[ANN] Steam Brigade released

[ryan thom]

Hello all. First off, I'd just like to say thanks to everyone here - you all make this place a great resource for indies. Much heartache and tears have been saved because you let others benefit from your experience.

Secondly, I'd like to announce that our company, Pedestrian Entertainment, is releasing our first product: "Steam Brigade (http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/steambrigade)". Originally intended to be a four month project, we ended up spending a year on it. We just couldn't put it down until it was done, and luckily we were able to keep ourselves fed and sheltered until it was. Anyway, we're pretty happy with the result, and I wanted to present it here for some peer review.

I'd love to hear any feedback or comments you may have. I'm specifically concerned about the difficulty level of the game, how easy or difficult it is to learn, and whether or not the demo offers enough to compel someone to buy it.

Download here (http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/download_steambrigade)

Some screenshots:
main menu (http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/images/10.jpg)
morning (http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/images/5.jpg)
afternoon (http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/images/4.jpg)
evening (http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/images/6.jpg)
night (http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/images/9.jpg)
story poem (http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/images/11.jpg)
back to the drawing board (http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/images/3.jpg)

System requirements:
-PC with Windows 2000 or Windows XP (98 and ME untested)
-1Ghz or faster processor
-OpenGL compatible video card with 32mB video ram or greater
-65mB free hard disk space

Thanks in advance for your input! :)

[whisperstorm]

Just tried it out - I has a very Iron Giant vibe to it. Quite fun! Seems very accessible to novice players - I immediately picked up on the fact that you can deploy soldiers by pressing the numbers above them without having to dig around in the help screens at all. Looks to be very addictive :)

[Arkadesh]

Screenshots look great, but it just crashes on my machine. It's old 1.6 Pentium IV with poor Geforce4MX card running on Win XP, but it should meet the specs.

cheers,
Arkadesh

[ryan thom]

You're right, it should. Hm. Is there any message given when it crashes or does it just not start?

[ryan thom]

Also, to wisperstorm: Thanks! And yes, our artist is a huge fan of Iron Giant. How can you not be, really?

Good to know you found it straight forward - I'm getting a mixed response on that so far. Different strokes for different folks I guess. Any suggestions on the tutorial messages (wording, order) would be helpful too - as developers we tend to assume a lot unfortunately. Anyway thanks for the feedback.

[Nexic]

Hey, I really really like this game. Not sure I would go all the way and buy it, but I definitely played for a fair bit of time and enjoyed myself in the process. It's pretty original :)

Though there are some points I think could be improved:

The tutorial section was a bit confusing as I had to click on each thing myself, I didn't really know which section to go for. Maybe you should put them all into one big level, or have the controlling your glider one start automatically? I also think the tutorials are a bit lacking, and don't really explain things very well.

I found it pretty cumbersome to pick up soldiers and move them places. I'm notsure exaclty how, but I think this needs to be improved somehow. I got to points where I needed to move a man quickly, but ended up spending 20 odd seconds just trying to pick him up. Which was quite frustrating. If that didn't happen then I think I would have enjoyed the game much more.

The font on the intro screens is quite hard to look at, and as a consquence put me off reading much of the text.

[Arkadesh]

Typical error messagebox about instruction at adress xxxx trying to access memory at location 0x00000004 and some other - something like 0xFFFFFFxx
Do you have some exe that outputs some debug logs? I could run it here.

cheers,
Arkadesh

[ryan thom]

Arkadesh: I'll see what I can rustle up. I may have a similar card around here somewhere. What version of video drivers are you running? Have you updated recently?

Nexic: As a sort of stop-gap measure, would it help to number the tutorial levels 1, 2, and 3?

By "lacking", do you mean not enough information in each message, or not enough messages, or both? We were afraid of annoying the user too much, but maybe it's just not enough info. Also, would it be helpful to explain more about the purpose behind the skills you're learning?

Yeah, the piloting takes a light touch - most people tend to over-correct or are too heavy on the gas at first. Not sure what to say on this one. I really like the way it flies right now. I've experimented with making the Airship more agile, but that tends to increase the over-correct problem, and making it less agile is somewhat frustrating. Maybe another tutorial message is appropriate, but I'm worried there's already too much to read...

...speaking of which, I agree about the font. :)

[Arkadesh]

Hardware manager says it's 5.6.7.3 and driver file version is 6.14.10.5673
I don't think they're the latest ones, I've reinstalled Windows recently, and that's probably what I got from Windows Update. Let me check if downloading latest drivers from nvidia site helps.
Latest news: new drivers solve the problem.

cheers,
Arkadesh

[ryan thom]

That's great news, Akradesh! My homework is to repro the problem here and get a dialog box to come up or something instead of just crashing. Many thanks for finding this!! :D

[ryan thom]

I spelled your name incorrectly, Arkadesh. My apologies, but I'm not allowed to edit my posts.

