[Prototype] Fireboats
As some of you may know we've been focusing on short jam games here at QCF for the last few weeks. In an effort to be more open about what we're working on and also get some of that sweet community feedback, we're going to try and post more builds here. So this is last week's prototype:
Fireboats - A local co-op game about high-speed boat drifting and extinguishing fires in a floating city.
The objective is to use the water spray from your jet powered boat to extinguish as many fires as you can before the timer runs out. Putting out fires will extend the timer, but allowing boats to sink will remove valuable seconds from it. That's pretty much all their is to it, press A to boost, but try not to crash into things too much.
Downloads:
Windows Build
OSX Build
Controls:
We highly recommend using a gamepad to play:
Left Analog - Steer
A - Boost/Revive
If you really must use the (frankly awful) keyboard controls:
Arrows - Steer (Player 1)
Space Boost/Revive (Player 1)
WASD - Steer (Player 2)
Left Control - Boost/Revive (Player 2)
Design questions:
We're really happy with how the controls turned out. The lack of friction combined with high turning speed allows for really fun drifting around obstacles and through gaps. The best moments are when you pull off sweet turns to narrowly avoid collisions. In an effort to to try and create those situations we went with a mechanic not dissimilar to Crazy Taxi. We were hoping that the urgency of having to reach fires would have players taking risks and slaloming through narrow gaps.
I personally don't feel like this worked out as well as we hoped it would. The excitement curve is not what I'd like it to be and those rewarding moments of skilful piloting are too few and far between. Perhaps these controls should be used with a racing mechanic or a combat mechanic instead?
So we'd love to hear any feedback you have, in particular here are some things we'd like to hear opinions on:
And of course any other bits of feedback or ideas are greatly appreciated, thanks folks!
Fireboats - A local co-op game about high-speed boat drifting and extinguishing fires in a floating city.
The objective is to use the water spray from your jet powered boat to extinguish as many fires as you can before the timer runs out. Putting out fires will extend the timer, but allowing boats to sink will remove valuable seconds from it. That's pretty much all their is to it, press A to boost, but try not to crash into things too much.
Downloads:
Windows Build
OSX Build
Controls:
We highly recommend using a gamepad to play:
Left Analog - Steer
A - Boost/Revive
If you really must use the (frankly awful) keyboard controls:
Arrows - Steer (Player 1)
Space Boost/Revive (Player 1)
WASD - Steer (Player 2)
Left Control - Boost/Revive (Player 2)
Design questions:
We're really happy with how the controls turned out. The lack of friction combined with high turning speed allows for really fun drifting around obstacles and through gaps. The best moments are when you pull off sweet turns to narrowly avoid collisions. In an effort to to try and create those situations we went with a mechanic not dissimilar to Crazy Taxi. We were hoping that the urgency of having to reach fires would have players taking risks and slaloming through narrow gaps.
I personally don't feel like this worked out as well as we hoped it would. The excitement curve is not what I'd like it to be and those rewarding moments of skilful piloting are too few and far between. Perhaps these controls should be used with a racing mechanic or a combat mechanic instead?
So we'd love to hear any feedback you have, in particular here are some things we'd like to hear opinions on:
- The timer mechanic. Did you feel like the timer mechanic increased the intensity of the game? Did you find yourself under pressure to zoom to the next fire? Do you think something else could have made better use of these controls?
- The extinguishing mechanic. Were you able to get the hang of putting out fires? Did you have any of those moments where you pull up to a fresh fire, flip around, and blast away extinguishing it one go? Or was it mostly frustration with fires that won't quite extinguish?
- The multi-player. If you played with a friend (or three), did you work together nicely and achieve some jolly cooperation? Did the camera force you to stick together? Did the co-op element add anything to the experience?
- How did your game end? In a frantic rush to reach the next fire? In an uncontrollable blaze due to an explosion? Or in a disappointing fizzle because you ran out of fuel and couldn't find a buoy?
- What was your funnest moment? Did you pull off something cool? Did something hilarious or unexpected happen?
- What did you think of the player select screen? Did you use it to get used to the controls and experiment with some of the mechanics? Or did you just jump right in and start the game?
And of course any other bits of feedback or ideas are greatly appreciated, thanks folks!
Thanked by 1Tuism
Comments
The art is lovely. I love the low-poly low-textured PS1 aesthetic. It's easy to read and the colours are vibrant. The huds detract a bit from the aesthetic.
