@mheyman: most of the integration work was done by the programmer, I just have some basic knowledge about Unity, so most of my work was done in 3ds Max; you can see some terrain tiles ready to export and even a video of the 3ds Max scene, on the first posts of this thread.
Thank you for your good wished Nuclear Angel . If we have a decent sales on the movile devices we will try to port it to other platforms, and PC will be the first choice.
We received a lot of feedback from people who played the game and had a crazy days of work yesterday and today fixing bugs, hopefully we will upload a new version on Monday with a lot of fixes.
@Gmanx: I'd write the postmortem in a less pessimistic tone, it is true that the first weeks of sales weren't too good, but many people liked the game and critics were generally positives, so I think that at last we will get a decent monetization of the game on other platforms or even on mobile devices just changing our strategy
Congrats on releasing the game! It looks really nice, PS: thank you for showing the breakdown on the meshes early on, I appreciate that. It was quite helpful!
Wow, this looks really great. I'm seeing it for the first time now and looking through the process is very insightful. I've only had a chance to look through the thread for now. I haven't gotten to the article yet.
It may be too late, but I have one piece of input that could be helpful if you every plan on pushing an update. Right now, there are some issues with color vision deficiency. Being color vision deficient myself, and also writing extensively on the subject, I noticed it right away on some of the characters.
Anytime that you're going to use the same silhouette for an enemy or something, you need to be very careful about your color choices.
In the example below, the two circled items look almost identical to me:
A couple options you have are:
- change the silhouette slightly (the most work, probably)
- push the value of the colors to create some contrast (light red and dark green or dark red and light green)
@avenali312: I know, a friend of mine has the same color vision deficiency than you, but I can't make a color scheme for our game thinking on all the possible color sensitivities of everybody, I've just tried to make a nice palette for the 'normal' vision people. Anyway don't worry, even if you can't difference the color of the enemies it won't affect too much to your game experience, the only difference between the enemies of different colors is that they're slightly more or less powerful or resilient.
Finally the Ouya version of FullBlast is done and available for purchase (you also can play the first level for free).
Congrats on the Ouya release. It's great to see more shmups on Ouya. Your game is visually beautiful, but I feel there are a few adjustments you could make to make it more fun to play.
Firstly it needs an autofire when holding down the shoot button. Having to repeatedly press shoot in a shmup is annoying.
Your ships movement is too fast on diagonals - you're applying full X and full Y motion. When moving diagonally it should only be 0.7 X and 0.7 Y motion (Sin and Cos of 45 degrees) to be the same speed in all directions.
It would be nice to navigate the menu screen with the joystick, and not just the D-pad.
You need more interesting bullet patterns from small enemies. Always shooting directly at the player doesn't create interesting situations where the player gets cornered. You also need more variety in the small enemies, the pacing is too similar for large sections of gameplay, more variety in enemy speed, movement patterns and attack patterns is needed.
Lastly the boss dragonfly zooms across the screen sideways at one point without warning. This is guaranteed to hit players the first time they play. Usually it's nice to give the player a warning if an enemy is going to enter from behind or the sides so that they could dodge it even the first time they play the game.
This game has a lot of potential, I hope you'll polish up these issues on Ouya and then port it to PC. I've put up a news post about your game on shmup-dev.com. Best of luck with the Ouya release. It's already featured in the recommended section.
Congrats on the Ouya release. It's great to see more shmups on Ouya. Your game is visually beautiful, but I feel there are a few adjustments you could make to make it more fun to play.
Firstly it needs an autofire when holding down the shoot button. Having to repeatedly press shoot in a shmup is annoying.
Your ships movement is too fast on diagonals - you're applying full X and full Y motion. When moving diagonally it should only be 0.7 X and 0.7 Y motion (Sin and Cos of 45 degrees) to be the same speed in all directions.
It would be nice to navigate the menu screen with the joystick, and not just the D-pad.
You need more interesting bullet patterns from small enemies. Always shooting directly at the player doesn't create interesting situations where the player gets cornered. You also need more variety in the small enemies, the pacing is too similar for large sections of gameplay, more variety in enemy speed, movement patterns and attack patterns is needed.
Lastly the boss dragonfly zooms across the screen sideways at one point without warning. This is guaranteed to hit players the first time they play. Usually it's nice to give the player a warning if an enemy is going to enter from behind or the sides so that they could dodge it even the first time they play the game.
This game has a lot of potential, I hope you'll polish up these issues on Ouya and then port it to PC. I've put up a news post about your game on shmup-dev.com. Best of luck with the Ouya release. It's already featured in the recommended section.
