Reply to feedback

dmoisset on 2007/04/30 03:43 of PyCor 2.0

OK, here comes my reply to the comments. It is always very nice to get user feedback (even for people who hated the game). These are my personal opinions on the feedback, we were a large team (again) and I can not answer for everyone :)

Very cool but a bit difficult to play at first stage.

Difficulty needs a little adjustment. Not too much, if you know the game it can be played from end to end without dying. But a tiny adjustment (slightly higher initial stats) could make this much easier, to avoid getting players frustrated.

There is a strategy (for fights) but not too obvious. Tutoring the player a bit about that could help too, I guess a lot of people did not notice how important it was to choose the proper skill to use in attacks for each different opponent.

Frustrating at times, but then when hasn't the corporate ladder been that...

Thanks! as I said above, a tiny adjustment helps a lot.

Pretty cool, but it's quite hard. I couldn't get past the training room. I like the humor in the game.

You were not able to get past it because of the bug, or bad difficulty? anyway we have fixed both and will make a patched post-pyweek release this weekend.

About the humor, it was very fun to do a game with this. And our writing team rocked, again (as much as with our previous entry, Saturday Night Ninja). Perhaps more, because this game required lots of writing (and will require a lot more to finish).

Muy divertido, che!

Gracias!

Very nice.

Thanks. It is very rewarding to have possitive feedback.

Kinda fun adventure game

Thanks... it is kinda fun, because on the first day we started to make an RPG and not so much an adventure. However because of team uncoordination or something else, we ended up with a lot of adventure component, and the result was surprisingly fine. We did not plan for an adventure, because adventures are hard and require a lot of consistence and attention to detail which is hard to achieve in a week. However it seems the writer had some preference for writing dialogues and quests rather than monsters and situations ;-) Anyway, I enjoyed the result a lot, even if it drifted quite a bit from the original plan.

Rather enjoyed this. Excellent work. Thanks!

We enjoyed a lot making it!

This is very unique game. I still have to finish it.

The storyline is not finished; we plan to go on (this weekend we will meet to work on the game), and probably setup a server.

very odd game ... kudos to you!

Odd? I don't believe it to be unusual. In fact I expected lower ratings for innovation. but thanks!

It's a funny game.. like an office dungeon-crawler...

Hehe, it has a bit of that (dungeon crawler), and as I said above it was planned to be even more dungeon crawler than it ended up to be (with more plot, although intentionally not deep, and more adventure-like mechanics).

Not my type of game...

I guess we can not please everyone. Actually I expected to get more comments like yours; webgames are not as addictive as other genres.

This game is a lot of fun, and I was quite hooked until I ran into the training room bug. Well-written and very funny adventure. The use of a web browser is clever. The production would've gotten a higher rating if there wasn't a bug in the training room. I saw a music & sound effects credit in the credits. I didn't hear any music, however. Was that music during development? :)

I am glad you enjoyed the writing. The training room bug is fixed and will be in the next upload.

We have music for the game, but did not have time to integrate it. It required figting against some ugly web technologies (Flash and a Java Applet were the choices we had around), and we did not make time to integrate that. We will try to add it in a future release; what is certain is that we will include the music files in the package for the next release, so at least you will be able to play them along.

Sound FX are a bit harder, I am not sure how to make them fit the genre (web rpg), so we'll set what happens with them.

Interesting approach with the webapp, but I got a "pink_elephant" exception... not very helpful.

Deciding for a webapp was a really interesting choice; it freed us from of lot of pygame tinkering (getting coordinates, collisions, rectangles right) but also put some restrictions on the things we were able to do. And it required a bit of tinkering of a different kind to get it working in IE and Firefox at the same time.

The pink elephant bug is because we forgot to commit a file near the release, so the description for a room went up incomplete. The fix was posted a few minutes after the challenge ended.

The game has many bugs, most of the errors I got could be fixed by refreshing my browser, the game was fun but I had a hard time getting very far with all the bugs.

What kind of bugs? a lot of people mentioned them but we didn't find many (except some that we mentioned, or some obscure things below that were not done as we preferred, but should not be very visible). What I know that seems wrong and can be seen like a bug is that the game behaves weirdly when you use the back button on your browser, because that changes the state of your browser without changing the state of the server, and that inconsistency leads to weird results. There are some hacks to avoid users from clicking back, but we preferred not to. If you find bugs, please pretty please tell us.

