Umm, weird...
RB[0] on 2008/04/20 15:54
of HoleInTheHeadStudios-1.9
— edited on 2008/04/20 16:24
Here follows a little rant, and some responses to comments:
With more entrants than ever - we only had 28 respondents?
This was our best game *ever* - yet we got pretty close to our worst score ever - approximately equal to our last entry which had zero game-play.
We had zero DQ's or DNW's - yet a sizable amount of our responses were 1/1/1 or "I did not understand the game", and "where were the robots?"... yet there were no DQ's/DNW's given!?!?
And our ratings were a huge roller coaster - we were given either a great score, or a really low one, but only a couple that were average from our respondents - and an awful lot of them were like "it's just a risk clone..." - so, why did you rank it so low for being a certain genre (it is not risk, and was actually inspired by a different game) - did you do that for all the platformers, or the rpgs, or...?
Also, it seems that several of the games got a lot of 1/1/1's with no DNW/DQ, but the top games only got those (if at all) with a DNW, so it didn't count to there score... I assume this the judging irregularity richard mentioned?
Some comment weirdness:
"It had a very intuitive control interface, and it was a joy to play" vs. "Couldn't figure out how to play":
First, I realize that most people don't like to read instruction screens before playing - but once you realized you didn't get it - couldn't you have read the ReadMe (which points to the ingame instruction screens)?
And now a response to most of the comments, or at least their general meanings:
"too long of load time made it unplayable":
Yes, we were planning on optimizing the map generation - but it isn't that bad - some of the other games were this way too, and I think the addition of random maps outweighs the long load time...
"Graphics needed work":
Which ones in particular? The tiles were planned that way from the beginning - and the units were done by DiamondGFX at the last minute, and are really nice.
The rest - yes, they could use some work.
"It is not really related to Robot":
How so? Did you look at the title, read the instructions or look at the units in-game? The game is about robot armies duking it out - not very innovative for the theme, perhaps, but definitely there...
"SFX for every battle were too long":
Yeah - those can get annoying, I was planning on shortening them to be better, and not wait at all if they were disabled, but no time :(
"Pretty good, really. Would be nice to be able to see a count of how many units are in each area - sometimes it's hard to count the robots. Could use some tweaking, and some prettying-up. Use pyglet and you could have the window dynamically resizable, which would've been nice. Not sure why there's such a huge chunk of the bottom bit taken over by black.":
The count of bots would have been nice - I never considered this really, thx :)
Tweaking? Always :)
Prettying up? Not sure where - the gui could have been nicer, and a few things laid out better, but if you mean the GFX style (except for the background ;) ), that was intentional.
You can make the windows dynamically resizable in pygame too - but that would have been unnecessary IMHO, jut change the settings in your options menu.
The big black area was going to hold a lot more gui elements when we added multiplayer - like a chatbox and stuff.
"I couldn't zoom because I don't have a scroll wheel, which made it more awkward to play that it should have been.":
Dang! I forgot about that, sorry. Will fix shortly ;)
"Cool ai":
Thanks, I'm really surprised how well it worked too.
We were planning that Markus would handle this - since he is really good at it, and I would do multiplayer.
It ended up opposite ;)
In the end, this ai was my first real one, and took only about 3 hours to do so I am very pleased :)
"Like TEG...":
Never played - but it looks like just a clone of Risk - which this is not - some of the more advanced features were cut to save time - which did make it look closer, it isn't actually IMO.
"It would be nice to be able to move 'some' but not all troops":
This was planned - but after some consideration I decided that it might take away some of the interesting parts of the game - that and there was no time to implement the gui, ai or rules to fit this.
Will probably be in a later version though.
"Couldn't win because it would crash":
We have been trying to find this crash since before we released - no clue why it is crashing - could you give us a traceback?
"Will you work further on this?":
Absolutely :D
A few hints on game-play, for those having difficulty:
Read the instructions!
Guard you capitols and factories always
Try and grab other capitols/factories early
Play as several players, ie "players = 7", "ai = 5" or something
Wait for the map to load!!!
Other than that, thx again richard and everyone for a great pyweek.
The nice game we have now is more than worth the headaches from the site crashing, or the md5 uploading, or the weirdness in the ratings.
Cya all next time, and congrats to the winners :D
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Comments
RB[0] on
2008/04/20 16:47:
For teh borders - they probably could have looked more natural, but definitely not for pyweek ;)
Thx for the reply and interest :)
Tigga on
2008/04/20 20:39:
I wonder sometimes if people are very good at separating out their scores when judging. This competition I gave quite a few quite varying marks, say 5-2-3, or similar, but it seems that many people find a fault in one of the rankings, and base other rankings on that fault. I wish people would justify their comments better - for example this game has two 1-2-1 with the only comments being about the innovation. Why the 1 for fun? I really don't get it. A game has to be quite bad for me to give it a 1 for fun!
RB[0] on
2008/04/21 00:22:
But yeah - it's not that I mind the ratings, it is good to see where we need to improve, and it motivates me, but what I dislike is what you said, no justification, or reasoning, or for that matter, much attempt at getting into the game.
I played most of the games this pyweek, but only about 1/5 of them did I feel I played enough to be justified in rating them...
Ah well, such is a competition :)
Thx for the comments :)
saluk on
2008/04/21 07:43:
By the way, funniest comment you got: "1/1/1 It's a game?" I have no words.
At the end of the day, the scores don't matter all that much. What matters most is if you are proud of what you accomplished and/or learned something along the way. Your marks aren't too terrible really, and there were so many quality games of varying styles to make it a pretty tough contest to call. But I wish people would not be so quick with the 1/1/1 score!
RB[0] on
2008/04/21 14:49:
But now we can move on and put in those extra features that make it not like risk - like so many people complained about :D
Thx for the comment - and you are right :)
Cya later :)
I think I rated you pretty high, but I can sort of see where some of those comments are coming from. I bet a lot of people never zoomed in (or if they did, not all the way), because you didn't really need to in order to play. If you're zoomed out, then (a) it's not clear that the units are robots, and (b) the graphics aren't that impressive. This all changes when you see them up close, of course. I'm not sure what I would suggest to change this, though.
As for the square-grid boundaries for the territories, maybe that's how you want it, but I think it would look better with more realistic borders. Of course it would be harder to generate maps that way, but there you have it.
I'm glad to hear that you'll keep working on this. It really was fun to play!