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ruinthread-games3 years ago

Hi, thanks for the feedback!

Do you think the lack of control was perhaps a performance issue? Did the game run smoothly for you? The jetpack wasn't necessarily designed to maintain a fixed altitude indefinitely, pressing the space bar adds upward acceleration (so if you are already moving upwards you'll move faster and if you're falling you will just fall slower at first until you change directions in vertical velocity). I sort of pulse the space bar rhythmically whilst playing (eg. 2-3 seconds on, 2-3 seconds off). Its a bit more chaotic that way, true, but that is the nature of this game jam! :)

If your game wasn't running smoothly for whatever reason, then I can imagine the controls would be more frustrating, and I'm sure there is plenty of room for me to optimise the game, but this is just what I managed to make in one week..

If you're willing to give the game another chance I would love to hear if you manage to control the Rocket Cop a bit better. 

Was it mainly just the controls of the jetpack you found awkward or other controls as well?

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Curious Dog Games3 years ago(+1)

I think you might be onto something with the performance, it did show some of the telltale signs of a low frame rate, I try again tonight and let you know how I get on.

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Curious Dog Games3 years ago(+1)

I had another go tonight and the majority of the issues seemed to be performance based, I can't tell the actual framerate but it seemed pretty low and the game tended to hang at the beginning and end. I also had a one off issue with the cursor not locking when restarting the game meaning I couldn't look or shoot, I had a similar issue with another Godot game yesterday. I was able to get better control of the jetpack this time even with the low frame rate but it was a challenge and you definitely couldn't aim and shoot at the same time.

I'm a bit puzzled about what could be causing the performance issues as you don't appear to have any highly detailed models or textures, and the world doesn't seem that big, which would make me look at the game logic, maybe your AI is doing something too often or when it doesn't need to.

With regards to the controls it felt like the WASD keys were axis aligned, so W moves you north, S is south, and D and A are east and west accordingly. Typically in a third person game the A and D keys rotate the player and W and S move you forward or backwards based on the characters current heading.

That all said I think you've got something pretty good to build on and I hope you continue working on it after the voting finishes.

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ruinthread-games3 years ago

Thank you so much for making the effort of going back and trying the game again, I really appreciate it and the feedback you gave me is really valuable! I know that things go really slow at the beginning when the game is procedurally generating the map (and at the end its simply running the same process again), I've worked out a way that should potentially speed this process up enormously, but I've yet to implement it. Since the game ran fine on my computer I didn't invest much time in optimising and opted to add more features instead (always a tradeoff in these shorter game jams). 

Sorry about the cursor thing, I think its due to HTML5, also the desktop version of the game runs significantly better so I regret not uploading windows/linux/mac builds. I agree that it could be game logic such as AI causing the frame rate to drop, although the AI doesn't do too much other than a bunch of raycasting for the most part (can't easly update navmeshes during runtime in Godot at the moment), I'll have to do some profiling to be sure though.

I tried a different kind of movement system with this game, which kind of works the way you describe, provided you call the direction the camera is pointed 'north' the character moves in that direction when you press 'W' and analogously for the other cardinal directions (relative to the direction the camera pointing) and the mesh of the character aligns itself with the direction of velocity. I quite like it, though I can understand that it might feel strange initially to players who are used to something different.

I've already made a bunch of small improvements based on the feedback I've received, so looking forward to seeing if I am able to take this game further. Thanks again for being such a good sport!

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