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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperPlaytestingHarvest: Massive Encounter (release imminent)
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jeb
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« on: August 10, 2007, 06:14:09 AM »

EDIT! Further down this tread you will see that we are currently running the second beta test! Get the game from http://www.oxeyegames.com/harvest/download-now/

EDIT 2! A release trailer is now available:



Hello!

It would be great to hear what the TIGSource crowd thinks about our real-time strategy game "Harvest: Massive Encounter". We have just recently released an open beta version of the game, which can be downloaded from here:

(Open beta has expired. New release will come "when it's done".)

The game borrows concepts from the tower defense genre, but adds a unique touch with its resource management system. All your buildings will require energy that is produced from solar plants, and the energy needs to be transported through an energy link network. The energy links can be redirected to make the system more effective, if a part of your base is "going dark".

Here's a screenshot of the game:



The objective of the game is to survive for as long as possible, and the plan is that the full version will have a detailed high-score system. The beta contains one game mode on one planet (map), but the full version will have several modes and maps. The purpose of the beta is mainly to receive feedback on the balance of this game mode, since it is the "normal" game mode on the "normal" map.

Anyway, read more about the game and its background story here: http://www.oxeyegames.com/harvest/

PS. The game will be released as shareware when it is finished.
« Last Edit: February 26, 2008, 02:36:39 PM by jeb » Logged

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« Reply #1 on: August 10, 2007, 07:27:13 AM »

Looks Nice, I'll download and test this.
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handCraftedRadio
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« Reply #2 on: August 10, 2007, 07:48:12 AM »

I could only make it to level 5. The game needs music very badly. I think the enemies should start comming in a lot sooner. It seemed like it took forever for the first enemies to come in and then it was just one or two guys and I already had a lot of towers built up. I like the graphics and effects a lot, keep working at it! Grin
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« Reply #3 on: August 10, 2007, 08:57:26 AM »

Ooo, I played this back when it was a entry in some contest Smiley.
Looks like you've come along way. Will write a grand post once I get to play it a little!
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« Reply #4 on: August 10, 2007, 09:34:22 AM »

Not bad!
Here are some preliminary comments... Mostly quick notes I wrote while playing the first 15 minutes...

The game is nice and has a good feel to it

You should add special icons to clearly show the player what are the units that attack and those who harvest. Since you already divided you units in groups, all you need to do is to make icons to show those groups to the player

I would make it clearer that when you cannot build a tower. I know you have a red outline in the unit bar but the warning should be focused in-game. Make a big red X appear ove rthe "ghost" building or make the ghost red or have a message written over it saying "cannot build"

Whenever you make a move that results negatively, like trying to build something when you don't have the money or placing somewhere it doesn't fit or anything else you can think of, play a sound effect and write it on screen.

When I select a unit I should be able to deselect it by right clicking since you're already using that control when building. Left-click selects, right-click deselects.

At first, I thought that the provider of energy would shoot their power to the nearest tower in need. For example, if you put focus on battle, the energy shooters (dunno their names yet) would concnetrate on feeding their energy to a tower that shoots something while in battle, which mean that harvesters would have less energy hence harvest less.

Example:
Let's say your feeder shoot 5 energy per sec
Your attacker need 10 energy to shoot normaly, 20 to be at full power.
Your harvester needs 5 energy to harvest normaly, 10 to be at full power
Below these energy, they attack/harvest at half speed. If no energy they become idle
Taking that you have a setup where a feeder is placed between an attacker and an harvester:
Using the attack priority, the feeder will shoot his energy to the attacker only when under an attack, putting the harvester idle and the tower at full power
Using a harvester tactic, the feeder will feed 3 energy to the attacker and 2 to the harvester, putting the attacker at low rate but still defends and the harvester would still be able to harvest at low rate

All in all, the player would have to manage where he places his feeders, attackers and harvesters while also switching form one priority to another. Anyway, it,s just a thought, perhaps the system is very good as it is, but my first reaction to the game was that I didn't understand why the feeder wouldn't give energy to the tower I was trying to build...

Speaking of which, I had a hard time reacting to an attack. An alien attacked me from the rear and i was trying to build a new attacking tower but couldn't because the feeder would still feed the harvesters. Almost cost me the game because of that silly saucer... Well, in a way it did cuz I started a new game Wink

What's the un-link supposed to do when selecting a tower?

Are you planning of having money bonuses for destroying alien ship? Like selling scrap metal or using it to build special units?

I would give a clear warning when enemies are aproaching. Perhaps add a radar functions on the main buildings that react when an enemy is closing in...

