play Bubble Struggle 2

[kreso]

I have almost finished the game I've been working on for past 3 years.
It is in beta phase - I'm just going to add sound and few minor bug fixes for final.
It's a free online game, sequel to my first game Bubble Trouble (aka Bubble Struggle).
I know this isn't a typical indie, download, 20$ game but the main reason I am posting here is because I have learned a lot from reading this forum and wanted to show you results

Bubble Struggle II: Rebubbled
www.rebubbled.com

Little bit of history:
I have spent a lot of time and money on this one (more than 3 years and 5k$ - all earned form the first game). All of the money went into 4 deals with different character artist. In the end, I wasn't satisfied with any of them, and to be honest I didn't know exactly what I was looking for but what they made wasn't it
So I dumped all of the stuff they made (and it was pretty nice stuff!) and got lynda.com tutorials for 3d max, learned animation and modeling and made my self a character. I know it isn't anything special but I like it more over the character other artist provided (detecting a little bit of narcissism here )
Also, when I started making the game flash MX (ver 6 ) was actual. Then came version 7 and some extended capabilities that I wanted to use and had to change a nice chunk of code. After working for some time with flash 7, it started to crash a lot and I figured out why - too much code inside one file. Luckily soon flash 8 was released and it worked with 1000's of lines of code without any problems. These are important events I wanted to bring out, of course there were a lot of small ones which I am sure every indie developer has. To make a long story short - I can't believe how much graphics I made, how many new stuff I learned and how much code I have written/changed/dropped because I decided it wasn't good enough or shouldn't go inside the final version.
This makes me believe that everything really is possible (if you are crazy enough, that is).

So, I hope you enjoy the game. I think it's pretty nice.

Feedback welcome!

And of course, some screen shots:

[MFS]

Hey, just played through your game a bit. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit (never played the original) and thought it had some clever ideas. It is a nice example of a very simple game mechanic that has many different ways to alter gameplay.

Well done. Your modeling skills aren't too bad either

The only thing that bothered me was the short delay once my character was hit -- he would pause before being knocked into the walls which felt/looked a bit odd. Overall, a good job. Some nice effects/other objects/graphics would also really help as well =)

Edit: Weapon carry over to the next level would be nice

[Tertsi]

Me and my friends have played Bubble Struggle a lot and it's an awesome game so I'll just have to give you feedback on this new one soon. Had to post this so I'd remember.

[Sharpfish]

From the shots it looks like Pang style gameplay? I enjoyed that on the Amiga.

[Tertsi]

I think the outlines on the bubbles should be removed.

The character could use more saturation or a different color. Better than before though.

The backgrounds look plain and well.. bad. (At least until level 18, I didn't get further on the first try). The old ones were much better.

As far as I've seen the gameplay is still the same except there are now some objects to interact with (ladders etc.) so I don't have much to comment here. They are good add-on though but the game still feels the same.

[kreso]

@ MFS
The short delay is so you can see that the bubble has hit you. In version before you would fly against the wall immediately but some of the players suggested that they would like to see where exactly bubble touched them so I put it like that.

@Sharpfish
Yup, I got the idea from Pang, SuperPang on arcade machine to be exact

@Tertsi
I put the outlines when I saw that bubbles were not visible on some backgrounds.
The backgrounds look bad? I was in a deal with an artist and after he stalled me for 3 months (he made 1 background of 30 agreed) I dumped him and made myself backgrounds. I know they are, well... not really good, but these are kind of backgrounds that fit inside the game if I want it finished before I die of old age
The gameplay is pretty much the same except there are different modes of play...


Thanks for the feedback!