Dave

We seem to have posted at the exact same time, so I should get used to doing the Dave and Excal thing or that'll be confusing :)

You're lucky to have a musician who can come up with something like that at a drop of the hat. I personally think it's great and really 'gamey' and perfect for Board Horde. The game has a wicked sense of humour, so does the music. Anybody who can't see that and then votes it down because of it needs a good slap :)

I did Jovian War over about a month but never for more than 1 hour at a time. Compare that to Korelos where I spent 6 months and some nights spent 5 or 6 hours on it. It helps that all the graphics were taken from previous resources (Korelos, the Scirra folder that comes with C2 and the IGB pre-made ships) but mainly it's really easy to make simple games. Korelos was a bit trickier as you can imagine, but nothing C2 can't handle.

Got to agree about the guys who run Newgrounds, they're very good. For some reason they did my game icon for me, which was frankly much better than the one I submitted. Quite nice of them really :)

Excal

I agree, but on reflection, it does serve it's purpose. I found it very disheartening when I put Korelos up, to have so many people criticise it who simply hadn't given it a chance. But then again, that's the point really. It's not nice to hear criticism, but at least they're honest (brutally honest sometimes) and that's how you'll improve your game. If they say 'It's too hard' there's no point saying 'Well play it a bit more and get better' because the next person will come along and say it's too hard too. So it's a good way of working out what needs to be done.

It's certainly unfair that good games get low ratings while poor games get really high ratings (that part is a bit suspicious frankly) but overall I think it's a good system. The real killer games on there which have 20 million plays do deserve it as they're really fun to play. The trick is to reach 4 stars I think and I doubt you'll manage that on a first attempt, so take the criticism and keep working on the game.

It's still slightly annoying that my new game (which frankly isn't very good) is getting better ratings than the previous one, but I understand why. I might even work on improving this one based on the comments, since it's much easier to do than Korelos, which had become a bit difficult to work with (and won't load into C2 any more sadly :( ).

My vote for Board Horde raise it from 2.42 to 2.44 in a single vote, huzzah! Silly though, it should be much higher.

I see you suffered a few hate-votes on Newgrounds too and the game is rated stupidly low. I'm getting a bit suspicious, because I've seen some truly awful games with 4+ stars and some really good ones rated down at 2. I suspect people are getting friends etc to vote up their games because some are very bad. 2.4 for Board Horde is totally unfair. I'd understand it if every game was down at 2 stars because some of the haters state really stupid reasons for downvoting (I've seen people vote a game at 1 because 'I don't like shooters' and it's common to get a 0 vote because it doesn't work on their machine, which is sort of annoying). But some really weak games get 4 stars which is really strange. I think the main trick is to get rid of every bug and get it working on every platform and then re-release it, because that will kill most of the hate-votes and you should get closer to 4. I've added my vote :)

I can't believe someone said the music was annoying, I love it. I found myself humming it while walking to dog, lol!

I guess the point of Newgrounds and Kongregate is to test out your game. Release it, see the response, fix the errors (would help if they'd reply when they find bugs) then release it again. Eventually it should be completely ready to go.

Still, it's a bit lame that my new Jovian War game, which took about 20 hours to complete, got more than Board Horde which is far better and probably took you 50 times longer. I guess the point is, my game is simple and doesn't have bugs or issues on other machines, due to the simplicity. For now, it seems like that way to go.

I'm not sure where to go after the Newgrounds route etc. I guess marketing it on your own webpage or other places would be worthwhile. Not the sort of thing I know much about unfortunately.

Weren't you planning to launch this for the Newgrounds touch competition, or am I imagining things? Or some other competition? What happened?

Lol, thanks man. It wasn't an uber-serious project, more an experiment that I ended up finishing, just because I hate leaving games unfinished. I was initially just playing around with the smoke from Korelos and thinking of ways I could reinvent that game, or my first game, Outworld (the first version of which was written in Blitz Monkey here - Outworld

Another game which I quite liked, but was much too complicated and the arcade section was poor - so very similar to Korelos. If I mix the arcade section from this game with the management section of Outworld, maybe I'd be onto something, but I still think you lose too many ratings for a complicated game.

One thing I was interested to see is whether this gets as high a rating as Korelos, which it doesn't deserve, but it's about to get the same (just below 3 out of 5). My theory here being, you're as wise to write a simple game in 1 month than a complicated game in 6 months, since the complicated game will receive far too many hate votes... unless it's spot on I guess.

Still, I can't help myself, I prefer complicated games so I'll probably end up doing another mad project next <img src="smileys/smiley36.gif" border="0" align="middle">

Jovian War

Just a quick shoot-em-up I threw together over the past couple of weeks, mostly as a test for mobile phones and to test out some Clay.io features. Ship is controlled with the mouse or touch and firing is automatic. Collect coins to upgrade at the end of each level.

Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome.

In terms of polish and quality, I think it's excellent. Really nice and professionally done. My worry is that the game is slightly complicated and it's kind of hard to know what's going on - or at least, I had no idea where the enemies were and just spun around looking for them. There are probably instructions but most people refuse to read them and expect the game to be intuitive and instantly accessible. So if you stick your game on Kongregate/Newgrounds etc, my guess is that you'll receive a lot of hate votes from people who couldn't be bothered working out how it works... as I found out to my cost with a recent game.

But personally I think it's very good and if you market it well and ignore the haters (like I didn't :p ) then I see no reason why it can't do well.

Ah sweet, I'd lost track of this. Haven't checked in on it for a month and it's improved immensely, so good job! It feels really polished now and it's much clearer what's going on - even I could work it out :p

Love the music, really adds to it. And it's clear now what the potions and so on do. Didn't find any bugs and it played through smoothly on mine, looks pretty much ready to go :)

I guess the question I'm asking is, is there any reason for slowness when switching between layouts? Is this known to occur on slow machines and are there solutions to it? I should say that starting on my arcade layout from the beginning causes no slowdowns, it loads and starts immediately and it's a very simple start-screen. All it does is 'Go to layout' when the button is hit.

I'm just previewing on Lan at the moment.

My mobile is a Nokia Lumia 620 (fairly slow phone).

Can't post a capx right now.

Is this simply due to the slowness of the machine? If it is, is there anything I can do? I don't mind if I can just do a 'Please wait' screen, but even that doesn't show up, it just seems to lock up for a few seconds.

Not sure if this is a common issue. It's only affecting my game when I try to preview it on my mobile phone.

I have a start screen with a 'Start Game' option in the middle. When you click/touch that, it switches to the arcade layout and the game begins. Pretty standard stuff and it transitions immediately on PC, but on my mobile it takes a very long time - anywhere between 2 and 30 seconds, during which nothing appears to be happening.

Any ideas what's causing this and is there anything I can do to alleviate it? I tried putting a message up 'Please wait' while the transition is occuring but even that doesn't show, it just locks up for a while as soon as the button is hit.

I am now seeing it when previewing (with the message that ads don't appear in a preview) and positioning seems fine on mine. Only problem I'm still seeing is that it doesn't work if you upload to Newgrounds, not sure about other places.