[WIP] Astro Cab

edited in Projects
I've been dicking around way too much in my life and now it's time for me to start making games - what I've always actually wanted to do.

Astro Cab is a project that I've been working on for a little over a month. It's basically the furthest I've ever got in developing my own game, and started as a project that I knew I could do entirely on my own as a means to learn Construct 2 - an awesome drag-and-drop game development application similar to Game Maker. It's inspired by Space Taxi and Ugh!.

It's still very much in development; I've just finished getting all the (very) basics done and I'm at a point now where I can generate new levels very quickly.

image

I aim to complete this game and launch on iOS, Android, PC, Mac and Linux, and maybe in-browser too if I can figure out a proper way to handle transcactions. At this stage, I think I'll attempt to sell it, probably for a dollar or two. Not necessarily to make money, but to make a game that people are willing to pay for. It's a small difference in some people's eyes, but it's one that matters to me.

Current build can be played in your browser here[1.8MB; Chrome or FF is recommended]. It includes most of the core systems: briefing screen, vehicle selection and upgrades, two stages and a score screen. All visuals are still very rough at this stage.

Very brief gameplay overview:
- Cursor keys to control your ship. Space to boost.
- Your goal is to pick up passengers indicated by the glowing green orbs, then drop them off at the red glowing orbs.
- You need to hover near the pickup/dropoff for two seconds to complete the teleportation process. Breaking teleportation resets it.
- Missing too many pickups or dropoffs during a level ends it.
- Try not to smash into things.

Input, feedback, bug reports - all are welcome!

Current update status
New version is up (same link): it contains a simple vehicle upgrade system as well as score tracking between stages. Saving and loading has also been implemented through WebStorage.

My next goal is to implement a more advanced upgrade system that will be in addition to this system (kind of like perks from Call of Duty, with "XP" that you have to pick up throughout the levels), then I'll make the next three levels to complete the first chapter.

After that it's improving the visuals and starting work on the user interface.
Thanked by 1edg3

Comments

  • edited
    Update!

    I've been tinkering with the visuals or, more accurately, working on an artistic direction for the game, and I think I've settled on one. It'll feature a retro sci-fi pulp magazine look: torn up, old, you know the sort.

    An example of some of my experiments (this is the Eden Project garden station from the second level):
    image

    I've also been working on the game mechanics, and I've now almost finished the scrap upgrade system. Basically, the player will find pieces of scrap that periodically appear during the levels. If they pick them up, they'll add to their scrap total. As your total scrap increases, you'll unlock access to bolt-on upgrades that act like perks, giving a variety of benefits to suit different playstyles and particular level challenges. You can only choose three at a time, and I think I'll have about 12 available in total. It's XP, really.

    That's about it for this update, which you can play here.

    Just one more thing to add with the upgrades and then I can start fleshing out a few more stages and creating more assets, working with this visual style as I go along.
  • Congrats on following your dreams and trying to make games! It's fantastic to see. Now for some constructive criticism:

    First some basic technical issues:

    - The first time I played I got stuck with no passengers to pick up.
    - There is no feedback about how much upgrades cost.
    - I couldn't go to level 3 (provided there is a level 3)

    Gameplay wise, I certainly thought the spaceship movement had potential to be fun. But, at the moment it just feels a little too clumsy. Perhaps increasing the braking force would sort this out.

    I think that just collecting and depositing passengers will get old very quickly, so you might need to introduce some new mechanics to force the player to make some meaningful decisions. Maybe something like adding a mini-map and more stations to force players to plan efficient routes. Or adding enemies to fight, or passengers that must be chased down, some thing like that. At the moment it feels very much like you just motor to a random green point, motor to the supplied red point and repeat. The only challenge is staying still enough to transport.

    My advice would be to stop worrying about the art style until you are sure the game is fun enough to make it worth putting the art effort into.

    All things being equal, this is certainly better than most "first game attempts" that I've seen.
  • edited
    Cheers @Squidcor, I appreciate the feedback.