Hard to judge this one, not the ordinary type of game.. Anyway, it feels completed, even if I get a lot of errors when I run it, like missing link. But it often work if I refresh the page.. It also feels a bit to hard (or maybe its just me that suck).

One of our goals was to be different, and it seems we achieved it. Can you report the bugs, please? we are planning to mantain this.

It is a bit too hard (just a bit), we have tuned it a little more and will make a release soon.

wasn't the whole idea of pyweek to use pygame? also, it has many bugs (exception all the time, unformatted htmls, and so on..)

The rules say that it should be python, and allows using pygame but it is not part of the rules. The rules even mention HTML and Javascript as supporting languages, so I think a webgame is not outside the rules at all.

Please tell us about any bugs you find. thanks.

In a way, this game is just fantastic. It's probably the funniest game ever made for PyWeek, right down from the battles and puzzles to the dialogue. But the game is also very unstable even after the first patch, which is quite unforgivable for a text adventure.

I'm very happy you enjoyed it and had fun. Please tell us about unstabilities, we tested quite a bit and did not find anything serious, so probably we are testing in the wrong way.

Interesting game! I never figured out how to restore reputation points, nor was that clearly explained anywhere, which meant that I didn't play this game for long, but good effort and nice use of interesting technology.

We had an internal discussion about reputation. I was a proponent of having very simple ways to recover, and other members of the team said that was not challenging. We reached a middle ground but not very useful IMO: reputation is slowly restored with time, and a few hard-to-find items (the sleeping bag).

Probably one of the parts of the game requiring more redesign. (i.e., not tweaking, but rethinking how it should be done right).

Nice presentation -- using a web browser as the front end is an interesting idea. Started off well, seeming to promise an interesting storyline, but the fun fell off when it degenerated into a long series of battles to build up stats -- not really my thing. I do like the alternative take on character stats and hit points, though -- quite amusing!

As I said before, it was (at least on plans) more of an RPG than an adventure, and that kind of RPG where you have several battles and build up stats. So that explains a bit your feelings ;) I agree that a deeper and more involved storyline results in a much better game, but we would not have been able to reach that goal decently in a week (and probably not in a month). So we preferred to make a better monster-bashing game instead of a mediocre complex adventure.

My only complaint was you didn't finish and I had to dive into source to find out that I couldn't progress past the Holodeck. I'm looking for the completed version of this game!

Oops, sorry, forgot to blog about that.

Several levels are missing (a lot of that is written, and even some of the graphics are there), but not integrated into the game.

We will put a server online soon (so you will be able to put your character there and be able to move on to newer level as soon as we add them).

WOW! Incredible game! I'm seriously impressed with all of the ingenuity it went into creating your own web server game. Nicely done! The game was a lot of fun, and all of the little office-life humor was hilarious. Great stuff! I ran into a pink elephant error as I was in the training room, but I vaugely remember you saying something about a patch released after-the-fact. I'll have to download it later to try it out. Still, I enjoyed it all very much, and thought you did a fantastic job!

Going for web was a bold choice. It helped a lot with presentation; text handling is much easier than with pygame, which is important for a game with so much text). We enjoy putting humour in our games, and probably there is more coming for the upcoming levels

The pink elephant is a known and fixed bug. Thanks for the positive comment!

I thought long battles got really boring when neither the enemy or I was making much any damage. It's cool to see a web based game, although it seemed to have some pretty big problems where I got an error page and couldn't progress further. I didn't try the patched version though, so maybe that's already fixed.

Yes, several monsters should have a lot less rep points (and hit stronger, to make battles more intense). Also, there are strategies for fighting, but they are not too obvious, so most people probably ended up choosing the attack skill at random (bad strategy) or just the one they had higher (mediocre strategy). We should make it more obvious to increase playability (at least with a graffiti in the bathroom ;) )

Wow, a lot of effort went into this game! It seemed quite inspired by MUDs, perhaps?

