Shroomsters
Hey all. A game I've been developing, Shroomsters, is approaching completion.
It has been described by one of my friends as what you'd experience if you played Mario on Acid. Its inspired by the old-school side-scrolling platform games of the early 90s.
http://www.lunarpulse.com/games.htm
In addition to a PC build and web build, I plan on releasing it on Android platforms for free, just to see how it does. People I've shown it to tend to like it, but also tend to have suggestions that to me just sound like feature creep (whereas I just want to finish it off already). Nevertheless, suggestions / observations are welcomed and appreciated :)
It has been described by one of my friends as what you'd experience if you played Mario on Acid. Its inspired by the old-school side-scrolling platform games of the early 90s.
http://www.lunarpulse.com/games.htm
In addition to a PC build and web build, I plan on releasing it on Android platforms for free, just to see how it does. People I've shown it to tend to like it, but also tend to have suggestions that to me just sound like feature creep (whereas I just want to finish it off already). Nevertheless, suggestions / observations are welcomed and appreciated :)
Comments
I like that you've got some different game modes, it keeps adds some nice variation.
The somersaults Shroomster does after jumping on a badie's head is a nice touch.
Though I do have some criticisms (I hope they're constructive). I know you are just trying to finish this off, so I'll try not suggest really time consuming adjustments:
1) I'm not a big fan of the music. It's quite loud as well. The sound effects are quite nice, but being drowned out.
2) The controls for going through the doors were quite unclear to me... it seemed like "W" worked the best, though it felt like I got through a door by pressing "UpArrow" once. The detection box for entering a door was very small so I kind of resorted to moving side to side mashing keys I thought might open it. If the detection box was a little bigger, and maybe the door sprite lit up when you were over it, I think you'd be able to avoid this frustration.
3) A lot of the enemies take the form of the Mario Bros turtle, jumping on their heads and then being able to send them flying in a direction by jumping again... I really liked this enemy in Mario, but in Mario it was a bit more interesting, the turtle would keep traveling until it felt down a hole or you stopped it. This allowed for some interesting almost pin-ball-like situations. I felt a bit disappointed when your turtle-like enemies disappeared after a short distance.
4) I felt the jumping on the enemies's heads was slightly less forgiving than I expected. The rest of the game is very forgiving... and there's tooltips constantly guiding you, so it feels like a game designed for players who aren't good at platform games, which is okay, but then I'd expect the goomba jumping to be easier (because it's more fun I think than just shooting everything). Though I understand platformers are more difficult on Android devices than PC.
5) You can just shoot everything. If there was one enemy that couldn't be shot and had to be jumped on that might make some emergent puzzles. Maybe that Man-O-War-With-A-Head-Trumpet enemy could retract its tentacles and stop for a moment whenever shot (to indicate it is invulnerable and requires jumping on).
Those are my thoughts! I hope it doesn't feel like a barrage of criticism. I look forward to more of your games!
[edit] Oh, welcome, by the way! :D Glad you joined!
So, uh, what are you planning to get out of Shroomsters? Because, to be honest, it doesn't seem to be the work of someone with as many years of game development experience as you have, that's why I'm curious as to what you're looking for from it: Game design experience/crits? Figuring out Unity? Graphical/musical crits?
What should we be giving you? :) Same thing happened to me and I went around mashing different keyboard keys to see if jump and attack were mirrored anywhere. They were: Z and X. Would have been a good idea to include that info in the how to play info.
Other points:
1. Why do you only seem to have one instance of a projectile available at a time? If you fire again, you reposition/refire the projectile that you've already sent out. Is that a purposeful thing? As an aside, I totally hated having my weapon switched away from the homing shot when I picked up something I didn't think was as good... Could weapons be picked up purposefully with "up" instead?
2. Why is there an up key that's different to jump? Surely an "interact" key would make more sense because it's less movement-related and less frequently used than jump?
3. Why are the shop menus mouse-driven? It's rad that you can play the whole game with the keyboard (and actually feels better that way, because the mouse doesn't give you anything position-wise, not even shooting direction, which I sorta expected) but forcing players to head on over to the mouse just for shops felt odd.
