[Feedback Friday #70] - 70?! The exponential power of time [08/24/2018]

Feedback Friday #70 is open until September 7th

Looking for a life hack for success in the games industry? On Oct 17, 2014, this community created Feedback Friday. For just a moment, forget about the hundreds of products we've explored. Instead, try to imagine yourself sitting at your computer on Friday, Oct 17th of the year 2014. That's a 4 year younger version of yourself. Imagine seeing this community of developers working to explore game design. Imagine that you decided then to build a stupidly simple game every 12 weeks. Imagine that the first ones were crap, so for the first year you produced 4 pieces of junk. You put them out into the world anyway. You heard the feedback, grokked where it could've been stronger, and then went back in for more. You learned techniques, became faster, and made contacts. The second year you feel more confident, though in truth, it looks much like the first. The third went by in a blur. And now, you're sitting at FF #70. After 4 years, you're developed a significant portfolio. Due to the exponential power of time, you've walked the walk, so now you talk the talk. Maybe you've had a little hit, maybe you've figured out what it takes to build a hit, or maybe, all this learning has opened new doors to impressive jobs at major studios. Maybe you've become a Senior Artist, Lead Designer, or Tech Director. Maybe you've found your dream job. Now, realize that other people have done something exactly like this. Instead of dreaming, they took action.

Today is the next step along your journey. Try; Improve; Repeat.

Good luck,
Gigi.

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Want design feedback for your new game? Then you've found the right thread! Post here to get precious player feedback. Discuss until we lock the thread to start the two week break.

How To Ask For Feedback

• Show - Pics, videos, or best of all, a playable game!
• Be Concise - Who's got time for Wall 'O Text? Less is more

How To Give Feedback

• Be Positive - Finding redeeming qualities in the worst of games, is in itself a game
• Focus On The Design - Not the designer
• Be Specific - "Your game sucks!" is for nubs

What To Show

• Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play >>> everything else
• How To Scope Small (Unity tutorial)

Gigi

[PS - Feedback Friday #69 is here]

 

Was the opening monologue too intense?

Gigi

 

I think the opening monologue was really good. It definitely sparked my interest and I really appreciate the effort that you put into every Feedback Friday.

For those interested, there will be a game jam this weekend (from 31st of August to 2nd of September, called The GMTK Game Jam.
Although it would probably lead to the games having similar themes, I think it could be a good way to get new ideas and to gain more experience in game development.

 

Shot from an interactive short film I'm working on. Whose voice do y'all think would fit this scene better Morgan Freeman's or Charlton Heston's? Thinking of getting an impressionist to narrate the film instead of doing it myself.

 

Werner Herzog's.

 

Charlton Heston given your choices. I cannot take Morgen Freeman serious in any way, he disqualified himself by taking roles where he talks generic bullcrap that should appear like the mystery of the universe. Movies like Now You See Me, Transcendence or Lucy especially. Whenever i hear his voice i see the headlines of bad science click-bait articles.

Normally i lean towards male narration but looking at your pic i could also very well imagine a motherly female voice narrating.

 

How about Cate Blanchett (the elf queen narrator in Lord of the Rings)? I'm with @Marrt that this scene needs a darkly intense, mysterious, and foreboding female narrator who can someone convey just the slightest hint of 'lovely beyond imagining'.

PS - that's a LOVELY fricking scene. The barely visible deer with the piercing white eyes just screams Mystery Box.

Gigi

 

I'm not restricting myself to those two, they're just the first voices that came to mind. I'm going for more of a grand, mysterious feel so a mother's voice would be a little off-putting. Though I'm open to suggestions if you could show me some examples of the kind of motherly voice you thinking about.

 

Came across this video and yeah Cate Blanchett's voice in that scene is awesome, definitely would fit this film. Mysterious, intense but not frightening. Only thing is I feel a male voice might fit even better. When I hear certain trailers that have a deep male voice saying something inspirational or telling a story I just can't picture a female's voice having the same emotional impact.

Have any other female voice ideas?

 

Ok, so I'm hesitant to share because I think there is plenty polish missing, but free feedback right? - anyway here goes:

(slightly outdated ugly-shadow-having example gif
https://i.gyazo.com/fe9e5401ffdbd6df7b184eee5d1055e6.gif


Pocket Pursuit - Android/iOS action driving game
TEST IT ON ANDROID - 64MB APK, must enable third party sources for installation:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bwfieqi5eka949u/test.apk

If you test, please take a moment to share how the controls feel, and how bad the FPS get, and bonus points for what device your testing on! Found a graphical or gameplay bug I haven't mentioned below? Please share! Absolutely hate it? Lemme hear about why it sucks!

TLDR:
Its a chase game where your a cop or a criminal in a car, and must chase or evade other AI cars while dodging traffic. It is still weak on the "gamification" side as I've spent too much time on the technical side of things to make it work on phones at an acceptable framerate with acceptable car count and action on screen. Its still very rough around the edges and many things you see are likely to change to some degree. The only options when you open the game are to play a "police mission" or a "criminal mission", and these are simply randomly selected spawns that put you and some AI cars in the world, allowing you to chase/be chased around. The only way to end the missions and restart (to try out the other missions) is to reload the scene and select the other option.

