LÖVE

I made a New Year's resolution to finally make a game and finish it this year. I've started a lot of projects and toyed around with a lot of ideas, but always set the bar too high and quit when the game proved too difficult to implement or didn't feel good enough. To overcome this problem I vowed to make a game from start to finish, no matter how shitty it would be.

Last week I started playing around with Love and after a few nights of after work coding and a nice 18 hour spree on Saturday, this is what I came up with. The game still needs some work, but I'm happy enough to demo it. I even made a small website for it as an exercise.

So, I present to you for critique Avoidant. You can get the standalone versions of the game, or the .love file. I'll also put the game up on GitHub when I get the chance to clean the code up a bit.

In case you don't want to go through the website (I undestand), here are direct links to the files:
Win 64 | Win 32 | OS X | .love

The game is a simple enemy avoiding game, with a small twist. (Gameplay GIF) You need to collect energy to beat the game, but in order to do that, you need to be close to one of the enemy types while avoiding the others. And the type you need to be close to changes every few seconds. And to make things difficult, the enemies you need to be close to try to avoid you and the others will actively hunt you. There's no death in the game, the aim is to get the fastest time.

The game mechanic is a bit bare bones, but it can be fun for a while trying to get the high score. There's even multiplayer (two players on one controller), but it's not very well balanced right now as I had no-one to test with over the weekend. I also plan to release the options menu as DLC later.

The game is purely procedural graphics as I quickly found out I seriously lack in the art department. But I think the game is still OK looking, I even used a bloom shader (that I found online). I'm even just a tad proud of figuring out how to do the lightning effect by myself.

All in all, I think the project went well even though I had major reservations about the game early on. Luckily I was able to force myself to be satisfied with just a simple game instead of trying to add more features and game mechanics. This project taught me a lot, most of all that it's better to do something crappy than not do something awesome.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post, and maybe try the game. All critique and feedback is welcome, although I'm not planning on working on this title much more.

First of all, congratulations on finishing a game, it takes a lot of effort regardless of the level of complexity.

The game feels very polished and solid. All of the visuals are cohesive and feel suitable, I specially like the background. It is nice that you have added a lot of small effects and visual feedback, again contributing the the overall feel of a complete game. The music is very nice as well!

A few points that could be improved:
* Try to make the tutorial less dense and include some images. Remove credits and controls from here and give them a separate tab.
* The player moves faster when going diagonally, this is a common issue that is easily fixed.
* Personally I prefer when games do not default to fullscreen, but I can see that you do not have a option menu yet. So maybe when you do have that, think of having the game launch in windowed mode.

Huge thanks for the feedback! You were absolutely right on all accounts, so I fixed the diagonal movement and changed the tutorial to be a playable one. Much better this way. I'll change the full screen when (if) I have time to implement the options menu.

hbar wrote:Huge thanks for the feedback! You were absolutely right on all accounts, so I fixed the diagonal movement and changed the tutorial to be a playable one. Much better this way. I'll change the full screen when (if) I have time to implement the options menu.

Very nice. My only recommendation would be adding a visible timer (and possibly a lose clause). It wasn't clear to me that my score was based on time until you've finished a game.

Either way, it was fun to play a round.

Congratulations. It has a very Geometry Wars feel. Making a game is a difficult endeavor and it was good that you set realistic goals instead of impossible dreams.

Seltzer wrote:Very nice. My only recommendation would be adding a visible timer (and possibly a lose clause). It wasn't clear to me that my score was based on time until you've finished a game.

Either way, it was fun to play a round.

Thanks for taking a look! You are right, the time element should be explained better. Somehow I overlooked that when making the new tutorial.

However, I'm hesitant to put a timer on screen for a few reasons. Originally I had one, but it proved to be useless as there rarely was time to look at it while playing. And after I removed it, I started to dig the whole no-text interface, so I'm a bit reluctant adding it back. I hope that explaining the time element in the tutorial will be enough.

I also had a lose state originally, but removed it after I noticed that the race against time was enough of a motivation, at least to me. But, maybe I'll bring it back later as a different game mode.

Your feedback is much appreciated

markgo wrote:Congratulations. It has a very Geometry Wars feel. Making a game is a difficult endeavor and it was good that you set realistic goals instead of impossible dreams.

Thanks for trying it out!

Having "finish the game, no matter how shitty" as the sole goal was the key to overcoming the writers block I had about making games. I actually spend a lot of time polishing and tweaking the game anyway, but never felt that perfectionist pressure I had before.

The one thing that I would say, is that it would be more appropriate to say 'crappy', if you ever want to sell this.

EliterScripts wrote:The one thing that I would say, is that it would be more appropriate to say 'crappy', if you ever want to sell this.

Haha, right you are. Even though I have no plans of ever charging money for this (not worth it in my opinion), I think I would probably not brand it "shitty" nor "crappy" in the hypothetical scenario.