Perhaps it's in relation with the last point, but it felt like ages before I got to kill something. I even checked around the map to see if there were someone standing in a corner or something...

Speaking of which, our goal isn't very clear at first. Perhaps you could have an alien base arrive to tell us that there will be an enemy at some point of the game. Anything to tell us why to build. At my very first try, I figured no one would attack so I only made harvesters and feeders and only one attacker. Could be interesting to have enemy foot soldier moving toward our base.

Do you have plan of adding units to the player?

Enemies should have clearer attack. Perhaps you could select specific colors for the player attacks and enemy attacks so that whenever we see a color we know who is attacking who. For example, player shots could be blue and enemy shots red (classic scheme), but it could also be green and purple or black and white... Anything you can imagine as a matter a fact...

Perhaps a timer written somewhere could be nice to tell us how much time we've been playing but I'm not totally sure about the idea.

Is the threat level associated to us or to the enemy? If you want to tell us how much the enmy is threatning us, perhaps you should place the info closer to the mini-map instead of where you tell us our personal info such as how many cash we have.

Anyway, like I said, I'll try to play a bit more cuz I only tried it out for 15 minutes or so...

Good game in the way!
Later!
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jeb
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« Reply #5 on: August 10, 2007, 10:38:43 AM »

Wow! You can always count on Guert to give great feedback!

First off, some gameplay stuff: You have noticed that you can redirect the energy of energy links, right? That's the main way you will deal with "focusing" defenses. Linked towers work the same way (click on a tower, drag to another tower).

The reason why right-click doesn't select (or scroll the view, as some have suggested), is because if you want to redirect two links or towers with obstacles in the way (like a tower that you DONT want to link to), you can right-click on the target tower instead. Since we've received so many comments on the right mouse button, I suppose we have to make it a lil' bit more flexible.

Yes, the feedback on "failed" building placement must be a lot better. We actually recorded a "You don't have enough credits" sound effect, but it sounded too much like Starcraft Protoss, tehee... We won an award with this game ( http://www.sga.to ) and plan to use some of the money to buy actual voice actor recordings.

I'm not completely sure what you mean about the energy provider. Thewreck (one of the team members) suggested that the energy links never should send more energy to a target than it actually needs (such as a harvester that only needs one spark), but I haven't figured out how to keep track of that in the code...

No, we do not plan to have player units.

All enemies "attack" by colliding with buildings at the moment. None of them have ranged weapons. The threat level is actually a game timer... it will increase regardless of the player's actions (well, except if you count the game speed as a player action Smiley ).

And finally... about the player's objective: Yes, you are absolutely right. The main flaw with the game right now is that there is no story element in the game. You don't know what you should do and especially not WHY you should do it. We haven't decided exactly how we will fix this, but the discussion has been something like "a short introduction sequence before the player is allowed to begin".

Anyhow, thanks for all the comments!
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« Reply #6 on: August 10, 2007, 11:20:48 AM »

And it's always a pleasure! Wink

Well, I'm gonna think about my idea a bit more... And, as I mentionned, I didn't really play much, only took a couple of baby steps in the game. I'm going to play it again and we'll talk about this later on.

Congrats for the award! I don't think sound alone will save you for the warning. Sound is always a plus but sound can be turned off so you can't use this as your only vehicule for messages... The player has to see it. The best way is to sow it with a purty picture, write it down, play a sound and have someone say it. Now there's no way someone will not understand... Well, in theory, but there will always be an idiot somewhere... Wink

Later!
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« Reply #7 on: August 10, 2007, 11:49:06 AM »

Wonderful! I've been playing it for the last 2 hours! :D

The farthest I got was only level 20 though, using a star-pattern base where each of the five points consisted solely of turrets, linking together, ending the link on the outermost point. You should really overtly tell the player how to link things though, because until I read your last post I was like "Argh, how do I link turrets?".
The cockroaches (Waves 13, 14, and maybe 15) might be a tad difficult, but if feels good to finally overcome that hurdle with only 1 or 2 losses.
The way I did it, personally, was when the roaches got close to my star, I unlinked the turrets, quickly killing the poorly armored mothafuckers.
This brings me to my next suggestion. Have a seperate button for disconnecting just one link, so all the links AFTER that one stay in place. It's a godsend being able to one-click unlink an entire chain, but when you just want the one at the end shootin' at a nearby dude, it's a major hassle clicking about 15 times. Wink


Finally, I think the 50 credit missile turret could have a little more power, but it's probably got more use later on when there are more armored foes.
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« Reply #8 on: August 10, 2007, 04:54:17 PM »

2 more things: What does overloading really do on those narbular Energy Nodes? and: Unlink should have a hotkey. "U"?
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« Reply #9 on: August 10, 2007, 05:00:20 PM »

Thanks for the comments!

