position myself in front of a sign several times and hit E quite a bit before it registered and the sign's message appeared. Even after a dozen or so signs it was hard to tell if it wasn't registering because my position was off, or because of ping, or because the input never got through.

Other feedback from further into the game:

- The controls seem very random after playing both combat and building, and switching between the two quickly. The keys I'm using are kinda strewn about the keyboard, and switching between that and the mouse is rough. There was a situation where I was building and ran into a lawyercat, and couldn't navigate the UI quickly enough to keep from getting mauled. I bet you could condense all the controls such that the only keys you need on the keyboard are the movement keys.

- It's hard to distinguish height with the current tiles. Some shading or shadows would add a lot. It's hard to tell what's a floor and what's a wall at the moment.

- Definitely need more than 3 hp!

Good luck! I can see this potentially being a lot of fun once the choppiness is fixed.  Beer!
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Sim9
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« Reply #3 on: September 11, 2011, 09:13:53 PM »

PiJoKra:  Thanks for playing and for your feedback.  I am getting numerous reports of lag, and especially outside US, the lag can get really bad.  I will look into the latency issues.  I will have a think about signs, possibly I could just have them autodisplay when nearby, at least for the tutorial.  I know the 'E' detection also doesn't work very well, so that's also frustrating.

justinfic:  Glad you liked it!  Yeah, I am wrestling with some performance issues, both on rendering and on the network.  On the network, I am using TCP, which makes things easier, but sometimes quite slow compared to UDP.  I also suspect there's something slow going on internally, as even a localhost server gives me a ping of 40.  It's something I will look into and improve.

Signs definitely have an issue with being accurately detected, some worse than others (you may have noticed how all the 'official' signs are set evenly three tiles apart Wink).  It's a bug I plan to fix soon.

Controls - the intent was to have FPS style controls, so WASD for movement, and then buttons near it for other things.  Since you can also use arrow keys, you can end up using awkward controls.  There definitely needs to be a quick switch to sword button though (possibly a weapon/item slotting system like many online games have), as I agree it's super frustrating to have to run from mobs while also trying to equip a sword.

I agree height is very hard to distinguish -- there is a shadowing system, but it takes a while for shadows to generate.  I have not played on a single core machine yet, so it's quite possible that the shadowing code was fighting the main thread and causing poor performance (and not generating shadows quickly, either).  I am thinking about possibly having this done on the server side instead and downloading the shadow map.

Yes, plan is to level up your HP as you play through a skill system and/or finding hearts.  With a good ping, 3HP actually is plenty, but with a bad ping, 300HP wouldn't help you much Tongue  So, I'll be taking a look at network code.

Thanks for playing and your feedback.
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mcc
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« Reply #4 on: September 11, 2011, 10:19:07 PM »

Random thoughts-- I"m going to be honest but not necessarily polite Smiley

The first thing I saw when opening this was a reference to "wild lawyercats". This made me smile.

The login seemed unnecessary and antiquated. If I had run across this applet at random, instead of finding this thread and having the creator specifically ask for help, I probably would have walked away right there. I don't like signing up for accounts and I don't think most other people do, either. I think it is important to create a flow, when "login" is necessary, to kind of "trick" people into signing in, or at least make it as quick and seamless as possible. A few games I've seen like this dump you right in with a name like "guest98495", then give you the opportunity to create a nick afterward. Services like this I've set up, i've tried unifying the login/password box so that if you just enter an l/p that doesn't exist, it registers you instantly. If I were doing this I'd probably aim for a login flow like: bring the game world up immediately, so that the user can see something there enticing them to log in; ask them to enter a username; if the username is already registered, ask for a password; if the username is registered, start the game but toss up a box offering to let them register a persistent account with a password/email. This way people won't have the chance to go "I have to register? No thanks!", by the time they realize they have to enter a password they have already kind of emotionally committed a little by hitting return.

