[ANN] Challenge your friends in 5 delirious mini-games!

It's great! Beautifully polished, and nicely designed, single-button, time-waster gameplay that's truly for all ages.

Some thoughts:

- Your live demos on the menu screen are excellent, but I experienced an annoying loading delay of about 2-3 seconds between each one. It's especially irksome when you're on a submenu (not looking at the demo at all) and the cursor freezes because of the background loading.

- When you switch one player's button to the button used by another player, they should swap buttons by default. Right now, if I set player 2 to use left mouse, player 1's button becomes invalid.

- You must add a CPU player option and/or a single-player mode. Even though it would be boring by comparison, I think most players will want the option to play their time-waster when no-one else is around, especially when first evaluating the demo. To make single-player at least somewhat worthwhile, you can always add a high score list.

 

-Unfortunately I can't avoid that annoying loading delay. I'm thinking of adding a small graphic element like a "loading" text somewhere on the screen or maybe simply changing the hand cursor by an hourglass. (hmm.. reminds me of something)

-Here you have a good idea. Switching controls between players. Nice, thanks. I didn't think about that.

-CPU player was initialy planned but finally removed because I can't program AI. But it's true that the game would have a strong sale incentive (?) with CPU opponents. Lonely gamers would then be additional potential buyers. I must do something!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Drake. I really appreciate.

 

Are you sure? Since your games are so simple, all your AI needs to think about is whether to "do" or "do not" based on the objects around them, right? Besides, it's a casual game - your AI only needs to be good enough to make a good show of losing to the player.

 

Hi, it's the same McPhisto from the Clickteam forums...

Since you're using MMF, I could give you a hand with AI if you want - I've just finished doing the AI for my game (which was NOT fun!).

 

"there is no try."

 

One question: do you really have trademarked MinuteMatch?

 

Actually, I can fill you in on that. SoniCron was quoting Yoda, an inspirational mentor character from a mildly popular film series originating here in the US (recently concluded). English isn't Yoda's native language, either, so don't sweat it.

 

Ah understood! Que la force soit avec toi.

 

Wow, impressive quality of graphics/animations and ease of use!

The website is of the same quality... Puts me to shame :-}.

Just one small thing: after installing the game, the game's window opened in the background. I had to click on its button in the taskbar to see it.

 

SonSon,

Do yourself a massive favour and learn to program properly using C++. You have the talent to succeed, so why hold yourself back by using mmf?

 

Here's a question for you, Robert. Why ditch your tools, if the tools get the job done? When I downloaded MinuteMatch, I saw a simple game that was well conceived and well executed. I think this game could do very well with casual gamers who are looking for something a bit different. I don't think that audience will perceive any technical limitations with it, either.

 

Because he clearly isn't getting the job done. This is clearly stated by his comment about the fact he cannot do AI.

This is because AI in mmf is notoriously difficult. By moving future projects to C++ he will open up worlds. IMHO this will earn him more money in the long run. That is why.

 

Is it? I'm managing to get by in MMF, and my AI is fairly complicated. I'm not trying to say that it's easier than it would be in C++ or whatever, but it certainly wouldn't be all that much harder for games such as MinuteMatch.

 

Oh. Well, I took his comment to mean that he lacked the confidence to tackle the AI, not that MMF made it impossible. I haven't personally used MMF, but I have seen at least one nice side scroller made with it, so I can't imagine that his design is out of reach.

You're right, of course, that tools can be outgrown. I'm just not sure that I see the evidence of that happening here.

 

I agree that AI amongst many other things are surely easier/faster to achieve with a real programming language (reuse of code ha..). Also MMF has many limitations that make things harder and longer to do, but I was attracted by the ease of use and WYSIWYG. If MMF version 2 doesn't make things easier I might learn C++ but it wont' be easy.

I already struggled so much with MMF that I'll surely achieve the basic AI needed for MinuteMatch.

-We had some feedback that the musics sound strange like "ambient sound from a terror movie". Did someone experienced something similar?
-I'd also like to know if users with QWERTY keyboard had problems setting the controls? Do the keyboard keys you press match the keys displayed in the Control setup screen?
-EDIT: Do people located in the US have the price displayed in USD? Same for Europeans with the price displayed in EUR and of course England with prices in GBP? ROW must have prices in USD. Thanks.

 

Hm, I already uninstalled the game so I can't tell you about the price. Just wanted to say... It looks to me that you already have AI in your game... What about the demos in the main menu? I see sheeps jumping, shells closing, tritons surfing.. That should be enough for the single player game. Even when I played the shell game, the other shell did stuff by itself! Only in the sheep game the other sheep didn't move.
(oh, and C++ is great if you have years to waste learning the language )

 

No problems setting the keys for me with a qwerty keyboard. The keys match as they should.

I'm from Europe and the price is displayed in EUR for me.

 

@stan: Ha! I was waiting for this one. I'm pleased to tell you that everything you see on the menu auto-demos is pure randomness!
Do you really think that this could be enough for CPU opponents? I think I should do something more especially if I want several difficulty levels for CPU players.
About learning C++ does it really take years to learn and be able to program decent games? Disheartening..
EDIT: I was talking about the price displayed (only) on the website.

@lowemark: Thanks for input lowemark. I hope it works for others too.

I also wanted to *special thank* Robert Cummings for his sentence that went straight to my heart and increased tenfold my motivation to do games.