You know you guys should have won this contest. As soon as I saw screenshots I actually listed Dog Tag on top as far as direct competition with my project. So at the risk of sounding like a complete ass I'm going to tell you what I believe went wrong.

First I'd like to say that I really respect the fact that you guys were on time and met your milestones with no problem. You guys had been so far ahead that you were able to implement multiplayer. Your assets were decent, your engine was excellent, but for some reason your game was lacking. The reason I'm posting this is because I know your game could have been placed so much higher with some extremely minor adjustments.

The Theory
There is one thing about any sort of form of entertainment and that is, you must capture your audience in 5 minutes or less. Really they should be interested in about 2 minutes or you've probably lost your audience forever. Once you have their short term attention, you have to keep their long term attention. I'm telling you...people have such short attention spans its not even funny.

People on this site are far more generous than most crowds I've seen. I'm sure most of them played through just to see what the competition is like. However, I guarantee you that most people that don't know you and that don't have any sort of feel for development would have totally shut your game off in the first 5 minutes.

So lets just say you have 4 minutes and 45 seconds after loading time. Your intro was too long. On top of that, I didn't feel that the intro connected me with the story at all. Even if it did connect the game, it didn't feel like that. It was something you should have caught in focus group testing. If you did have a focus group, then your focus group was either the wrong people or you didn't listen to them.

Now lets say theoretically they immediately clicked through the intro. So now you have 4 minutes 45 seconds to catch their interest in game play. Well first of all the whole "connect to server" idea was really confusing and nearly intimidating to me at first. If I was a noob end user I would have had to look at the game manual at that point. You don't want that to happen because you've already broken suspension of disbelief. In other words...if your intro kicked ass and they got hyped to play the game, then their groove would have been ruined by a complicated interface. They should be able to get in the game with like 3 simple clicks without reading...

Other things I have to complain about is the fact that your rockin' rocker music was far too loud and distracting for menu music. The music should compliment the game, not overshadow it. If you wanted to go with that music then you would have needed a much more exciting and active menu screen. In other words no music would have been much more professional in this case.

Gameplay
Ok ok...so lets say they figured it out quickly and now they have 4 minutes flat. Consider 45 seconds for navigating the menu + optimistic loading times.

Consider this scenerio: You have 4 minutes to capture your audience in level 1. The environment is really cool looking! Lets investigate... Can't find any enemies...you already lost a minute just walking up to the first enemy. Then your first enemy takes forever to kill...now you lost 1.5 minutes. Now they have to walk around a lot more just to find the next few enemies. Thats 2 minutes...and already I'm losing interest because the enemies are so hard to kill. And it repeats... By now you need a miracle to gain interest and retain it.

I hope you can see where I'm going. These are things that your focus group should have caught. You should have observed the frustration in them not being able to kill the enemies easily. Someone mentioned a rocket launcher...you should have noted the fact that the players probably didn't use the rocket launcher.

Did you know you can literally run from start to finish without firing at anything? Thats exactly what I did. I finally shut it off because I got bored.


Proper Game Flow
Imagine this...

###### Frustrating ######

-----Game Flow--->

###### Boring ######

Game flow is what your player "feels". Now game flow goes up and down. So it gets hard and it gets easy. You should strive to keep it right in the middle. Its almost impossible to keep it in the middle for everyone. So really the game flow pattern fluctuates. You want the majority of your target market to stay in the middle somewhere. So in other words good game flow goes in between frustrating and boring. Once your game is too easy then it becomes boring. Once your game gets too hard then it becomes frustrating.

In dog tag, the game got furstrating right when it took 1000000 bullets to kill a zombie. So immediately I hit the ceiling. Then the game got really easy once I realized I can run away and not get hit. Then it got boring and hit the floor. See how this could have been avoided in polish?

Finally...
In short this is what you messed up on:
* Intro - Too long and not entertaining at all
* Menu - Complicated server/menu system
* Music - Out-of-place
* Game flow went from too boring to too frustrating too quickly. In other words it takes forever to kill a zombie (frustrating) and yet you can run away from them really quickly (boring)


I was gunning for you guys. I really wished you guys would have wiped the floor with the competition. You guys had something going, but probably slipped in the polish phase. Maybe you didn't hit a milestone, but I honestly think dog tag could have been 100x better than it is right now just from utilizing quality control a little more.

Anyway I'm being blunt while trying to be tactful at the same time. Thats pretty hard to do especially when you aren't sure of criticism is welcome. So I hope you guys don't take this in a negative way. I'm only posting this because I know you guys have potential. I know you guys could have done so much better. So hopefully you can use this information to build a much better game in the future.

Hey nes, thanks for the reply. Thats actually the kind of comments I was looking for and I am REALLY PISSED OFF that the judges were not REQUIRED to give that kind of feedback instead of some number.

Anyway on to your comments:

Intro music: I guess this one goes more to personal taste, altho I can see how maybe the volume was too loud.

Confusing menu: I agree on this one, looking back we should have had a seperate button from single and multiplayer, that way the player trying single player for the first time could just jump right into the game.

