farflamex's Forum Posts

  • rosareven - By the way, I don't see any comment or vote on Clay.io, are you sure it went in correctly?

  • It's definitely coming along and going in the right direction. The sound effects are nice and overall it's looking pretty good.

    Couple of things - is the AI in the game yet? I had to play against myself as usual but I'd like to play against the AI. I couldn't work out how to do that.

    The rule that you have to roll a 6 to get on the board can be pretty aggravating. Is it central to the game, or could you fix it so that if you have no pieces on the board, you get a free entry next turn? I like the fact that you need a 6 to get EXTRA pieces out, but if you have none, it can take forever (I know you get 3 rolls but it actually took me 4 turns to get a piece out once). I know this is common in some board games but I don't like it and you just feel a victim of the dice (I guess that's board games for ya :p ).

    I still feel a bit more visual instruction would be nice rather than a pre-game description (I'm lazy like everybody else nowadays). Say you hit a potion, a quick pop-up bubble saying what it does would be nice. And I'd still like to see the flashing pieces :p

    Still, overall it's quite intuitive and if you just play it through you soon pick up the rules, so I'm just nit-picking really. With the excellent graphics and simple-but-fun gameplay, you'll do well with this :)

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  • It works! Back to normal now, loads in fast and plays perfectly :)

  • Thanks for the input. I should have looked for more input whilst making the game as I could have avoided some of the problems maybe. It's why I'm keen to help with Board Horde as I realise how valuable input can be. The thing that's most frustrating about the Kongregate crowd is they just say 'Loads of bugs', give it a 1 rating and then don't answer when you ask what the bugs are.

    I sort of agree with you about the combat. Once you get good at it, it's actually much better to fly away from the enemies and have them chase you, which forces them to fly straight at you and they become easier targets. The 'fun' part of that is that you have to keep rotating to keep your stronger shields facing them (gives a Star-Trekky sort of feeling of 'starboard shields failing'). But overall I'd agree that the combat isn't quite right and let's the game down a bit. Worse of all, it's the bit that people see first and they just assume it's a combat game and could easily lose interest. The problem is, due to the movement style of the game (i.e from above and free to go in any direction) I'm not sure how to alter it. In a standard shoot-em-up, you're going in one direction so the enemies can be given paths and stuff.

    By the way, interestingly, the ships have no AI at all. It's a strange quirk of the movement system that they constantly appear to dodging and weaving around, but it's just because of the way they move. Sometimes they even seem to retreat when they're damaged and come flying in for hit-n-run attacks but it's not programmed that way. They're just given a random location close to your ship and they attempt to reach it constantly, and occasionally change the location. All of their behaviour stems from that. I was expecting to have to work for weeks on the AI and it all worked with like 1 command xD

    I did notice that it doesn't work on IE9. Not at all on my PC, it just loads up and freezes. Not sure how to fix that. It's dead on Kongregate now - 2 star rating, although if I knew what all the bugs were I'd fix them, delete it and re-launch it there because Kongregate DOES send you lots of traffic (about 300 hits in 2 days).

    Incidentally, host your games on Clay.io. I'm not sure if the advertising revenues are broke but I made $2 from 300 plays, so almost 1 cent per play. That's huge in my experience.

    I'll tweak the other stuff you mentioned. You can't actually save the game until you're in the station by the way. With the new C2 feature, I could probably change that to save the entire game now, even out in space.

    Rosareven, give me a shout if you need any help with your game. It might be something I could help with if you're making something similar. I should say that C2 was fine for this game and I didn't experience any major obstacles, other than the ones everybody else probably experience (my pet-hate with C2 is the inability to tweak and object after it's created until your next top-level event, that caused me loads of problems).

  • I just cleared my cache and browsing history and the same thing is still happening. I should point out that it IS running - I know that because the fps counter occasionally changes from 59 to 60. But all I have is the empty board, the 6 counters at the top and the 'Board Horde' headline. Nothing else happens and I can't get it to start - there's no sound either.

    It might just be Dropbox being very, very slow? I have left it for 5 minutes though and it's just not starting.

    Have you tried putting it on Clay.io? I'm not sure if it needs to be 'finished' to go on there, but the last I played, it's playable so I think it'd be ok. They seem to have really good servers, although I thought that about Dropbox until now :p

  • By the way, thanks for spotting the planet description font, I've made it a set 16, which works even on the smaller screen - there's plenty of room.

    Try playing it here Korelos - you can see the difference the screen sizes make. For one thing, it's MUCH easier to play at this size. I think you may need to look into this with Board Horde right from the beginning - try to get it working on 800x600, because it's a right pain trying to move down to that size later.