[Surrealix]

I love it!

I agree that's it's a bit of a pain trying to pick up your soldiers. I like the difficulty of everything, it ramps up pretty much exactly how I needed it to. I got through the tutorials ok, but again I'd agree that they could be filled in with a bit more information.

The sketches for the story and the menus look really cool too. There's a really nice overall feel to the game.

[sulaiman]

A very neat concept. The graphics are really nice as is the theme. I had little difficulty in picking up the main gameplay after a few minutes of play. The only real difficulty was the moving things around part.
Picking up people was really a chore. I think that anything that could ease this would help greatly and also make the game faster and more exciting.

The AI should be more aggresive in crushing you if they have the advantage. I got into a stalemate which seemed like it would last forever. The tutorial needs a tad more handholding and directions.

All and all I wonder if it could go into a C&C side-scrolling direction.

[Ryan Clark]

Hi Ryan! Your game looks great. And it's also nice to know that there's another indie gamer named Ryan here in Vancouver :)

In case you didn't know, we have Vancouver indie meet-ups (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=5739) now and then, if you're interested. We'll probably have another in April, after the IGF's over and things have settled down.

Anyway, your screens look great... I'm off to boot into Windows to give it a whirl.

[Ryan Clark]

Hm, unfortunately I get the following error:

The STEAMBRIGADE.EXE file is linked to missing export SHELL32.DLL:SHGetFolderPathA

I'm running Win98, which is probably the cause of this problem. I recall hearing issues with SHELL32.DLL on older machines, though mine isn't THAT old (1.7GHz).

[Nexic]

Yeah, the piloting takes a light touch - most people tend to over-correct or are too heavy on the gas at first. Not sure what to say on this one. I really like the way it flies right now. I've experimented with making the Airship more agile, but that tends to increase the over-correct problem, and making it less agile is somewhat frustrating.

Hmm I'm thinking that this could be fixed without changing the flying speed. For example greater vertical range, and maybe a little more horizontal of the magnet thingy would probably do it

[electronicStar]

Screenshots remind me of "steel empires" for the sega megadrive.
Will check out the demo and give myimpressions later:)

[ryan thom]

Hmm I'm thinking that this could be fixed without changing the flying speed. For example greater vertical range, and maybe a little more horizontal of the magnet thingy would probably do it

We experimented with that at one point, but found that often you'd pick up more troops than you wanted, making the ship too heavy. I'd consider lengthening the vertical but thinning the horizontal maybe... gonna think on it. Thanks btw, this is great feedback.

[ryan thom]

Hi Ryan! Your game looks great. And it's also nice to know that there's another indie gamer named Ryan here in Vancouver :)

GAH! There can be only one!! ;)

Yeah, I'm down with a meet. It'd be great to chew the fat with some local indies.

Re: Shell32.dll... boo-urns! Any advice? We've got a Win98 machine kicking around here we'll get running again - hopefully won't take long to get it working on that.

[ryan thom]

The AI should be more aggresive in crushing you if they have the advantage. I got into a stalemate which seemed like it would last forever.

Well, we don't want to make people cry during the demo, so we disabled some AI abilities for the early levels. Just wait till later - it's vicious with a Flack Truck.

The tutorial needs a tad more handholding and directions.

Ok, looks like there's a theme here. I'll get to work on that.

[Nexic]

The tutorial needs a tad more handholding and directions.

Yeh I really agree with that statement. I felt a little lost when playing the tutorials.

[Ryan Clark]

GAH! There can be only one!! ;)
So, we'll have to settle this highlander-style at the next meet-up? :)

Re: Shell32.dll... boo-urns! Any advice? We've got a Win98 machine kicking around here we'll get running again - hopefully won't take long to get it working on that.
Have a look at this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/shell/reference/functions/shgetfolderpath.asp

The "Remarks" section seems to explain it. I hope this helps!

[Pyabo]

Is it too late to change the name of your company?!? You do realize that "pedestrian" as an adjective means ordinary or dull... ?

pedestrian (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pedestrian)

Or are you going for the Hamumu-style humorous approach? "Coming soon: Mediocre games!"

[ryan thom]

Is it too late to change the name of your company?!? You do realize that "pedestrian" as an adjective means ordinary or dull... ?

Yep, we're aware of that. The notion was "Uncommon games by common people". But we haven't put that up anywhere, as we haven't decided on the precise wording. We're still working on our "mission statement" also. j/k

[ryan thom]

Regarding the magnet, I wonder if the fundamental problem is that people expect the sides of the magnet to be sticky. Was that your original notion?

