Iron Strike at the Independent Games Festival

[WILL]

Wow, I'm truely grateful for all the interest in hosting the game. Thanks a lot guys!

I have made up a video (XviD encoded) of the game's intro sequence. It even features the new PGD themed 'Worlds' logo. :thumbup:

Thing is... it's still almost 10 MB big. So... if you want, I can email it to you guys and you can host it for us...? The other option is YouTube.com, but I'm not so sure about that. Especially if we want to update it later on.

As for the game bugs/issues, I'm going to see if I cannot fix a few things myself before I upload it just yet. But if I have your FTP/email info I can easily upload/send once I have done what I can. Just PM me and once I can I will...

[WILL]

Robert has just sent me his FTP information. If Jeremy and JSoftware wish to be mirrors aswell please either give me an EMail address or an FTP address aswell. [size=9px](Had a few issues with connecting to Robert's FTP server though, it's possible that I may only be able to connect via Passive Mode so email might be nicer...?)[/size]

The game release is going to have to wait until around Monday though. I'm going to tinker with Mission 3 a bit and try to fix major errors with it before I try to release it. It's a rather annoying problem and I think that it'd be nicer for you all to try it right through to Mission 4 or 5. (The game as said by Dirk is rather short in gameplay time...)

[WILL]

Well I've finally managed to get it to Robert and he has kindly mirrored it here: Iron Striketormfront Intro Video (9.36 MB RAR File)

Please tell me what you guys think of it...

[czar]

Over all I thought it was good. The pgd logo looked great.

The storyline is good but the way it is presented has a couple of problems.

1. The reader has to be able to read very quickly. Only the centre of the screen is opaque which means you have a small window to read the material.

2. The format works well with short bits of text but this went on for a quite a while.

3. The font also doesn't help. I found it hard to keep track of where I was reading.

The question is...

Is the full story important to the game? If not I would suggest editing it to be much much shorter. The full text could be shown as a mission background during a briefing or whatever.

I have to say I was expecting to see some in game action. Reading a black screen for two minutes was a bit of a let down. Only after watching and re-reading your post did I click that it was the intro to the game.

Why not make a an inaction movie then use that as a background to the mission briefing. You could fade out the centre of the screen where the text appears so it is still readable.

[savage]

My only critisisms of the video are that the text jumps up the screen a few times, which made me lose my place. It really needs to be a very smooth scroll. Also it needs an audio track accompanying the scrolling text for those who are too illiterate to read.

WILL can you PM me the transcript and I will put on my best English authoritarian accent and record the voice over.

[WILL]

Yeah, this is all true.

The intent was to eventually have montage of 'mock' video clips and news reports of these major events taking place from the current 'War On Terror' to WWIII to the end of the Alliance-Coalition coldwar.

The thing that I think killed us the most was lack of time to work with the material. Dirk was fighting to keep bugs out as he added all this new stuff and I was trying to manage all the material ALL in a very short period of time. Which all lead to an unfortunately poor performance at IGF. :?

Things that I'd like to see done to Iron Strike, post-IGF... [size](This was both me and Dirk's montra the whole time we worked :lol[/size]

Intro-wise:

1) Slow down the scroll speed (much slower intro)
2) Add the mock montage of the progression from current day to the story
3) Rescore the whole game... intro, main menu, missions, boss fights, ending
4) Possibly try to shorten or abbreviate the 'rolling text' somewhat [size=9px](maybe a few visuals will substitute some of the text?)[/size]
5) Add a narrator [size=9px](Possibly putting Dom in the acting business w/ him being in a music video too and all )[/size]

In-game-wise:

6) FIX missing dialogs, pause action durring important story moments (will fix a lot of problems)
7) Get real world satellite images for the menu[size=9px](weren't able to get this done in time)[/size]
FIX my ultra cool boss fight in Mission 5. [size=9px](It was a really cool idea. We just had too many engine issues to make it work.)[/size]
9) All kinds of tiny perks that remained due to a missing beta testing period. :lol: [size=9px](This poor thing litterially went right from the developer's table straight into the judges folder.)[/size]


I'm not sure where, but I'm also thinking of adding a cutscene/trailer somewhere where you see a silhouetted Russian General talking[size=9px](giving a speech to a friend or to taping it as propaganda)[/size]. The idea is that you don't see his face or anything, but hear the 'power' in his voice and sort of fear this man's conviction. A nice story build-up scene. Where we'll find someone that has that kind of voice [size=9px](and is Russian or can pull off the accent perfectly)[/size] is to be seen.

Either way, other games have done comebacks to the IGF so it seems that maybe we can do it too. But like I told Dirk before, we'll need to enlist the help of more than just the 4 people that did work on this one.