    The no passengers issue has been resolved, and there's now a level 3. As for the upgrades you're quite right; that's a "on the list" thing. I'll make sure that it's in the next update because it's a quickie.

    The ship movement is something that I've been actively toying with, and I'm at a point now where I'm trying to find that fine balance between giving players early vehicles that are fun enough to use while still challenging without being frustrating. Obviously I want players to upgrade the stats of the vehicles as they progress, but I don't want the early vehicles to feel clumsy to control. It's definitely given me an appreciation for balancing these elements.

    Yes, you're definitely right: more stuff to do. There will be. I don't want to bring direct combat into play, but some ideas I have include: more stations (from level 3, actually); black holes that create gravity wells; planets that have gentle gravity pulls; moving obstacles in the levels; rival cab companies; simple bullet hell-style enemy attack dodging (alien/pirate invasion); manual docking with certain stations later in the game; emergency evacuations of passengers out of dying planets/stations; docking with small, moving ships; VIP or precious cargo pickups that cannot be bumped too much. I've got more planned (and some partially implemented), but I don't want to spoil the whole game :P

    I'll post an updated version this weekend with level 3 added and a change to the upgrades system, along with some updated visuals (I know, I know) that are what I think are pretty close to the final product. Personally, I think that art is often much overlooked in these sorts of one-man operations; I think it's something that can work in tandem with development and shouldn't necessarily be sidelined. It's certainly not taking precedence, though.
  • edited
    This might be a weird thing to say, and maybe this is the wrong place to say it, but I feel like the purpose of this thread is more as a game developer diary than a mechanism for developing better games.

    Which is fine I guess, if GeometriX is determined to make this game in the way he chooses and to someday sell it (as is his stated goal).

    But I feel like GeometriX is missing a lot of opportunities to improve his game design skills and to improve Astro Cab.

    @GeometriX Deciding to polish and sell a game before you've tested the gameplay is terrible practice. I know those are harsh words, but I think there's a lot of evidence to back that up. (like this... although this isn't exactly that deep an article http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ShellyWarmuth/20101213/6627/The_Importance_of_Rapid_Iterative_Prototyping.php but there is a ton of other articles that reiterate this message)

    I don't mean to be hostile or to imply you shouldn't be posting here. I don't know how to express these things and nudge you into what (I feel) is the right direction without saying that I think what you're doing is wrongheaded.

    The advice and critique @Squidcor gave is solid. Focus on getting the mechanics you have fun. You don't need a metagame and art yet.

    In fact if you add more metagame and art at this stage you'll only make it harder to test the core mechanics and get feedback on them. That feedback is crucial to gaining insight into how players are experiencing your game and making improvements. Also by adding more complexity to the game you will make it harder to change the things that already are in place, and at the same time you will invest more emotion in the existing elements yourself which in turn will make decision making more problematic.

    To be clear: I'm not saying this game can't be sold and there is no audience for it. But I think the movement of the ship isn't as interesting as it should be (both Space Taxi and Ugh! have better risk/reward dynamics built into the movement) and I think you should improve upon that before polishing further.

    (And before you integrate art it might be worthwhile mocking it up and getting feedback on it, just like everything else once it is integrated it is much harder to fix if there are problems).

    Also both Space Taxi and Ugh! give the player perfect information about the player's objectives (the limits of the screen are the limits of the game space) and so the status of those objectives is easy to track. In Astro Cab, as it stands, the green dots appear, but are identical to each other and so hard to track and also don't convey the implicit urgency that an impatient passenger does in Ugh! This makes decision making in Astro Cab seem arbitrary (as Squidcor pointed out).

    But although (as of writing this) there are problems with this game design, I think there is a deeper problem here in the development methodology Geometrix is employing. Geometrix should be focusing on prototyping a game instead of seeing the production and sale of the game as a foregone conclusion. Geometrix should find the fun before getting mired in polishing the game. And Geometrix should be be asking questions of the users of forums (here or somewhere) to make feedback easier to give and to maximise his chances of making something awesome.



