My second flash game

[Serg]

Hey everyone ;)

I am proud to announce my second flash gmae :D that I made all by myself drawings and code etc

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Comicsserg/blob-aliens-2

Pleeeeez check it out and don't hesitate to hit facebook like button :D
if you have account on kongregate you can also rate the game :D


:D thanks in advance :)

[Cronky]

I played it! Rather than replying on the site I thought I might just put it here.

The game was quite fun for what it is. The game wasn't incredibly hard, but it had enough of a challenge to keep a person interested. Adding in the fact that the waves do not stop just because you didn't kill an amount of monsters means that if you don't hit your groove then you could be looking at a tough fight ahead.

I do have a few things you might consider for the future iterations of this game (if you make it)...

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-You might want to use the first wave(s) as a tutorial for controls.

While it may just be me, I did not actually click on the controls menu on the main screen, as I assumed they would be taught regardless and the Controls menu would just be a refresher for when I was deep into the game. I imagine control menus in games (especially flash games) to be the instruction booklet of the current generation of games. It's useful and can be more detailed then explained in-game, but it's optional to read.

It's a minor thing, but you could also teach the controls piece by piece. Say you didn't start with a jetpack or grenades, but they were in the upgrades screen. You could teach how to use those things upon purchase.

-Pull back the stage a little bit and give the player some more room to fly around.

It seemed like the Jetpack/Fuel consumption aspect of the game was lessened because flying out of the way had little use when the enemies would hit the edge of the screen and be back at you by the time you can land/run out of fuel.

-On top of the above comment, you might also want to let the player shoot straight downwards when they are in the air.

Flying seemed even less useful when even if you got out of the way you couldn't shoot the enemy you were trying to evade (who is then right below you).

-You should make the enemies more unique in abilities.

I'm going to go over each enemy...

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Green Aliens: I get that they were supposed to be the main fodder. They were served their purpose.

Invisible Aliens: Could they be hit while they were invisible? In my head they couldn't, but they transitioned too fast to tell whether or not that was true. I could see them either be the ones that are sneaky and pop up on you (if the transition was slower), or them being much like the Orange Aliens in the sense that you have to time your shots right.

Orange Aliens: In my opinion these were the toughest enemies in the game. Mainly just because they were the only ones that required me to actually time my shots. By far my favorite in terms of variety. Though admittedly the ability to headshot them is hard to judge. The general rule of "aim for the eye" is tough to do when the animation of them was so jittery. That's not really a con though considering they were supposed to be hard to hit, but while you are riding the line with them pretty well I would say you are probably leaning more towards the bad side of things with their animation.

Floating Aliens: I felt these guys were supposed to have a bigger purpose. Perhaps that they were supposed to be the aliens that were sort of "Anti-Air" since they were located on the ground. I also sort of expected them to be the Long Range enemy. With every other enemy having to get right next to you (albeit not too tough when there isn't very much room to maneuver in), it seemed like they were going to be the ones to bring a bigger threat to the table other than being more of a bullet sponge.
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With that you have all your enemies and 3 of the 4 did the same things, as I saw. While I could see there are definitely some ideas at play for how they would be separate, I think you just need to tweak them a little more so their purpose is more visible.

-I wasn't too clear on what conditions were needed to gain access to the Upgrade screen.

How many Waves did it take to unlock the upgrade screen? At times it seemed like 10, at others it seemed like 3 or 4.

What you might do instead is take players to the upgrade screen after each wave, or after each few waves. This would take care of the couple problems I had with the Upgrade screen in general. My first problem was that I didn't know how many waves I had till it unlocked. The 2nd was that there was no time in between waves that let me access the upgrade screen without basically already being in combat. If you were fast then you could get in to it when the wave name popped up, but if you didn't realize it till half way through then you had to stop mid-fight and upgrade stuff.

This would be alright if that was the point, but then why not keep it unlocked at all times? You could do that also so that players could buy health at anytime. With that you could also ratchet up the difficulty because with constant access to health, you could make it harder for players to accumulate enough money to buy Rate or Power upgrades. There's a fine line to walk there though as you don't want a player to be too underpowered late in the game if you're purpose is to make the game tough because of that reason.

