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[manabreak]

Heya!

I'm manabreak, and I've been working on an infinite driving game called "Pixel Highway". I would describe it as a mash-up of Road Fighter and Jetpack Joyride.  

Now, it has reached a point of stability where I'd be more than happy to see people try it out. Both PC and Android users are welcome! As I'm targeting Android, there's some slight differences of what kind of feedback I'm looking for from PC and Android testers. If you want to try it out on PC, it's more about the gameplay and experience, whereas Android testers should focus more on how the game plays on their devices. All devices and screen sizes are welcome, as I want to make it support as many devices as possible.

How you can test it

Android users should join the Google+ group. It's an invite-only group, but I'll let you in.  The reason for using the Google Play's beta testing features instead of directly sending the APK to you is that this way, I have more information available about crashes, ANR's, devices and so on. Also, you'll get your updates much more easily!

PC users can download a Java .jar from this link. The link will be updated as new beta versions are ready, so you can just follow the same link to get an update. The game window is fixed to 480x800 size, so you should have enough vertical resolution to fit the window on your screen.

What I'm looking for

General critique is the first thing. Tell me about the things you liked and didn't like, and especially why. To make the game better, I need to know why things do or do not work.

Pacing and balancing is the second thing. Is the game's difficulty good? Is it too hard in the beginning? Does it get too hard too fast? Is it too easy? Do the cars switch lanes too early or too late? Does the car spin for too long time? Do you get too little or too many coins when compared to the pricing of the items?

Ideas and suggestions is the third thing. Did you come up with something that's missing? Was there something in the game that should be removed altogether? Should I do X differently?

Android-specific stuff is the fourth thing. Did the game scale well? Was something too large or too small on the screen? Did you try it on a table or on a phone? Did the game slow down? Would you like to control the car by tilting the device? Everything device-specific is welcome!

Opinions about the monetization is the last thing. At the moment, it's going to be monetized with in-game purchases (buy in-game money with real money) and ads. The ads are shown only to people who haven't purchased anything with real money. After the first purchase, no matter how small or large amount, the ads are disabled forever.

I hope you participate and try it out! Everyone who tries it out and gives feedback will be mentioned in the credits section when the game is released.   Also, feel free to ask questions, I'm more than happy to answer them, be it about the stuff I use to make the game, about the ideas, anything!

[Quicksand-S]

Some screenshots and/or a video would be nice.

Anyway, I downloaded it but my antivirus said it "could be" a trojan or exploit of some sort, so I didn't end up playing it. Any idea what your code does that might've caused it to be flagged?

[manabreak]

Some screenshots and/or a video would be nice.

Anyway, I downloaded it but my antivirus said it "could be" a trojan or exploit of some sort, so I didn't end up playing it. Any idea what your code does that might've caused it to be flagged?

Sorry to hear that. I have no idea what could cause that... The only thing that I can think of is the saving and loading of high score data, but I don't think that should cause it. After all, it uses just the basic libgdx JSON classes to do that.  

EDIT:
The Jotti.org results show that AVG gives a false positive, all other scans show nothing. No idea what causes AVG to do that though.

[jc]

Just played the game. Seemed very simple and addicting. It made me want to keep trying to see how far I could get. My only issue was that I got a killer score and the game didn't save it.

General critique
What I liked: The art style was very colorful. It reminded me of Flappy Bird, lol. The controls seemed fluent (I played on PC with a keyboard btw). Easy to pick up and play.

What I didn't like: I don't know if it's just me, but the coin sprites seemed a little out of place. I don't know, they just looked too small or something. Minor nitpick.

Pacing and balancing
I didn't notice any difficulty curve at all. I don't know if I just didn't last long enough or what. When I first started, I kept crashing right at the start. But, once I got used to it, I could go on for quite a while.

Once you get hit by a car, it's pretty much game over. I don't know if that was intended. I only had one instance out of all my runs where I got hit by a car and managed to stay on the road.

Ideas and suggestions
Only thing I can think of is maybe make the score counter a little bigger. Maybe it's just because I was on PC, but the score counter was really tiny up in the corner. I didn't even notice it at first, and it also didn't show my score after I crashed. Come to think of it, is the goal of the game to see how far you can get or see how many coins you can collect?

Android-specific stuff
Didn't play on Android so I can't answer this one.  

Opinions about the monetization
What exactly is the in-game money for? Maybe it's just because I'm a cheapskate, but I probably wouldn't want to spend any extra money once I already have the game. That's just me though. I don't play many Android games so I dunno.

