MachineHell - 3D Arcade shooter is out!

[Yuriy O]

Hi. I would like to announce that we have released v1.0 of our 3D Arcade scrolling shooter, called MachineHell.

Story:

The world has been invaded by an alien race of machine warriors.
You are an elite soldier, controlling an advanced military hovercraft. The mission is simple, but tough -search and destroy all the alien Machines and reclaim Earth.

Screenshots: http://www.machinehell.com/screenshots.htm
Download: http://www.machinehell.com/MachineHellDemo.exe

Please let me know all your dislikes/likes as far as
1. Gameplay
2. Stability
3. Graphics
4. Overall

If you experience any glitches/crashes/bugs. Please report it with your config (OS, RAM, VIDEO) and how and when it happens/ed. The more specific information is, the more helpful it is for us.

Really appreciate all your feedback. TIA!

[oNyx]

The installer says it needs something like ~17mb... however after install you extract stuff and actually take about 36.5mb. If you run out of space during that process you end up with pretty odd results (http://people.freenet.de/ki_onyx/mh_notex.jpg).

It's of course fixable by uninstalling, making some room (or using another partition) and reinstalling. But your installer shouldn't lie in first place.

Website:

-Minimum system requirements are on the download page. That piece of info comes somewhat late there
-About page. "Nuclear Games" below the logo has tons of jagies. Email uses black font (on black background)
-Horizontal scrollbar for no reason in 800x600

Ok... the game ;)

The graphics look really good for the most part. Some animations look a bit strange. Eg those cannons... they rotate nicely but they don't adjust up/down. Rockets don't explode.

Mouse control is horrible right now (very jerky tilting), but it should be a one or two liner fix.

The landing sequence is somewhat broken... the ship is tilting to one side while flying straight to that spot. Hm. Landing by itself is odd... I mean why? Just fly straight out of the scene with a nice boost.

Only the first two levels are selectable... make that more visible somehow. (A green border is really to subtle)

Oh and a really bad one... I ran out of ammo... dodged some bullets until I was dead. Resurrected, but still no ammo... I died 2 or 3 times until I reached the next bunch of ammo thingies. The default primary weapon should have unlimited ammunition and whenever you run out of special stuff you should fall back to that. The way it is right now is just... frustrating.

No gamepad support... doh. I mean c'mon even a lot of freeware games have that ;)

The ship itself feels really big and it's hitzone is also really big (as big as the ship). It doesn't help that the enemies have rather fast bullets while your movement is pretty slow. No visiual feedback if you got hit.

["Maybe it's just me" block ahead]

I think it's worth to experiment a bit there with different settings (I hope you have em all in one place). Like... ramping up the movement by 50-100%, removing the forward/backward tilt, slow down enemy bullets (down to 50%) and let em shoot a bit more, speed up your own bullets by 100%, shrink the ship down to 33-50%... change the hitzone to the body of the ship (wings=no hit)... and for rebalancing it... increase the damage by a factor of 4 or 5. Be also sure to have some very cheap enemies which can only take one hit.

The "reasoning" behind that:
-scroll direction demands that + easier to dodge
-forward/backward tilting just looks odd - it's "unrealistic" (change the flames instead)
-enemies=bad
-player=good
-easier to dodge
-better feeling + easier to dodge
-giving decisions more weight
-giving the player the feeling that he has a powerful weapon

[Add salt were needed ;)]
---

Stability wise... no problems. Win98se/k7 500/128mb/gf2mx/dx9/opengl1.3

Alt+Tab also works.

---

Phew. Quite the list. Well, I just think it's not as good as it could be. I mean it has for sure lots of potential. Here and there some tweaks and fixes and it will really shine.

Uhm... and...
Zoom in=65
Zoom out=90
Camera left=88
Camera right=67

Those are disabled right? There is also an odd line with just "=16".

[Midnight Synergy]

Intro looks great, but couldn't get far into the game - portions of the background kept "disappearing" and wouldn't be cleared properly. I've attached two pics. Athlon 1 Gig, Win XP SP2, ATI 9200

[Yuriy O]

Thanks for giving it a try!


The installer says it needs something like ~17mb... however after install you extract stuff and actually take about 36.5mb. If you run out of space during that process you end up with pretty odd results (http://people.freenet.de/ki_onyx/mh_notex.jpg).
It's of course fixable by uninstalling, making some room (or using another partition) and reinstalling. But your installer shouldn't lie in first place.


