Game Demo for LifeCycle

Hello Everybody

Here is a short demo of my game. I hope you like it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/280347917/LifeCycle10/index.html

Didn't try it that much, but initially it seems quite interesting with a lot of potential, nice graphics and sounds. I don't know if it because its for mobile phones, but the gaming area was quite small making it a bit difficult to see exactly whats going on. Also you should make it so you can just hold down the shoot button, that was what made me stop testing it as it brought back memories of Diablo 1 and the manic mouse clicking

Thanks for the comments. I'll definitely take them into consideration. The strange thing is I set the gamepad controls up to just hold shoot and never thought twice about putting the same thing into the mouse and keys version. But it's a good idea and easy to set up so I'll pop it in the next version.

Cheers

Yeah I was waiting for this one.

Very interesting concept, theme, environments and atmosphere. It's alien but it also is somewhat natural or familiar. Maybe we are a microorganism inside a body? Maybe we are going to be the hive queen of some alien race one day? It feels rich and nice.

Besides the obvious placeholder graphics especially in introduction boxes (nice implementation by the way) there a couple things, though.

The environments are fantastic in design, it's a sin not to show them as much as you can. The game resolution is too low, and when I zoom in chrome it gets blurry. I think this games graphical design definately deserves HD. I don't know if you are targeting mobile, if not, I advice you find a way to implement this beautiful hand-drawn levels into game in somewhat better graphichal presentation, i.e higher resolution.

Other than that, rush mechanic seems to be broken. It just jumps in a random direction, not in the direction I am facing. Since it's useful it needs a fix.

Firing is good, but having to have to click for each shot is bad, especially when things don't die easily. The first mini-boss almost gave me carpal tunnel syndrome. I think it would be better to auto-shoot as long as the left mouse button is down.

One of the rocks got stuck in a small pocket-like edge of the layout and I had really hard time trying to remove it from there to close the hole. After working for about two minutes I was able to remove it from the edge but it was a little bit disappointing. Maybe a workaround code for stuck rocks? Also while pushing things around the mechanics are not consistent, sometimes pushes slowly, sometimes kicks away to a distance.

I know I sounded a mouthfull here but I am really interested in this game and where it can go, so when these rugged edges are fixed I will gladly play it. It's real potential, exciting to think interactions / competition between npc species, maybe using these strifes to beat otherwise very difficult situations, evolving to something else when you have enough food etc.

Can't wait.

Windwalker - Thank you for the comments this is exactly what I was looking for.

I'm already looking into a few of the comments - The rush attack was not implemented well. I had it working but and I realised a major issue with it - If you were too close to a wall the player sprite ended up stuck inside it. I've tried to adapt it take this into account but I'm not sure how to deal with it yet. It's all part of a learning process.

I need people to play it through as I've got quite good with the controls and hadn't noticed the stuck rock. Is it the second one on the first screen? I noticed another issue as well sometimes when a boulder is shot at it goes the wrong way. I'll take a closer look.

I like the style of how you do "cut scenes".. very creative... and helped with that eerie feeling.

And I too thought the game looked a bit small. Maybe add an option button to scale the whole thing up x2? but I guess it's your layout size that is small?

I'm a sound/music person myself... so I would definitely say it could benefit from some ambient/texture sound design to help convey that alien environment. I kept thinking it was small bugs and flies. Also some textural (non melodic) music could also add a lot of depth to it.

And I didn't understand the rush mechanic really.. I seemed to go the wrong way when I did it..so I didn't use it much. I liked the having to move the rocks or boulders into the holes to cross into new areas, that was a clever level design and keeps things nice a separate.

Overall great effort so far!

Thanks for the comments jobel.

We are going for a weird world sort of sound-scape for the game rather than music. Were quite far from any sort of final arrangements, it is very much work in progress. An idea were toying with is to have stabs of music or sound elements that emphasise key points. But I'm not so sure what they might be just yet.

I'm already looking into the size issue. It's difficult to decide as I'm not so sure what kind website it will be released on and the design layout it's going to fit into. I think though the general consensus is that it should be bigger.

The rush mechanics... I'm looking into it.

Cheers for the comments

Sry if I repeat what has already been commented. The visuals are really great. The intro before the game started seemed strange. I thought maybe the game had already started because it reacted to the mouse and I thought that maybe I should do something with these tiles to proceed. A text like "press any key to skip" and the ability to skip could help.

It would be also nice to upscale the game to maximum browser area. Have you tried letterbox scaling?

Cheers for the comments suntemple. Good points. Never thought about that. I've added them to the todo list.

music can be textural or like a soundscape as well!

check out the beginning to Elliot Goldenthal's "Agnus Dei" from the ALIEN 3 soundtrack