Blast space rocks and giant tentacled monsters in a crazy frenzy to prove the effectiveness of the new Neo Magiko prototype!


Download link at bottom of post.

they look like panties

Quote:Alright, so I've played this.

It's a fun little game, but the design ends up flawed and overly difficult in the end. I see the idea of only being able to move with your weapons, but the execution here makes it way too difficult to control your character-- leaving you to basically propel yourself in one direction forever and hope you can hit an asteroid.
It's easy to move your character, but it's difficult to actually control them, and, more importantly, stop them from moving. Moving becomes even more difficult because the player flips in a total 180 because of the mouse aiming-- forcing the player to realize that if they try to fire the direction they originally were, they're just going to get flipped over and propel themselves farther.
The game obviously has a learning curve, which I respect-- the best games usually have learning curves. The problem here is that the learning curve is brutal, and it seems like the entire fun factor of the game comes from beating that learning curve, rather than actually learning the game.

The graphics are eye-catching, but there are a lot of areas in the menus and such that give off an amateur/poor look, mostly due to the fact that there are visible scribbles and rough edges in many menu elements-- making the game have a little bit of a lazy-ish look. Transitioning from, say, the main menu, to the options menu, looks really nice though.



The gameplay seriously needs to be fixed, though. At the moment, this game feels like an interesting try, but consistent play just feels frustratingly difficult. You want to make a game that is fun and interesting, but you also want the game to be easy to pick up and play-- otherwise, a lot of people aren't going to play it past the first time.

As a game developer, you want to aim for the largest "community" you can establish with your project; Make the type of game that you want, but if you're going to release it publicly, you also want to make it accessible to as many people as possible.

Quote:Heh, yeah, distractions kept me from posting sooner (important distractions, though).

Anyway, from your write-up, I figured two major possibilities:
1. The idea of propulsion with weapons may not be a good fit for a shoot-to-survive game, but rather a game that focuses a little more on movement and strategic weapons-fire, like an exploration game with combat elements (that was actually another idea I came up with some time after I started this one)
2. The difficulty level needs to be shallowed a bit (or a lot) in order to give the player plenty of time to get used to flying and to realize the implications of traveling in this way before really trying to kill him.

I think a lot more of this game could have been ironed out more if I had established a much better testing group, instead of just me and one other friend every now and then. With more testing, I may have realized the basic flaws in the system better.

Finally, as for the graphics, the game was originally being developed for a minigame competition at MFGG, but I was late by a few hours due to me misunderstanding the duedate. After that, I did upgrade a many of the graphics, but started to get really lazy for some of the transition pieces and the menu backgrounds. On top of that was the feeling that I really wasn't happy with the style that I was using, but also feeling like I didn't have the skill level to do either of the other styles I wanted to try.

Anyways, it was a stressful, though somewhat fun, development process, and I've learned a bit from it. I'm not sure if I'll be adding any of my planned extra features (like bosses), but either way, it's back to SoL and my other projects for now, heh.