Extreme Critism Wanted - Xeno II

[Nexic]

Xeno Assault II to almost complete and I could really do with some feedback. I am really very bad at critizing myself, and without a kick up the ass from a publisher I usually release things before they are really finished. So I invite you to kick me up the ass :) A lot of things don't work, but almost all are to do with the GUI side of things such as the online scores and the buy now stuff. Oh yeh that reminds me, I *really* could do with some help setting up score posting. I have tried several times but I think my knowlage of server scripting is just too little. (yes ive been trying to learn but i dont learn fast enough!) So if anyone could give me a tutorial, point me to one, or even better make the damn thing for me! It would really help, thanks :)

If you decide to give it a go here are the three main things Id like to know:

Did it run okay? Too Slow, Too fast? Did it even run at all?
What machine spec (graphic card is the most important)?
And why you thought the game sucked :P


Screenshothttp://www.jaggedbladesoft.com/IndieGameDev/XenoIIshot.jpg

Game (zip format, 7mb)
http://www.jaggedbladesoft.com/IndieGameDev/XenoIIAlphTest.zip

[lowemark]

Not Found
The requested URL /IndieGameDev/XenoAlphTest.zip was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

[Nexic]

Sorry:

http://www.jaggedbladesoft.com/IndieGameDev/XenoIIAlphTest.zip

[lowemark]

Yeah, that worked better :)
Downloading it now, will get back with comments after trying it out.

[luggage]

nice game!

Ran fine on my laptop, Athlon 2400, Radeon Mobility gfx card (not a great one) and 512 mb ram.

Needs a loading screen, the little window kicked into a full screen window but I was faced with a black screen for about 10 to 15 seconds before the splash screen.

It was a bit hard to begin with. It felt like it was taking too many shots on the first level to kill one enemy. It instantly felt like it was going to be hard work. I picked Normal level by the way. Maybe make the enemies easier to kill according to the difficulty level? (That may well be in there I haven't time to check at the moment)

The blue text on the panel on the right side was a bit hard to read. Maybe make them bevelled or a black outline around the text?

If I get chance I'll have another go and play it for longer, my testing for this is a bit on the light side!

Looks really nice though, good job!

[Nexic]

Thats very odd because there is a loading screen, at least on my computer anyway. Very odd.

[svero]

Ok but just remember.. you asked for this!

I find it's hard to tell what the bonuses will do. The images don't really give me a clue. There's text but it's way at the top of the screen and I have to look away from my ship to see it. Maybe you could move the text towards the bottom and make the icons more telling.

I don't care for the scoreboard graphic on the right side.

I'd like some kind of star map to track my progress through the game rather than just have it say level4,5,6,7... I donno if I'm achieving much.

I don't like the user interface in general. It's clumsy graphically ugly and hard to use. I think it needs to be redone.

The levels lack something. And I find this very hard to define. But when I play old classic arcade games like 1942, or xevious, or R-Type there's a certain definite-ness to the way the enemies attack me and how I take them out. In a lot of recent shooters including yours I find im just sort of moving left and right and shooting and there's not really a level of skill or recognition of the attack that I get in the old classics. This is a tweaking thing, and I guess I think your game could use more tweaking.

I think there's actually nothing particularly wrong with your game so It's a hard one to criticise constructively. Everything is good but everything lacks a little as well and its hard to say when enough polishing or tweaking is enough.

[Nexic]

Im not really sure how to act on your comments Svero but thanks. I do know what you mean about lacking a certain something. I guess ill have to think hard about it.

As far as the star map comment I am planning to put one in + I am going to add small cutscenes so you get a little bit of a story with it. I think that should solve that one.

[EpicBoy]

Nice game! I really had a good time and only have 10 minutes left to play in the demo. :)

The criticisms you asked for:

1. I find the little ships flying around in the background to be very distracting. I flinch at them all the time, thinking they're missiles or real ships or whatever.

2. The graphics on the side bar are WAY too busy. The text is hard to read as a result. I would simplify that greatly.

3. The rules behind getting power ups dropped and earning free lives wasn't clearly defined for me. I never really got a handle on it.