Also, there were a couple glitches here and there. Sometimes I would pick up invisible coins and sometimes it wouldn't count the coins properly.

[Quicksand-S]

Ok, so I gave it a try.

My biggest issue with it is how long it takes to restart (PC version). I shouldn't have to take my hand off the keyboard to click a few times with my mouse. I want to get back into the game. Being able to just hit the enter key a couple of times or something would be great.

The sound at the beginning is really irritating to me, for some reason. It sounds like the car is shifting gears, but it happens three times in quick succession.

I really like how the different cars behave differently. I was hoping for that. The game also handles very well. It's enjoyable just to drive the car. I actually recovered from crashes quite often. I did feel like blue cars tracked me a little too well, though. I could rarely avoid them, but I could survive collisions with them most of the time.

I agree with jc that it's unclear what the goal of the game is. Every time I die, it tells me I got a "New Record" but doesn't say what that record was.

The car placement seems very random. I would suggest creating some rules to make it a bit more calculated. That would also help introduce more of a difficulty curve. You could have fewer green cars the farther the player gets, for example.

I felt like the arrows should change size or something, so that the player can tell which cars are closer than others. Either that, or get rid of them. I generally felt like I had enough time to avoid things, so I didn't even look at the arrows most of the time.

As far as monetization, I'd play this on mobile with ads until I got bored and then never touch it again. I'd never pay for anything in it, and wouldn't play it on PC (except for testing purposes, obviously). The base game seems to need a lot more substance, in my opinion, and then maybe you could just charge a small amount for it rather than relying on ads or micro-transactions.

Bug: Some coins up ahead of me disappeared without me (or anything else) touching them.

Bug: Sometimes pressing Enter on the New Record screen adds a space to my name...and not even at the end. Seems weird.

Bug: I died and restarted but the screeching sound went on and on. Even quitting to the menu didn't stop it.

Bug: Sometimes cars seemed to spawn too close to the edge of the road. Blue ones would jitter when trying to move toward me, but wouldn't be able to. Other cars spawned in the very center of the road sometimes. I feel like the game might feel better if it had well-defined lanes.

Edit:

Just got curious about the json scores file. It looks like it might not be saving properly. If I'm reading it right, a couple of entries have my name as "Player class:com.dreamcatcher.getaway.ScoreData,name..." which blends into the next entry (ie. the quotation marks are missing, which screws up everything that comes after).

[manabreak]

Just played the game. Seemed very simple and addicting. It made me want to keep trying to see how far I could get. My only issue was that I got a killer score and the game didn't save it.

Thanks for playing the game! There's probably a bug in the high score code, I'll get right to it.

General critique
What I liked: The art style was very colorful. It reminded me of Flappy Bird, lol. The controls seemed fluent (I played on PC with a keyboard btw). Easy to pick up and play.

What I didn't like: I don't know if it's just me, but the coin sprites seemed a little out of place. I don't know, they just looked too small or something. Minor nitpick.

The coins are on their third revision and I agree, they still look a bit off. Programmer art and so on. 

Pacing and balancing
I didn't notice any difficulty curve at all. I don't know if I just didn't last long enough or what. When I first started, I kept crashing right at the start. But, once I got used to it, I could go on for quite a while.

Once you get hit by a car, it's pretty much game over. I don't know if that was intended. I only had one instance out of all my runs where I got hit by a car and managed to stay on the road.

Good to know you didn't notice any difficulty curve - there definitely should be one! The game gets faster and faster, and dodging the other cars should get more and more difficult. Probably the enemy cars should spawn more often when the game progresses..? It's intended that it's rather hard to manage the car after you get hit, there's going to be missions that force you to try and bump multiple cars during a single game. There will also be shop items that shorten the spin time and forgive hits. Idk if you checked the shop, but there's an item called "Steel Bumpers" which lets you hit one car without spinning. The bumper graphics are bugged at the moment, and so is the code, but it should give you the idea.

Ideas and suggestions
Only thing I can think of is maybe make the score counter a little bigger. Maybe it's just because I was on PC, but the score counter was really tiny up in the corner. I didn't even notice it at first, and it also didn't show my score after I crashed. Come to think of it, is the goal of the game to see how far you can get or see how many coins you can collect?

The end game graphic is WIP, it will show your distance and coins collected. The goal is pretty much to go as far as you can - the classic infinite runner goal. I'll try to figure something out with the score counter, while keeping it from overlapping with the road too much.

