Can Someone Test My Game + Feedback

[Nepenthesis]

You can find the game here: http://www.nepenthesisland.com/seafood-escape/
Password: ihavecrabs

It's really simple and it only has three levels. This is the beta version upon which I'll make changes and fix glitches. I'm having issues with the sound (I can easily fix how it only plays once) so it plays tracks over each other and causes major errors (not too noticeable) when you retry a level... Just annoying.

So what do you think? Feedback on the graphics, gameplay, ect. would be awesome. Ideas and suggestions are welcomed. Are any levels way too hard? Too confusing?

Thanks for the opinions! :D

[Sam]

The main character bobs up and down on the spot on certain areas of the platforms, which I assume is due to how you handle the collisions. The font for the actually score is different to that of the labels. The UI is behind the level graphics which makes no sense to me.

Graphics are quite nice, but the gameplay is very straight forward. Maybe add more depth to it by introducing more mechanics. Having a sound icon with two separate on/off buttons is over complicating it. Just have a single icon that toggles the music on and off.

[Joyhype]

At 5/31/14 07:40 PM, Nepenthesis wrote: You can find the game here: http://www.nepenthesisland.com/seafood-escape/
Password: ihavecrabs

It's really simple and it only has three levels. This is the beta version upon which I'll make changes and fix glitches. I'm having issues with the sound (I can easily fix how it only plays once) so it plays tracks over each other and causes major errors (not too noticeable) when you retry a level... Just annoying.

So what do you think? Feedback on the graphics, gameplay, ect. would be awesome. Ideas and suggestions are welcomed. Are any levels way too hard? Too confusing?

Thanks for the opinions! :D

Hey,Nepenthesis I made it to level 2 but I got frustrated after dying a ton.
So here's my feedback.

- Make the space between the crabs a little bigger.

- The hitboxes need to be optimized a bunch! When I jump on the boat the hitbox is just a little odd and sometimes pushes you into the water.

- When the player gets ontop of the boat-crane-ladder thingy, make it distinct so that players no there's a turtle that they can ride.

- When you're on the turtle, code up in the hitbox detection to make the player's X follow the turtle so you don't have to press right arrow or left arrow to follow the turtle or else you'll fall in the water.

- There needs to be more visual and audio feedback for many things. If a player hits a crab, the hp bar going down isn't enough feedback.

- The spacing between crabs in my opinion is a little too close and needs to be a little bit bigger.

[Nepenthesis]

Thanks guys! That helps a lot.

The biggest issue is that I don't know actionscript that well... I know it well enough to do what I did, but that was with hours and hours of Googling and testing and rearranging code.

I'll improve the sound button, I should be able to figure that out. I'll also easily be able to respace the crabs and add some more instructions in the difficult-to-understand parts.

**About the hitboxes, is it possible to edit that graphically in any way, instead of doing it with AS2? I'm not great at Flash even though I've had it for 4 years... Sorry if that's a dumb question lol**

[Nepenthesis]

And also, do you know if doing the thing with the turtles you suggested is simple, by making the character move with the turtle? Would it be easy to find how to write it online, or would I need pretty good AS experience? I'm going to try to learn it this summer.

[Hero101]

**About the hitboxes, is it possible to edit that graphically in any way, instead of doing it with AS2? I'm not great at Flash even though I've had it for 4 years... Sorry if that's a dumb question lol**

You could graphically define a smaller hitbox. I'm assuming you are using hitTestObject which is why it's so easy to get hit by by something cuz your character has his pincers sticking far out. So if you wanted a quick graphical solution you could draw a rectangle that is the size of the crab's body, place it inside the crabs MC (just guessing the crab is a movieclip), set the alpha to 0, and give it an instance name like crabHitBox (something shorter would be better). Then you could just reference it like:

if (crab.crabHitBox.hitTestObject(enemy))
{
     //do stuff like lose hp
}

And also, do you know if doing the thing with the turtles you suggested is simple, by making the character move with the turtle? Would it be easy to find how to write it online, or would I need pretty good AS experience? I'm going to try to learn it this summer.

It is definitely something you could find online. I don't know the code exactly myself as I'm still learning but I've read it before. It's rather simple so you grasp the code when you read it. You essentially would check if the crab is touching the turtle and if it is then have the crab match the turtle's movement. Try searching the web for "player stick to platform" or something along those lines.

