Happy to see the game has a tutorial. Some of the tutorial dialogue was skipping far too quickly than I could read it. Would be good to make sure it's paced properly, and tied to gameplay more. Might have been that my troops were too far ahead. The test map doesn't have a whole lot of depth to it, which is fine, but the enemy team just seems to be playing by different rules as there's endless waves of them that can't be beaten. Grenades seem to be able to wipe squads, but it's just too random and unpredictable. I'd like there to be text that shows up when hovering over buttons. The characters and art are pretty good.
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Thanks for playing, and thanks for all the feedback. Those are on the todo list now. High quality 3d models should hopefully get destructed into lower poly ones in time, as the game gets more polished, to try and make the visuals more cohesive. More decoration will be added as well. Streets currently has areas which are way too big and need to be scaled better. I'm planning to keep the concept of weapons not carrying over between levels. I like the sandbox of needing to find weapons and ammo before being completely ready to fight anything. Shotgun needs to be a bit more reliable. Flamethrower is still rubbish. I changed ladder movement from looking up goes up, looking down goes down to minecraft ladder movement, where pressing forward goes up and back goes down. Still not perfect, but I think ladders just don't fit that well in first person video games. Will try to avoid using them for needing to go down.
Car controls nicely. Seems like the foundations are in place. I'd recommend a few tweaks. Maybe make the car cast a darker shadow, as it seems a bit too soft and not grounded. In fact, more shadows, dark areas and intense colours in the picture would be nice, as the current visuals are too washed out. The first time I pressed backspace to flip, I was teleported to a tiny floating island outside the map, which was weird. There's some mipmapping going on which causes these lines where the texture is and isn't blurred, which is quite offputting. I'd recommend removing any mipmapping altogether.
I like this. It was fun. Can't go wrong with a haunted house. Finished the game without using the walkthrough. Got killed by the clown and the girl in the well. Dying and keeping your items felt a bit weird. The second floor bathroom has no exit, so its game over if you go in there. Couldn't figure out if the clock did anything. I liked the interaction the items had with the world, they felt natural. I liked "moms room". I'm never a fan of using ai generated stuff, but its not too bad in a short demo like this.
Very polished game. Pretty fun. Not really the kind of game I'd usually play, but still had a good time with it. Played for about an hour. I like that there's not an overwhelming amount of dialogue. I like the characters and how fast you progress with getting upgrades. Sound is really well done. At the start of the game, I thought it'd be more darker, so it was a surprise when the tone was more laid back with the tropical environment. Not super sure what relevance the intro had to the main game. I had some trouble starting the game, as I was pressing 'Enter' to select the buttons, but kept getting booted back to the title screen. I would prefer if wasd also worked for the movement keys. Would also be good to have mouse support, as an alternative to z/x. Clicking the mouse still selects whatever's in the center of your screen. Sometimes my abilities seemed to use a lot more action points than expected. Not sure if it was some curse I had or was a bug.
Just gave it a quick try. It looks like it could be cool, but in my short playthrough I couldn't find any enemies to fight to see if the combat was any fun other than the slug. I think its a mistake having your first location be in a town, where there's mostly shops and people asking if you want upgrades. At this point in the game, I have no idea on the power level and skills/weaknesses of my party vs the enemies I haven't yet encountered. If you start the game off in a dungeon, you can understand the base power of your party. I got a quest to go do something in a prison, but with the large size of the town and with no map or any way to know where the prison was, I just gave up.
Nice game. Quite fun to expand the little empire. I like the sound effects and art. The resources probably need labels because I wasn't sure if the food icon was food or grain at first. Also needs an indicator that expanding the roads is going to use wood, and a confirmation dialog for demolition buildings. Would be nice to overload the structures with extra people. Wasn't sure what the "latern bearer" represented or what the beacon was. Maybe I needed to explore more?