For right now, I hope to have a release within maybe 1-2 months, but the more I try and estimate the time it'll take the longer it seems to drag on

Spoiler: TOO LONG DO READ

CURRENT KNOWN ISSUES:
- APK is a bit large (I want to get below 50 MB) for now, but later I want to change the audio format and hopefully drop that a bit, and perhaps some other tweaks to save on size down the road.
- Police cars look like regular cars. I haven't created all the car models in a "police variant" yet like I plan to do, but for now just use your imagination . The orange/green non-traffic cars are criminals, and the blue cars are police. I slightly considered spending a couple hours wrapping that up before sharing here, but then instead I didn't.
- Loading times can be a drag when you first start a mission or reload the scene. This is because the camera quickly transitions to a new location, and the game must quickly load in the new surroundings. I've got a plan to deal with this by simply making the camera smoothly transition from the start location to where the mission will begin, but for now I just let it lag!
- There are no win conditions (enabled) yet. You can't be "Busted" or "Catch" the criminals. For now its more or less a tech demo of the city scene, with vehicles running around.
- Traffic cars sometimes "pop in" when spawning. This will be dealt with by adjusting some of the distances and such, so try to ignore it if you notice any now.
- The music will cut off and there will be no sound after a short time. I have already got an idea for a looping system to keep the music going and allowing transitions to other tracks potentially, but unfortunately its not ready for show time yet. There is a complete lack of sound effects, only music. Feel free to mute using your phone/tablet audio controls, because there is no way in game to shut the music off yet

What is it?
It is a driving game where the player is either a police car, or a criminal car, and they must either pursue or evade the chasing vehicles.

What existing game is it most similar to?
Smashy Road for android - the control scheme is based on the highly successful Smashy Road, but the idea here is to make something that allows you to be the pursuit car as well when playing as a police car. I tried to stray away more from the fundamentals of that game, but I enjoy it, so most of whats playable now (which isn't much) is very similar to how that game plays at its basics. I think there is room to work in some more unique features still that can help separate the style even more, as I don't wanna make it too clone-y, but for now it doesn't have a whole lot in the way of original things to do.

How far along is it?
I had hoped to have it done... a month or two ago . But the thing grew as they always do, and I've spent a tremendous amount of time on R&D of the async world loader, the traffic system/cars, and making this actually run on just about any old toaster of a phone you can get it to install on.

Why did I make this?
I hope to make it a high performance "simple city simulation" which I may use as the backbone for future titles, or at least that is the idea right now. It originally was born a machine learning game back when UT was pushing the new ML features linking with tensorflow. I had created a "zombie survival" sort of scenario, where a randomly generated city would spawn in some humans, and some zombies, and they would attempt (by control of tensorflow) to kill/avoid each other. Long story short that flopped and the ML setup that came out of the box wasn't really intended for that sort of scenario, so I scrapped the idea - but I hung onto the city generation algo I had come up with. I proceeded to convert it to a different game, and brought in AI vehicles on a waypoint system around the city with traffic lights, and then went on to add player cars (tested with various kits like the impressive Edy's vehicle physics) which I still haven't settled on a final form of. For now it no longer uses Edy's as I had performance issues when using many physics cars at once, although I haven't decided how that might end up.

Why is it so ugly?
Well... I am not the finest artist in the land . I do hope to improve the visuals to some extent, but to be realistic I won't be taking them much higher tech than that, both for performance reasons, and to make creating the art a workload I can handle alone.

WTF is the numbers in the top left corner?
Those are your FPS. Ideally, they won't drop below 30 FPS average, but hey, its a demo man! The highest number is the max frames recently, the middle is the average, and the bottom the lowest frames recently.

Why are you still reading this? Test it!

 

@MD_Reptile why are you trying to get file size under 50mb? 64mb is nothing for a mobile game, definitely don't need to spend time trying to optimize space imo. A 10 second video recorded on a phone takes up more storage than that.

 

That is true, and its one of those goals I may not really ever meet, but I figure if I set the target somewhere, at least it doesn't grow into a huge 100+ mb APK nobody will download over the air and eat up lots of data.

Probably it'll only get a little more compact when I change audio to a more suitable format.

 

Much is lost that once was, for there are none now who remember it.

 

* Tumbleweed bounces slowly by *

 

The gif looks absolutely adorable! I don't have an android, so couldn't play it. The art style matches the gameplay and could make for a cute, joyful experience.

Gigi.

 

Messing around with the post-processing stack and some water shader today. Might turn this into a short film or game idk. What do ya'll think about a game where your stuck in the middle of the ocean in a tiny boat and you have to try to find you way back to land. But there are like giant sea creatures, storms, aliens n stuff in your way? Or maybe a fishing game where you try to catch sea monsters? Or maybe a short film about a guy stuck in the middle of the ocean trying to return to his family but has to deal with some sea monster thing?

Just rambling but if y'all have any ideas/suggestions please share them

 

Thanks for the encouraging words!

If any one could spare a moment to do a short playtest I'd really appreciate your suggestions

 

@Jonathan-Watkins - Raft is a recent example of an Indy game that does this quite successfully. It's a great beginning for a story. You might find it useful to examine how you turn this one concept into a story that still creates a meaningful Interest Curve, like this:



Curtiss.

 

Loved your opening text. I'm unsure about sharing anything at this point since it's not really friday? XD But I'll be sure to keep an eye on these posts and share stuff things I'm working on. Thanks

 

Will we make it 4 more years? Only time will tell. In the meantime, another FF draws to a close. Nice work everyone.

Gigi