Hey, a little late but I thought I'd follow the stream and ask what you think of our game. :) I'm part of Team GBG and our game is called A Violent World. Here's a screenshot in case you don't remember it or if you haven't played it yet: We started working on the game pretty much right after the contest was announced I guess. I have a screenshot here, taken on the 11th of may. :) (just saw this on the contest page: Start Date: June 6, 2005 at 12:00 AM EST, so I guess we did get started pretty early. :)) We used OGRE (as you can see I guess) with the PyOGRE binding. I guess the choice landed on them because we've touched OGRE in the past and me and viblo really like Python (and I'm pretty sure Alexander does too, now ;)). It seemed like a good choice and it really has been nice to work with. Well I won't bore you with more details (unless you ask of course), so on with the real purpose of the thread: What did you think of the game? Did you even try it? :)

Indeed it can be difficult. Especially on the later levels. The first level is extremely trivial. The second one can be pretty hard in contrast I guess, the next level is even more difficult because there's the pirate ships (and a lot more zombies) and the last level... well to be honest I haven't completed it myself. :D But I think viblo or his brother has, so I guess it's possible. :)

We made sure that the first level was extremely easy because we didn't want people to get turned away because the first thing that happened was that they died (a flaw that some of the entries does have).

Anyways, cool that you like our game. :) We do too.

We're painfully aware of the bugs though. Especially the crash bugs, of course. Unfortunately the site/person (www.blinkenlights.se) who hosts our SVN is down right now and he hasn't been able to get his computer up and running again, or we'd be working on fixing some of the problems so that we could release a better version for tomorrow.

Btw, gamedev staff, if we did fix a better version, would you use it instead of the one you are currently hosting? Not for the contest of course, but just for having a better version for people to download.

Also, I really really recommend you read the manual. It has some information that can be important to know. There's stuff missing from it though, sadly (stuff I forgot to put in it).

Some sort of cheat/password to skip ahead levels would be wonderful. I'm tired of having to re-beat all the levels to get to the Snow one [grin].

We removed it before uploading it to gamedev, I'm afraid. In retrospect it was a small mistake, since, as you say, you need to beat the "simple" levels to get to the interesting one(s).

The level will restart if you lose, enter a name and hit enter, but I guess you already knew that.

I must say I really think it's cool that you are "having to re-beat all the levels" :D It means you must've played the game a couple of times by now? Only entry I played more than once, I think, was Zirconia (although I didn't beat it the first time).

Are you kidding? I love this game. It tends to get really slow at times, which makes beating the levels that much harder, but it's really fun.

Suggesions...
Textures - maybe more varied for the ground, and more carefully created and applied for the buildings/robots/etc.
Soundtrack - I like the song, but more than one would be nice.
Turret/wall - Sometimes when you rotate a turret, the control will switch over and try to build a wall.
Name - Does entering your name do anything?
View - the view is hard to control. The right click - pan is nice, but difficult to use, as it doesn't rotate you around any obvious point on the ground. As well, the zoom/scroll-wheel seems backwards.
Zombies - It's hard to see where the airlifted guys got dropped. You can't see through the blimps, and you can't see them through the turret/wall they're destroying, so they go unnoticed. Perhaps having the turrets/walls/structures glow red when they're under attack?

I'm loving this one [grin].

[Edited by - Avatar God on November 10, 2005 12:32:32 PM]

Thanks for the comments. :) Btw, are you playing with high or normal graphics? Cause high ==> snow ==> a lot less FPS :)
Also, enabling shadows will reduce the FPS a lot as well.

Textures - maybe more varied for the ground, and more carefully created and applied for the buildings/robots/etc.

Yeah, we know. They aren't really the greatest around. Can you say programmer art? ;)


Soundtrack - I like the song, but more than one would be nice.

Yeah, that would be nice. Although I must say I really like the music Mould's Room made for us, very non-typical for an indie game imho (i.e. not just something done on a synthesizer). But yeah, more music would be cool. But I'll save that favor for my next game. :D

Turret/wall - Sometimes when you rotate a turret, the control will switch over and try to build a wall.

I'm pretty sure this only happens if you are too quick to start moving the mouse after you press down the mouse button. It's really kind of ugly (the click vs hold solution) and should be reimplemented.


Name - Does entering your name do anything?

Yeah, it gets entered into your highscore. We were pretty close to having an online highscore thingie, but it didn't make it into the release, sadly. I'm afraid there might be a crash bug though if you don't enter anything under some circumstances.


View - the view is hard to control. The right click - pan is nice, but difficult to use, as it doesn't rotate you around any obvious point on the ground. As well, the zoom/scroll-wheel seems backwards.

You can switch to FPS mode and back with SPACE. Might help. :) I guess the zooming might be in the wrong direction, I thought about that too now that I played the game. I thought I fixed that. Heh.


Zombies - It's hard to see where the airlifted guys got dropped. You can't see through the blimps, and you can't see them through the turret/wall they're destroying, so they go unnoticed. Perhaps having the turrets/walls/structures glow red when they're under attack?

They're not zombies, they're ninjas! And yeah, sometimes they can be dropped right inside a turret which makes it kinda hard to see them. Although I've never had a problem seeing where they get dropped, maybe it's only if the airship is pointing in a specific direction?
You're right, some "under attack" indicator would be nice. For now, we'll label it as a feature: The ninjas are EXTRA sneaky! :D



Oh, and this might be of interest: It's easy to make new maps. Well, it's easy to design where you and the enemies start and so on, but it isn't as easy to make a new heightmap for them, cause you need to generate the texture for it, create a normal map for it (the tool for doing that should come with the game), and you need to add a material for it.

But the fun part is the level design, and if you wanna try that, it's as easy as first checking game.cfg to see in which order levels are started, and then figure out which level you want to base the new one on. Then backup the levelX.cfg file and look inside it. It should be pretty easy to understand how to make new levels. (you can also rearrange the order of the levels so you can play the snow-level first ;))



Oh, and if the game crashes, could you post and say what you think might've caused it? (i.e. what happened right before it)

Wow, cool.

I didn't think about being able to make my own maps... I'm gonna have to try that!

So, the ninjas [smile]. When my view is at default, the ninjas get dropped under the blimps, which I can't see through. Once the blimp decides to leave, I can usually see them, unless they've hidden inside something.

Seriously, I'm going to have to try this custom map thing :) That, and the spacebar [grin].

Thanks for the fun game!

//edit. Also, it just crashed for the first time. I had entered my name after Level 1 (Deserted Area) when it died. Don't really have any other useful information...

//edit. One last thing - when the lasers fire, the line continues back behind the turret, but without the red color.

[Edited by - Avatar God on November 10, 2005 4:47:36 PM]

Going FPS is awesome! So much more cool to look at.





So, someone *has* beaten snowstorm on normal? Cause I'm not sure it's possible...
It would be possible if I could either destroy or shoot through walls.

[Edited by - Avatar God on November 10, 2005 5:41:45 PM]

I usually don't play RTS and thought that this game is great: very different from the typical RTS; I liked the music too.

I was one of those who thought the difficulty jump from the 1st and 2nd levels was way too high. Took me quite a few tries to beat the 2nd level. I find the 3rd level pretty much impossible for me (any tips? ).

Like others have said, a save game or password option would've been nice.