King Tree: Reply to feedback, and postmortem, all in a big post

Tee on 2007/09/23 02:05 of King Tree

So it's over again. :)

I'm happy, I moved up a notch. I was 7th on #2, 7th on #4, and now 6th! Maybe someday I'll get up there. :)

Anyway, I'm going to reply to all your comments like I usually do, then I'll say some final words.

Comments:

Game is ok. With some more levels it could make a good puzzle/action game. It seems inspired by flash webgames. DQ because twistedness is completely absent.
It's inspired on tower defense games, which in turn are inspired on Warcraft. Sorry about the twisted part. I meant to have a more twisted-like tree, but I had to cut out some branches because there was no space to put the nests. It's still a bit, um, two-branch-twisted tree. :)

what is twisted here?
See previous reply.

Gotta love defence games. Nice take on it.
Thanks!

Amazing work! definitely my favourite. Interesting design, I always wondered how to make a non-traditional RTS for pyweek and it seems you achieved it. Only question... where is the twisted theme? in the branches?
Nice to hear it's someone's favourite. Thanks. :) For twisted, see first reply.

Frobbershatted! That can't be good...
Yes, it's the typical reaction of a King Human when he sees a King Tree. :)

The game has both the best graphics and definitely the best music of all pyweek games this time around. All hail CC licenced stuff! The gameplay is pretty average tower defence-esque stuff, but it's still balanced and enjoyable. I noticed one weird bug when I was playing - my upgrade strategy was birds level 2, birds level 3, insects level 2, and this resulted in the birds nest reverting to generating crows.
Those are programmer's art, one who just discovered inkscape and pretty gradients. :) As for the music, I was really lucky to find one that fits. Balancing was one of my main goals this pyweek. And the bug is odd, I'll look into it later. The nest built is supposed to be based on the leaf you click.

nice game. original.
Thanks. Not too original though, it's inspired on tower defense games.

This is one of the best games I've tried for this PyWeek. I love the graphics, the music is sometimes boring but it's nice. Some sound effects are missing. The game play is fun but it could be improved. I think this game is very similar in concept to Onslaught. Again, I like the polished production.
Thanks. I'm happy to hear you liked it. I didn't have time for adding sounds, so I just threw in a music. :)

Excellent, the graphical style is really nice, everything seems well put together and the game is a lot of fun. It's a shame it's not longer-lived; additional difficulty levels or extra waves would have been nice for increasing longevity.
Thanks. :) I didn't want to add too many waves, though, because people might get bored before the end, given the way the balance turned out.

This game could benefit from tuning things, adjusting margins, varying effectiveness, and stuff like that. As an endurance game it feels a little thin in the amount of stuff to manage; more options and attacks would be nice. Maybe some unlockables as a reward. Background music is nice.
I spent a few hours at the last day balancing, but I found out that it's really hard. But, I'm somewhat happy with the balancing, I don't think it's too bad like it was on the last pyweek. I would have added another feature, but I didn't have time.

Good fun. Would have been nice if there were some instructions on how to play within the game - I resorted to the README, but I imagine many players would just give up. The balance seems good, although it would have been nice to have a little more variety in the available creatures, or at least an easier way to see what their effects were.
Sorry about that. I would have put a tutorial, given the unintuitive interface, but I didn't have time. I did put an ingame message asking you to read the README, though. :) Balancing seems good, yay. The status message shows the stats on creatures when you put the mouse over their leaf, but I admit there's not that much variety.

Different, and challenging!
Thanks. :)

I could't figure out how to play :( (or win)
Sorry for not adding a tutorial. :( I would have, but I didn't have time.

Awesome job. Some tweaking in the graphics to make the different upgrades and leaf jobs more distinctive would go a long way. Consider adding a winning condition, or at least a score summary at the end of the game (it doesn't even tell you what wave you got up to). After some play time it gets a bit easy -- there's no strategy beyond simply adding more crows and upgrading their nests -- perhaps the humans should attack the nests as well? Or the tree topology should change?
"Awesome" is always nice to hear on feedback. :) Hmm, yeah, you're right, the leaves are only different in colors. I didn't think of making them more different. It has a winning condition. Note King Human says he'll bring you 20 waves at the beginning, so it ends after 20th wave. :) I agree on the "too easy after some time" part. Changing tree topology, that's a great idea.

nice tower-defense game. the interface really could have used some tweaking - for example a highlight, when something is drag/clickable. but it was fun for a while, though i'm not really in that tower-defense thingy. one of my favorite entries, because everything fits together. how is the theme integrated? i'm no DQing you because I assume its the twisted-path up the tree.. well, okay.
You're right about tweaking the interface, but in my opinion a tutorial would have been a better time spent. Though I guess the tweaking would take less time. Thanks for not DQing me. Read first reply. :)

Good game! It needs a little more predictability, for player to develop strategies, etc; otherwise, you play it twice and it's done
Thanks, and I agree. There's not much replayability after you finish the game.

I don't like to be forced to read the readme to understand simple stuff. However, after I understood how everything worked the game turned out to be quite fun :)
Me neither. A tutorial was one of the things I didn't want to throw away, but I had set one of my main goals as balancing, so I chose balancing over tutorial. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Fun "Tower Defense" game with twisting paths.
Thanks.