Opinions about the monetization
What exactly is the in-game money for? Maybe it's just because I'm a cheapskate, but I probably wouldn't want to spend any extra money once I already have the game. That's just me though. I don't play many Android games so I dunno.

Also, there were a couple glitches here and there. Sometimes I would pick up invisible coins and sometimes it wouldn't count the coins properly.

The in-game money is for buying items in the shop. Most of the shop items are already functional, although information shown about them is a bit scarce. There will be many more items available, some of which are purely cosmetic. You wouldn't spend any money on it - fair enough, I have never bought any in-game goods either. It does seem a viable business model, though, I know the guy who made Hill Climb Racing and he's driving a brand-new car and bought a house just for the company. 

Coin glitches are on my list already.

Thank for trying it out, I appreciate it!

[manabreak]

Ok, so I gave it a try.

My biggest issue with it is how long it takes to restart (PC version). I shouldn't have to take my hand off the keyboard to click a few times with my mouse. I want to get back into the game. Being able to just hit the enter key a couple of times or something would be great.

The sound at the beginning is really irritating to me, for some reason. It sounds like the car is shifting gears, but it happens three times in quick succession.

I really like how the different cars behave differently. I was hoping for that. The game also handles very well. It's enjoyable just to drive the car. I actually recovered from crashes quite often. I did feel like blue cars tracked me a little too well, though. I could rarely avoid them, but I could survive collisions with them most of the time.

I agree with jc that it's unclear what the goal of the game is. Every time I die, it tells me I got a "New Record" but doesn't say what that record was.

The car placement seems very random. I would suggest creating some rules to make it a bit more calculated. That would also help introduce more of a difficulty curve. You could have fewer green cars the farther the player gets, for example.

I felt like the arrows should change size or something, so that the player can tell which cars are closer than others. Either that, or get rid of them. I generally felt like I had enough time to avoid things, so I didn't even look at the arrows most of the time.

As far as monetization, I'd play this on mobile with ads until I got bored and then never touch it again. I'd never pay for anything in it, and wouldn't play it on PC (except for testing purposes, obviously). The base game seems to need a lot more substance, in my opinion, and then maybe you could just charge a small amount for it rather than relying on ads or micro-transactions.

Bug: Some coins up ahead of me disappeared without me (or anything else) touching them.

Bug? Pressing Enter on the New Record screen adds a space to my name...and not even at the end. Seems weird.

Bug: I died and restarted but the screeching sound went on and on. Even quitting to the menu didn't stop it.

First off, all the PC-related "features" and bugs are not on my focus - the restart thing is a lot faster on a mobile phone as you have your thumbs on the screen anyway.

Glad you liked the handling! The blue cars do track you, but an easy trick to avoid it is to change your direction right away when they start moving. Of course, an issue shouldn't be resolved by the dev giving away hints and such. :D

The "new record" is about the distance you managed to cover, the distances should appear in the high scores. The new record view is awfully laid out and is missing tons of information, so I agree it might be confusing.

The car placement and spawning is something I'm already looking into. I'm thinking of patterns, like four yellow cars spawning side by side, and like you said, decreasing the number of "easy" cars later on. The arrows do a little bounce when they appear, denoting the "order" of which arrow was first. It might be too subtle, though, or it might only work as a tracking mechanism for certain players. It's a more of a cognitive thing, really hard to say.

The thing with paid app is that it's really hard to lure new players in the first place. Trying it out becomes difficult, as you have to pay for it. I'd prefer going with the freemium plan for the sake of this.

Anyhoo, thanks for trying it out, giving your critique and reporting those bugs. I appreciate it!

[Quicksand-S]

Yeah, I figured out that trick for the blue cars after I wrote that, but I forgot to erase it. Oops.

I like the idea of car patterns, although there's something to be said for randomness too, so maybe a combination would be good.

As far as the arrows, maybe the range could be decreased. The way it is now, I might have five arrows at the top of the screen at a given time, and I have to remember which one showed up first. Since knowing what's coming up far in the distance isn't particularly helpful, maybe arrows should just pop up right before a car appears to give the player a really brief warning. Detection range could increase with the player's speed, so that the player always has enough time to react.

Yeah, you have a point about luring in new players. I guess releasing a demo for this sort of game wouldn't work too well either. Any idea what you'd be selling for real money?

[manabreak]

Yeah, I figured out that trick for the blue cars after I wrote that, but I forgot to erase it. Oops.

I like the idea of car patterns, although there's something to be said for randomness too, so maybe a combination would be good.