[Joyhype]

At 6/1/14 04:30 AM, Nepenthesis wrote: And also, do you know if doing the thing with the turtles you suggested is simple, by making the character move with the turtle? Would it be easy to find how to write it online, or would I need pretty good AS experience? I'm going to try to learn it this summer.

Updating the players.x to the turtles.x is easy enough. You just have to define an if statement that says like in your update loop. So that when player hits turtle he follows turtles x every frame. If you don't define the player.x to = the turtle.x in the update loop, what will happen is the player will jump to turtle's last x and stop.

if (player.hitTestObject(turtle.turtleSprite)) {
			    	player.x = turtle.x; 
			    }

This may not fully work because I don't know what you're doing with your update loop and or if how you've written it. And since you're in AS2 some things may be different, since I make all my games in AS3 with Starling. But this is the basic idea of making things follower another x.

As for your hitboxes. There's a lot of things you have to consider. Did you crop your images properly in Photoshop/Flash? Are you using pixel perfect collision or just rudimentary hit box detection? If you want to adjust your bounding boxes, you can draw a red rectangle around your sprite to visually see the hitboxes (requires some markup) but this will give you a better idea of where the intersections are occurring.

[Nepenthesis]

Thanks guys, that helps a lot!

I think I understand the turtle thing... Thanks! I'm pretty good at learning languages but have never learned a programming language before. Since it is basically in English it makes total sense to me when I read it... I guess I just need to memorize what I do so I can use it later.

As for the hitbox thing, I'm getting confused... My character's movie clip and the enemy movie clips are rectangles that fit perfectly around the body of the character/enemy, including crab claws and stuff. I think the problem is that the areas of the movieclip with nothing inside of it also deal damage, which makes everything awkward.

I understand how to make the hitbox inside the clip and reference that to deal damage as you described above, but I feel like it would be very very tedious going through every single mob and mob variation that I've made in order to add hit boxes. I feel like it just wouldn't be worth the time there...

Is there anther way to do it? To where it only registers pixels in the movie clip as part of the enemy?

Thanks for your help, again!

[GeoKureli]

This game needs work. First off, I hate the enemy hitboxes and the entire health mechanic. There needs to be a visual cue of when I'm hit, I'm often hit without even knowing it. and you don't need to make the hitboxes cover every pixel of the asset. give the player a buffer. For the crabs don't include the entire claws in the hitbox, for a spikey things, put the hitbox's edge somewhere between the edge of the spikes and the solid sphere-like center, but honestley if your collision uses hitboxes, try using more blockish shapes assets so the player can clearly see what not to touch.

one you get hitboxes solid fix the health mechanics. try 3 hits max but after the player gets hit once make the player invincible for a short amount of time, and make him flicker or animate in some way so the user knows that he/she is invincible.

My big pet peeve, the 3rd spike is place in an annoying location it's too easy to hit and it's not clear that I would have hit it.

Just have one of your friends play it in front of you and you'll see that your hitboxes are confusing.

[Nepenthesis]

At 6/3/14 12:14 AM, GeoKureli wrote: This game needs work. First off, I hate the enemy hitboxes and the entire health mechanic. There needs to be a visual cue of when I'm hit, I'm often hit without even knowing it. and you don't need to make the hitboxes cover every pixel of the asset. give the player a buffer. For the crabs don't include the entire claws in the hitbox, for a spikey things, put the hitbox's edge somewhere between the edge of the spikes and the solid sphere-like center, but honestley if your collision uses hitboxes, try using more blockish shapes assets so the player can clearly see what not to touch.

one you get hitboxes solid fix the health mechanics. try 3 hits max but after the player gets hit once make the player invincible for a short amount of time, and make him flicker or animate in some way so the user knows that he/she is invincible.

My big pet peeve, the 3rd spike is place in an annoying location it's too easy to hit and it's not clear that I would have hit it.

Just have one of your friends play it in front of you and you'll see that your hitboxes are confusing.

Thanks for the suggestions! The spikes are urchins and they fill up the entire hitbox with their spines.

As for other enemies, I'm not sure how to specify a hitbox that is a reasonable size. If someone could explain to me what to do, I'd very much appreciate that! :) When I make my movie clips, it registers an entire rectangle as the hitbox. Should I make a new movie clip called "hitbox" and put it inside all enemies, resizing it as needed, and make it register THAT rectangle as the enemy? It would be inside the enemy movie clip.