    I've pushed to the Firefox store (very easy through Clay.io, took about 2 minutes), and am gonna do Chrome later (much fiddlier, I tried with a different game) and am upgrading to W8 later, so I'll try the W8 store. Will report when I have some details, might come in handy later if I do more games, and at least I can pass on my experiences.

  • Thanks Dave. It is pretty disheartening when people give bad reviews, but that's inevitable as you say. It's even worse when the game is running perfectly on mine and the 1-star rating was given on the assumption that I've just released a bug-ridden game, which isn't the case. I worked long and hard to fix every bug and it's pretty much bug-free. It just doesn't seem to work very well on Kongregate for some reason.

    These technical issues are frustrating. It's like the issue with your Board Horde game not working on my PC. Can't work out why it will load in and it's probably not anything you're doing wrong. But it's the sort of thing that will lead to hate-votes, so it can be annoying. Live and learn :p

    Glad you discovered the crippling effects on the ship. It can be quite scary as different parts of the ship shut down. For example if you just lose your thrusters, you can fly around but not steer and you need to shift repair crews to them quickly and the ship will slowly start to turn again (very slowly). The fires work well too and will slowly spread from compartment to compartment, eventually burning the whole ship down unless you fix it or get back to a station.

    I was originally planning a distress signal effect because it's basically game-over if you lose too much control and you're on fire. I was thinking of having them drag you back to a station but I couldn't think of a good way of doing it - besides, there needs to be a way to lose somehow. But I do like the idea of calling in allied vessels for help and that'd be very easy to implement (probably).

    There is a larger campaign going on. The number at the bottom of the screen shows you how strong the enemy have become and you need to make sure it never reaches 1000. It speeds up, so eventually the only way to stop it is to visit enemy systems and smash up their supply lines (which is also very profitable). Mind you, it's also a very good way of getting killed so it's a gamble.

    Thanks again for the encouragement and it's nice to know at least one person has seen some of the math at work :)

  • Kongregate is a bad idea though. I've noticed this before with Kongregate - you'll get 1/5 ratings from people if there's a bug or technical issue, regardless of the game. If you put up a simple game which works well, it'll get 3 or 4 stars, just because it works. If you put up a better game which has technical issues, you get the hate votes. Everybody is claiming there are bugs but it works fine on mine, so I'm not sure what they're seeing that I'm not.

    Thanks for the feedback. Some of the scaling issues are a problem. I initially designed it on full-screen (it's full screen on Clay.io but 800x600 on Kongregate). Shrinking it down to that size was a problem as it's really not designed to work on such a low resolution. I'll increased the text sizes as there's plenty of space there for a larger text size.

    There is a big X on the radar for the station but maybe it needs to be clearer because the radar is too cluttered now too.

  • It's a bit too late already sadly, once you put something on Kongregate with even a single issue, everyone gives it a 1/5 just because of the bug. Strangely, if you put up an idea which took a few hours to put together, so long as it doesn't have bugs, people will vote highly and say 'Keep working on it'. Seems better to spend a day on Kongregate games :p

  • My game is up and running on Kongregate here ...

    Korelos

    The only bug I'm seeing is that if you click off the window, you can no longer press any keys. I assume the window loses focus or something, like if you type in a comment, you can no longer play. Is there some way to ensure the window always has focus, or maybe regains focus whenever there's a mouse click or something?

  • Thanks man, good list. I've put it up on Clay.io and linked through from Kongregate, so I'll see what people have to say. Will try the Chrome Store and then move through the list. I'll see if I have any success with any of those, should be fairly obvious in a day or two.

  • Still looking for a solution to this one, so I'll try again with a screenshot.

    My game is uploaded to Clay.io where it works fine without borders, and I'm pointing at that from Kongregate. The screen size is 800x600 and that's specified at both Clay.io and Kongregate. But when I play it on Kongregate, I get scrollbars around the sides of the screen which make it unplayable. Pic below....

    Kongregate Pic

    I've asked Austin at Clay.io what the problem is and his answer was.. 'That's C2 related, not Clay.io. The index.html file it generates has some margins which make the overall page larger than 800x600. You can tweak it with some CSS, or just make the game 20px or so smaller'

    I don't see how making it 20px smaller would help, because then I'd specify a smaller size and still get margins? Added to which, my game is cramped enough since I'd planned it around a much larger screen and it's been a pain getting it that small.

    Does anyone know how I tweak is with CSS, i.e what the tweaks are? And how I'd then change that in Clay.io?

  • Cheers, nice one and thank you :)

  • Will do, thanks for your advice. Even better, I told my Mum this story and she decided to buy it me for my birthday, so it's even cheaper now :p

  • Don't know if this has been asked, but is it possible to use it as terrain, and deform it/alter it's shape so physics objects react correctly to it? I think I saw somebody somewhere say this is possible but I can't find anything to reset it's shape during runtime. I imagine it would be processor heavy, but would be fun to play with.