4. I had the same issue with doors as @BlackShipsFilltheSky did. Was never sure when they would activate, it almost seemed like I had to hold the up key for a while before a door "noticed".
What you need to bear in mind is that big AAA titles are huge, collaborative efforts with a lot of money behind them -- working on those, well, they're great that you get to be part of something big, but you're a cog in a massive machine. I'm now doing military and mining training simulations -- not that cool in terms of prestigue, but the money and technical challenges are good (I'm actually a game engine developer more than anything else).
But in my spare time, although I love movies, games, music enjoyable, I'm still too creative and so tend to mess around with other engines and technologies just for the love of being creative. I've made two games with Unity3D, the first was just a few day experiment with me learning the engine (Death Arena Survival Challenge), whereas Shroomsters was me basically going back to old-school vibes, doing some crazy 2D art, making the music in Fruityloops, and basically just having some fun.
Peeps who I work with are often surprised, because what I do professionally is high-tech 3D programming (look on my site to see, too much to explain), so it seems to them that something like a 2D platformer is somewhow "beneath me". But I think that's nonsense. I think its cool that there are a ton of guys out there, in SA, who are into game dev. At heart, we're of the same breed.
So really, this is just me throwing out some of the stuff I do for fun. I do appreciate the critiques. I probably won't act on it all (this is just a pet project for fun), but nice to be in contact with other guys in the country into the same stuff.
Hope to become active on the forums and chat to y'all soon.
Regarding the web thingy not working -- shite, sorry about that, only saw now. Upgraded it all to a new version of Unity recently, maybe that messed it up.
Regarding the doors, you basically press the up key... its old-school Wonderboy 3 controls (what I was playing via an old Sega Mastersystem emulator, one of my favourite games of all time from when I was 10 years old)... the instructions do explain it, but possibly a bit obscure :P
As for somebody not liking the music!!!!!!! Screw you! I love the music, I made it all myself! Haha, oh well. Each to their own I suppose.
if (typeof unityObject != "undefined") { var params = { disableContextMenu: true }; unityObject.embedUnity("unityPlayer", "WebPlayer.unity3d", 800, 600, params); }I knew that the up key opened doors, I just found that it didn't seem to work very well at doing so ;) I think Evan's talking about the same problem. Presumably that would translate to the phone implementation as well... Evan's idea to make the doors light up when hitting up would take you through them is neat :)
Silly me!!! Actually, just assumed it would work (prev Unity games worked same with both PC and web), but had to recently (about a week ago) port to new version of Unity (more work than expected) -- I never had internet connectivity on my PC at the time so never had latest version of Unity web player to test. Uploaded a bit later without proper testing. Sorry about that -- downloadable app should be better to play. Am generally all over the place and busy with a kazillion things at once so sometimes rush these things :/
My bad.
Appreciate the comments... I think that to improve that stuff, making it easier to jump on guys heads (just teaking a few vars), and also making them not disappear quite so quick would be good improvements. I actually agree with you completely... jumping on heads to get the somersault going is more fun than shooting, so it should be easier. I shall make it so! Thanks :)
Hope that answers some of the usual "why would you ever leave the games industry" questions :P
On casual players: I'm actually kinda surprised you'd go with a platformer for the kind of player you're talking about. Your game still has twitchy movement needs to dodge things and hit that wizard, plus the zoom ratio makes it harder for people to predict where enemies are going to come from, those are elements that I'd never associate with a more casual-style game. (Note that I don't think casual has to mean easy - I'm punting a friggin' roguelike at casual players over here) You could also include enemies that can't be jumped on, can't be shot and the like with better visual identification. If flashing red enemies hurt you when you jumped on them, players would quickly learn. If flashing blue enemies reflected shots, they'd figure that out too ;)
On DE: Daniel! That was the guy's name that worked on the Warhammer-style mod :D Truth be told, from what the mainstream devs I meet at GDC say compared to how much fun the indies are, there's no way in hell I'd enjoy working in the AAA industry. Leaving it is something I can totally understand ;)
^ This is probably the best video out there about conveying mechanics in a way that players enjoy... also Plants Vs Zombies devs did a gamasutra article on tutorials that I thought was great. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/165359/
I mean... I kind of presumed that the snakes might kill me if I stood on them. But I think the problem with this particular game is that a lot of the mechanics don't tie to a theme. I mean the enemies behave like Mario turtles, but don't actually look like Mario turtles. So players aren't necessarily going to expect that because something looks a certain way (like a snake) that it will bite you if they stand on it (because they don't expect the visual clues to mean anything).
