Sands of the Arena (beta)

How do you do that? Post a link to a year old post without knowing what's in it?

I mean, it seems that that point just countered whatever you were talking about.

And when you're talking about trying to sell a game getting connections and soforth, the legal rights to images and art style are just as relevant as anything else. Why would one give you a publisher connection if what you do might reflect badly on them? I wouldn't risk my connections on someone with the attitude such as yourself. Did you take the photo of that helmet? Photography can be a very careful art form as well, and I doubt that the photo you put up has an expired copyright.

That said, I don't know who complemented your art selection, but there are definite problems, just from the screenshots. And it seems to me that our opinions are probably outweighing the few you got on the art elsewhere. The pieces have little to no consistency. You've got circles with primary colours and strong dithering, on a sand background that I can see from the bottom of screenshot 2 doesn't tile well, cards that don't look like physical cards, (which sometimes have borders, and those borders edges have inconsistent widths and missing corners), and a bunch of cards that do different actions (by their text) but all use the same image, causing confusion when trying to differentiate at a glance. Having consistent art pays off because I can't be bothered to look at the gameplay if the pictures don't entice me enough to go further. It feels like a slapdash job from the pictures and thus not something I'd likely bother pursuing further.

That's my honest, straightforward opinion. Whether you choose to ignore it, react defensively about it, or think about it and take it into consideration is up to you. Sorry for being so harsh, but I felt a reality check was needed after some of your responses to others.

 

Discussing the problems with your work is entirely appropriate for your thread, at least as long as you're on this forum - although I wonder why you're here at all, since you don't seem to have much interest in professional opinions.

While "sit down, shut up, and listen to your elders" isn't really a strict guideline for life (there are many times when the elders and the established wisdom are just plain wrong) it is somewhat surprising to see a new poster waltz in and tell all respondents that THEY are posting incorrectly.

 

I think it's going to be difficult to engage anyone with your game play mechanics because there is little context behind user actions. It's basically just rock-paper-scissors, except you choose 5 moves in advance before resolving. There's no strategy; conflict resolution is just random. If this is what you want, then fine; if you were expecting people to get more out of it though, then I suggest trying to find ways to influence the choices players make.

Also, you need to hire a graphic designer to help you. I'm not talking about the fact that you are using public domain art, I'm talking about the fact that the art in your game is poorly implemented. Composition/color choice/font choice/etc. all look very amateurish, and this is going to impact your ability to sell the game regardless of how you personally prioritize graphics.

^^^ This is high school, teenager kiddie crap and I strongly suggest you cut that shit out, for your own benefit. Business is about results. No one, whether it's people on this board, companies you are forming business relationships with, or the eventual customers of your game give a fuck about showing you the proper respect you deserve or admiring the macho manliness with which you defy elders. All that matters to anyone is whether or not your product is worth their money. If you don't want to take our criticism constructively (we're trying to help you improve your game), then by all means go ahead and release the game as you intend. You can listen to us, or you can listen to your sales numbers. Your choice.

 

Sure, maybe it's not illegal but it makes your game look incredibly amateurish. This forum is designed for professional game developers, so if you post something that looks unprofessional you going to get criticized.

I took a look at your 'final product' and I sincerely hope you're not going to try and sell it. It's a very long way from a polished commercial product.

 

Classic. (I've said the same thing before.)

 

Ok, I've spent the last 8 months making nothing but these kind of card-type games and I can tell you that in general they are a rather niche market. Honestly, you have lots of problems:

- The interface is very counter-intuitive (why doesn't "resolve" automatically happen?)
- There isn't a real tutorial
- The gameplay mechanics are almost totally luck-driven, which kills the fun factor
- There are no visual effects whatsoever
- The art looks like random clip art pieces mashed together with bad font choices everywhere

That SWF is final? Ok, how about you put that SWF demo up on Newgrounds, and if it breaks a 3.0 start thinking about trying to charge for it...

- andrew

 

When I said RPS, I'm not talking about a limited number of options. I'm talking about the thought that goes into the decisions. Why should I choose to do a low attack first instead of a high block first? Or a medium block second? Or a slash 4th? There really is no mechanic that influences me to choose one over any other for anything. The only real strategy is to try and detect patterns in your opponent's choices, but he can defeat that easily by just throwing in random choices to screw you up. Congrats, you are back to RPS.

It's good that your special moves require strategy to use, but you need to implement some strategy for the basic moves, as well. In fact, it's MORE important to have strategy for the basic moves, otherwise the special moves have nothing to work off of.

Think of American football (apologies if you're not an American football fan). Offense has various rushing plays they can use, and various passing plays they can use. Defense has various defense plays they can use to counter. So you have stuff like zone defense to stop fast receivers, but flood passing plays beat zone defense, etc. Now, most people stop here and think "wow, look at all the strategy", but there's still actually ZERO strategy in that. The strategy comes from secondary factors like down, yardage, injuries, different team and player characteristics, etc. So while a man to man defense will generally stop a flood offense, if it's 3rd down and 2 the defense generally knows the offense is not going to pass and can ignore most of their pass defenses. Without a concept of yardage and downs, the offense and defense have nothing to guide their decisions and they are just picking random plays. No strategy at all.

This is where you are at right now. You have all the plays but you don't have any secondary factors to influence the player's decisions.

andrew had a good suggestion; you should throw it up on Newgrounds or something when you feel it's ready and read the comments that result. Once you have lots and lots of feedback, you'll start to see what the most common suggestions are. Just remember that if you can't find some way to learn from negative comments, you are never going to make it in this business. All games start out sucking and it takes time and iteration to improve them and give them polish. If you lash about and bitch and moan every time someone says something bad, you're wasting valuable feedback that could be used to make your game better.

 

So you have a guy who made an RPS game saying something positivie about RPS games... big suprise there. But anyway, the game he is talking about is a minigame within an MMO, he's not trying to sell that game individually. I guess most of the fun from that game will be about actually collecting the cards, kind of like the card game in Final Fantasy 8. Since your game is standalone and you don't have any enjoyment from actually collecting the cards you need to at least have to more strategy to how it's played.

 

Okay nevermind. Clearly you're an expert developer and don't need any help.

 

Ok, ignore the haters. This game is amazing, and is going to sell 100,000 units. The concept is so fresh, I've honestly never seen it done before. I would immediately send this to EA and Microsoft so that they can get started on the console versions right away.

You should immediately hire a PR person, a business lawyer, and a personal foot masseuse.

 

I love these threads.

 

We can dream.