Coco shooter

maur

Hi i'm new to the forums. I made a somewhat top down shooter game. It's my first game but it's not fully complete. I would like people to please test it out and tell me what they think. I need feedback. It's fairly simple and the graphics are simple. I know it's my first game but you can be as critical as you want. I need honest opinions because they will only help me improve. I'm asking this because I would like to see if it is worth putting more time into this project, so to do that I need to see what the general public thinks about it. Otherwise I will scrap this project and move onto another idea.

Check my profile for the link or http://arcade.gamesalad.com/g/113052

Game instructions and information

- The objective of the game is to survive for as long as you can. You must avoid the red actors and shoot them. The game has endless levels
- Use arrow keys to move. You can move in 8 directions. Up, down, left, right, up left.. ect
- Space is to shoot
- P is to pause
- The green number at the top left is your ammo. Red boxes spawn which refill your ammo. Green boxes refill your health
- After each level is complete, the enemies speed and spawn rate increase
- Each enemy has 3 health (3 shots to kill them)
- For some odd reason I have noticed that the game doesn't work on mozilla and google chrome. Safari and internet explorer seem to work fine though

Critique questions

What do you like about the game?
What might you dislike about the game?
Is the fairness of the game fine? (Is it to hard, to easy, or not enough of something)
What additions do you think might go well with the game? (What do you want to see)
Do you notice any bugs or things that should be worked on?

Plans

So far I am going to try and make a title screen and a score system. After that is complete I will try to come up with improvements and take suggestions from others.

quantumsheep

I had a quick go on it, and here's my initial thoughts as requested.

Firstly, I would say make it play about 10x faster. Right now movement is a tad laborious.

I'd say i like what you've done with the pacing in general, but you could perhaps go into greater detail with regard to pacing/difficulty.

For example, you may want to start with one enemy that has just one health. Then add a second enemy to the scene with one health.

Then go back to one enemy, but make it a new one with two health. Then spawn two of these enemies. Then spawn two of these enemies and one of the first one.

Or something like that. Make the difficulty easy to start with (one hit enemies) to introduce players to the shooting movement/shooting game mechanic.

Right now, for example, you shoot the enemy once and nothing happens. You shoot it again and nothing happens. Then you shoot it a third time and it disappears.

The enemy not dying on the first hit might confuzzle people as to if the game is working or not.

Adding 'two hit' enemies different (different graphic and or size) and introducing them after the one hit enemies will add variety and strategy to the game.

Then add the 3 hit enemies, and chop and change the 'pool' of enemies that are spawned to suit.

Maybe try and figure out how to implement power ups. I see you have an ammo refill and health refill. Perhaps consider adding in invulnerability. Or enemy slowdown. Or 'reverse controls' as a bogus power up.

Get creative - maybe have a shrink power up that makes the enemies tiny for a while so you can kill them when you collide with them without losing health.

Essentially, you have the basics down and now you have to think about strategy/variety/pacing/powerups/polish.

Additionally, the graphics are pretty basic. There's nothing wrong with basic graphics, but they should be consistent and informative.

For example, and I'm sure it's just an oversight or you just haven't added them in yet, but there's no labels for what the HUD elements are. I don't know which one is my health, which one is my ammo, etc etc

If you want some inspiration, may I suggest Smash TV (an arcade game which had a wonderful SNES conversion called 'Super Smash TV'). I'm sure you can find it on an emulator somewhere!

Sorry to be so long winded - I'm tired and need to sleep, but thought I'd try and help a little

Good luck,

QS =D

maur

Thank you for all of the input. That was really helpful. Sorry for the late reply but yesterday I was working up on some of the stuff you said.

I made the actors smaller to make the level seem larger and increased the speed. I don't know if it's fast enough but I think it's at a decent speed now.

Regarding the health process you were talking about, I made the enemies health start at one and then increase to 0.5 as you go up a level. I also added a random function between 1 and the increased number on each level. For example an enemies health can range from 1 to 3 on level 4 or 5.

I added a sloppy but quick title screen just so that it doesn't start the game immediately once you go on the link. I will fix that up a little more later on.

Next thing i have planned is working on the powerups like you said. I have another idea instead of powerups though that i might try to implement. It will be an upgrade system. You get coins every time you kill an enemy and when you press pause or some other key there will be a menu to upgrade your character in some way. I'm not sure whether ill stick with powerups or the upgrade system but powerups seem to be easier to make.

If anyone has any other suggestions or comments about the game please tell me. I'm willing to listen to anyone else's opinions.

joshiwu

Also, A few more Animations. Try this, Open your coconut actor. goto the code thats says if collide with enemy. and add a spawn actor of the left and right half of the coconut which can be the same actor using the built in flip attribute. SO in other words the coconut should break on collision . maybe even pick up the pieces for food?(health) Also You need 8 animations for enemy down. One animation if hit from left, one animation if hit from right , and so on. See a youtube video called "jump through" a lesson on making mario style platforms. the same premiss would work.

maur

Alright i'm back with another update. This one is a little larger.