Does that make sense?
I don't think there is anything you can do about this really. But it's maybe something to consider for the next game! LOL! Sweet response dude! (you should hear the rubbish music I come up with)
Also, Jarred says hi!
Ah, you're one of the guys working with Jarred!? Cool, tell him I said hello back.
Yes, one of my work friends (also into game dev) says that its difficult to tell whether some of the background elements are simply that (background elements) or can be interacted with. I'll try think of something to help with that.
I eventually just decided to keep it as simple as possible -- at some point you'll figure out that you can jump on enemies heads, and it works like that for all of them (I actually explain it in the instructions on the phone version, but for this version the how to play section had too much in it due to it using the mouse buttons -- something which people probably wouldn't figure out on their own).
Well, I find it tough to say what a casual game is, or who a casual gamer is. If I look at the people (family members, friends, girlfriend etc) who find modern games too complex (require too much investment of time and effort), those same people played video games as children (SNES, Sega Megadrive, those Nintendo rip-offs that were so common in SA etc), so they understand how those games work. For this particular game I was playing Wonderboy 3 on an emulator (old Sega Mastersystem game) and my girlfriend commented how she remembered playing games like that as a kid and missed it. So that's what basically made me decide to do it. I'm hoping that twitch mechanics will not be that much of a problem, since they can still pick up and play them and understand that it works a bit like Sonic or Mario. Its also intended to be very forgiving and easy, the kind-of game that you just have fun with for a few minutes and automatically just finish without having to put in too much effort. I've decided to tweak the difficulty since I made this build (the wizard is a bitch to kill on the phone version, I gave him too much health).
1 - make the music quieter (drowns out other effects).
2 - make the monsters that have been jumped on roll further and not disappear so quickly.
3 - make it easier to jump on guys heads (have fewer situations where you try and fail)
4 - perhaps make some monsters 'non-shootable' so that you HAVE to jump on their heads (its more fun, I agree there)
5 - make the door detection box bigger with door lighting up so that the doors are easier to use
6 - make the web version actually work! (haha, 1 x fail, foolish Damien!)
7 - maaaaaybe make weapon pick-ups collectable by pressing up key instead of automatically grabbing them (unsure about this though)
8 - find some way of making weapon pick-ups stand out from background elements (and maybe make backdrop elements less visually intrusive)
9 - maybe use alternative tracks (I have quite a few actually, some unused -- the track for Ice Crags is TOO heavily inspired by a Golden Axe track which might not be good)
@BlackShipsFilltheSky
Regarding the music -- I'll lower the volume (you can also turn it off in the settings), but I'm curious... each of the four zones has a different track. Is there any one in particular that you don't like (or some that you hate less than others :P)? Haha!! I actually completely forgot that I had put those (Z and X) in there (I actually did most of the work on this in the space of a few weeks halfway through last year and then lost interest until a week or two back, so my memory is hazy).
Regarding the controls -- on the PC version I really didn't give it much thought, I just did what worked for me at the time for testing. So...
10 - think of better controls (using the mouse for jump and shoot doesn't reeeeally make that much sense).
Also, again @BlackShipsFilltheSky, the gamasutra article you linked to (related to PvZ) mentioned this: Did you feel that the message pop-ups were too frequent, that there was 'too much noise'? Upon reading this I had a suspicion that it might be the case, but I'm unsure.
11 - maybe make message pop-ups less frequent.
Thanks for your crits so far folks, much appreciated.
Anyhow, time to go to work for me. Later.