Amju Super Golf v.1.1 released

[Jason Colman]

Hi everyone!
I'm very relieved to announce that Amju Super Golf v.1.1 is finally released! If anyone has the time to give it a whirl I would be very grateful for any feedback - as harsh as you like! You know I can take it!
My goal with this release is to market it a lot better than v.1.0, and to really ramp up the sales! Well, let's hope so!
Thanks!

[svero]

Well... OK. Harsh as I like :-) Let me get my red pen...

A list of problems

- Runs way to slowly on my pc. Its a high end pentium, 500+mb ram and an ati radeon card and yet it's dog slow. That's a problem because it probably means most of your target audience can't play the game.

- Very slow load time when starting the game with no progress bar or indication it's starting up. I nearly killed the process thinking it was crashed.

- Once I was in the game there was no tutorial to get me started. I clicked on the mouse and tried to aim and stuff but only managed to send one ball off the end. The animation for that was quite stuttery and hard to follow. Then I tried the keyboard. 1 arrow key rotated me in one direction and the up key brough me up into the sky and I didn't know how to get back a normal view. At that point I just gave up.

I think it might be fun. A nice little golf game with this style could be good if it would run well enough and have an easy interface and nice tutorial to lead players in. I think it still needs a lot of work before you can sell it.

[Mike Boeh]

Definitely a Radeon problem... It worked fine on my Geforce4, but slow on my Radeon 9800...

[GameStudioD]

I had no problem loading and playing the game on a P4 3 Ghz with Intel's Extreme Integrated Graphics (drivers have never been updated either). The graphics were smooth and no loading delays.

I really like this game. I am a fan of HotShots golf and I love platform games. I somehow managed to figure out how to pass the first course!

However, some things need to be worked on to allow players to enjoy this great game.

* Pressing up takes you high above the course. That camera movement is too static, it needs to be a smooth and natural rise above the course. You should have a 'reset' button to get back to the normal view.

* The interface for hitting the ball needs to be improved. Sometimes its hard to see where you are aiming because the character gets in the way of the view. I didnt like the text while I was putting, it just gets in the way.

* Possible bug: When I pull back the mouse for a full power hit, the mouse leaves the window. When I release the mouse button outside the window, the click isnt registered and I have to do it all over again.

* Its very hard to figure out what to do. A tutorial level is necessary. The moon things do stuff. I dont know what the hearts are for, am I supposed to collect them all. I smashed a house on the first course, I dont know if that was good or bad. If it was, I apologize to the occupants.

There is a great game here. Just some interface improvements need to be made to allow people to enjoy it.

Good Luck.

[Jason Colman]

Thanks for the feedback guys, I appreciate it as I know we are all trying to work on our own stuff!

That's really dismal news that I have a compatibility problem with Radeons. I am only using vanilla OpenGL 1.1 calls. Clearly, I don't have one of these cards. Does anyone have any advice for dealing with this kind of situation ?

As for the rest of the comments, thanks very much. I will try to address the usability problems you have raised.

[stan]

Tried it on an Athlon 850MHz, Radeon 9200 SE 128MB with updated drivers (probably not up to date though), Windows 98 se, 512MB ram.

It didn't take particularly long to load, but I saw briefly a "Couldn't load..." message just before the main menu appeared.

It would be nice if the buttons (or mouse pointer) changed when the pointer is over them, so that the user knows it's clickable.

It's playable, but really jerky.

I think a tutorial is needed, even though I could find how to play and rotate the camera quite quickly.

I would like to be able to rotate the camera by pressing the RMB and moving the mouse!

Apart from these, it looks like a nice game (maybe a bit too difficult too quickly... moving platforms on level 2?)

EDIT: forgot to say that key presses are not always registered.. sometimes I have to press twice so that the camera starts moving. Maybe related to the low frame rate?

[Glennyboy]

Ran fine here (nVidia GeForce4 4200Ti). The only real suggestion I would make is regarding the camera. It seems to jerk around a lot, like when it's following the ball. There's no sense of smooth motion to accompany the smooth look and feel of the game. Similarly when the player's aiming a shot, the arc is also a little jerky and wobbly. It's not actually difficult to aim, though, but I think smoothing these little bits out would let players feel a little more in control and involved.

On the plus side, it's a damn nice game! I also really like the music, fits with the overall style very nicely. Good luck with this!

[AnotherDev]

I would like to be able to rotate the camera by pressing the RMB and moving the mouse!

A must in my opinion.
The game should be playable with only the mouse.

[stan]

Just saw that the game (or installer) created a "D:\Amju Super Golf" directory to store 4 .cfg files, even though I installed the game in "D:\Jeux\Amju Super Golf".

[Jason Colman]

Oh cool, more feedback! Thanks guys! Here are some answers to your comments. They are kind of explanations of what is going on. If you have any suggestions for better ways to do things I would be very grateful!

- Stan, it creates <drive>/Amju Super Golf to store config files if it can't find the Applications Data directory. I think this will be the case for NT and windows 98. The reason it does not put the config files in the directory you specified is so they are not wiped out by an upgrade.

- Another Dev: I agree the game should be playable with the mouse only. But the Mac has only one button.. in v.1.0 you could drag anywhere except on the ball to drag the camera, but people found this confusing. Perhaps if the user could drag a camera icon ?

Thanks again for the high quality feedback. This is gold for me