Using a speedboat to solve situations is pretty badass. Putting out fires by travelling backwards is elegant. As a game where it's just about fighting fires in floating cities the fantasy feels a bit contrived (and the elegance of the speedboat propulsion is a bit undermined by the extra rule of floating houses... houseboats and other boats in a harbour wouldn't have required this), but I'd think it might come together if other speedboat interactions get implemented:
My Xbox (knockoff) controller didn't work. Definitely works fine in other games.
Played it by myself, got pretty frustrated trying (and failing) to put out the fires. It feels like you should be able to put out a fire by riding past and spraying water onto it, but often it was unreliable, leaving me circling the boat trying to put out each corner, often as other corners ignited, or zooming at the burning house and then rushing away only to have left the far half still on fire, or sidling up to it and then zooming away which sometimes got half the house. Some situations are literally impossible as far as I can tell (like when a burning house is next to some rocks and you can only approach it from one angle). The game often ended with me just plain unable to put out the first fire.
Played it with Richard an additional 5 fails. We managed to put out one fire consistently but never could put out a second. Rushing to the scene of the fire was definitely the fun part. He was "The Rock" and I was Egon Spengler from Ghostbusters.
It doesn't seem like the water particles actually put out the fire, but rather some kind of ray cast. It doesn't visually seem like I've sprayed the fires better when the fires go out. Obviously I don't know how the calculation is done, but the water spray didn't seem to be a reliable clue as to what would work.
It doesn't feel like being able to put out a fire is where you'd want to put your challenge.
Taking damage from collisions seems to be contrary to the fast racing around, and the granularity of the damage doesn't means the disabling blow is often a soft one. I do like that there is a teammate revive mechanic. It might be able to achieve that without blanket collision damage (like catching on fire, or having a concept of exceptional damage from explosions, or being disabled more often but regaining control easier).
The timer already achieves a penalty for collisions. Although I would have thought a penalty for houses actually sinking would have been more in line with the players' goals.
Ramps would be fun :)
I play tested on Linux using wine. Seems like I can only play the square arena battle scene? I didn't see the world view like the gif or how @BlackShipsFilltheSky described, so I will just give you feedback on the arena. The gameloop/timer didn't seem to be working for me either, so after my two burning houses eventually died there wasn't anything else to do. This is probably just a wine issue so I'll just comment on gamefeel instead.
I agree with what @BlackShipsFilltheSky said, its quite hard to judge how the water cannon hits the object, which makes it difficult to accurately putt out fires.
At the moment the square arena seems a little too small to boost in, which is confounded by the damage you take when hitting the sides. I pretty much never boosted in the arena, which was a little frustrating when boosting is so fun.
I would really like there to be some incentive for doing a drift move to putting out the fires. At the moment for me the best way of putting out fires is to speed directly toward the fire then just before colliding, turning and going back in the opposite direction (you can direct allot of water at one spot easily that way). The whole ping-pong movement that encourages seems way less satisfying in terms of gameplay.
Maybe you could generate a sideward-propogating wake/wave by drifting that adds to your backward spray? That could make the incentive to drift way more enticing. I am thinking of a side-ways wake like this:
I'm also a bit unsure about how/when you have enough speed to destroy the fuelling stations? Destroying them with too much speed felt a little arbitrary and really damaging. Maybe if you hit the fuel station with too much force it could just go upside-down for a little while and then rotate back up? Not sure if that makes it too easy though.
Secondly, my genuine X360 controller didn't work either. Sadness. :(
I restarted the game twice, and tried pressing a lot of things (while trying to understand the weird choice in level design and the disconnect between the screenshots and the game) before pressing enter in the circle. I assumed afterwards that I hadn't read the instructions (I had a similar experience in Sky Islands), because I don't read instructions, but I think now there wasn't any instruction.
Edit: More feedback.
I would really like to be able to push the houses away from each-other without loosing health. I find with two houses next to each other, getting one extinguished is fine, both is impossible really hard. If I could extinguish the one then push the other away from the burning one that could help
I would really like more reason to be boating around at high speeds, maybe having houses be extinguished more easily and having less obstacles between each spawn could help (turns out it depends on how the world spawns, sometimes I can cruise around pretty easily). Also If the camera could pan to favour the direction you are going that could help with visibility.
Thanks for the feedback everyone, if you tried it with a keyboard, I implore you to try it again with the now-actually-working gamepad controls.
Honestly, I do not like it.
1. The idea is not that appealing, even though the .gif and art looks promising.
2. The controls are jerky.
3. The water cannon at back, is counter intuitive when motion is forward.
I do like the theme and art,
would like to see rather another game like Worms done with same art and world, like a player vs player pirates battle.
