Air Bud
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 Some plants even masturbate into their own vaginas in order to reproduce.
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Reg. Date: Sep 2001
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Reply 23 of 63 (Originally posted on: 08-21-15 07:07:29 AM)
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Quote: The timing of "tutorial" messages seems to vary quite a lot. Not sure what to do about that. I suppose in the finished product, there might be a way to create a stage specifically designed to introduce the player to individual concepts, removing the need for the tutorial in the "main game" or something. It just feels a bit clunky and disorganized right now. The tips are usually pretty helpful, but I don't know why I don't get the message about cancelling my shots until mid-way through the second constellation.
It's currently set up to give you that message after your second ray of light fades out, so if that doesn't happen for a while, it won't show up. I'll probably either need to state that earlier, or relegate it to the instructions.
Quote: The moving black holes are neat, but also really annoying as far as the trial and error aspect goes, because now it's something else I have to wait for as the player when trying out different shot trajectories (especially with two differently sized black holes). I don't think there's a good way around it, unless the player can shoot rays of light more frequently?
I'm not very happy with the moving black holes at the moment, they seem to artificially make things way too difficult, especially when they rotate so closely around a star. I will either need to remove them, or spread them out much further so that they aren't such a nuisance.
Quote: Sometimes when I click to shoot, the star flashes half black and does not shoot? I'm not sure why this is. It can be really frustrating when I just want to test a shot and I keep getting a sound effect and nothing shoots.
Whenever you take a shot, the collision detector for the star you're shooting from gets turned off for a few milliseconds to allow for the ray of light to get away. It appears that maybe having a timed mechanism isn't a good idea given the wide variety of computers this will be played on. Does your computer lag a bit while playing this?
Quote: On a desktop computer, using the arrow keys to shift my perspective and scroll around the map was possible, but on a laptop, the arrow keys don't seem to respond to anything, making consecutive shots difficult to make sometimes. Not sure why it doesn't work on the laptop?
I never reimplemented arrow panning in this version of the game.
Quote: On a desktop computer, using the arrow keys to shift my perspective and scroll around the map was possible, but on a laptop, the arrow keys don't seem to respond to anything, making consecutive shots difficult to make sometimes. Not sure why it doesn't work on the laptop?
The World Map feature is really nice, and helped correct the scrolling problem when my perspective got too screwed up, and is also great for navigating from one end of a constellation to the other. It would be nice if the option to turn it on/off were a bit more distinct, rather than waiting for it to fade out, but it's good and works well and did more or less exactly what I wanted it to when I made use of it.
You can actually click and drag to move your viewport around. I will need to state this explicitly in the game.
Quote: Background music (and sound effects) disappear for me after a few minutes in game, and I'm not sure why (especially the sound effects).
Come to think of it, the left/right arrows are currently bound to volume control, so if you pressed LEFT enough, everything would just get muted.
Quote: Upon completing constellations other than Aries, the World Map indicates I have made all connections, but I did not receive any message confirming this (or a happy sound effect). Is it just be the result of early development and it hasn't been implemented yet?
I encountered this bug last night before going to bed, and think I managed to fix it, but never re-uploaded the game file.
Quote: At the moment, the trial and error aspect reminds me of pixel hunting in old adventure games. It's easy to see what the outcome will be, but I just have to try clicking on a whole bunch of different pixels to get the shot just right.
There's a part of me that is fine with that in this game. I've never really intended this game to be much beyond point-and-click. From the start, I've kinda envisioned this being something that would be better suited for mobile devices, hence the incredibly simplistic control system (you literally only ever click on the screen). Keep in mind, I'm releasing this as a Flash game, a platform notorious for people looking to waste time. If I were trying to put this on Steam, I think this would be a much more serious problem.
Quote: This is made worse by the need to reveal the map. What purpose does that serve? It doesn't seem to support anything thematically - it seems to just require arbitrarily that you waste a few shots in each area. There is no sense of exploration from it because all you can hope to find is the pattern of stars (which you already know) and where the arbitrary obstacles will be, which are all approximately the same.
This is totally fair. The fog-of-war was originally intended to make this game more about exploration, where not even stars were shown on the map. I later made all stars visible, and now the fog-of-war is just an annoying barrier (which takes up a TON of memory). About the only thing you can hope to discover at the moment are wormholes that may or may not help you connect two stars. In case you can't tell, I've been toying with the idea of removing the fog altogether for a while.
As for the rest of your post, I understand what you are saying, but it seems as if the only option you leave me is to go to my menu bar and select Project -> Close Project.
That's not going to happen. This may sound cynical, but this is a Flash game that will end up on Kongregate and Newgrounds... for a week, maybe a month if I'm lucky. People will play this for either 30 seconds, five minutes, or two hours.
The point I'm trying to make is that while you are absolutely correct, the target audience and platform matters a great deal here. If I were trying to sell this commercially (on Steam for example), I would probably hire you as a consultant because everything you're saying is correct. However, it's a free-to-play Flash game that I'm making in my spare time. To put things into perspective, I have another two weeks with this before I have to put it behind me and return to grad school.
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