As far as the arrows, maybe the range could be decreased. The way it is now, I might have five arrows at the top of the screen at a given time, and I have to remember which one showed up first. Since knowing what's coming up far in the distance isn't particularly helpful, maybe arrows should just pop up right before a car appears to give the player a really brief warning. Detection range could increase with the player's speed, so that the player always has enough time to react.

Yeah, you have a point about luring in new players. I guess releasing a demo for this sort of game wouldn't work too well either. Any idea what you'd be selling for real money?

Good idea about the indicator range, I'll try to fiddle around with it.

I'm thinking of selling coin packs ($0.79 / 0.79€ for 10,000 coins would be the smallest pack, the more you buy, the cheaper it is) and possible some special cosmetic upgades, such as replacing the default car with a hippie mobile.

[ThisIsAvery]

Downloaded the PC version.

When I first started, I clicked, and that made my car do something (move to the right) so I died several times before I decided I wasn't actually supposed to use the mouse.

The look of the cars is great, the texture of the road as well.

It was very frustrating having the cars swerve into or away from me "randomly" at first. If I had downloaded it free I would have probably quit. After a bit I thought to myself, "that's so stupid, wait... a designer that bad wouldn't post a game here." So I stepped back and looked for differences, and only then did I notice the car-color tell. I would experiment with differently-shaped cars for the tell, or forcing several of the same color in a row at the start, or an infographic explicitly outlining it the first time you play and under a "help" button later. Players are stupid, like me.   Don't trust them to get your smart mechanics.

It's extremely frustrating to get chain-spun-out with no interaction between. Doesn't happen often but it seems like cars are most often spaced about one spin-out apart. I would maybe add more differentiation between car spacings, so on average they're much less likely to be the perfect distance apart vertically.

It's a little hard to tell whether you're going to hit the side or not when you try to squeeze by, and it feels a little cheap when you go for it, and then the game just suddenly stops (because you touched the rail). Maybe give some grace for the player driving themselves into the edge by making them scrape along the railing. They can still get owned if they touch a car.  However this might be feeling unfair solely because there's no death/failure effect yet.

It doesn't list my mileage or coins gained after a run. This should get a TON of love as it's the Flappy Bird element. Huge cheers/effects for new record, etc. Get those Tweet/Share buttons right up there.

I noticed a pack of coins just blink out of existence as I was moving through them.

Lastly I found the engine noise really annoying. You definitely want a sense of the speed increasing there, but I would definitely turn the sound effects off before dealing with that for a while.

Overall

Overall I found it more frustrating than rewarding. I think this is largely due to the difficulty of recognizing green vs. blue cars. I'm sure you're used to it by now, but it probably takes new players a relatively long time to train themselves up to the difference. Compare this to Flappy Bird or even Jetpack Joyride where the challenges are fairly intuitive. The training in Jetpack is more reflex-oriented, rather than the cognitive process of "wait does green go towards me or away, and is towards to the left or the right right now?"

I would playtest this a ton and eliminate the cognitive requirement through any means necessary, even adding giant arrows on the backs of the cars if I had to.

The "reward" factor is lower than it deserves to be, primarily because it hasn't had a "juiciness" pass yet. A huge amount of ground could be gained here with extra effects, tweening, and audio love. The better the reward factor, the less important any lingering frustration factor would be.

On the positive side, the design is totally solid. There's no reason it couldn't be quite addicting, with the proper amount of ironing.


EDIT:

Good idea about the indicator range, I'll try to fiddle around with it.

You could make the arrows increase in size the closer they are. Draw the larger ones below the smaller ones so you could still see them all. 5 arrows on screen at once is probably no good, though.

[manabreak]

Downloaded the PC version.

Thanks for trying it out, sorry that my answer is a bit delayed, I just moved into a new apartment and got the connection working 30 minutes ago.

I would experiment with differently-shaped cars for the tell, or forcing several of the same color in a row at the start, or an infographic explicitly outlining it the first time you play and under a "help" button later. Players are stupid, like me.   Don't trust them to get your smart mechanics.

This is something I've been thinking as well. One approach I've thought of is to make the first couple of tries start out quite slowly, and pause the game and show tips during the first play. For example, when the game starts, it would start driving, then show a tip to describe the controls. Then, yellow cars would start coming, and a tip would be shown that tells to avoid them. After a while, blue and green cars would appear as well, giving hints about them similarly. All tips would be shown, if not during the first play then during the next tries. Any thoughts?