My first 15 seconds were pretty harsh. The game kept freezing up for seconds at a time and jerking (I am playing in Chrome on a Mac). I would go seconds at a time without response. For a pixel art game that is kind of crippling, I feel like NES-type games are all about fluid responsive play control.

The controls seem arbitrary. "e" and "i" aren't near each other. The sword doesn't seem to be picked by default, but at some point I picked by accident; arrow keys and spacebar are a sensible set of controls but by the first sign telling me "use 'e'" i wasn't thinking about the space bar...

I feel like the game could have made the controls more "obvious" or revealed them to you through gameplay instead of having you read all these signs. A game this simple doesn't really seem like it needs a multi-minute tutorial. On top of this, the signs (and there were a LOT of them) were unpleasant to interact with. I also ran into this problem where half the time when I walked up to a sign it wouldn't respond; meanwhile, it quickly started to seem weird I was spending all this time on signs but when I look at a sign I have to take my eye off my character and look at little text in the corner of the screen. This all made me impatient about treating the signs as a method of exploring. I wanted to just barge through doors and wander around, I didn't try looking at signs or trying to understand why some doors opened and some didn't. What if the signs triggered just by you walking near them instead of having to hit "e", what if they splatted text on screen as an overlay rather than going into the text box in the corner?

Once I got out of the tutorial area, I encountered more control problems. As I walked around, sometimes the game would stutter for a few seconds; sometimes the game would run at double-speed for a few seconds, and there was no apparent reason why. It was disorienting (again, especially for such a simple game). The erratic speeds and the nonresponsive world elements (like the signs) made me feel like I didn't have much control over the game world, when things like doors didn't respond I didn't feel sure whether it was an actual gameplay thing I just didn't understand (I did see the "red doorknobs" sign) or a bug. Similarly at one point I accidentally realized there was a building near the start space that I could climb on top of; I spent about 30 seconds crawling over the building trying to figure out if that was something that was supposed to be happening or a collision bug. Using the sword was similarly weird, if I walked as quickly as I could and tapped the sword button I would see the sword appearing, briefly... behind me, stabbing into my back. What?

The art style was a good start but I didn't feel like it was very attention-grabbing and it didn't seem to give things a lot of "definition", I didn't always feel immediately sure I knew what I was looking at. This was especially true of the "3D" elements (I.E. I had trouble telling the difference between things I could step "onto" and things that were just walls, like the mystery building). I liked the main character sprite more than anything else on the screen.

Once I got out of the "city" I killed my first lawyercat. It didn't seem to offer any challenge (except the challenge of getting the sword to hit where I meant, since I couldn't move and sword at the same time) and its death seemed confusing, it abruptly disappeared and a pile of gold appeared nearby but not where the lawyercat had been standing. At about this point I'm like, okay, I want to explore, and just jammed the "up" and "left " keys to see what happened if I just kept walking. As far as I could tell, the entire game world from there was a homogenous open plain with vaguely repeating grass patterns and groups of milling lawyercats. If I kept walking up and to the left, the lawyercats were no risk, since they ran slower than me and couldn't catch up to attack; I could have done that forever. There didn't seem to be much of an impetus to do anything in particular, there was no reason to explore because all areas were essentially the same and there was no clearly defined reward for killing lawyercats. Eventually, I came to a large square area that was just black-- totally black-- and when I walked inside the area, I was obscured by the black. Because this was the one unique thing I'd seen so far (and seemed like a bug) I kind of played in and around this; it looked like a map tile that didn't load or something. I tried to take a screenshot, and as I did so this happened:

- The game froze for a second or two (like it does periodically)
- One frame was visible of a lawyercat standing near me
- The game froze for another second or two like that
- The game unfroze and I was dead

Though, it's possible this wasn't the game's fault and the mac screenshot function had frozen up the browser or something.

In short: I stopped playing it "after a minute" because the gameplay was nonresponsive and nothing seemed to be happening. You've got what seems like a good technical start and there are a lot of interesting directions you can take this, but there's not really anything like an engaging game there right now.