Noted
Btw, within the options menu there's an autofire option, we added that to let players decide if they want to play more "old school" (having to fire each time) or using autofire
The controls have been updated, the patch will be live today or maybe tomorrow (it has to pass the ouya tests to be approved)
The dragonfly was made that way, to hit the player if he is not aware, and certainly even if sounds rude, I have no intention of changing that :poly142:
We finally find some time to make a
PC version of the game with improved visuals, here is the Steam
Greenlight campaign, any vote or help spreading our project is
more than welcome
Replies
@mheyman: most of the integration work was done by the programmer, I just have some basic knowledge about Unity, so most of my work was done in 3ds Max; you can see some terrain tiles ready to export and even a video of the 3ds Max scene, on the first posts of this thread.
We just published our website: WWW.UFOCRASHGAMES.COM
And also a teaser of the project:
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkOvTa3nT8[/ame]
We've created a Facebook page and a twitter account where we are posting news regarding the project.
Stay tuned!
You can follow FullBlast on Facebook and Twitter
Another model
Good luck with this!
Some more highpoly models:
I love the battleship
Finally our game is on the stores!!! you can find it on both App Store and Google Play
@Palm: Your son has good taste in games
We received a lot of feedback from people who played the game and had a crazy days of work yesterday and today fixing bugs, hopefully we will upload a new version on Monday with a lot of fixes.
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/AlexPerez/20141024/228589/FullBlast_another_indie_project_that_bites_the_dust.php
Sorry to hear it didn't do so well but many, many thanks for giving us an insight into what you guys did right/wrong. That info is VERY valuable.
@Gmanx: I'd write the postmortem in a less pessimistic tone, it is true that the first weeks of sales weren't too good, but many people liked the game and critics were generally positives, so I think that at last we will get a decent monetization of the game on other platforms or even on mobile devices just changing our strategy
It may be too late, but I have one piece of input that could be helpful if you every plan on pushing an update. Right now, there are some issues with color vision deficiency. Being color vision deficient myself, and also writing extensively on the subject, I noticed it right away on some of the characters.
Anytime that you're going to use the same silhouette for an enemy or something, you need to be very careful about your color choices.
In the example below, the two circled items look almost identical to me:
A couple options you have are:
- change the silhouette slightly (the most work, probably)
- push the value of the colors to create some contrast (light red and dark green or dark red and light green)
Hopefully that makes sense.
@avenali312: I know, a friend of mine has the same color vision deficiency than you, but I can't make a color scheme for our game thinking on all the possible color sensitivities of everybody, I've just tried to make a nice palette for the 'normal' vision people. Anyway don't worry, even if you can't difference the color of the enemies it won't affect too much to your game experience, the only difference between the enemies of different colors is that they're slightly more or less powerful or resilient.
Finally the Ouya version of FullBlast is done and available for purchase (you also can play the first level for free).
[ame="
Firstly it needs an autofire when holding down the shoot button. Having to repeatedly press shoot in a shmup is annoying.
Your ships movement is too fast on diagonals - you're applying full X and full Y motion. When moving diagonally it should only be 0.7 X and 0.7 Y motion (Sin and Cos of 45 degrees) to be the same speed in all directions.
It would be nice to navigate the menu screen with the joystick, and not just the D-pad.
You need more interesting bullet patterns from small enemies. Always shooting directly at the player doesn't create interesting situations where the player gets cornered. You also need more variety in the small enemies, the pacing is too similar for large sections of gameplay, more variety in enemy speed, movement patterns and attack patterns is needed.
Lastly the boss dragonfly zooms across the screen sideways at one point without warning. This is guaranteed to hit players the first time they play. Usually it's nice to give the player a warning if an enemy is going to enter from behind or the sides so that they could dodge it even the first time they play the game.
This game has a lot of potential, I hope you'll polish up these issues on Ouya and then port it to PC. I've put up a news post about your game on shmup-dev.com. Best of luck with the Ouya release. It's already featured in the recommended section.
Noted
Btw, within the options menu there's an autofire option, we added that to let players decide if they want to play more "old school" (having to fire each time) or using autofire
The controls have been updated, the patch will be live today or maybe tomorrow (it has to pass the ouya tests to be approved)
The dragonfly was made that way, to hit the player if he is not aware, and certainly even if sounds rude, I have no intention of changing that :poly142:
We finally find some time to make a PC version of the game with improved visuals, here is the Steam Greenlight campaign, any vote or help spreading our project is more than welcome