[Play] Eclipse Polarity (yeah!)

Thanks everyone for the continued good words :)

Flashkit, you set the benchmark of quick successive releases mate, I'm just trying to catch you up now ( Two games in a week isn't bad ) :)

pentru, the map format allows for an attribute value for each tile, so if I wanted background interactions I'd just set those values and do it all tilebased ( The same map format was used for my Day of the Warm Beer game, but just running in a gAS engine ).
It was decided from the original design doc stage that this game wouldn't have that though, as I always realised it would take a chunky pc to get the number of sprites we wanted without adding more to it.
We did have player>background collisions on chapter 3 with the girders, but those are just sprites.

DancingOctopus we did actually increase the height of the playing area, and the horizontal movement along with the black border is also there to make it feel much bigger than it actually is.
All the way through it was a struggle to keep the fps high enough ( Right until the very death we were tweaking stuff to try and get any more speed out of it ). I've got quite a meaty pc, and in FF it's not as smooth as it should be ( As much as it pains me to say it, but IE is so much better at playing the game back ).
The sickener is, when testing I had it at 40fps because on the desktop that played roughly the same as running it at 60fps in IE.
If we could do a d/load version, we could crank everything up so much and run it at 60fps with no issue at all *sigh*

Noticed someone asked how long it took to make, I'm not sure about the other guys, but I record all my time taken on stuff ( Freelancer, need to know these things, I'm not just being badly anal. Well... ), but in total I spent 51.5 days working on this bad boy.

Squize.

standing ovations ;)
but that´s what you get if you aren´t allowed posting anything about that for so long

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...but in total I spent 51.5 days working on this bad boy

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that´s alot of time and it propably shows people here how much more effort it includes what can´t be seen first.
again also from me: awesome project (to sad I couldn´t enjoy dev. comments or infos beforehand)

I presume that's 51 eight hour working days?

Also, forgot to mention that the only thing that really annoyed me was that once you start the game there's no way to turn off the sound without quitting to the main menu.

Thanks render :)

Yeah personally I'd rather document the whole development process, but with everything being commercial these days I really can't, which is a pity.
Although once a game's out I'm cool with explaining as much or as little as people are interested in hearing.

Sam, yeah 8 hour days ( Although it wasn't exactly laid out 1 day after another :) ).

As to the sound, it's damn near impossible to cover everyone's presentational bases, and every option just incurs so much more work in relation to the benefits. If we had a key set aside for sound on/off then that would have impacted on the key bindings menu, in that the user wouldn't have been able to select that key, or if they did they'd then have to re-set the sound toggle key.
There was no way I was going to have an on-screen sound button, just would have stuck out like a sore thumb, so the only other option would have been to include it in the pause menu, which would have made that screen very busy text wise or would have meant having a separate menu screen to go to in there.

Sorry, not a rant, just wanted to show how much thought has to go into all of it, how a little change just goes down the line and affects other things ( It's always tricky trying to explain to a client, or even a designer. What seems a simple request sometimes is just the biggest pain in the arse you can imagine ).

Squize.

Well that was quite fun. :)

I just played as far as I will probably for a long time, got to four bosses that spun around me on hard mode. (7th on the highscore :))

Great job guys, that was a lot of fun and quite intense as it progressed. I wish I could just play through the bosses again(A sequel of just bosses? :P), but I'll guess I'll have to fight my way back.

I really enjoyed the power-ups, specifically the homing rockets and the large spinning ball of doom(those were a lot of fun).

Congrats guys on a great game!

I gotta be honest. I really didn't care for this game right after the release. Then, about 20 minutes ago, *sheepishly* I finally figured out the whole polarity thing (though I find myself getting confused mid-battle if I'm supposed to be same color or opposite color... got myself killed LOTS of times). Anyhow, now I think it's truly a stellar game. Netted myself 2nd place on the scoreboard. Woot. (V, you're wave patterns really piss me off. That whole 1 step over, when step down... ARGH!). Only got to level 8 though. Though I'd love a unlockable "boss-rush-mode" to add on to UG's suggestion above. Great game.

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Originally Posted by ImprisonedPride

V, you're wave patterns really piss me off. That whole 1 step over, when step down... ARGH!

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:s really? I find them about five times easier to get past than Squize's. :/

Well I probably just suck, but that pattern I mentione got me nearly every time because I tried to tag ever last one of them and they'd crash into me. Sigh...

Brilliant, it's great to read people actually playing the game rather than just viewing it ( If that makes sense ).

btw, the H-Chain ( Was originally a Kill-Chain, but child friendly and all that ) is the best way to bump your score up really high. Only really possible on the first chapter 'cause then it gets too hard, but that's my little insider secret.

Squize.

gah, so annoying, keep trying to set aside time to play this properly - but by the time I finally get round to it this thread would have packed up and gone home! From the 5 mins I've had to have a go it looks ace! Now if you could please get on with converting it to my gameboy so I can play it on the tube we can all move on!

This game rocks. The polarity stuff is what makes the game unique. Well done. My first thoughts were about graphics and animation quality. Wow!
I had more or less understood the polarity system on my first step but I've found the game too hard/frustrating on the first levels. I would have done waves of blue followed by waves of red, but not blue and reds on the same wave.
The learning period is quite long but it is proportional to the game quality which is fine :)

(Spoiler)
I found problems with the game. I am not tiring to wine but there are things that make this game less enjoyable and sometimes frustrating.
The ship isn't fast enough to counter the shoots. It moves slowly across the screen. The enemies and your ship are too big and have less space to move around and prevent crashes. When there is a swarm it’s almost impossible to kill all the bugs and you are forced to go to a corner where it’s very easy to get shoot and hard to get back into the action. Enemies can pop out from any where which isn’t really a problem if the ship could move a little faster. The last Boss doesn’t move which wakes it easy to destroy and there is not an ending, plus some minor small glitches that could happen. And maybe the power ups could have lasted a little longer and wouldn’t fly away from your reach so fast. That is all I have to say that could have made this game more interesting and had people coming back for more.

I think its cool when people still play a game till its end ages after its release :)
That said i agree with all your crits and should we ever get to work on the game again or on a followup we´ll work on addressing such issues.
Thanks for your feedback :)

hmmm he registered an account just to say that.. it must be tomsamson plugging his own game!!!!!!!!

haha,right,what better way to plug your own game than to only talk about the negative sides of it? :D

Frogking21 I could reply to each and everyone of your comments, but this game has served it's purpose now.

Yes there are quite a few faults with it, some things that at the time we weren't happy with, but there is only x amount of budget, x amount of time and x number of people with different views on how the game should be.

Good work for getting to the end though. It would have been nice to hear your feedback on some of the "unique" levels there were in there ( Such as the level that is just a big boss you chase down a valley ) which I still think is pretty cool, but should I ever do another vertical shoot'em up there are lots of things I'd do differently.

Squize.

I understand Squire.
In case you should make another vertical shooter, I got an idea.
You could make it a racing game with power ups like turbo, and different guns. In this game you would have to speed across a level filled with enemies and explosives while also racing against a computer opponent.
Like the game "Diesel and Death" except it would be like an arcade vertical shooter
http://www.andkon.com/arcade/racing/dieselanddeath/