If that's how you do it, then I can figure out how to do that for the character easily.

I like your suggestion about the health thing but I honestly have no idea how to do that, I'm literally just learning actionscript (I had to look up a lot of codes online just to get this game working like this, and I agree it's bad compared to professional games)... I can VERY easily give the character more health (the health bar would go down slower)...

I'm not sure how to add sound or visuals to damage... Is it simple to make the character fade/invincible like how you suggested? I really like that idea but don't know how because I followed a tutorial for the actionscript on the current health bar and don't know any other way.

[GeoKureli]

At 6/3/14 01:08 AM, Nepenthesis wrote:

Should I make a new movie clip called "hitbox" and put it inside all enemies, resizing it as needed, and make it register THAT rectangle as the enemy? It would be inside the enemy movie clip.

yes, excellent work!

I like your suggestion about the health thing but I honestly have no idea how to do that, I'm literally just learning actionscript (I had to look up a lot of codes online just to get this game working like this, and I agree it's bad compared to professional games)... I can VERY easily give the character more health (the health bar would go down slower)...

NO, more health is not the issue, the problem is that getting hit means almost nothing. getting hit should be a big deal in your game, so that the player will want to avoid it much more.

timed invincibility isn't too hard and there's tons of ways to do it. Here's one way:
When the player gets hit you set a variable to the number of frames you want him to be invincible, every frame you remove 1 from it, and when you check for collisions you also check if that variable is greater than 1, if it is, he's still invincible.

I'm not sure how to add sound or visuals to damage... Is it simple to make the character fade/invincible like how you suggested?

i usually do something like

if(isFlashhing) hero.visible = !visible;
else hero.visible = true;

visible is a boolean each movieclip/sprite has.
isFlashing, is some boolean I made that I set true when the player is hit, and false when the timer runs out

Sounds:
I almost never deal with native flash sounds, look here

[Nepenthesis]

At 6/3/14 01:45 AM, GeoKureli wrote:

At 6/3/14 01:08 AM, Nepenthesis wrote:

Should I make a new movie clip called "hitbox" and put it inside all enemies, resizing it as needed, and make it register THAT rectangle as the enemy? It would be inside the enemy movie clip.

yes, excellent work!

I like your suggestion about the health thing but I honestly have no idea how to do that, I'm literally just learning actionscript (I had to look up a lot of codes online just to get this game working like this, and I agree it's bad compared to professional games)... I can VERY easily give the character more health (the health bar would go down slower)...

NO, more health is not the issue, the problem is that getting hit means almost nothing. getting hit should be a big deal in your game, so that the player will want to avoid it much more.

timed invincibility isn't too hard and there's tons of ways to do it. Here's one way:
When the player gets hit you set a variable to the number of frames you want him to be invincible, every frame you remove 1 from it, and when you check for collisions you also check if that variable is greater than 1, if it is, he's still invincible.

I'm not sure how to add sound or visuals to damage... Is it simple to make the character fade/invincible like how you suggested?

i usually do something like

if(isFlashhing) hero.visible = !visible;
else hero.visible = true;

visible is a boolean each movieclip/sprite has.
isFlashing, is some boolean I made that I set true when the player is hit, and false when the timer runs out

Sounds:
I almost never deal with native flash sounds, look here

Thanks! What do you mean by boolean? Not too up on the terminology. Will the code you described work with AS2?

Also, do you think the sound mute button is necessary? I copied it over from a REALLY bad game I made two years ago with TERRIBLE music that everyone raged about. I'm starting to feel like I don't really need it, and if someone wanted to mute it they could just turn their sound off. It's causing weird issues, and this would allow me to just place the sound once on the menu. Opinion?

[GeoKureli]

At 6/3/14 02:06 AM, Nepenthesis wrote: Thanks! What do you mean by boolean? Not too up on the terminology. Will the code you described work with AS2?

Booleans are variables that can only have 2 values, true or false

var myBool:Boolean = 5 > 0;
if(myBool) { myBool = false; }

Also, do you think the sound mute button is necessary? I copied it over from a REALLY bad game I made two years ago with TERRIBLE music that everyone raged about. I'm starting to feel like I don't really need it, and if someone wanted to mute it they could just turn their sound off. It's causing weird issues, and this would allow me to just place the sound once on the menu. Opinion?

just leave the mute button, some people listen to their own music when they play games