Always put a link to your product in your post! Far more people will look at it if they have an immediate route to it. :)

That's awesome! Very well put together, and fun to play. Will you be releasing the level editor so we can create our own fiendish levels?

Congratulations on the finished game.

Very nice, really enjoyed it! If you're going to stop development on it, I hope you've got another one in the pipeline [smile]

@HopeDagger - thanks for the suggestion. Done.

@takingsometime - glad you enjoyed it. The level editor was never really written with others in mind plus was written with a second hand copy of C++ Builder so not sure where I stand legally on distributing it.

@jjd - cheers for the comments. Next project planned is a more Mario style platformer which will hopefully be a bit richer in features than Orc, which was only ever really a test bed for starting with Direct3D.

Fantastic.

No, really. I had fun playing this. [smile] Allow me to fling the following criticism in your direction:

• Great sound effects. Simple, minimalistic, but they were all fitting, clean, and consistant. I'd rather have a few good sounds than a bunch of bad ones.
  
• Great graphics. Again, the consistancy gives a lot to the atmosphere of the game. And I love the added touch of having the protagonist actually animate his turns left/right. :)
  
• Music got a little repetitive. Given there was only 4 levels, it wasn't that bad, though. If you choose to add more levels down the line, definitely add more tracks.
  
• My one main feeling when I beat the game was: underuse! You have so many cool gizmos and features that you just aren't using to their potential. [sad] I'd love to see Orc with 20+ levels, more enemies, and more clever puzzle trickery. The switches and player's gun could have a lot more creative uses. And less sadistic levels like the last one! ;)
  
• Given your timeframe, absolutely fantastic work. I'm looking very forward to seeing what product you'll be putting forward next!

Quote:Original post by HopeDagger
Fantastic.

No, really. I had fun playing this. [smile] Allow me to fling the following criticism in your direction:

• Great sound effects. Simple, minimalistic, but they were all fitting, clean, and consistant. I'd rather have a few good sounds than a bunch of bad ones.
  
• Great graphics. Again, the consistancy gives a lot to the atmosphere of the game. And I love the added touch of having the protagonist actually animate his turns left/right. :)
  
• Music got a little repetitive. Given there was only 4 levels, it wasn't that bad, though. If you choose to add more levels down the line, definitely add more tracks.
  
• My one main feeling when I beat the game was: underuse! You have so many cool gizmos and features that you just aren't using to their potential. [sad] I'd love to see Orc with 20+ levels, more enemies, and more clever puzzle trickery. The switches and player's gun could have a lot more creative uses. And less sadistic levels like the last one! ;)
  
• Given your timeframe, absolutely fantastic work. I'm looking very forward to seeing what product you'll be putting forward next!

Thanks ever so much for all the great comments and I really do appreciate such constructive criticism.

Regarding the music, or regarding sound effects in general, I can create my own graphics but I am restricted to finding freeware WAVs on the web so am a lot more restricted. I agree the drone is a bit repetative, but I find that unless there is SOME kind of constant track, the actual sound effects sound strange and out of place.

I'm very impressed that you beat level four, and sadistic is certainly the word. You should have seen level five (which got dropped [smile]). I hear what you are saying about the combination of gizmos but I did find I was starting to run out of ideas. I even dropped the other enemy ship from the game mentioned earlier in the journal, because it didn't feel right.

I think that a problem sole developers face is that designing levels is not much fun compared to writing games plus it is very hard to assess how interesting levels are when you've played every feature to death while debugging it.

I quite agree that the gun was totally underused. I sort of forgot about that.

I have to agree with HopeDagger. The game was fantastic, but too short. Maybe you could release the level editor so that users could build their own levels?

Great job and good luck on your next project!

Quote:Original post by EasilyConfused
I think that a problem sole developers face is that designing levels is not much fun compared to writing games plus it is very hard to assess how interesting levels are when you've played every feature to death while debugging it.

The ultimate solution to this is to enter the world of playtesting. Even doing smaller 'internal releases' for us GDers to assess and critique will often make a big difference in the end result (which you can then release to the public public) because of the (hopefully positive) influences from the different perspectives of the testers. A lesson I learned extensively during my Skirmish plights!

EDIT: Oh, right! Like Programmer16 (implicitly) said, releasing the map editor is a 'good thing(tm)' too, since user-contributed levels can be easily added to the 'core game' and don't cost you any effort. ;)

Right. Consider all the input about a level editor thoroughly taken on board, and HopeDagger is quite right about play-test releases.

As I remarked above, I have a second-hand copy of Borland C++ Builder 3 I bought on ebay that I wrote the level editor with, so it requires DLLs to ship with that I am not sure where I stand legally on distributing.

Next project, I'm going to consider taking a leaf out of Programmer16's book on MalykAI and build a level editor into the game itself. I still think that is an interesting idea.

Failing that, write a level editor as a full screen D3D application which could be fun since I've wanted to write a D3D GUI since seeing other people's work in that area round here.

Thanks all, as always, for the valued input.

Very nice! Level 4 was quite challanging, and I wasn't able to beat it.

Looking forward to your next project.

congrats =)

Great job on creating a fun game.

cool game!