It's extremely frustrating to get chain-spun-out with no interaction between. Doesn't happen often but it seems like cars are most often spaced about one spin-out apart. I would maybe add more differentiation between car spacings, so on average they're much less likely to be the perfect distance apart vertically.

Thanks for pointing this out, I'm planning on randomizing the spawn timer a bit to compensate for this and to make it a bit less predictable.

It's a little hard to tell whether you're going to hit the side or not when you try to squeeze by, and it feels a little cheap when you go for it, and then the game just suddenly stops (because you touched the rail). Maybe give some grace for the player driving themselves into the edge by making them scrape along the railing. They can still get owned if they touch a car.  However this might be feeling unfair solely because there's no death/failure effect yet.

You're absolutely right about this. There's no death effect yet, but it definitely would benefit from a small scrape time, depending on how hard you steer into the wall. If you just bluntly force the car there, it shouldn't give any scraping, though.

It doesn't list my mileage or coins gained after a run. This should get a TON of love as it's the Flappy Bird element. Huge cheers/effects for new record, etc. Get those Tweet/Share buttons right up there.

True, true. The UI is really, really work-in-progress. The replay factor is made up pretty much on the premises of the mileage and coins gained, as well as completing missions.

I noticed a pack of coins just blink out of existence as I was moving through them.

As others have pointed this out as well, it's a bug in the coin pool handling.

Lastly I found the engine noise really annoying. You definitely want a sense of the speed increasing there, but I would definitely turn the sound effects off before dealing with that for a while.

The sound is more of a placeholder than anything, I whipped it out pretty quickly trying to mimic the engine sound from Road Fighter. Will try to do better.

All in all, I agree with almost everything you said. Thanks so much for trying it out and sacrificing your time to write all of this. I really appreciate it a lot, and I will absolutely take a lot of things to consideration based on this. Thanks!

[Quicksand-S]

I just had a thought. Not sure what I think of it, but I felt like I may as well mention it.

If you want to make it clearer how cars are going to react, how about making them use their turn signals? That's something that would instantly be understood by many/most people. You could probably find a decent way to make it noticeable while keeping your pixel-art style (Dithered bloom?).

[manabreak]

I just had a thought. Not sure what I think of it, but I felt like I may as well mention it.

If you want to make it clearer how cars are going to react, how about making them use their turn signals? That's something that would instantly be understood by many/most people. You could probably find a decent way to make it noticeable while keeping your pixel-art style (Dithered bloom?).

Neat idea, but I really have to try it out first before I can tell whether or not it works. It's rather quick to prototype it, though.

[ThisIsAvery]

Thanks for trying it out, sorry that my answer is a bit delayed, I just moved into a new apartment and got the connection working 30 minutes ago.

Hey no sweat. Remember you don't "owe" people anything; it's your product!

One approach I've thought of is to make the first couple of tries start out quite slowly, and pause the game and show tips during the first play. For example, when the game starts, it would start driving, then show a tip to describe the controls. Then, yellow cars would start coming, and a tip would be shown that tells to avoid them. After a while, blue and green cars would appear as well, giving hints about them similarly. All tips would be shown, if not during the first play then during the next tries. Any thoughts?

This would help explain things a lot. You definitely need every player to get, "this car does this, this car does this." If they think it's random, they'll quit pretty quickly I think.

Make sure the player doesn't have to go through the tips stuff every game, though. Honestly, the blue/green concept is really straightforward, so you could probably just have a little graphic the first time they play and in a help menu, or just pop some text someplace.


I'd still also worry about how long it takes to train a new user, "green = towards, blue = away". Remember that you're super used to it by now, and possibly never were confused over green/blue because you implemented them both yourself. But new players will have a, "green, okay... was that towards or away" semi-conscious thought, which takes just that X-hundredths of a second longer than it takes you. They will have it for many or dozens of games even before it's ingrained enough that their reactions are up.

I think you should definitely explore tells that the brain could use subconsciously, like shape of car or turning indicator on a side, etc. Even something like, "young asshole hotrod vs. considerate elderly driver in a VW" might grip subconsciously, instead of relying on the conscious lookup "table" of color.

[Quicksand-S]

I really like ThisIsAvery's idea of using different types of drivers to represent driving styles. That could work really well.

[Willy Elektrix]

I joined the Google+ group to help test, but I'm a little confused. I'm not sure how to actually get the .apk file. I'm pretty new to Google+ and Google Play, so I apologize if this is a silly question.