Free Demo of Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutso!
The amount of work I've put in over the last couple of weeks has been quite scary, but at last I have the game at a Beta stage. In order to take a little break (of sorts) I've created a demo of the first part of the game. For those who are interested, you can download the demo from the downloads page here.
posted by Steve | 4:53 PM
8 Comments:
Ah, at last. :) Look forward to a spare moment to try this!
And I hope you'll share your thoughts with us.
Steve:
Just finished playing it - posted a link from my blog. I really enjoyed myself, and the animations are seriously cute! Just a few niggles which I'll share:
- Why doesn't Space advance the opening cut scene as well as Enter? In fact, why doesn't any key do it?
- I'm not certain the Examine command is useful, especially as not everything that can be interacted with can be examined c.f. the panels in the prison area. However, assuming you want to keep it, can you please make it that the same key cancels the examine window as opens it? I find pressing Cntrl and then Enter a bit bizarre. Cntrl twice would be more intuitive. (No need to remove the Enter to close the window as a second option, though). I'm open to the idea that you use Examine later in the game, but in the demo Action alone would have been fine, I think.
- If it were me, I wouldn't have used a life system. I didn't test what happens when you run out of lives, but I assume the game ends. This pushes some of the gameplay into save game management, which I'm not a fan of. But this is a retro-style game, and I see no harm in it either. Just a matter of personal preference, perhaps.
- You absolutely need to add a control to disable the music! Many players want to turn music off, and it seems foolish to deny them the option. :)
- This could make a great mobile phone game, although you'd struggle to sell many copies owing to the fact that 99% of mobile gaming is brand dominated. But still, this would make a cute mobile game and the cost of conversion would be minimal.
- Embedding cartoon strips into the world is a lovely touch!
Okay, must fly! Best wishes!
Chris, many thanks for your comments, all of which are extremely valuable. Thanks, too, for the link.
Having the conversations advance on any key was originally implemented and gave me problems that I could only overcome with the current restriction. If I had proper programming skills I'd probably be able to handle it better. I'll look at allowing Ctrl too, though.
I wanted both interact and look/examine as I'm a bit wary of single button gameplay. I'm not sure it gives the player enough to think about at times.
I like the feeling of pressure that a life system has, though I agree with you on the save game management. So I've employed a system that creates an autosave whenever Ed changes location. If you "die" I give the option to continue (as well as load, of course) and you hardly lose any time at all. I also add on more life if the player is a little low.
I'm not sure how I'd do the music on/off, but I'll definitey think about it.
As I created the game in Game Maker, it might be a bit difficult to convert to a mobile game (or any other format) I would think.
Hi Steve,
Have been keeping tabs on your Nutso game for ages and was delighted to finally get a chance to play a demo. It definitely lived up to expectations (going by the screenshots you've been posting) and was a real joy so a huge congrats to you for making something that's just great fun to play! Have been getting a kind of nostalgia trip because it reminded me of games from the old Commodore 64 days (I'm thinking a bit of Gauntlet mixed with Paradroid). The music is also reminiscent from back then as well.
Favourite aspect of the game is definitely the cartoon strips hanging on the walls. They provide a nice distraction. It's like you get the game but these strips are a pleasant bonus - you actively try and access a part of the room just to read each strip even if you don't necessarily need to do so in order to progress the game.
I'm pretty fond of the humour as well. It's a nice easy going style of comedy that grows on you. If you're worried about people not quite getting it I can tell you they definitely will a few screens into the game. I'm pretty sure you'll win several more Juniper Crescent fans after this escapade.
The graphics speak for themselves - eye candy through and through! :) The tile-based construction definitely works for you.
Here are some suggestion I have (don’t worry, nothing too bad):
On the outside scene with the sheep, when the screen began to scroll I got very slight glitching in the middle of the screen. It's not overly noticeable. It might even be my graphics card or it might be a small limitation of the Game Maker game engine (since you're using pretty detailed graphics). If it can be fixed then great but don’t lose too much sleep over it.
An extra sense of danger could be added if you indicated more when Ed loses one of his lives (i.e., his energy bar goes down to zero – not the end of the actual game). Have him flash on & off, play a sound or something similar. It’s indicated that the life has gone in the bottom left but you wouldn’t really notice it unless you went looking for it since you’re so engrossed in running away from Mr Smoozles. It might make the player panic that little bit more when they didn’t realise their energy was so low that they lost a life, adding to more heightened gameplay.