Thanks for recognizing the effort. Programming was interesting at least, but the inmense marathon was writing and rewriting the scripts and dialogues, the rooms and items descriptions, the state machines for the quests (in a sublanguage that we use in the engine) and making lots of drawings for all that.

It has certainly inspiration from MUDs; perhaps the best genre description for a game like Corp is "web-based MUD". Actually we did not have time for putting a lot of work on the "M" of MUD (i.e., multiplayer). The only point were players can interact is leaving messages to each other in the bathrooms. We planned but didn't have time to add other weak multiplayer interactions, like score tables and halls of fame, meeting other people and see their items, etc. And we still are thinking about not-so-weak forms of interactions like marketplaces to trade items and stuff like that. I don't think we will get to close mlustiplayer interaction (player vs. player, or cooperating in real time in a combat), but a lot of depth an interest can be added to the game in that direction, and it is really quite easy to implement.

Very nice idea! It was fun to play, but I have the feeling that the game is not well balanced (or very very hard ;). At all it would have been enough for me if the players would have received more than 1 reputation point after they losed all points and clicked the "fixme" link... Nevertheless - Good Work!

As I said above, reputation needs a little fix, and also a bit balancing. Thanks!

Loved it. Reminds me of Kingdom of loathing. Of course I'm guessing you did that on purpose. Anyway, made me laugh, and I always love when games do that. Great game.

Absolutely :) Kingdom of Loathing, for those of you that liked Corp, is what you should be playing ;) Before we set for the name Corp, the HTML title was "Kingdom of Loathing meets Office Space". And there are some half-hidden references inside the game (grep the source for "lemon in a box").

We took a lot of ideas from there, although we made it a bit more linear (which works better for a short game), added more dialog, and tried something different for the combat system (not sure if that was for good). Of course the setting and writing is different; but doing a web MUD and not copying KoL is really hard, because they had done a really nice work, so it is hard to be different without making it worse.

I'm happy so many of you enjoyed the homour. It is sometimes quite silly, and not everyone enjoys that kind of humour, so we sometimes felt stupid writing them (the warehouse has the biggest silliest collection of bad puns I have ever seen!).

i hate to register to websites! why must i register to play a game! and if dont choose a password, the name field gets erased! argh! :) had to play with fix, dont know how i should score that.

The registration perhaps was not necessary, but was a bit of futureproofing thinking about multiplayer gaming later. And being able to have multiple persistent characters in different stages helped really a lot for testing and debugging.

A web based game. Cool. Took a while to get into the game, but after that it became a bit more fun.

It takes a bit for joystick/gamepad oriented guys (I don't know if that is your case, but we knew it would be hard to get that segemnt of the public hooked)

It might just be me but web browser style simulations aren't really my thing. It's innovative I guess but I simply didn't have much fun with it.

OK. Thanks for trying :)

I wasn't able to play through this due to some bugs on floor 2 that kept making my character inaccessible. A room reset on login would be nice, because there is no way to escape when the room I'm in is bugged. I think it was the third enemy on the training grounds. Up till then, the gameplay was really fun, and using reputation as hit points is a very original idea. The low-key graphics also fit the game very well; and the web presentation is very clean.

Floor 2 was really an extra (last minute additions went there) and quite untested and incomplete. Floor 0 and 1 were mostly finished (except for the training room bug that crept into our release). There wasn't very much more to it, so I am glad you enjoyed that first part of the game. Next releases will have more.

I love how you were able to make a browser based game in only a week! Sadly, though, the game-play left me hanging... Is seemed like a great idea, but it is not enough to keep me playing(some of it has actually driven me away, in fact)

In fact making it browser based helped a lot making it inside the week. I am curious about what was what drove you away.

From what I played it's quite a bit of fun. I dunno how much strategy there was but it's an innovative background for an rpg.

We will put more effort in making the strategy obvious.

Very interesting usage of python to create a game. Also, I'm impressed with the realism of this entry. Playing this is almost like practicing for office life.

haha. OK... some of us had practiced office life and have some first hand experiencies to help the writing. What is missing can be completed watching Office Space and reading Dilbert.

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We have been working on a new release this weekend, probably to come out on tuesday. We are also looking for server hosting to put the game live.