I'd suggest trying out Realm of the Mad God if you haven't already, it is a game somewhat similar to this one. For one thing they get a lot of things right, for another as your most immediate competition you should probably try to identify one thing your game can/will do better than ROTMG does so you've got a specific argument for playing this instead of ROTMG.

EDIT: Some screenshots

Weird building I could climb on for no obvious reason http://i.imgur.com/sAuby.png

Inky blackness of eternal night http://i.imgur.com/JguWk.png
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kamac
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« Reply #5 on: September 12, 2011, 07:12:23 AM »

Much objects act too slow (doors, signs). It's hard to interact with them.

Also, the server is too slow(or is it the code?). Hills must be showed somehow, instead of using the same tile grass. You can probably make them lighter, as they go up. Another thing is, that you've got no idea what to do. You're in there, and what... now? I know i can kill monsters and buy some items which is nice, but what's the point  Gomez?

But you are a good java programmer i presume  Grin
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Sim9
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« Reply #6 on: September 12, 2011, 07:16:50 PM »

mcc:  Thank you for your detailed feedback.

Excellent, yes, I need to do more of this humor Wink

That's a good point, and I like the idea of keeping the initial user funnel as wide as possible before deterring people away with registration.  I will have to see how hard username changing during a session is, but otherwise I like this a lot.

Unfortunately I don't have a mac to test against (although I have tested successfully on chrome in windows), but what kind of hardware specs do you have?  I am particularly wondering if my threading is unworkable on single core machines.  The art style is simple, but there is actually quite a lot going on in the background... but I'm finding out that in non-ideal conditions it can get pretty rough.

Odd that the sword wasn't auto selected for you - that should happen, but there must be a bug in the system somewhere.  And I realize now I don't ever actually call out spacebar in the instructions anywhere, oops!  Good point on the signage, it wouldn't be hard to have these autodisplay when you're near them, and I admit would be a lot easier for players.

In terms of speed, the road tiles do allow you to move at 2x speed, but this isn't explained anywhere so I can see how this would be disorienting.  On the sword issue, that would be due to high latency -- something lots of people are having issues with.

Art-wise, yeah, it can be impossible to tell walls/depth properly if shadowing is taking a long time to calculate.  Unfortunately, on some boxes I hear it takes a looooong time.  Otherwise, yeah, art is my weakest area, so it's something I'll be working on future and trying to improve on.

The black square is most likely you out-running the streaming, an effect of latency.  Later on, I'd like to have some procedural terrain and designer-built areas to make exploring rewarding, but currently it's just open space until someone builds there.  I suspect the lawyercat's death would make more sense if the netcode were more optimized, but an actual death animation would also help clear up the confusion, and be more satisfying

Thanks for the reference to Realm of the Mad God -- I will check it out. 

kamac:  Thanks for the feedback.  I agree it's challenging to interact with the doors and signs, and I'll try to make this easier.

Definitely some performance issues I will be trying to smooth out.  And yeah, there's no clearly defined player purpose as of yet.  I'll have a think about that and see if there isn't some goal that makes sense, or just better player guiding in the beginning.

Thanks Smiley
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mcc
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« Reply #7 on: September 12, 2011, 11:18:28 PM »

Unfortunately I don't have a mac to test against (although I have tested successfully on chrome in windows), but what kind of hardware specs do you have?  I am particularly wondering if my threading is unworkable on single core machines.  The art style is simple, but there is actually quite a lot going on in the background... but I'm finding out that in non-ideal conditions it can get pretty rough.
It's a fairly poor horsepower macbook with integrated graphics, but it is multicore.

Java apps often run slow in chrome for me though.
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« Reply #8 on: November 27, 2016, 07:20:57 PM »

Sometimes the game will just freeze while playing, (I can't move, but mouse and buttons still work). I am playing on a 2012 MacBook with 8 gigs of ram 100 gigs free and a intel 4000 graphics card.

Thanks
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