Or (if you want to test this WIP still) add a front facing cannon and smoother controls, and add oil spills. Save the animal and human life... but keep it hectic and comical.
Ahaha. Spot the programmer art.
Extinguishing fires is certainly not where we were trying to put the challenge. I suspect the poor keyboard controls are largely to blame here, I kinda wish we'd not bothered with them. Or alternatively that I didn't upload a broken build :P
But I also wonder if there is a teaching problem too. Adding steam particles or some other type of feedback to let you know what works and what doesn't might alleviate this problem a bit. Once they've gotten the hang of it, a player should be able to easily extinguish an entire boat with a single well executed turn.
As you've quite rightly guessed, the damage mechanic was implemented as a way to add an element of risk to travelling at high speeds. The timer was added much later, and didn't work out as we'd hoped. Ideally, I'd like to find another mechanic that accentuates the dodging and see if the damage fits in that context. Perhaps racing?
That exists too, but it doesn't feel as meaningful as it could. I wonder if having a boat sink be a gameover state would be better?
Lies. There is no comparison :P
That's a thing we discussed, and it sounds like it could be really fun. Team games are a super interesting design space. We were also toying with idea of making it an asymmetric multiplayer game, where one player must run and leap between boats, starting fires for the other players to put out along the way.
Duly noted. Definitely requires more feedback.
Yep, that's typically the most efficient (and therefore currently most satisfying?) way to extinguish fires. The gamepad controls also allows you to do this in a much more flexible manner. That said, I like the idea giving the player more options in terms of how to extinguish things.
Cruising past the buoys for a (usually necessary) refill is supposed to be a high risk manoeuvre. That "oh crap!" moment when you accidentally clip one feels pretty fun to me. Does anyone else have any opinions on this?
Yep, I broke the instruction text at the last minute. >_<
The damage is relative to your speed, so it shouldn't be too damaging. But yeah, having a minimum threshold speed before you can take damage is probably a really good idea.
The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to just remove the damage entirely. Smashing a boat away from another one at high speed sounds pretty fun.
Yes! More speed and more dodging is definitely the direction I would go if we worked on this again.
That makes loads of sense for single-player. For multi-player we're kind of using the camera as a way to enforce cooperation. Leaving your partner becomes dangerous. Does anyone else have any opinions on this? Did it work at all?
That was on the list but didn't make it in before the end of the jam. Ideally we'd love to have various power-ups and abilities that you could collect and swap out (the HUD design hints at this a little).
Cool. That's totally valid feedback :)
Can you elaborate on this point a bit? Do you mean the turning? Did you play it with a keyboard or a gamepad? Yup. "Firing" backwards is not something we're used to in games. I think it makes for some neat gameplay though.
Fair enough. I think the art is one of the things that turned out best though :P
Thanks again for the comments and crit everybody, you are all awesome.
Not sure why my experiences with the controls are so different to @Squidcor's ... There's a chance I just suck at this... But I'm pretty decent at both GalakZ and Luftrausers. So my guess would be that this is adjusted to be developer hard. Assuming it's not a fault on my part, I think this is the kind of problem where the best feedback for Fireboats would be handing the controller to a random person and watching them play (like at a meetup or something).
And yes, we'll get it in front of people at the next meetup or salon.
When I turn it jumps to an 8 directional grid.
Firstly, I found the controls pretty simple to get the hang of. The boat certainly does feel "boaty" in an arcade way, and I can't say I had any issues with driving it when using an analogue stick. Actually steering the thing around was great fun.
I didn't feel the fuel mechanic was very well communicated, and although they're surrounded by sparkles, I didn't know what the refill bouys actually were until I spotted the tiny fuel icon at the top. Probably wise to flag those better, ESPECIALLY when the player is low on fuel.
I... didn't feel that the fire extinguishing element was terribly fun. Sure, the challenge of steering my boat so that the wake puts out the fires is cool is theory, but as has been raised it was difficult to know whether I was actually doing anything. Could be you need more visual feedback, could be that you need to reduce the extinguish threshold for wake exposure. It also got a bit old once I got the hang of it. I agree that the core conceit of "steer a boat and interact with stuff via a rear-mounted water cannon" could be better exploited for other puzzles, or to manuever/fill exploding water tanks (don't ask) to mass-extinguish fires? I just feel the game needs a bit more depth and immediacy.
Looks like you're already making changes and improvements though. I hope you post it soon! I'd be keen to see where you're taking this.