-Upgrades should have a more visual component so you can judge how powerful you are in comparison to what you were at the start.

Perhaps make it dynamic to what you upgrade specifically. Start the player out with a wimpy pistol. From there lets say I only upgraded Fire Rate for the majority of the game. Change my gun to an Uzi (weak but fast). If I upgraded only Fire Power, give me a Rocket Launcher (powerful but slow). If you do a mix then give the player an Assault Rifle (balanced). This feature can become as deep as you want it to be from there. Say you wanted there to be multiple guns for each tree of upgrading. Fire Power emphasis could go from a pistol, to a magnum pistol, to a shotgun and finally a rocket launcher.

-You should either put less thought on the name of the waves, or make each wave have a more unique feature.

I am a fan of the naming convention of waves or levels on games. They give the creator ways to modify the gameplay without leaving the player blind. This game does this quite well. This also seemed to be your intention from the start, but it started going down hill towards the end. By the time I hit the last level you were just naming it things like "ROFL" and "LMAO". Which is fine also, but if you're going to make funny names then you should keep consistent throughout the game.

An example of the funny version I would have liked to see is on one of the "This is Impossible" waves you send only 1 Green Alien in. That's the whole wave. If you combined that with forcing people into the upgrade screen then you could make it so that the player had time to take in the joke also. A small joke, but you see what you could do with it that way.

Other than that give the players some modifications every once in a while. Perhaps infinite grenades, perhaps infinite fuel or no fuel, reset their weapon to the first gun for that wave, etc etc.

-Make the headshots harder to do, but make them more apparent that they're possible in game.

You might try changing the cursor when the player is on the spot for a headshot. Make the area VERY small of course to balance that, but the fact that the cursor is changing would tell players that there is probably a difference in shooting at the two different spots. You could then also widen your enemy design so that they wouldn't HAVE to have eyes to aim at. You could instead say in the controls that "Each enemy has a weak point. Try to find them all". At that point though you would probably have to change it from head shots to weak points in the scoring system.

I mainly say this because it would give players something to feel gratification out of. They would find the spot without you spoon feeding them on where exactly to shoot.

- You have a typo in your end game screen. It says that "You trew x amount of grenades" instead of threw.



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Don't take the heft of my post being things you can work on as me saying your game was bad. I liked what you did and for your second flash game it was pretty fun! I just wanted to give you some things to think about.

[Farley4Fan]

I played it a while ago.  Forgot to respond.  I'll keep my response really short so that it stands out from the next entry in a holy book that Cronky has wrote.  <3

It was cool.  My only suggestions would be to make it easier to tell how much damage you have done to the aliens or increase the amount of space you can move horizontally. 

Good work!

[Serg]

Wow thanks for the feedback :D

[Cronky]

I played it a while ago.  Forgot to respond.  I'll keep my response really short so that it stands out from the next entry in a holy book that Cronky has wrote.  <3

Someday I'm going to print out all my posts and sell it on the street as "1000+ pages of wise words ...but mostly just gibberish and meme pictures...".

On that day I will become rich.

@comicsserg
Are you already planning another game out, or have you taken a break for a while? I think it'd be interesting to hear how you go about creating a game like the one from this thread from beginning to end. Especially because it's one of your first games (on flash at least).

[Serg]

^^ I am taking a break in making flash games atm
as I am making animations and stuff for different games and film en I'm also working full time
also maintaining and programming websites and playing competitions in table-tennis, I barely have free time :o

but nevertheless I maybe will start making some other game after a few month :D then you can help me with brainstorming an interesting game design or game mechanics ;) what do you think?

[Cronky]

Sounds like an awesome plan! Throwing around ideas is usually a pretty good time. Might satisfy my curiosity enough to actually think about making my own games eventually! (Learning actionscript has proven quite hard when you half heatedly put the effort into it)

[Farley4Fan]

I once made a game where you move blocks as blocks are falling in tetris style and you try to make it from the bottom left corner to the top right.  Sound fun?

It was atrocious.  That was where I cut video game development out of my possible career choices.  Not fun.