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[Saltallica]

About GORILLA TOWN

Hey there, a buddy and I have been working on a small artillery style game inspired by the old Qbasic Gorillas game for MS-DOS. We call it GORILLA TOWN. Set in an imaginary 1920s world full of robots, your character, a super genius gorilla named Victor, must escape a city when the robots revolt - by throwing exploding bananas and using various power ups. You are in control of setting the angle and velocity of your throws and when to best use your hard earned power ups. The game starts easy and increases in difficulty, and as you play you earn money to upgrade your abilities. Each level and round you encounter can be a little different each time, the cityscapes, wind, environment colors, and placement of you and you enemy can change, making for a game that requires fast reaction times and some strategy.

We have a gameplay trailer here:

And our marketing site here:

http://gorilla.town




And, more importantly, a place to download a beta for Windows here:

http://gorilla.town/beta.html


System Requirements:
OPERATING SYSTEM Windows 10 64 bit
PROCESSOR Intel Core i5 2.0Ghz
MEMORY 2 GB RAM
GPU Dedicated GPU with 1Gb VRAM or better:
AMD Radeon R9 / Nvidia GeForce 650
*sorry, integrated Intel graphics chips just won't do*
STORAGE   430MB available space


Requesting Feedback!

We have an open beta going on right now and are trying to get some feedback! We are trying to acquire beta testers by giving them a free copy of the game once we release it on Steam in April of this year - I figure if someone is going to spend their time, they should get something for it. I think that offer stands here as well. If anybody has a few minutes to download and try the beta and give us some feedback, it would help us out tremendously. We are novices at this and want to make the best of our little game.



Behind the scenes:

I've been a developer - mostly web - for around 20 years. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s I was also active in the modding community by releasing free texture packs under the name "Graphtallica". I've dabbled in a lot of things but never put it all together into one project. My friend, a business analyst by day, was becoming interested in learning some coding skills to help strengthen his communication skills with developers at work. We decided a good way to keep interest in programming was to write a small game. One of my favorite games when I was a kid was the Gorillas game that came with Qbasic, even more so because I could read the code and tweak with it and watch how it changed the game - it started a life long love of computer programming. So, we aimed to make a very simple clone of the game, and little by little it got out of hand

So we've been working on this off and on for nearly 4 years - learning how to write our own particle engine, timescaling game loop, procedural level construction, managing keyboard and gamepad input, and the dozens of other subsystems and features required for even a small game. Not to mention learning how to create 2d characters and animations using Spine, and custom sound effects and an original old time jazz soundtrack. The hardest part, and we won't ever do it again, is doing all this in Javascript without the aid of a game engine or framework - we slammed together a few graphics libraries (PIXI.js, Paper.js) and Howler.js for audio, and the rest is all home grown trial and error.

I'm glad I got to learn some fundamentals and get to know something in and out, but building an engine is different beast than building a game. The next time around I want to focus on compelling art style and fun, instead of fighting with the Chromium garbage collector and weird browser issues!

So far, we've only had a handful of friends and family try it, the most vocal of which have been kids aged 4-13. They don't hold back on what they think sucks, or also what the think is really neat. So, seeing kids get excited about what we're building kept us excited about the project and kept us going - the game as such is meant for ages ~5 and up, but doesn't try to pander to children, it's something parents can share with their kids (I hope, as I have done with my 5 year old boy)

I would love to hear what you all have to say about it from a development angle as well as just as a gamer. Be critical, be harsh, I will try my best to take it 

Thanks!
Sean

[Jugusly]

o/

I been playing your game for 30 minutes and I want to say what i think about it.

Likes:

Music: I like the music it's good with the game idea and theme.

Art/visual: I really like it, you think you work hard in that place cause that’s why the game more got my interest, its corresponsive with what happen in the game, and that explosion effect was very great.

menus: just love it, fluid menus, simple, clean and very intuitive.

voice: wow bro, idk if you or your friend do that voice but was very cool, I really love that narrator, very good work with that and the sfx.

stage dynamic: I love when i hit the robot and the stage change, that’s great because the game will be so bored, good idea

dislike:

Control: arrows its good, but you didn’t use wasd for anything, the why don’t you set wasd control for the character aswell the arrows?

the shot have a variations when i throw, if is doing in propose y have to say that you need to control it more, because in that 30 minutes I can’t win the 3 battle, because when the robot start to attack whit 3 missiles i just can’t do any against he.

