[Sidescroller] - Moonrun
Hi all
This is the first game me and my cousin made, its a Javascript browser game.
Games that inspired us are, Paratrooper, Scorched Earth, Streetrod, Moon Patrol and Dope Wars
The gameplay is not straight forward so please read everything carefully during the tutorial.
We are very proud of the game. Please go and tri it.
1. moonrungame.com/demo
2. its FREE!
3. its a non mobile browser game unfortunately.
4. works best on chrome, or safari.
This is the first game me and my cousin made, its a Javascript browser game.
Games that inspired us are, Paratrooper, Scorched Earth, Streetrod, Moon Patrol and Dope Wars
The gameplay is not straight forward so please read everything carefully during the tutorial.
We are very proud of the game. Please go and tri it.
1. moonrungame.com/demo
2. its FREE!
3. its a non mobile browser game unfortunately.
4. works best on chrome, or safari.
Thanked by 1Merrik
Comments
I really like it! It's super juicy, lots of little details, the graphics are adorable, it looks and feels really good. Love the cat, love the juice :)
Some comments:
1. I feel like the game can benefit from less text-heavy tutorial. A lot of people can get turned off by it, so either introducing concepts in a more focussed manner, in smaller chunks, and juicing buttons up to be even easier to spot, and building a good flow buildup to more features, etc, can make the game easier to get into.
2. I have no idea why I can't buy all the ammo. If I was missing the guns to fire them, I didn't know that. Nor could I find where to buy the guns. In any case - no need to present the player with options they can't have, especially if there's no indication why they can't have it.
OK nevermind turns out I can buy ammo. I dunno why I couldn't earlier, maybe I put it on x20 and was buying something I couldn't afford. Maybe some indication of that would be good.
Though, feels like giving players more options to explore later instead of giving them all the options in one go will benefit the gameplay :)
3. Is it really necessary to put the power on each time you hit the main menu? It's kinda cool but it's also kinda irritating.
4. Menu buttons should be highlighted more - I know you want "that look", but players may forget the initial instructions or whatever, and may quit out of frustration. Make things easier rather than harder, it'll be better for players.
5. Feels like the in-game shot power indicator can be a bit better. If all you're wanting people to have is no power vs max power (kinda feels like it) then I guess it's fine, but if you'd like players to have finer power controls then a bar or something would be needed (like worms). The circle communicates nothing about how much power you put in.
6. Controls aren't obvious, though I figured out that right click is switch weapon, eventually. Can you carry more than two weapons at a time? Where are these weapons indicated? Can't tell... If you can only use two weapons, why not have left button and right button shoot the individual weapons, instead of switching?
7. The depth of gameplay really surprised me, I thought it was just gonna be a runner - The game might benefit from a deeper-sounding game... Or maybe a casual sounding name to draw in casual players while giving them a deeper experience *may* be a better way about it, not sure.
8. What're your plans for this? I can see this working on a mobile platform easily, with a bit of tweaking. Have a look at A Ride In the Mountains, has a similar mechanic.
Also, have you guys played Popcap's Heavy Weapon? The screenshot reminds me a lot of that game. Gods I played the hell out of that thing...
-edit- Hmm, I seem to be getting "Bufferloader, HXR error" popups and the game never loads :(
On topic, this is pretty nifty. I echo @Tuism's concerns about the intro tutorial. I feel like a lot of that stuff is pretty intuitive and doesn't really warrant as much explanation as you're giving it. Definitely do make the controls clear, of course.
I didn't immediately notice that I could charge my weapons to fire them further (I am playing muted, so if there's some sort of charge sound that would probably largely address the issue). Once I figured that out, I loved how the cursor would represent the charge state so I knew when I could release to fire.
Conversely, though, there was no way for me to tell what ammunition I had active while cycling through without glacing down to the UI. Could that maybe flash over the cursor as I'm switching? Or maybe offer some hotkey method of weapon selection (number keys?), so I can choose exactly what I want. Alternately, if you take @Tuism's idea a bit further, perhaps only offering two weapons at once would be a good option.
The scrap landing in the dirt in little puffs is great.
A tiny little touch, but I also liked how the wheels spun faster or slower depending on which direction I was moving.
I feel like your gun should be clamped to some reasonable angles. Being able to fire exactly horizontally or downwards feels weird and wrong.
Give all your 'main menu' items a mouse-over state so I know they're clickable. The text popping up when I hover over the mouse helps, but that would just take it one step further.
Pressing 'C' makes the game do really weird things.
Why is it ZX to move with mouse controls? One expects it to be WASD or arrow keys. I spent the first level not knowing I could even move.
I find it quite difficult to track my own projectiles. Make them bigger? Or flash? Or white? Or something?
Thanks for the feedback:
- the link worked when I tried it, sorry about that
- the tutorial was really hard to create since we didn't use any game engine products, will try to pay more attention to that in our next project.
- shot power and weapon cooldown is shown on the truck
- you can have as many weapons as you like, right click cycles through all of them
- current weapon icon and weapon ammo indicated on the bottom left, could be cool to flash it next to the cursor when changing though, good idea.
- the music is pretty big, I'm sure it loads if you're not on the page,
- that loading error is strange, very possible though, 95% of the game was hand written and full of bad coding practices, which also makes the mobile porting hard. :/
- pressing "c" goes to a zoomed in bullet view, initially for dev purposes, but left it in there for cause it looks cool, the camera follow the last fired bullet.
There is a boss at the end of the game. I'll twitter high five anyone who cares to beat him. :)
Thanks for playing
This really is a VERY cool game you've made. I love the menu touches and the randomly placed cat.
Some (hopefully constructive) criticism (in case you're going to develop the game further):
I had a bit of trouble starting it up, don't know if there's any way to improve that.
There appeared to be no free gun. I actually managed to use up all my ammo AND lose a level, which basically meant perma-death for me.
I wasn't too bothered by the extra tutorial texts. There weren't many screens to skip and the game was pretty self-explanatory (with some useful tool tips).
I think the player starts with too much ammo (you start with something like 100 scrap and 130 machine gun rounds I think). I think it would have been better to start the player with very little ammo on a small stage so as to teach them about buying ammo, and teach them to conserve ammo from really early on. As it stands it is very possible for a player to be trigger-happy on the first stage and not realize that ammo conservation is important (and therefore that player would want to start the whole game again, or possibly give up).
What I'm saying is that I assume giving the player all that extra ammo at the start is to balance the difficulty level for new players... But I think it'd be better to start on smaller levels and require players to learn to buy ammo sooner (so that they don't accidentally waste a lot of valuable ammo).
(Some backhanded praise) I'm usually not fond of games that force me to conserve ammo, but I think you've made it interesting here.
You basically hit the nail on the head with most of your comments.
The no-ammo perma-death is still a bit of a problem, not sure how to fix it, we thought a "SOS tweet" could give a player another 200 scrap or so... not sure about that. Maybe grey out the weapons more expensive weapons and unlock them as you go?
The ammo trading is also quite hard to teach people who just want to button bash their way trough the waves of enemies for high action 5 minute sessions.
Anyway, maybe we'll add some of these ideas in the future.
Thanks for the kind words.
SOS Tweet....... you can try it, but I wouldn't rely on social media things to make sure a game remains playable :)