Overcharging will make the energy link to suck up 30 energy sparks and then detonate. It's kind of fun to play around with Smiley

Ah, yes... There are currently two ways to unlink. Either click on the energy link and drag to "empty space", or double-click on the energy link. When you double-click, it will also unlink all other energy links that it points to.
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« Reply #10 on: August 14, 2007, 01:55:43 AM »

Jeez, where the heck did the last hour of my life go? Shocked
You, sir, have a winner on your hands.
But the farthest I managed to get was lvl 15. I dunno, man, it seems a bit unfair, since like, once something gets taken out everything just falls apart. I mean, like, if a turret gets taken out, you have less means to defend the solar plant which, when taken out, leads to everything having less energy, which in turn leads to turrets not charging fast enough, so they get destroyed and...you see where I'm going? It's like an inevitable chain reaction. Just "keep them off as long as possible, 'cause once they touch something you're dead" is what it seemed like to me. And then those zippy-fast things started coming in and the turrets were still focused on the UFOs and I was all like "shoot the speedy-thangs, gall-durnit!" but by then it was too late (not that the laser-turrets heeded my command anyway) and it was just devastation all around.

Erm...Well, yeah, likes I saids, real fun game ye got there.
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« Reply #11 on: August 14, 2007, 04:56:20 AM »

Heh, yeah I see what you mean. Usually when my first line of defense begins to break down I fell like "aaah, crap, it's over", and I press the fast-forward button to see how long it takes. thewreck (another Oxeye member) on the other hand, sees it as a challenge and does everything he can to stop the tide, hehe.

We've received a lot of attention for the beta test, actually. We got posted at JayIsGames and now we've been added to SomethingAwful's forums too Shocked It's great! Smiley
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« Reply #12 on: August 14, 2007, 09:13:36 AM »

Hmmm, the player should be able to try to save himself after the firts line of defense. A good "tower defense" map allows the player to make mistakes and has special units that can delay the almost invetiable. Units that stop or slow the enemies or that can move around the game area or simply confuse the enemy is always a plus.

How about some towers that can move around to attack? Or some very high electric fences? Perhaps a force field generator that will give some shield ing to the tower making them stronger for a while? Warp towers that can send aliens away from the base once in a while? Instant kill towers? Missile barrages that can attack the first alien in sight massively but takes a long time to reload?

Anyway, I haven't had the time to replay the game. Talk to ya later!
Guert
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jeb
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« Reply #13 on: August 31, 2007, 03:29:49 PM »

I just wanted to make small notice that we have uploaded the Mac OS X version of Harvest. Direct download link: http://www.oxeyegames.com/files/Harvest.dmg

Cheers!
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jeb
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« Reply #14 on: October 01, 2007, 05:13:18 PM »

Project update:

The open beta test has now ended, thanks for all your help! We have submitted our game to IGF, hopefully the competition will not crush us too badly... Wish us luck Smiley

I've uploaded a new YouTube clip from an unrelease section of the game. It shows me playing the "rush" game mode on the winter "Poseidon" planet. The game mode is somewhat hectic, in case you wonder why I build my base so unplanned and erratic:




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« Reply #15 on: October 02, 2007, 07:56:36 PM »

Hehe, that certainly looks hectic. I like the trick with building more power lines onto the enemies just to blow them up.
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« Reply #16 on: December 11, 2007, 07:15:39 AM »


Ok, time for an update! We do not only make monocle creation guids or tools for settling disputes - sometimes we get to do some actual game development too! It's time for the second open beta test of Harvest: Massive Encounter!

In case you've missed out on the fun, a short description of Harvest would be "an arcade real-time strategy game", because it's a RTS in which you aim to beat your score by either being faster or surviving longer (depending on game mode). The open beta is a sneak-peek of this game, and allows you to play the "normal" game mode on Hephastus (one of three planets).

Get the open beta from here: http://www.oxeyegames.com/harvest/download-now/ (both Mac OS X and Windows versions are available, weighing at about 40 MB).

Read more about the game here: http://www.oxeyegames.com/harvest/

We are very close to release, so mainly we are looking for technical feedback (performance, crashes, weirdo-stuff), but we may still be able to implement some new suggestions if they're not too big. Please do speak up Smiley
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« Reply #17 on: December 12, 2007, 12:36:00 AM »

I played it for an hour or so tonight and really enjoyed it!  This is a fun, accessible, pretty, and exciting game.  Congratulations!  This is something to definitely be proud of.