    Thanked by 1GeometriX
  • I'm going to weigh in on the gameplay as well - I think the shuttling back and forth needs something else going on in order to really create tension for players.

    It's really easy to assume that taxi games are about passengers, because that's the largest goal we see as players when we glance at the gameplay, but passengers are actually just there to get players to be ok with re-sampling the same gamespace instead of having more levels. Take Crazy Taxi, for instance: That's very clearly a driving game, if you could simply bee-line straight to wherever your passenger wanted to go, it wouldn't be a difficult game at all; It's the driving elements that make it tricky, things like avoiding other cars because you've got such a limited driveable area, picking routes (again, road limits) and going offroad at specific points (road limitations yet again, but reversed this time to be about where other cars can't/wont go); Then you've also got all the car handling mechanics to deal with and the arcadey drifting/boosting are really polished and would be as fun in a karting game.

    Crazy Taxi is a driving game that uses passengers to make you be ok with driving the same routes over and over again. Ugh is a platformer that uses passengers to make you be ok with not moving on to different levels quite as fast.

    Space Taxi needs to explore the elements that could make its core movement gameplay more interesting: Space concerns and limitations on where players can safely go, things that get in the way and block player movement in ways that players can gain advantage out of, etc; Movement concerns that give players systems to master and use to their advantage. Crazy Taxi giving bonus money for risky maneovers is a great example of enticing players to do crazy stuff that could totally fuck with their run, but is worth the possible downside. What if your ship was a towing vessel that tractor-beamed other ships around the level and you could do neat stuff like "flick" a towed ship by letting go of the tractor beam at the right time during a turn? Then players could risk flicking a ship towards the ship's destination (because it would get there faster, so more money) but they might miss and have to go fetch it again. Or if the player ship had a boost function that was faster when not towing a ship, they could flick their fare forward, boos to catch up and flick them again with the whiplash as they tractored past.

    Fun moment-to-moment gameplay is never going to be a bad thing ;)
    Thanked by 1GeometriX
  • @BlackShipsFilltheSky thanks, you've given me some perspective here that I didn't have before. I guess I don't really know what this thread was originally intended as - a dev diary, maybe, but also to show early gameplay and get feedback on it, so I don't take anyone's criticisms as hostile and I appreciate your honesty. I need to learn not just how to make games that simply function as such, but how to become a games developer.

    I agree that I was missing any opportunities - maybe my initial approach put off anyone commenting sooner - but you've made valid points and now I'm all ears. I don't want my "I intend to sell this game" to come across the wrong way: I want to make a game that people are willing to pay money for because it's a good, fun game - not just to crank this out the gate and make moneez. I suppose I did take for granted that I could simply progress with development as it currently stands, pushing through to conclusion and attempt to sell the game, but looking at your criticisms there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the core gameplay mechanisms that I need to figure out.

    Which leads me to @dislekcia's feedback, which I think really highlights my game's core flaws.

    Looking at Astro Cab after reading what you said it's obvious now that right from the start the core gameplay is too whitebread. I intended for the early levels to be simple and ramp up difficulty by adding in layers of challenge (things to dodge, etc.) but that's boring and uninspired. I need to find something to add dimensionality to the core gameplay rather than plonking down stuff on top of it.

    Looking at your Crazy Taxi example, it was made challenging by the prospect of rushing past obstacles like buildings, other cars, pedestrians and so on. I think I need to add more traffic and stuff into the game world, and to cope with that I need to push the controls to be more responsive. That should be a start, at least. I'll have a good think about and prototype some other options. I suppose I shouldn't actually rule out combat altogether - maybe it's worth a bash.
  • Yay, good luck! :)

    I'd just be careful about trying to add more stuff (more obstacles, combat) to try and fix boring gameplay, as opposed to having an engaging foundation. It's hard to get that fun core (for me, anyway), but once you do, I think adding layers is pretty easy. :)
  • Tractor beamzzzzzz! :D

    Seriously, space is really a rad place to set something like this because you can do all sorts of strange physics stuff "for free" and not have to worry about people going "this isn't like my normal drive home".
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