[Feedback Friday #8] - December 5, 2014

Want design feedback for your new game? Then you've found the right thread! Post it here to find out what others think. Discuss to your heart's content, until next Friday, when we'll lock the old and start anew.

How To Get Folks To Checkout Your Game?

• Show - Be Interesting! Pics, videos, or best of all, a playable game!
• Be Concise - Who's got time for Wall 'O Text? Less is more.
• Read This - More great guidance in @superpig's post.

How To Give Good Feedback?

• Be Positive - Finding a few redeeming qualities in the worst of games, is in itself a game.
• Be Respectful - Whichever side you're on, play nice or don't play!
• Focus On The Design - Not the designer.
• Be Specific - "Your game sucks!" is for nubs.

Good luck!
Gigi

[PS - Feedback Friday #7 is here]

 

I'm back with the next update. Depending upon you guys before I push this in my original WIP.



Link
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38338116/WarfrontDefenders/Webplayer.html

There are few major changes in this update.
1. There are various types of vantage positions now. Some provides cover and protection (marked with yellow) and some without cover (orange).

2. There are two special types of position now, health and ammo, if you get your wounded soldier in the health position he will gain health over time and if you get him to ammo position, he will refill ammo over time. But each of these special postions can be occupied by one soldier only.

This new feature : health and ammo positions are an experiment. These are in place of the drag and drop health/ammo button. Let me know if these are more fun.

PS. The barricades are still done via button.

3. There's a new Hud feature, yelling out situations of enemy and soldiers. Let me know if this is working.

4. @Aiursrage2k Easier entry of level duration.

5. @Aiursrage2k Tutorial is updated. Its more informative now, still working on it.

6. Behaviors are worked upon. Soldiers auto-attacks if enemy is in range, if out of range, but fired upon, takes cover. Enemy behavior is also worked upon. There's a mechanic of enemies avoiding gunfire near the end of the level time, let me know if this is too advantageous for the creeps.

Thank you and waiting for your feedback.

 

@FlyingRobot I have been trying out your game for the first time.

As I play Warfront Defenders, I mentally relate the game to tower defence game were towers have health and ammunition. The feedback on top of each soldiers head upon providing an action helps in terms of communicating feedback. If the message weren't there, I wouldn't have known whether my soldiers actually have received my commands.

Fixed positions
I have a few questions I think you should reflect upon. Are the fixed positions necessary? When some of the german nazis started to group up near one of my soldiers, I felt the urge to stack more soldiers close to each other, however it was not possible for me. This made me fell the game to be a little bit stiff. Would it be possible to have "unlimited" positions to move to, or would this ruin the intended design? What about adding stamina to your soldiers, so they only can run x distance before being able to move again? Then you avoid ending up in the RTS genre.

Drag n' drop commands
I don't quiet understand the drag n' drop commands for your own soldiers. I began thinking whether this design was intended for mobile devices, however aren't multiple finger taps easier to manage than swiping commands to the battlefield? Could it be a possibility to add both type of inputs?

Audio
And lastly, think about adding audio at this stage. I love audio in games, and if a game doesn't have just a slight piece of audio, I feel it becomes flat. I believe adding a bit of audio to your game at its current stage would be in place, and the game would gain an additional level of depth. You already got a bit of graphical feedback as it is, animations, UI which changes upon command selection, feedback from soldiers when taking a command, "ghost" animation upon killing a soldier and so forth. Just adding a few gun shots SFX, death screams SFX and button SFX would benefit your game.

I hope my feedback have been beneficial to you, feel free to ask and I'll elaborate even further if needed.

 

Edit: Now the link to Google Play is functional...

Alright, I'll give this thread a shot as well.

Dragon Journey
You play a dragon who have to save its friends from evil crystal monsters. Your friends are caught in large purple crystals and its your job to detroy these crystals! Smash crystals, use the available powerup orbs, shockwave, vortex and firemines and beat your highscore. Additionally, you can upgrade these powerups and boosters as aid for your quest. If you don't find our dragon fancy enough, you can even purchase new skins in the shop!

In terms of game rules, our tutorial should be self explanatory enough. Feel free to comment on this though. The game is only available on the google play store. This is because I am not allowed to publish it else were due to policies and such. to The game is only available for Android. But don't worry, it is free

To be more specific about the feedback we are looking;
- Do you as a player understand the rules? If not, what confuses you?
- How is the pace of the game? Too slow, too fast?
- How is the control scheme? Do you feel in control of your actions?

Feel free to add other comments and feedback.

 

@Freaking-Pingo Thanks for playing the game. All of your points are duly noted and are invaluable. I think I'll try jesture based commands in place of unnecessary drag and drops. Let's see how that works out. I'm still divided on whether to go for fixed positions or not. Letting towers in any positions in this little map is opening up crazy game mechanics. But, may be there can be zones where you can place soldiers rather than fixed positions. Let me see.

Yes, this thing needs a dash of art and music now.

 

Well if you could put your characters anywhere it would make sense to put them all on the flag. I think you might want to have a variety of unit-types (IE maybe flamethrowers and rocketeers so you wouldnt want to bunch them all up) and maybe give the character multiple flags to defend.

Right now i found that even though i might have 7 soldiers (only 4 or so would be shooting the rest would just be standing around doing nothing).

 

@Aiursrage2k The piling up of creeps are one of my concern from the start. Though the creep waypoints are distributed throughout the map, sometimes they do pile up. I remember my counter strike bots .

May be some behavioral AI should distribute the piling. Let's see.

 

Another week draws to a close. Week #9 is our Holiday Edition! It'll be up for 2 weeks. Let's see what you got!
Gigi