I only have a couple of nitpicks.

One, I feel like RMB should deselect units, instead of having to hit ESC or that tiny button in the upper left.  YOu can already use it to cancel the current building cursor, so it felt like it would deselect buildings too.

Two, it was not immediately obvious to me how to upgrade the missile turrets.  On my first playthrough I did not even know I could select buildings!  Probably this is at least partially due to me being stupid.  But, there it is.

Three, the second time I played I felt like I was doing fairly well, and the battles were VERY exciting and fun.  However, after a while the REALLY major waves started to approach, and all of a sudden my power net seemed to sort of...just die.  I'm not sure if it was a graphical thing only, but I had a bunch of solar plants and there wasn't much change in the number of turrets or anything.  Is it possible that when enemies flood the screen its simply hiding some of the power net particles for performance reasons?  Regardless, that was kind of frustrating and distracting for me as the alien overlords crushed me beneath their pointy metallic pointers.

Four, The linking and unlinking is turrets is F'ING AWESOME.  However, I found it difficult to unlink and relink them in the configuration that I wanted with any reliability.  I would love to see this part of the interface made more clear or intuitive!

Finally, just wanted to reiterate that you guys have done a very nice job.  I do not enjoy tower defense games much, nor do I generally get a kick out of most RTS games, but Harvest is really inviting, and I had a blast playing it tonight!

Also, I am proud to say I took 918 of the bastards with me that time.  Take that, disgusting alien hordes!!

EDIT - A few addendums.  ONE!  The normal gameplay waves are balanced exceptionally well, mad respect.  TWO!  It occurs to me that perhaps my power net failed because ALL of my turrets were so busy?  I'm not sure.  Unit power consumption is a bit obfuscated so it is hard for me to grasp exactly what happened there.  THREE!  When you are running in windowed mode, the EXTREME viewing angle and distortion on the planets on the main menu is a bit disconcerting.  FOUR!  Awesome job guys Smiley

EDITING AGAIN - Overcharging the relays looks awesome but I didn't get a chance to try it yet...
« Last Edit: December 12, 2007, 12:49:05 AM by AdamAtomic » Logged

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« Reply #18 on: December 12, 2007, 12:57:53 AM »

Hope the Oxeyes don't mind me addressin' some of your points
Three, the second time I played I felt like I was doing fairly well, and the battles were VERY exciting and fun.  However, after a while the REALLY major waves started to approach, and all of a sudden my power net seemed to sort of...just die.  I'm not sure if it was a graphical thing only, but I had a bunch of solar plants and there wasn't much change in the number of turrets or anything.  Is it possible that when enemies flood the screen its simply hiding some of the power net particles for performance reasons?  Regardless, that was kind of frustrating and distracting for me as the alien overlords crushed me beneath their pointy metallic pointers.
That's because unused energy can be stored indefinitely, and it normally builds up, but once you're constantly using a lot of turrets, your stockpile gets depleted and you're making less energy then you're using, so there's a lot less energy in the network.

Four, The linking and unlinking is turrets is F'ING AWESOME.  However, I found it difficult to unlink and relink them in the configuration that I wanted with any reliability.  I would love to see this part of the interface made more clear or intuitive!
There are some hotkeys (one is z, the other I can't remember) which will quickly change your turret network.
Z will reroute a large network so instead of all guns (including B) leading to point A, you hit the Z key on B and they move to powering B up.
The other hotkey (x maybe?) makes it so all unlinked turrets within powering range of the selected turret link to it.

Also, right clicking on a selected turret will unlink it incase you didn't know, which is very useful.

Huzzah!
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« Reply #19 on: December 12, 2007, 01:02:20 AM »

Re AdamAtomic:

Haha, thanks!

Yes, you are right, when the aliens start to pick up in numbers, your energy starts to drain real quick. A lot of people have suggested some kind of "energy meter" to help you see how much energy you have/need. Suppose this would show "total amount" and "current trend" or something.

Yeah... I guess I have to make RMB deselect buildings. Originally the RMB was used to perform actions with buildings (such as redirecting energy over energy links), so I didn't want buildings to get deselected if you "mis-clicked". These days, however, it's much easier to redirect energy (simply click-drag over energy links) so I don't think anybody really uses the RMB to redirect... and thus it shouldn't cause any major problems for people.
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