Experimental Gameplay Project – Neverending Game
- September 28th, 2010
- Posted in cHALLENGES
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Rise and Fall
UPDATE – I’m working on fixing the issues in this prototype. You can see the progress here.
Here is my submission for the September Experimental Gameplay Project Competition, Rise and Fall.
The main concept is to climb as high as you can by shooting the enemies and making platforms out of them.
It is my first challenge ever like this. As a result you will see the bugs in the build. Hopefully in the future I will refine my creation process and mitigate issues sooner. This is about 7 days worth of work during the evening after my day job. I used Game Maker to create the “game”. For more information on the games creation check out the journal posts here.
Thanks for checking out the game.
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Controls:
- A – Move Left
- D – Move Right
- Space – Jump
- S+Space – Jump Down
- Enter – Fire
- F4 – Full Screen
- Esc – Exit the game
The controls were a bit hard to really play the game effectively.
You should change the shoot key from Enter.
@Snorlax
Can you elaborate on what you found challenging with the controls? What key would you suggest for fire besides enter?
I’m not sure what I would change. Of course I find everything as fine, but I designed it. I was keeping the idea of first person shooter controls (WASD).
In an upcoming update you will see a reduction in the character speed. It should make it less unwieldy. When it goes up, let me know what you think.
Thanks for the feedback!
Interesting. Overall executed well, and fun idea, but has a few problems that make the experience a chore.
First, it is often seemingly impossible to proceed. Sometimes the seemingly random vertical movement of the platforms and vertical spawning of enemies makes it appear impossible. It was this way on my first try.
*SPOILERS*
Second, there are many things that are not effectively communicated to the player. The first problem above of course can be resolved by the not actually completely random vertical movement of the platforms, but by jumping again and again you can make it move up (which can lead to a moderately boring one-button game). It took a lot of experimentation and patience to discover this. Something like the platform lighting up green with an up arrow for a split second when you land on it would notify the player that there is something to learn here. Similarly, when the player jumps, sometimes it seems like the horizontal “air-control” movement is blocked. I suspect this is due to your cliff-hanging code, or some other aspect of your platform collision detection. Having been trained by generations of Keen/Mario/Sonic/etc. games, many players will instantly say a game has bad controls as soon as you limit their horizontal impulse movement in the air, for any reason other than hitting a large and obvious wall or brick (and by obvious I mean you must not be able to get through it in any way at all).
Third, the controls… generally you should provide at least a couple layouts if possible. WASD + Enter is fine, but consider W for jump as well as space, and possibly space for shooting. Another popular scheme is Arrow Keys + ctrl/space/z/x/c for shooting/jumping. The idea of first person shooter controls in my mind implies using the mouse to shoot and aim.
Finally, the strong points. Great animation! It was nice to see all those frames in the jump animation (especially considering that’s mostly what you’re going to stare at as you play this). The dynamic platform generation is good. The cliff hang feature is fun and adds some tension. The jumping sound is nice.
Hope that helps some, maybe add in some bg music and double jump if you decide to keep working on it. Good luck!
@vazor
Thanks for your feedback.
I’m wondering did you play the Updated version or the one with the stick figure guy?
The stick figure guy version is REALLY buggy. I had some problems with the basic engine. There were some quirky Game Maker issues I had to discover before the platforms would work better.
I haven’t looked at the code in a bit, but I believe there was a bug in the ledge grab. There is also a quirk in the way I check for the ledge grab. I actually look to see if the character can climb up to the ledge above. There in lies the problem. If there are two platforms one above another the character won’t grab. It’s annoying and a flaw in the design.
The comment you made about the platform design are great observations. I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to explain the game mechanics. Small changes to the art would have done much to help new players.
The controls are chose are a personal preference. If I were to continue working on it. I would definitely consider different options. Arrow key movement drives me crazy, but when making a game for other people options are very important.
Thanks for your review. It is greatly appreciated.