Game Programming Challenge 3: Indirect Control

[Claxon]

Yes there are two other judges, but both rather busy (as am I) so I'm trying to get results from them soon, but it may be after the weekend. I think it's good to have both scores and feedback posted here, that way everyone can learn from each other's projects. I don't think e-mail is really necessary.

[Nilbmar]

Originally Posted by Gshonk

Haha, maybe I shouldn't have taken it out then But it isn't about who wins, the fact that you DID something is awesome. I can't even get myself to work on side projects half the time.

Nope, gameplay/control should be the first factor in that list...and my graphics suck, thats just how bad my gameplay is. Lol, "the game is masturbating." I'm still laughing at that.

I did do something else with the text-entry scheme that would have fit this challenge far better. When I get it further along I'll post a link in case anyones interested. (A platformer where your letters create the platform, still uses a jump command but I wasn't making it for this challenge.)

[Claxon]

One of the judges has just sent me his results. His name is Andrew and was a mobile games producer at one of the companies I previously worked at.

Placeholder Pawk 13/25

Originality 3/5
Certainly new concept which brings back memories of old text adventure games, but it's difficult to work out what is actually happening and how to get consistent results from the character. It is useful to remember than when you're introducing a new gaming style, you should give very clear instructions to the user on how to control the game andd what the goal is.

Audio 0/5
No audio that I could hear.

Playability 1/5
As I mentioned above I found it very difficult to figure out just what was happening as I entered text, or indeed how to produce recreatable results. Anything I did manage to do was typically by pure luck.

Stability 4/5
The game appeared quite stable, alhough I did have issues getting the initial instruction text window to close.

Performance 5/5
The speed of the game seemed fine on my netbook with no noticable peaking or slowdown.

[Claxon]

PewPew Lazor 13/25

Originality 3/5
A nice concept although I have seen other similar games in the wild. I managed to get to a state with 4 mirrors and the pattern seemed to be the same:- After destroying several targets a new mirror is added to the mix. However I found that the easiest way to play was to position the mirrors near the edge of the play area and sweep the area by rotating one mirror, which made it a bit easy. I don't know if later levels do this, but I'd suggest a variety of obsticles like fixed walls and prisms that refract a laser into two seperate ones etc.

Audio 0/5
No audio that I could hear.

Playability 4/5
I found this game pretty ennjoyable. It gave me that "just one more try" feeling, which is ideal for ay game. The controls were very inuitive and there was virtually no learning curve. I only wish there were more challenges as you progress

Stability 5/5
Stabiity seemed fine. I played for quite a while with no crash issues

Performance 1/5
Unfortunately the performance of this game was very poor. The framerate started quite low and got increasingly worse as more mirrors were added to the game, making accurate aiming with the mirrors quite time consuming. The good news is that there should be some easy optimisations that can be made to increase this back up to a good speed.

[Claxon]

Sketch Lemmings 15/25

Originality 2/5
I like the twist on the original lemmings game here. It's like a cross between lemmings and line-rider. The limited paint supply & time limit on lines is a good touch, but I would like to see a little something more than just drawing platforms for you lemmings.

Audio 2/5
The music did have a Lemmings feel to it, but could do with a little more variety and some sound effects.

Playability 3/5
There was a certain infuriating charm about this game. I soon decided that it would be almost impossible to complete the 2nd and 3rd levels with 100% success, but it didn't stop me from trying. It would be nice to see more levels, I think you could get some really interesting combinations with the right level designs.

Stability 5/5
Stability seemed fine to me, not much more to say really.

Performance 3/5
The performance was good, except (one my laptop) it would slow somewhat whilst drawing a line, and when the line disappeared. This didn't seem to be a problem on my more powerful pc, but there is room for optimisation.

[Nilbmar]

Considering I'm a composer that no audio was a pretty silly mistake. I had two iterations going, one that didn't have audio in case the user didn't have the XAudio2 component and I forgot to keep the audio version up to date.

I know its too late, but heres an older one with the audio.

http://www.box.net/shared/xqcuui1enx

Arrow left or right to change between two "chiptune" style songs.

I'd like some comment on the music from anyone interested.

-----

As for closing the instruction window, was that because..again, I didn't explain what to do, it was difficult to get the mouse focused on the ribbon or something else went wrong?

----

Btw, I didn't notice any issue with Pew Pew Lazor's performance and considering I'm on dialup thats pretty good.

[Claxon]

He said that the click sensitive area was not over the ribbon, but slightly below it. I think I know what the problem is though, he mentioned that he was playing the games on a netbook which typically have small screens (mine has a max resolution of 1024 x 600) and your game window's size is about 645 x 780, so the top of the window would be beyond the top of the screen. I just checked on my dev pc and if that happens the selection box will appear in the wrong place. It seems you'd need to adjust the box position relative to the window position.

I've not had any performance trouble with pew pew lazor either, but I've only tried it on a pc that's spec'd up for game development. I might have a look on my laptop tonight and see if I get the same effect.

[Protector one]

Originally Posted by Nilbmar

Btw, I didn't notice any issue with Pew Pew Lazor's performance and considering I'm on dialup thats pretty good.

I was a bit surprised about the performance comment as well! I knew it ran shit in the Wii's Opera Browser, but I had no problems on other machines I tested it on.

[Claxon]

I tried it on my own netbook last night and it started well but I did noticed some slowdown too. Particularly when there were a few explosions happening at the same time. I was using firefox, with a 1.6GHz processor and 2Gb of RAM, so not sure why it would slow to the rate that it did.

[Nilbmar]

This makes me curious, I didn't get far into the game cuz I pretty much suck at any game involving reflexes. That judge mentioned getting to four mirrors, did you get that far Claxon?