I possibly agree with one of the previous posts that you might want to rethink some of the controls a little bit. They're completely usable as they are but some wrong footing does happen - sometimes I end up hitting 'Return' instead of 'CTRL' and visa versa. Maybe it’s just not clear enough what the difference between the two keys are, or maybe I just need to get the hang of playing the game a bit more. Might be useful to have an icon or similar to indicate which button is available for pressing, or have the same button both open and close whatever the current dialogue/interface is.
It might also be useful replace less commonly used keys (such as 'Y/N', 'D', etc.) with a 'highlight & select' approach instead. What I mean by this is use the cursor keys to flick back and forth highlighting between 'Yes' & 'No', then pressing 'Return' to select the desired choice. I found I was roaming the keyboard in order to find the key I wanted, which was a bit distracting. If you stick to the core buttons (i.e., direction keys, ‘Return’ & ‘CTRL’), it’s more intuitive for the player. Don’t know if you ever read a good web design book called ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ but it’s along those sort of similar lines. It would help the game controls to flow that little bit more.
Sorry to keep adding to the list (!!) but a nice feature to add would be the ability to remap the keys on the keyboard. That way you can keep everyone happy no matter what weird way they want their controls laid out for the game.
The above are only suggestions because game interface as it stands is more than useable. You’re probably trying to stick to getting the game out by a certain date so don’t try to rip your hair out attempting to make changes!
By the way, I had a chance to hook it up to xbox controller (they're XP compatible – used the XBCD drivers instead of the MS ones since MS doesn’t look like it wants to release any updated driver until Vista comes along). I then used ControlMK (http://www.redcl0ud.com/controlmk/) to map the keys to the controller. You might need to restart ControlMK to make changes take effect but Nutso played great on the controller once I had it configured (set the ‘Rate of Repitition’ to about 10 for the direction controls and ‘OFF’ for all other keys). Have had the controller lying around for ages with not many games to play on it (I’m mostly an adventure game fanatic) so it was great to have made some use of it at last!
Good luck with the final run up to release, Steve. Looking in very good shape at the moment so can’t wait to play the full thing!
Paul.
Paul,
Many thanks for your comments, particularly the extra nice ones. :)
I'm particularly glad you liked the graphics - I've wanted to do a tile based game for a while and this is my first go at creating such graphics. You should have seen the early versions of some of the first screens! It was certainly a fun learning curve.
I like the idea of the graphical marker for losing a life. Perhaps a black heart that breaks above his head...
Some of the other stuff - mapping keys and highlighting yes/no is probably stuff that's a little outside my capabilities right now. I'm beginning to think that I ought to take up some programming for future projects.
Okay, this is where I show my ignorance - how do you connect the XBox controller to your PC? Is there an adapter?
Hi Steve,
Sorry, I should have mentioned that it’s the Xbox 360 wired controller I was talking about, not the older one. No adapter is needed because it has a USB interface. I see they’re going relatively cheap on Play.com at £17.99 (http://www.play.com/Games/Xbox360/4-/719734/Official_XBox_360_Wired_Controller/Product.html). If you’re buying one make sure you don’t get the wireless version - I think it needs an additional piece of receiver hardware to work on the PC that doesn’t appear to be commonly available yet.
In the suggestions I was describing, they’re not so much essentials but ‘nice to have’ pieces of chrome. I’m sure it’s more important for you to get the game finished than getting too caught up in adding chrome extras (something that’s probably tempting to do until the cows come home). Any kind of feature creep usually gives rise to that dreaded word ‘delayed’ (a word that typically causes developers to turn their heads and spit on the ground).
Good luck with your foray into programming in the future. I’ve had a dabble with Game Maker in the past and it seems to pretty much be a sort of icon-based programming so you’re not so wide of the mark. If you get any spare time (a rare commodity, I’m sure), it might even be a good exercise to replace all the ‘Actions’ icons for each event in a test project with a coded script equivalent. That way you’ll know what results to expect with your new code replacement. The Game Maker language appears to be a variation of JavaScript so you should be able to translate a lot of what you pick up to other game engines such as WME.
I've created a list of bugs and polishing items and left off anything that I consider feature creep. I think there's also a distinction to be made between responding to feedback and diluting the vision. Some things people have mentioned would be good to bear in mind for the next game but if I incorporated them here would take something away from my original intention.
I'm not averse to scripting and much of what I've done has been through scripts. In fact, the icon based drop and drag stuff is just scripting in a more visual format, which I kind of like. I like the way that everything is effectively an object with properties to be manipulated.
Having looked at the Torque 2D system, I find that to be too "programmy" - it's like they've gone part of the way there without creating a fully-fledged visual user interface. I don't like, for instance, the way that you drop sprites onto a background and then make objects from them. It seems the wrong way around.
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