Absolute jank and I say that in the best possible way. I had a fun time playing. It's actually quite impressive how many systems there are for a one man prototype, while still being somewhat functional. From the looks of your profile, you've jumped into a lot of different projects and I remember playing the roman game, which this game looks like it borrows a lot of content from. I'd encourage you to stick to one project to completion. This projects very cool but will probably need too much work for one person to make fully functional. On a side note, it appears that there might be a lot of plugins at use. If this is the case, I'd recommend avoiding this habit in the future and programming these systems from scratch, creating each new system to completion and without bugs. That way you'll end up with a less buggy game, learn a lot and have systems that you can more easily port over to new projects. If this isn't the case, then please ignore. Back to the game though, it actually has some great atmosphere and concept. You clearly have a lot of skill and vision. It'd be nice to see it used for a game with the potential to be used to completion.
It looks pretty cool, but I'm not good enough at it to beat it. It feels like there's probably a bunch of advanced mechanics that I don't understand that are needed to win. To get out of the starting area, you need to move you tanks on a road past two forests. However, most tanks will drive on the forest terrain, making them move very slowly instead of the road. I tried using the F + RMB command to make them drive on the road, but it didn't seem to work. The map is very huge, I can't really get anywhere before the convoy starts coming and dying. Infantry hidden in forests seem to be able to shoot you at long range, but making my tanks target them either seems to do nothing sometimes, or makes them drive up really close before eventually starting to attack. I don't really see the point of recon vehicles. I think the unit labels should be hidden unless the unit is hovered over, because they obscure what's happening. Overall, I think there's probably a lot of good mechanics in there, but the starting level is too difficult of an introduction. I think you should start with a smaller, easy to beat level to give the player a way to experiment more with the controls and units.
Professional Surf Hopper (Aborted) jam comments · Posted in Professional Surf Hopper (Aborted) jam comments
I've done a bit of surfing before and know the general concept. That being said, the movement feels too far off the general source engine movement to carry over well. I'm not a fan of the jumping backwards mechanic at all. I guess you're trying to emulate the backwards bhop mechanic speedrunners use? I just don't think its fun not being able to see your gameplay. For the first level, it just seems like walking up a big platform that doesn't really encourage surfing and then requiring a backwards jump to beat (which I couldn't pull of). I'd be more keen to try a traditional, starting up high surf map.
Hi, thanks for playing! With feedback on the shooting, I'm planning to overhaul the blood splatters on enemies. But do you have any other ideas for it? With the times you felt like you should've hit, were the enemies far away from you? I added a range cap to the weapons, but it might be too short. I'm not sure a range cap was that good of an idea. I wasn't sure I should give the flamethrower more ammo, since it's meant to be a power weapon. Maybe since it's close to the end of the first level, I can add just a bit more. I'll be working on the enemy ai to try and make them more dynamic and get them to reposition often. Cheers!
No problem, I'll keep that in mind that they might not be that obvious to see. With regards to the other stuff:
I'll be working on the various props in the game, such as chairs and tables, making them lowpoly. They're all from asset packs and just dumped into the levels for now.
I reduced the mipmap bias to try and give the image a more grainy, pixelated look. Otherwise mipmaps ruin the pixelated effect at distances further than a few metres. However, I can't disable mipmaps completely because otherwise it ruins distant textures. I'm not sure I can get it better. Would you have any ideas on how to fix this?
I'll work on making the enemy ai a bit more dynamic. I'll try and make them move around more and reposition.
Enemy bullets will be getting a new model. I don't think making them hitscan is the right move. I've always hated hitscan enemies in games like doom, because you have a lot less options to fight them. Being able to dodge an enemies shots is a good feeling and I'd rather build on that.
The enemy car will be getting a makeover. Currently its a placeholder.
Ladders are shit, I agree.
Didn't know about the wall climb exploit. Will definitely fix that. Thanks for finding it.
I think I might add some buildings to separate the uphill and downhill roads in the center of the map. That should hopefully make the map feel less empty and make it more convincing as being a busy shanghai street.
Will fix out of bounds exploits eventually, not a big priority for now.
Overall, thanks for all your feedback. It's very helpful, probably the most helpful I've got from this demo day. And thanks for giving the game a go!
Hi, thanks for playing! So far, I've had other positive feedback about the movement speed being just right, so I'll likely keep it that way. Interesting that you had problems with the mouselook, I'll definitely do some digging into that. I'm glad you like the new sprites, they're one of the only things in the game that I consider "done". I'm also not fully satisfied with the specular. I think it looks great in parts and fills in big patches of flat surfaces with some detail nicely. I wasn't too happy with diffuse only. In other areas it is quite overwhelming, so I'll turn it down in those parts.