Zombies taking too many shots: This was partially a design flaw and partially a bug that we didnt have time to go back and fix. Originally the idea was the zombies would take a few hits and fall down, then get back up after a few seconds. Due to some animation bugs in torque we could not get this to work right, sometimes it would and sometimes it wouldnt. We were discussing what to do about it when 2 huge crash to desktop bugs appeared and basically ate the last week and a half of development time. So much so that I took 2 days off of work and stayed up all weekend at the end until I finally found the issue.

We did discover that you could run away from the enemies but it was too late to implement some way to counter it. One method we thought about doing was adding a score, that would give the players another reason to kill stuff (to increase their score value). The biggest issue we discovered at the end was players never found the tank in the zombie level, not finding the tank really changed the dynamics of the level and made it far too long and boring. If we were to go back I would have made the tank much more obvious or maybe even required to open the next area or something.

Not sure why some people wouldnt use the rockets... in testing players fired grenades and rockets all the time. Personally I thought they were the fun part, but maybe the remapping to the R button was the problem? I did this because I wanted to make sure all players could fire rockets without requiring a 3 button mouse (the keys could be remapped but maybe that just wasnt obvious enough).

What I think some of our biggest issues:
1 - The AI, or lack thereof. We implemented enough AI to know where the player was but the enemies were stupid and had no pathfinding. This was mostly due to lack of time again.

2 - Levels were too big and empty. The funny thing about this is I should already know this because its something I complain about in other games:) I think it mostly boils down to the fact we didnt get started on level design until September, up until that point we were learning and trying to fix up Torque to the point we could use it.

3 - Zombies taking too many hits... We should have added another zombie type that was easy to kill and have more of them for at least the beginning of the level, then ramp up the difficulty as you play thru. Again the issue with this was we could only add a handful of enemies before the game started skipping animations (You can see this happen right before the first tunnel with the number of zombies spawned there).

4 - Scope. We were in way over our heads from the beginning with the scope we tried. We did a lot of things in the game but none of them were done really well. Its just something you can only learn from experience. For our next game we plan to start much smaller in scale. The scope of the game was just too huge for 2 guys to do.

But, in the end this is really a huge success for us. Our main goal for Operation Dog Tag was for us to learn the torque engine and complete our first real game. We have learned a ton about what we can and can't do on our own, the ins and outs of torque and where we want to add/fix the engine and a bunch on scope and game development. I am still really angry with the lack of feedback from the judges, but the rest of you guys have been great for feedback and comments... Thanks, and we'll keep you posted on our next game that we plan to start working on in January.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
Thats actually the kind of comments I was looking for and I am REALLY PISSED OFF that the judges were not REQUIRED to give that kind of feedback instead of some number.

I'm sorry you are upset that it is not a requirement, however, due to other obligations some of us judges could not devote the time to write up detailed comments on each and every entry. Hence, it is not a requirement. We may not have had the results for another 2 months, otherwise.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
I am REALLY PISSED OFF that the judges were not REQUIRED to give that kind of feedback instead of some number.

Chill. You think we're not going to give you any more in-depth feedback, that we don't want to help you improve your game? The priority was to get the numbers done so we could figure out who won. Detailed feedback comes after that; so far I've written 1,500 words in my 4E4 postmortem and I'm only about a third of the way through. You'll get your feedback, but I've got a lot of other things to do at the moment, including performing a play, taking a bungee jump harnessing exam, site development work, and - oh yeah - my university course. I appreciate that you've worked on this stuff for up to five months, but I'm going as fast as I can. Being REALLY PISSED OFF at me and my colleages isn't going to help anyone.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
Hey nes, thanks for the reply. Thats actually the kind of comments I was looking for and I am REALLY PISSED OFF that the judges were not REQUIRED to give that kind of feedback instead of some number.

Well I'm glad the comments were useful then. I was actually hoping the judges would post comments with the results too. But I guess as the staff has said in this thread, they'll post them soon enough.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
Intro music: I guess this one goes more to personal taste, altho I can see how maybe the volume was too loud.

Its not the volume that I was talking about actually. The song is too busy for the menu. The only way I can see the music working for the menu is to have the menu be more active. Maybe put some crazy AVI in the background or something. The audio and video should compliment each other. In this case it conflicts. Just imagine this...imagine putting rammstein to ballet. It won't work.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
Confusing menu: I agree on this one, looking back we should have had a seperate button from single and multiplayer, that way the player trying single player for the first time could just jump right into the game.

Yeah thats the solution I would have went with too. For future refrence, try to assume that the majority of your players will never even touch multiplayer. The reason I say this is because again, people have short attention spans. Most of them will skip through the intro and look for the "new game" button immediately. Its like the stereotype of the guy that doesn't like looking at the instruction manual before putting together his stereo system.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
Zombies taking too many shots: This was partially a design flaw and partially a bug that we didnt have time to go back and fix. Originally the idea was the zombies would take a few hits and fall down, then get back up after a few seconds. Due to some animation bugs in torque we could not get this to work right, sometimes it would and sometimes it wouldnt. We were discussing what to do about it when 2 huge crash to desktop bugs appeared and basically ate the last week and a half of development time. So much so that I took 2 days off of work and stayed up all weekend at the end until I finally found the issue.