The first thing i added was messing around with sound but it doesn't seem to work when I published it. There is also a new link to my game because the last one did not update properly.

http://arcade.gamesalad.com/game/113288

Other than the sound I added three upgrades. One makes the character move faster, the other slows the character down and the last makes him large, invincible and destroys actors when he touches them.

I fixed up the title screen a bit and made it look nicer and added an instructions section.

Also, A few more Animations. Try this, Open your coconut actor. goto the code thats says if collide with enemy. and add a spawn actor of the left and right half of the coconut which can be the same actor using the built in flip attribute. SO in other words the coconut should break on collision . maybe even pick up the pieces for food?(health) Also You need 8 animations for enemy down. One animation if hit from left, one animation if hit from right , and so on. See a youtube video called "jump through" a lesson on making mario style platforms. the same premiss would work.

I tried finding the video you were talking about but had no luck. I think I understand what you mean but i'm not sure how to make it work. I will maybe try adding a walking animation for the character.

My next plan is to finally work on the score system. I'm still open to suggestions

-Timo-

nice game but I found a little bug... when you hold space and keep moving to different ways you keep shooting coconuts and your ammo doesnt count down...

quantumsheep

Well, I think it's an improvement, so well done!

I particularly liked the 'giant' mode - was great fun - a bit like picking up the blue pill in Pac Man

Again though, it's too slow. What I would do:

1. Make the 'speed up' speed the standard speed for movement.
2. Make the 'speed up' power up make you go twice as fast as the increased speed from point 1.
3. Make the bullet speed twice as fast as it currently is.
4. Move the brick walls off the screen, or only just about visible on-screen. It gives the player more room to move in.
5. Add a graphic for 'spawners' so players can see where the bad guys are spawning from so that it looks like the bad guys are coming from 'somewhere' as opposed to just appearing.
6. I noticed that enemies took more hits to kill, but it came as an unpleasant surprise as the bad guys all look the same but have no indicator of how much health they have (either by using a different graphic for the enemy or adding a health counter to each one).
7. Organise the GUI so that all information is in one place (at the top of the screen I'd say).

Keep going. I think it's a potentially fun little game! And hopefully, with a few suggestions from others, you'll learn a great deal from making it!

QS =D

maur

I'm back with another big update. Once again the new link is here http://arcade.gamesalad.com/game/113288

Don't use the old link. If it says version 1.4 then thats the outdated one. It should say 1.5

nice game but I found a little bug... when you hold space and keep moving to different ways you keep shooting coconuts and your ammo doesnt count down...

Thanks for telling me, I didn't notice it until recently. I fixed it.

Well, I think it's an improvement, so well done!

I particularly liked the 'giant' mode - was great fun - a bit like picking up the blue pill in Pac Man

Again though, it's too slow. What I would do:

Keep going. I think it's a potentially fun little game! And hopefully, with a few suggestions from others, you'll learn a great deal from making it!

QS =D

Okay i got 1-3 down. I didn't do 4 because I might have another plan of maybe changing the background and then constraining the camera to the character so that you can't see the whole map.

I got 5 and 7 down.

For 6 I tried to add health bars for each enemy but it wasn't working properly. It would not display a loss of health for some reason. It's hard to explain how I have the level system and enemy health setup. I set it to increase to 0.5 each level. They start with 1 health. The coconut does 1 damage and each time they spawn, it randomly gives them a health from 1 to whatever the increase is. For example on level 4 an enemy can have 1 or 2.5 health because 1 + 0.5*3 (Level 1 doesn't count as an increase). So what I tried to do was make the health, level health increase and coconut damage all higher so that the health bar would be more visible and display a loss of health but it wasn't working. It gets more complicated to explain how the health is attached to each enemy and how I was trying to connect it to a bar.

The new health bar the character has is what I was going to use for each enemy. Maybe one day the idea will just come to me and ill figure it out or if you can find me a video or demo it would be really helpful.

Thanks for all the suggestions though. You have been really helpful.

On top of all that I added a blinking animations when items are about to disappear. There is a game over, scoreboard and restart and home button. The only one odd thing is the highscore and score are not separated with line spacing when I published the game but in gamesalad it seems to be fine.

Any other idea's or improvements?

-Timo-

you now using spawn actor when you collide with the white actor, you also just can put the wrap x (in scene) on, thats nicer I think
and maybe you also can, if you big, make the coconuts bugger
the BIG update is really cool the game is much better now well done!