Maybe I didn’t get the mechanic good and that’s why I cant win that battle.

[Saltallica]

Hey Jugusly, thanks for taking the time to check it out!

My friend will be happy to hear about the music and voiceovers, it's not been heard by too many people and I know he's spent hours and hours working on them both!

I've spend a long time on the art and I should post some screenshots of the early work - it looks a ton better than what we started with!

And I've probabaly spent hours on the tweaking the explosion effects, I think that was my fourth or fifth revision at this point.

We realized at one point that, yes, the game would get boring without some sort of dynamic level changes, either by changing the wind, building heights, or player positions. Whereas the old qbasic gorillas game was one hit and you're dead, we chose to have a health system that makes for more varied action.

Control: That's a great idea. I'm old school and never really considered WASD, but it would be pretty straightforward to add. On a side note, I usually end up setting my FPS key bindings to one row to the right and use ESDF, which gives me an opportunity to map some other keys with quick access to my pinky and ring finger. I've been using that since the Quake 1 days before WASD became the standard :-)

The shot variations - ah yes, I suspect you are on the very first level of banana. I think we need to somehow adjust the graphics so each level of banana gets a different look. In this case, you start with an old, spotted, mushy banana, and as such, when you throw it, it's a bit of a wild pitch and will randomly change velocity and angle as it soars through the air. As you upgrade your banana with the UPGRADE-O-RAMA, you get a smoother and more predictable banana with more increased damage. Would you have any ideas on how to make that more clear?

It's also important, and nearly impossible to beat the later levels/rounds without acquiring powerups. You won't always have the reach or health or wind in your favor, so it becomes a game of strategy - when to blow up blimps for powerups and when is the best situation to use them. I'll have to figure out how to make that more clear to users!


Thanks again for spending the time to test! PM me your email and I'll put you on our list to get a steam key on release :-)

[Saltallica]

We've made a slew of bug fixes and control improvements in this latest beta update.

• WASD keys have been added in addition to using arrow keys.
• Press either shift key, or the left trigger on your gamepad to flip the player in the other direction - this is useful if you or your enemy teleports to another building and you want to be able to throw things at them without having to do so behind your head.
• When using toss-o-vision on the easy peasy skill setting, the projected throw path and banana match exactly.
• Made the banana random trajectory changes predictable - this makes figuring out your next shot much less frustrating
• We redesigned the HUD to take up less space and removed some non-essentials.
• Got rid of on-screen controls since you really can't use them fast enough to play the game effectively, the game is designed to use keyboard & mouse or gamepad.
• A little helper message once you get to the third round that acquiring and using powerups is a very important part of the game and becomes a core mechanic to beating the levels.
• The robots throw different fruit, not just bananas: lemons, limes, apples, etc - whatever you can find in your local grocery store. Doesn't change any game mechanics, just makes things a bit sillier
• When buildings go up and down, they will stay in a safe zone so your gorilla or enemy robots don't go off screen or get obscured by foreground graphics
• Reduced the frequency of the voice over / radio announcer quips, and added 15 new soundbites to add more variability
• Made the first three levels a bit more exciting by adding B.O.X.M.A.N robots flying old World War One planes. They don't change the difficulty too much and make for enjoyable cannon fodder
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Fixed some hover interaction on the overview map - sometimes you could have multiple map markers highlighted that made it confusing as to which one was currently selected
• Modified the Nautilot (on the water levels) behavior so he doesn't throw underhanded and hit his own boat - this makes him a little more challenging as he sends more projectiles your way
• Modified the Streambot (on the moving train levels) so he throws overhand as well
• Made it so when the window loses focus or is minimized, the game will pause automatically

If anyone would like to try the beta with the new updates, just hit me up and I can send you a steam key!

And of course, links:

http://gorilla.town

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1217560/GORILLA_TOWN/

https://www.indiedb.com/games/gorilla-town

[Pekdata]

This looks awesome. I'd love to test it. Is the Steam version different from the one on your website?