Well you spent two weeks on it and if it took two weeks more to perfect it you should have. Above all this was the biggest complaint I saw among other people as well. You know what your solution could have been? Make the rocket launcher the primary weapon. ;)

This is roughly how I categorize the most important aspects of FPS gameplay
#1 - Player Look Movement
#2 - Player Keyboard Movement
#3 - Gun
#4 - Enemies
#5 - Enviornment
#6 - Enemy Graphics
#7 - Environment Graphics
#8 - Gun Graphics

You have your most important things being things that are "close" to the player on the top. Your movement has to be *perfect* and by perfect I mean it has to be what they expect to use. So basically you can't divert from UT/Q3. I digress. The gun has to have surrealistic movement and sounds to provide the player with proper feedback. So those are the elements on the top. I bet you'd agree that those are some of the most important feedback elements. Well I put enemies right at the top also. The reason I do this is because next so using the controls all the time, the player will be focusing all their attention at shooting enemies. So its pretty reasonable to assume that if your environment is cool and your enemies suck, then its unlikely that the player will like your game. The reason is that your environment won't give your players feedback, but your enemies will.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
We did discover that you could run away from the enemies but it was too late to implement some way to counter it. One method we thought about doing was adding a score, that would give the players another reason to kill stuff (to increase their score value).

Simple...slow down fast player movement. It was kind of hard to just run away from them when walking. But running was so fast that I could just breeze through the level. Also there were those shotgun zombies. You could have made those do more damage. The other thing I would have suggested is putting in way more enemies. For the size of the level, they were too few and to far apart. In an infested city I would expect to see swarms. Thats a matter of personal prefrence I guess though.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
The biggest issue we discovered at the end was players never found the tank in the zombie level, not finding the tank really changed the dynamics of the level and made it far too long and boring. If we were to go back I would have made the tank much more obvious or maybe even required to open the next area or something.

Yeah making that obvious would have really made your game so much cooler. You should have just stuck it in the middle of the street. Even though it wouldn't make much sense, the player wouldn't really care that it was random when they're too busy blowing stuff up. Its hard to break suspended disbelief with silly misplacements like that.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
Not sure why some people wouldnt use the rockets...

When I played it, I didn't even know it existed.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
What I think some of our biggest issues:
1 - The AI, or lack thereof. We implemented enough AI to know where the player was but the enemies were stupid and had no pathfinding. This was mostly due to lack of time again.

AI didn't need path finding. There just needed to be more of it. Pathfinding would be nice though.

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
4 - Scope. We were in way over our heads from the beginning with the scope we tried. We did a lot of things in the game but none of them were done really well. Its just something you can only learn from experience. For our next game we plan to start much smaller in scale. The scope of the game was just too huge for 2 guys to do.

Hells naw! Thats why I have respect for your team. You guys, just like my team, went above and beyond. The only difference is that you delivered. Thats one of my peeves about this contest. Too many people went with the safe choice of making some 2d rts mmorpg game of some sort. I prefer to make something entertaining rather than "safe".

Quote:Original post by Khawk

Quote:Original post by Selsesstissan
Thats actually the kind of comments I was looking for and I am REALLY PISSED OFF that the judges were not REQUIRED to give that kind of feedback instead of some number.

I'm sorry you are upset that it is not a requirement, however, due to other obligations some of us judges could not devote the time to write up detailed comments on each and every entry. Hence, it is not a requirement. We may not have had the results for another 2 months, otherwise.

I understand that it would have taken a good bit of time to make detailed comments on each entry. Maybe I expected too much, but based on the contest page as it has been since early summer here is what I really expected.


For each entry:
Did it qualify, if not why was it disqualified.

Then for each entry based on the judging rules from the contest page:

Technical X out of 10: Reasons the entry scored X.
Creativity X out of 10: Reasons the entry scored X.
Fun X out of 10: Reasons the entry scored X.
Polish X out of 10: Reasons the entry scored X.
Kudos points X: Reasons for each point.

Technical average + Creativity average + Fun average + Polish average
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4 + Kudos Points

To get the final score from each judge. Then take the total/number of judges to get the entries final score.

That way every entry knows the reasons for their score, and why someone else did better or worse. Then maybe once the judges do have time they could come back to the entries and talk about things they liked and didnt like, but at least the participants would have something to work with until then.

And if this was not gamedev I guess I wouldnt expect this much, but isnt the whole point of gamedev to learn? We can't learn from our successes and mistakes if we do not know what they are.

Anyway, that's what I expected. Maybe I'm the only one that feels this way and if I am than maybe I'm wrong, but I just wanted to make it clear why I was unhappy. I also want to make it clear that I am not disputing the results of the winners... just the lack of info.