You are right on this. It extracts graphics after, however installer judges the actual size of the packed files. We will work on correcting it. In your case I believe you extracted it somewhere with not enough room and some textures got cut off and would not display in the game.


-Minimum system requirements are on the download page. That piece of info comes somewhat late there
-About page. "Nuclear Games" below the logo has tons of jagies. Email uses black font (on black background)
-Horizontal scrollbar for no reason in 800x600

That's one of those things ;) I will take care of them. Later though, I will have the site redesigned by a pro. Min req, that's me. I just thought to squeeze them to the place where people actually get to the point of downloading the game.


Mouse control is horrible right now (very jerky tilting), but it should be a one or two liner fix.

Did you mean just tilting is jerky? I thought we did mouse control very well. Tell me more.


The landing sequence is somewhat broken... the ship is tilting to one side

A lil bit :)


Only the first two levels are selectable... make that more visible somehow. (A green border is really to subtle)

Yes, we are aware. Just now gotta figure out a better way.


Oh and a really bad one... I ran out of ammo... dodged some bullets until I was dead. Resurrected, but still no ammo... I died 2 or 3 times until I reached the next bunch of ammo thingies. The default primary weapon should have unlimited ammunition and whenever you run out of special stuff you should fall back to that. The way it is right now is just... frustrating.

Wow. You are the first one who ran out of ammo. To be considered.


The ship itself feels really big and it's hitzone is also really big (as big as the ship). It doesn't help that the enemies have rather fast bullets while your movement is pretty slow. No visiual feedback if you got hit.

Yes, there's such tendency.


-forward/backward tilting just looks odd - it's "unrealistic" (change the flames

I know that. I will tell you a secret. Long time ago it was a helicopter, that's why it's still tilting :)


Stability wise... no problems. Win98se/k7 500/128mb/gf2mx/dx9/opengl1.3

Hmm, was it swapping the disk any? Maybe that's why control seemed jerky to you? We discovered a little glitched on 98 with 128 megs before, but thought it's fixed.
---


Uhm... and...
Zoom in=65
Zoom out=90
Camera left=88
Camera right=67

Just one fixed cam view.

Again, thanks for your feedback!

[Yuriy O]

Intro looks great, but couldn't get far into the game - portions of the background kept "disappearing" and wouldn't be cleared properly. I've attached two pics. Athlon 1 Gig, Win XP SP2, ATI 9200

Thanks for taking time to check the game out. Wow. That's something really new. SP2... don't know if it could make a difference, but what version of directX are you running?

[arcadetown]

Played it and overall it very good. The graphics and gameplay are real solid. Like the simple mouse control. A few small things you might wish to look at.

Some flying enemy ships did not show a health meter, I looked and looked but could not see it.

When hit an enemy have them react as appropriate such as if shoot a robot have it bounce backwards a little.

Maybe have the enemies do more dynamic stuff. Liked how some robots came out from doorways. Once they are out maybe have them move around more instead of just standing still.

Was there only 2 levels in your demo? It seemed pretty short and probably want atleast 3 levels in a free trial version, probably not enough to get people hooked.

The powerups came pretty slowly. On first level I didn't get any powerups till about 2 minutes into it. Typically powerups are given pretty liberally as games like this are all about the powerup.

The triple spread shot powerup almost seemed like a powerdown as it spread my shot across a wide range so once in use it was very hard to destroy anything directly in front of me since only 1 shot goes straight forward. Perhaps have that powerup shot do a very narrow spread instead of wide spread?

[tolik]

I played it this morning and started to write comments. Unfortunately, my Opera crashed and I lost some of them.
I'll take another look.

I've spent a lot of development time this year on 2 SHMUPs so I guess I would be pretty objective with my comments.

The overall comment from all players here: MachineHell = "Raptor + Star Monkey".

1) There should be a "LAUNCH GAME" button in MachineHell Video Setup. Also, there's no mention that all of these are full screen modes.
2) Options aren't fully navigatable with Keyboard. Order Dialog screen is also not navigatable with it. Also, emphasize the header of keyboard controls in Options. Action/Key does look like any other key :)
3) Keyboard controls should have some modifier to be really in-sync with mouse speed. They are too slow. Caps-Lock to toggle it, some other key to activate it temporarily?
4) Enemy life indicators should be really lowered, as other people mentioned. They aren't visible until it's too late.
5) A lot of enemies start to shoot out-of-screen when you don't see them yet and you can't reach them with your bullets.
6) Tripple bullets seem to be MUCH worse than double bullets.
7) I've asked two hardcore SHMUP fans to join me in my play and all of us were very disappointed in A-Bomb. It should drop forward, not underneath, just the same way as any other weapon. The explosion effect should be really different... I would expect it to be much more detonative cause it didn't even kill an army of robots. How about rebalancing it a bit. I don't know about later levels though.
8) When the enemy has a lot of health, rockets do not explode with particles upon reaching him. Check Star Monkey, every bullet has a lot of particles making the game look AWESOME.
9) Models are instantly replaced by explosion particle when killed. A bit boring. If you would add more particles which I'm talking about in 8), it would look better. How about adding falling animations for other enemies?