Regardless, the thing we may do to try and help this is to make the bottom "sticky" surface of the magnet to be exactly the same width as the collision box of the the magnet itself (ie the same width as the sprite). The sticky surface was made thinner to reduce the number of occurances where the infantry or engineer sprite didn't line up with the magnet (the rifle or wrench sometimes didn't connect even though the geometry did). But, gameplay first. We'll give it a shot!

[ryan thom]

Ryan: Thanks for the link. We'll include this in the next build, hopefully this weekend.

[Ryan Clark]

Ryan: Thanks for the link. We'll include this in the next build, hopefully this weekend.
Great. Post again (or PM me) when it's ready and I'll test it out for you.

[Arthur[VD]]

Great game :)

[Jamie Cheng]

Hey another Vancouverite! Here's my 2c:

-- The art is beautiful. Congrats! As we know from our game, the right art really makes a huge difference, and I think you guys did a great job on making everything looks very polished.

-- I only played the demo so far, but the gameplay is fun. The UI was intuitive (though I thought I was supposed to use my mouse at first), and I enjoyed the general mechanic of picking things up and moving them around.

-- Having said that, the air-ship is quite sluggish to handle. I understand it's because you're applying a force so it takes time to decelerate / accelerate, but i found it really annoying to have to go alllll the way back to refill my air-ship because i accidentally got shot a few times. Perhaps tweaking the force a bit more, or making it so it's faster to stop than to accelerate, and increasing the top speed would help. IMHO, if the air-ship was much easier to handle, the game would suddenly also become much more fun and addictive.

-- Also, I feel like the magnet should be restricted to an acute angle, so I don't have the magnet ever facing the sky. That seems to only frustrate and slow down the pace of the game.

-- I'd love to try this multiplayer. I like the back-and-forth feel of the game.

Congrats on a great game! I hope it does well for you.

Cheers,
Jamie.

[ryan thom]

If possible, I could really use some more feedback on the font. Anyone else have difficulty reading it? Anyone really like it and think it should stay?

[ryan thom]

Hey thanks Jamie!

-We may try to work mouse input back in there.
-Multiplayer is *definitely* in the works!
-Good suggestion about the airship. I was quick to poo-poo any changes to the acceleration (sorry Nexic), but perhaps having "brakes" be more powerful than "gas" is the key. Will experiment...

[tolik]

This is an amazing game... I do remember seeing something similar as secret levels in Tyrian, however this one is so extensive and cool. High production values though. Difficulty is quite high from the beginning.

[ryan thom]

Ok, there's a new build up. You can find Steam Brigade 1.0.2 here: http://www.pedestrianentertainment.com/download_steambrigade

Ryan - it should now detect the OS and use a different method to determine the path to store the settings file if it's win98. I still don't have a win98 machine running, so no guarantees (definitely on "the big list").

Nexic, others - the tutorials have been redone to be more of a step-by-step instruction style. You guys were so right - this is much better already. Probably one or two holes in our logic, but definitely a step up.

Tolik - thanks!

Next come more flight control experiments and a graceful way of letting people know they should update their video drivers. The crash that would happen if OpenGL was not supported has been fixed, but now it runs VERY slowly in software mode instead, which is a pain.

Lastly, does anyone else have any comments on the font? Anyone really like it and think it should stay?

[Ryan Clark]

Ryan - it should now detect the OS and use a different method to determine the path to store the settings file if it's win98. I still don't have a win98 machine running, so no guarantees (definitely on "the big list").
Unfortunately, I get the same error as before. I suspect it doesn't like the fact that the missing DLL is even linked. It looks for it and doesn't find it.

I would suggest that you drop whatever non-Win98 method you're using, and use only the Win98 compatible method. It should work on 2k, XP, and 98 that way, right? If you've already got the workaround, I don't see the downside.

Good luck!

[ryan thom]

Working on mouse input at the moment... what would you guys think about a "click here to move here" and "click that unit to pick it up" sort of interface, rather than mapping mouse movements to thrust?

[arcadetown]

Users seem to like character moving towards where the mouse is positioned. Here iif mouse on left/right of screen it moves left/right, above/below character moves up/down. If mouse somewhere close to character stays still.

The other option would be like in Space Taxi 2 (http://www.arcadetown.com/spacetaxi2/game.asp) which wouldn't work in your game as would constantly need to pick up the mouse and drag it repeatedly left/right to scroll the screen (not fun).

Also, be sure to have your game auto-detect mouse or keyboard usage instead of asking them what type of control or burrying it in options screen.

[PoV]

Yeah, a nice abstracted mouse "go here, go there" system should really make the game more accessable. Magneting will probably introduce some oddities, short of making right click the ON/OFF button. It's a tricky one, but introducing "mouse something" should make a huge difference. Allowing a swapable button setup for Warcraft players and lefties might win some people over.

Going to a mouse control, I have to recommend thinking of or looking at Diablo. Not many gamers really realized how accessable the game was. It took seeing my mother play the game quite competently before I noticed.