Good game! Seemed a bit easy to me - once I got to level 5 nothing really got about the first cross. Good music, pretty. Perhaps the text for King Human was a bit too close to the edge, but that doesn't really matter.
I agree on the difficulty, once you get high level creatures, you've basically beat the game.

really nice, but afaik birds are far superior to insects
I guess you're right. I noticed it and tried to add more power to insects, but I don't think it worked out very well.

Thats a wierd game.
Hehe.

Nice game, but it the attacks seem quite weak in the beginning.
Again, agree on the difficulty. :) At the beginning you should combine fireflies and crows, but later on, anything high level beats the game.

It simple!
Ok. Yes, I could have added more variety, but I didn't want to overflow with unimplemented features like last time.

Quite addictive!
Thanks. :)

I like it! More levels!
I'm glad you liked it. :)

tower defense is always fun, It's not obvious what the difference between different creatures are (why I can build two types), but maybe I just didn't pay attention enough.
Two types for some variety. :) Fireflies and dragonflies have the ability to slow down the enemy, so it should help out while others attack. Wasps are supposed to have poison, but their effect is very unclear.

I loved it. Nice relaxing defense game with great art. Too bad it's hard to balance a defense game well.
Thanks! Someone who noticed it's so hard to balance it. :)

A fun story with nice graphics.
Thanks.

Praises to King Tree! Had some fun for an hour building the whole "tech-tree" and admiring the tanks on the tree.. There isn't much reason to play again once you've seen everything but still: Very well done!
Thanks. :) No replayability after you finish, I agree.

Original idea for a RTS, and also funny, but poorly balanced. It's hard to survive long.
People either say it's hard to survive long, or it's too easy. Well, if you can get past the beginning (you'll probably need a crow + firefly combo, then upgrade as fast as you can), it's too easy.

Quite addicting - Good work! :)
Thanks. :)

Really cool game, I loved it :)
Thanks. :)

I like the concept of tower defence games. You could add some more types of defence. (bugs? worms?)
I would have added another feature, but I didn't have time (see last words).


Some last words on the game (a little postmortem):

• I'm happy how the graphics turned out. It's the first time I use Inkscape for something relatively big, and I realized it's not as hard as I thought. I also feel lucky to have found a nice music that fits the game.


• I threw away one gameplay feature due to lack of time. Randomly, some special fruits would appear, and they would be able to be put on the branches as traps. To be more precise, spikes, poison plant, and spider web. At least this time I implemented most features I had originally planned. Last pyweek was a mess on unimplemented features. Other things I wanted to do were a tutorial, sounds, attacking animation for the birds, and more effects (like bees increasing the rate of fruits).


• I'm sort of happy with the balancing, considering how hard it is to do it properly. I think my game is slightly hard on the beginning, and gets too easy towards the end once you have level 3 bird/insect. There are only few waves, 20, so people don't get too bored near the end. :) Next time I have to make a game that's not so hard to balance.


• I think I achieved most of the goals: planning, balancing and sounds. Planning, I think I did fine. Balancing, some people liked it, others didn't, so I'll say I did "not bad" because balancing is so hard. :) Sounds, I was lucky to find a nice music that fits the theme, and most people liked it, so, well, although it's not really my credit because I didn't make the music, I did ok too. I would've put sounds but I didn't have time.


• Earlier today I was wondering if if I had mentioned somewhere that my game is inspired on tower defense games it would have affected my ratings. If it would, I apologize. By the comments it seems most people know tower defense, but I noticed a few who I think didn't know. But I don't think it did affect, my innovation score is the lowest of the three.
  
  I personally don't play tower defense too much, but I thought it would be a nice try, since I had no other ideas. I would've probably gone for another idea if I had a better one. Anyway, I'm sorry if I took any credit that I didn't deserve (as in the concept of a "tower defense" game). There are (too many, in fact) tower defense games out there if you look for them. The fact that there are too many of them is the main reason I was reluctant to do it. But even though it's based on tower defense, I worked hard on adding my own touch of originality to it, and I hope it worked. :)


• Um, sorry about the twisted part, too. That tree was meant to be more twisty, but adding more branches was getting too confusing.


• Next time I'm going for less work. I'm not sure how apparent it is, but I worked too much on this one (I'm not a very fast coder). I got very tired this time, so next time I'm going for something relaxing and easy to implement.


• One of the main reasons I do pyweeks is to learn, so I wouldn't be finished if I didn't tell you what I've learned this pyweek. Let's see. If you attempt to build a game that's hard to balance, you'll have trouble balancing. I think that's pretty obvious. :) Oh, and even if you don't know how to draw, you can manage making some reasonably decent graphics if you learn how to use the right tools. And programming practice, of course. That's always good.

Overall, I'm happy. I did most of the things I wanted to do and got mostly some nice feedback. :)

Well, it was great building a game and playing yours. Congratulations to Tigga and Psyduck Revenge for taking 1st place. Thanks to everyone for their games. See you all again next pyweek, then. :)

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Comments

dmoisset on 2007/09/23 21:18:

I found the game a bit hard at the beginning, then I practiced a bit and got much better and was able to beat it. For me, that means the balance was very good (not too easy to beat it on first try, bun not too hard so it can be beaten). Congratulations for a great game!