+ 10) Your textures are high res. This is very cool. Your models look very fine. We've enjoyed the overall outlook in 1280x1024 32 bit. The game lacks more particles and animations compared to Star Monkey. If you would lift up your GFX a bit... Please check Star Monkey, we like your game very much and it has a lot of potential to reach it's level.
Also, the game has no slowdowns and it's engine is very neat. I was playing on P3-800 with 256Mb RAM, GF5MX and Win2k and on P4 2.4 with 1 gig of dual channel RAM with GF5700 on Win2k. Plays the same!
Terminator/SkyNet theme is very great.


And the last but not least.
Scores. SHMUPs favorite thing is SCORING. You should really put scores on screen and after the level completion add bonuses. Without scores, it's boring now.


PS.
Also, I haven't noticed any difference between Normal and Insane.
And another point - instead of struggling and shooting the big ships, it's feasible to touch them. You don't lose as much energy as you lose when struggling with them and getting damaged with blue energy.


Mouse controls are real good. Same as Raptor, it just works!

When considering comments from oNyx:


I think it's worth to experiment a bit there with different settings (I hope you have em all in one place). Like... ramping up the movement by 50-100%, removing the forward/backward tilt, slow down enemy bullets (down to 50%) and let em shoot a bit more, speed up your own bullets by 100%, shrink the ship down to 33-50%... change the hitzone to the body of the ship (wings=no hit)... and for rebalancing it... increase the damage by a factor of 4 or 5. Be also sure to have some very cheap enemies which can only take one hit.

Please take a look at Star Monkey first. He's pretty close to it ;)

[oNyx]

@Yuriy O

>Did you mean just tilting is jerky? I thought we did mouse control very well. Tell me more.

The used mouse is a Logitech MX300 (800dpi) plugged into USB (So the refresh rate is 125hz. PS/2 is usually 60, 100 or 200hz. Serial 40hz.)

>Long time ago it was a helicopter

Hehe. Hm... a heli would be a bit cooler imo.

>Hmm, was it swapping the disk any?

No swapping at all or framedrops. The game run very smooth. That clearly wasn't the reason for the jerky mouse input.

Ok. I just played again for investigating the mouse behaviour. Are you by any chance using a seperate thread for gathering the mouse inputs? I know this jerkyness... it happens when the main thread takes too much time and the input thread only gets sporadic bursts of cpu cylces.

The mouse is also faster than the keys. You should get full speed with the keys imo.

Music and sound are btw really nice, too.

@emuLynx

>Star Monkey

I know Star Monkey. It's technically done perfectly, but the gameplay is completely boring from my pov. I really like the genre and I also play lots of shoot'em ups... usually bullet hell (bullet curtain) one hit=death games.

[Escotia]

I had a problem when the game started....

Athlon XP 2500+
Win XP SP2
DX9
Radeon 9200 IGP

[princec]

Very mysterious. Felt like it was running at 60fps... yet screen updates only came at 10fps. Unplayable :(

3GHz HT Pentium
gig-o'-ram
GF4Go
XP

Cas :)

[Yuriy O]

Intro looks great, but couldn't get far into the game - portions of the background kept "disappearing" and wouldn't be cleared properly. I've attached two pics. Athlon 1 Gig, Win XP SP2, ATI 9200

I wanted to let everybody know that we have fixed that glitch with ATI video cards where the image gets messed up in the game. Please give it another try. Thanks!

[Yuriy O]

Ok. I just played again for investigating the mouse behaviour. Are you by any chance using a seperate thread for gathering the mouse inputs? I know this jerkyness... it happens when the main thread takes too much time and the input thread only gets sporadic bursts of cpu cylces.

Not, sure about technical side, but I can find out. What exactly was jerking, though? Was it the Hero model jerking by itself by chance? I noticed this glitch, but not sure where it comes from. Looks like when there's a bunch of other things loaded in background, like word etc.