It's a cool concept, makes for a fun demo. Also a pleasant surprise to see shanghai gold in there, so thanks for that. I like that there's heaps of random events that keeps interest up. Would maybe like to see some crazier upgrades that can essentially break the game, like humongous coins of 1000% speed coin pusher. Performance and physics simulation could do with some work. In terms of potential, I don't think it would really work as a full retail game, but nothing wrong with having a fun demo to flex your skills. Was fun to play!
Thanks for playing. Currently the lightmaps are being baked at some terribly low resolution, because I keep finding things that need tweaking and am often pressed for time. Eventually they'll get final versions. I'll also need to tweak the reflectivity of surfaces, but I think having some of it adds a bit more visual flare to the game.
I didn't want to have dog enemies either, but they fit the setting too well. If it's any consolation, the sprite has rabies foam coming out of their mouths, so they're going to expire soon anyway. Not sure whether to keep the tintin room as an easter egg or not, incase people accuse me of stealing art. The blue lotus and other tintin adventurea definitely inspired the game though. Maybe you are actually playing as tintin. I'd like the keep the identity of the main character a sectet.
Hi, thanks for playing! I've gone in and fixed some of the bugs you reported and made some adjustments to brightness and weapons. I'll work on performance, weapon damage falloff and audio for the next update. You can actually get into the underground section by shooting the wood planks and finish the level from there. I'm hoping as I add more destructibles to the game, stuff like this will be more intuitive. Since there are very few currently, I can definitely see how weird it is. Cheers for the feedback!
Thoroughly enjoyed it. The puzzles were very good. I'd say the combat is too easy. The zombies never posed any threat. The game could also really do with a map and to rearrange the rooms into a more logical pattern. Currently it feels too maze like. I'm sure it'll be a lot better if you can differentiate the rooms with different textures. I'd also say the intro cutscene is too long and I forgot I was playing a survival horror game and not a visual novel. Also, try making the vn text be locked in place rather than shifting around, because its very hard to read. Overall good job, I'll happily play future updates.
Cool game, get very laggy though and eventually crashed when I tried to pick up an arrow. Might have had something to do with picking up an arrow while standing on a sword? I got pretty good at the bow and just went around headshotting enemies. I found that I didn't stand much of a chance with the sword, so I went archer only.
Really liked the look of it, the graphics and ui visuals are great. Sadly, it's too hard to play and maybe just unfinished. I had to look at the comments here to figure out you could walk through the grass to find the beach signs. Then the sign puzzle itself made no sense either. I had a eureka moment where I thought maybe the nail holes matched with the signs, but then I realized that they didn't match either. Watched a twitch stream to find the answer. Not sure if there is anything to do yet at the junkyard. I'll assume most of this is down to the gameplay being unfinished. Would probably be better to just hide all of the tutorials and UI if it isn't being utilized in the gameplay yet, because otherwise it's information overload. I'm looking forward to seeing this game in a more functional state.
The one setting I wanted to change was mouse sensitivity. I went into the options menu, changed the value to 0.6, hit apply changes and went back to the game, but the sensitivity hadn't changed. Opening the options menu up again, the slider had returned to 1. I tried this several times. I noticed the game also had screen tearing, even though the options menu said vsync was enabled by default.
I found the first terminal in the starting room, and immediately my eyes glazed over from 3 pages of text dump. I'm not into reading lore for a game unless I'm already invested in it. I skimmed it but nothing stood out to give directions on where I was supposed to go.
Gave it a try. Currently it just feels like walking around a maze with no direction. After I found the pistol, I wandered around for a while, shooting the occasional enemy and eventually just got lost. The very slow movement of the player definitely didn't help. I'd definitely keep the game much more linear while in early development, until you can get your gameplay down. Avoid things like rooms with no purpose. Another thing of note, the settings menu wasn't functional, which was annoying. The enemies seemed to be pretty well made, the sprite work was decent. Gunplay seemed cool too and I wish I'd found the other weapons to try them out. I'm keen to see this evolve.