4. The asteroid stages were a bit much. I always lost a life during them and I eventually changed my strategy to just flying through them and just trying to stay alive.

5. Maybe have a warm up or "3 .. 2 .. 1" count down whenever I start a new life or stage. I find I'm thrown into the action immediately, even while the "Stage [Whatever]" text is still fresh on the screen.

6. You should maybe represent how many shield units I have left ON my ship somewhere. I found it very distracting to have to cast my glance to the right side of the screen to check up on my shield health.

All in all, I think it's a good shooter. You've obviously got some love for the genre and you have a great base to polish up here.

[EpicBoy]

Oh, and I know this is pretty much par for the genre, but it -sucks- to get killed at the higher stages. You're knocked back to your default gun and you just start losing lives hand over fist once that happens. It's a cascading problem that most games like this have.

Maybe just knock me back 2 power up levels or something when I die? These sorts of games, for me, are most fun when I'm powered up and kicking tons of alien ass. Once I die and go back to the pea shooter weapon, I tend to not really want to continue (but I do anyway in hopes of getting powered up again quickly).

Something to chew on, anyway...

[svero]

Im not really sure how to act on your comments Svero but thanks. I do know what you mean about lacking a certain something. I guess ill have to think hard about it.

As far as the star map comment I am planning to put one in + I am going to add small cutscenes so you get a little bit of a story with it. I think that should solve that one.

For the gameplay i recommend taking a close look at old shooters you really like and trying to define in solid terms what it is that makes them good. Like how in pacman eating dots slows pacman down. Subtle but important. Try to root the subtleties out of games you admire.

I'm not so sure i like the story idea. If you do add one Id keep it pretty simple. The game is, after all, a shooter.

[cliffski]

As far as the star map comment I am planning to put one in + I am going to add small cutscenes so you get a little bit of a story with it. I think that should solve that one.

Arggghhh. At least make any 'cutscenes' skippable. I'm downloading it now. I recommend playing Star Monkey by small rockets, its a superb (and fairly recent) example of this genre. Its one of only 2 games ive ever finished all the way through in the last 20 years.

[Nexic]

sevro: Thanks I'll give what you said a try. As for the story it isnt going to be a proper one, not much more than your commander telling you where the next lot of enemies are. Just gives the player a bit of a break and a small reward after a mission.

epicboy: Thanks for your comments. I am going to act on almost all of them, especially the last one about the loss of weapons etc.

If anyone can be bothered I'd like it very much if you could tell me how it shapes up to my main competitors, Alien Sky and Crusaders of Space. (apparently crusaders of space has a huge conversion rate but I personally dont like the game)

Alien Sky: http://www.kraisoft.com/aliensky/
Crusaders Of Space http://www.alawar.com/games/crusadersofspace/

[cliffski]

ok you asked for it ;)


Text on RHS totally illegible on my machine. not sure why? geForce 5600 SE

I had NO idea what was triggering the big blue laser thingy i thought it was the Right mosue button but nope, I dont know how to avoid triggering it

The little 'background' fleets of ships are REALLY annoying, I'd lose them. I* kept thinking I had to avoid them.

The startup logo screen is a waste of the customers time. skip it. let me start playing NOW.

When I switched to high detail the screen went black. at least show a 'loading' screen as you reload the surfaces ;) I was close to killing the game at this point.

The suggestions to buy the game start way too early. let me play the thing first ;)

The ending nag screen should be skippable. I know how to use alt+tab and task manager. It wouldnt be so bad if this screen was fantastic to look at, but its not.

There was no way for me to tell if my ship was damaged. if thats on the RHS then I'm too busy to look there. Much better to show this visually around my ship.

But generally it was pretty good fun. Better than most in its genre.

