Snarlhill defender

[Thyandyr]

http://www.mediafire.com/file/8ji187a7jul861d/Release.zip

Simple game with nice music & global high score list.

[de_jean_7777]

Can you upload this to a place where I don't have to submit my email address to download? Such as mega, dropbox, google drive

[SilverWarior]

Hi!
I can't say for others but I definitely am not prepared to share my e-mail address with filehosting.org in order to be able to tryout your game. Especially not because past filehosting.org reputation for hosting various questionable content.
So you might consider hosting your game elsewhere.

I guess requirement for entering valid e-mail address is probably just an attempt by filehosting.org to get rid of some questionable content but still I don't trust them.

[Thyandyr]

Will do...

Megaupload asks too many questions
Drop box wants me to download something
Google drive... no
Mediafire, ok this works.

Initial post updated!

PS. It's good to have email address that can be given out to questionable services. One that is not used for anything, on a provider that you are never logged in to.

[Ñuño Martínez]

This is why 10 minute e-mail servers (http://lmgtfy.com/?s=d&q=10+minute+mail) were deployed.

Anyway, there are a lot of platforms to host sofware releases as SourceForge*, GitHub, GameJolt, itch.io, etc.

[edit]
I've downloaded it and I must to say I miss a lot of things. You should add some documentation. Just a README file with a brief description, license information (this is a must!) and contact information (this is also a must!) would be enough.

I also miss some information as developer. Did you use Delphi or Free Pascal? What libraries and/or engine did you use? Is it finished or you're still working on it? Do you plan to port/release it on other platforms (Linux, Android, consoles...)?

[edit2]
Tested. It didn't work. Can't play mp3 sound (?).
__________________

* I know SF has a very bad reputation, but new owners are doing a great job cleaning it. Really.

[Jonax]

Good to hear SourceForge is cleaning up their act. I've forgotten the details but had an unpleasant experience there a couple of years ago.

Agree with thyandyr that it's good to have a separate e-mail for such siters.

Can't try the game now. Will hopefully find time in a couple of weeks.

Keep up the good work!

[Thyandyr]

I didn't do it for any proper purpose really, just for my own fun so I didn't include any info other than what is displaying in-game. But yeah since you asked; it is done with Delphi FMX. 'Do whatever you like'-license. And I've only posted it here so contact is solved. But yeah, points taken in case I ever do something more serious.

[SilverWarior]

I have just tried your game and found several bugs in it.

When writing your name in the main menu pressing W or S moves main menu selection Ur or Down respectively. You should change your code so that when player is changing their name alphabet character movement bindings are ignored. My suggestion for doing this nicely is to force player to pres enter when on "Select Player Name" menu selection to start editing the name at which point you disable all standard binding. For player to confirm new name he should press Enter again. Or he could press ESC in order to abort changing the player name. In both cases you enable back standard key bindings.
When playing the game often some part the ground tiles on the right side would not render at all so there would be just some blue area where ground tiles should be.
1459
Looking at background image (one with hill and house) I'm guessing you might have tried to implement some Parallax Scrolling but the image is always stays centered which in turn prevents player from understanding of how to take badgers to the house for safety.
Your ground textures also doesn't seem to be aligned properly- It seems that they are overlapping each other which results in disturbed non-continuous pattern.
After dying when game tries to upload the high-score to global server if there is no internet connection or if your game is being blocked by firewall you end up in endless loop of "Socket error" exceptions so the game need to be forcibly killed. You should limit the number of upload attempt your application tries before it gives up.


I also have a small request.
When I was fidling with FMX in the past to see if it could be used for game development I must admit that I was very disappointed with its performance. So could you please add FPS counter functionality so I can see if its performance might have been improved in recent versions.

[Thyandyr]

Thanks for the feed back.

I tried fix 1) but just got bored since I couldn't fix it immediately. I'm aware of 2) but don't know why it is happening. 3) The game is this way just since I love doing things 'the wrong' way. 4. Agree it looks crap but again, I got bored. 5. This proably should actually be fixed, no one likes hanged aps in full-screen! I could add FPS in case I ever work on this again.

Anyway I just posted it here to see if there is any life in this forum, positively surprised by the activity!

[de_jean_7777]

Played for a bit. Gameplay wise it could be fun with more variety. It's simplistic, so not much to say. A few observations, perhaps for something your make in the future.
- Not sure why health and score are in the background and hidden by trees.
- The fishes can come too close together, which doesn't allow to kill the second fish because vigor doesn't regenerate quickly enough. This may seem unfair to players as it's unavoidable no matter the skill.
- Add an option to turn off the music :D
- Maybe provide additional visual feedback when losing a life other than a sound (cam shake).

[Thyandyr]

Valid points, thank you.

[SilverWarior]

The fishes can come too close together, which doesn't allow to kill the second fish because vigor doesn't regenerate quickly enough. This may seem unfair to players as it's unavoidable no matter the skill.

During my play-testing I don't remember running into situation where fishes would come to close so that getting hit by one would be avoidable. As far as I have observed when fish spawn either on left or on right side there is always some minimal distance between them which is large enough for you to be able to hit all of them. Sure you need to time the hit on the first one just right but it is doable. As for when you get into "sandwich" between fish from both sides well this can be quite easily avoidable by planning your movements a little bit.
Now what I do consider unfair is that based on my experience the only way to get combo hit you need to get into the fish "sandwich" in order for them to come close enough so that more than one can be hit at the same time.

In order to avoid above mentioned problem I would recommend varying speed of each individual fish a little bit. This would also make gameplay a little more interesting.


Maybe provide additional visual feedback when losing a life other than a sound (cam shake).

Would be useful. But I guess that the main reason why all of us would want this immediately is the fact that player health bar sometimes gets obscured by trees due to wrong Z ordering.

[Thyandyr]

Seriously, if any of you all enjoy playing it, I for sure will fix these things! I wasn't expecting people to actually play it!

[SilverWarior]

Do I enjoy playing it? To be honest not really. But that doesn't mean that you should just abandon it.
I think you should continue working on it even thou only a few people will be interested in playing it. Why? Because by further working on it you will be learning more about game development so when in the future you start working on another game idea you won't be making the same mistakes that you did this time.

If you need someone to bounce some ideas or do some play-testing I'm usually up for it because this can be a learning experience for myself to. In fact I have learned a lot about game development just by interacting with other game developers even when their games were made in other programming languages that I don't know.

[de_jean_7777]

As for when you get into "sandwich" between fish from both sides well this can be quite easily avoidable by planning your movements a little bit.
I had a scenario where the fishes came from the same side. Maybe I wasn't fast enough. Seems like you can hit a fish before it seemingly comes close enough, so maybe that was enough distance. However, the game is not interesting enough for me to go into more testing.

[pitfiend]

Do I enjoy playing it? To be honest not really. But that doesn't mean that you should just abandon it.
I think you should continue working on it even thou only a few people will be interested in playing it. Why? Because by further working on it you will be learning more about game development so when in the future you start working on another game idea you won't be making the same mistakes that you did this time.

Learming from mistakes is the only way to learn. Keep failing Thyandyr, it's ok. No one learns something for doing nothing.


If you need someone to bounce some ideas or do some play-testing I'm usually up for it because this can be a learning experience for myself to. In fact I have learned a lot about game development just by interacting with other game developers even when their games were made in other programming languages that I don't know.

Algos and Technics are language agnostic.