[RedKnight]

Another interesting shmup.
And I'm still late! as ever with mine :mad: .

from what I see from the screenshot.
I hope you have some nice scrolling background, maybe with moving objects, etc. dust/smog effect is also nice. :cool:

[Nexic]

Thanks CliffSki, Ill probably be acting on your advice too :)

[20thCenturyBoy]

My Spec : PIII 1GHz, Geforce 2 GTS, 512MB, DX9

The instruction text was way too dark, even with my brightness and contrast turned to max I couldn't read it. Ditto with the score panel in the game. The game plays nicely, smooth graphics, no glitches. But I found it slightly sterile I'm afraid. I think the overall tone is too dark for my tastes, and the scrolling background becomes boring quickly. A more varied background would do wonders although obviously a lot more graphical work. Like Cliffski I also couldn't work out what the blue lasers were :confused:

Svero has a point about the enemy movement. The old games were aesthetically pleasing because the enemies moved in sine waves for example, or other sorts of geometric shapes, rather than randomly jumping around.

Agree that the tiny background ships add nothing, they are rather distracting.

It felt odd to be stuck at the bottom of the screen. Does vertical movement happen later?

I think you have the general mechanics in place, it just needs to be finely tuned. Easier said than done of course. Good luck anyway :)

20thCB

[Nexic]

They only randomly jump about in a few levels, the rest of the time they follow geometric formations as you described... Are you sure you didnt play Xeno Assault 1 by accident ? :P

I am not sure why the screen was so dark, if you cannot see scores of the instructions with max brightness and contrast i think your graphics card is set to a very low gamma level.

As for the vertical movement this game is based around space invaders and other such early games where you are stuck at the bottom. Im trying to give at least a little bit of a retro feel.

This game really isnt meant to be a hardcore shoot em up, it is much more on the casual scale of things.

[Jynx]

Okay, well I played it and it ran fine on my machine: Athlon xp 1800, 256mb RAm and a Geforce mx 440. I saw a company logo during loading, followed by the title page which may also have covered some loading. But then there was an actual loading screen after that too, so that makes one too many into screens for my liking.

Looking at the instructions page I can read the text just fine, it might be a bit dark for people that don't have the monitor briteness quite high. It might be a good place to give details on each pickup?

Started playing on normal..

That powerful laser that goes off every few seconds: It seems to get charged on the right of the main screen over time whether I'm firing or not. Once charged, the bar goes yellow and then the next time I shoot it fires those 2 extra beams. My problem with it is, I can't tell when the bar is almost full so I just keep shooting and when it does get full it goes off straight away. It did look like it just went off by itself until I realised that.


I agree that the pickup graphics don't give me much information on what they do, except I understood the pause one pretty quickly (it slows all the baddies down). And they are all good for me anyway so I didn't mind that much. Perhaps by color coding them I would more quickly learn to recognise what the bonus would give me though. As for the text up the top that I think tells you what they are - it is too small and too far away for me to read it during the game. I only saw it by accident once at the end of the level.

Dropping of pickups seemed to be random. You could perhaps have a slow, non-aggressive ship that always has at least one bonus and that eventually escapes off the screen. Then I'd always be keeping an eye out for one of those and I'd be picking my targets more.

I think I picked up some ammunition for my right click gun. I tried using it while firing my normal gun and I couldn't tell if it was doing anything. Firing it with just the right click seemed to shoot something but I couldn't tell if it was very powerful or not.

I don't mind that the shield info is on the right - but that's because I didn't care how many shield points I had left until I only had 1. So, I would have liked a low health warning somewhere that I couldn't miss it. You could leave it on the right as long as it flashed bright red with an annoying noise when I'm almost dead.

The text names on the display to the right (like lives, score) were almost unreadable due to the background texture.

I liked the background, but also agree that some variety would have been nice to give a sense of progress.

The ships in the background were very distracting for a while. Once I realised that they weren't going to attack me or give me something good, I was disappointed that they also didn't seem to give any information about what was coming up next (I thought maybe they were moving up into position to attack me next).

I didn't think the ships moved randomly, I saw plenty of formation flying which was good. And I didn't care that I was restricted to the bottom of the screen, I used to play plenty of games like that.


I would have liked to have seen more variety in the size of enemy ships, but maybe I didn't play for long enough to see them.

Overall, I think the game was a decent shot at a 2d shooter with a lot of potential.

[kevryan]

I played a couple of days ago and it was a lot of fun. Reminded me of Galaga on super-steroids.

- text seemed slightly dark, but readable for me

- every so often a blue laser would shoot out - couldn't figure why or how it was being triggered

- was the right mouse button supposed to shoot a weapon?