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Yup, now it has been released, our little game for the jig contest :)
you can play it here:
http://jayisgames.com/archives/2007/...sadventure.php
http://www.stimunationgames.com/imag...creenshot1.jpg
Daydream, T1ger, Phreax, Psykopig and me worked on this one :)
We went for doing an adventure game where balls only move around in some of the scenes and are related in some way to the puzzles :)
haha, see, you never can know how a game will be received by the audience ;)
I thought jayisgames people would like an adventure game but the first dude comes in to moan about it and spoil the game for all others and from there it goes downwards in the comments, haha :( :)
Don't worry mate, the same thing happened to me, except I started off with great comments, then somebody mentions something negative and all the comments go downhill! They are starting to pick up again now though I think.
Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to play your game for more than 5 mins yet, but I must say it looks awesome. I didn't even know you guys were working on a game for the comp (if I had looked at your avatar a bit harder I might have realised). From what I've seen you are in with a good chance of a win IMO, I don’t know why so many of the comments are negative!
Anyway, Ill give it a proper go when I get the chance and give some real comments :)
Ali
thanks for the cheering words mate :)
I don´t think we have a good chance to win seeing the comments there so far, its no biggy for me personally since i don´t care much about winning the contest or not (though sure it would be nice for T1ger and the others to get a reward), i´m damn proud of what the team made in such a short timespan :)
I like the game and am impressed what the guys put into it and that counts more to me than any of the prizes (not wanting to talk em down, but yeah, thats how it is :) )
I´m just a bit sad that no comment i read up to now had anything good to say about the sound, art or storyline/ gameplay, that´s all :)
I´ll just leave reading the comments now :)
I´m glad you like the art, yup, i think dd and phreax did an amazing job there :)
And yup, i saw the thread about the contest late in our dev phase and then was way too busy to write anything propper :)
Then after it was submitted i just wanted to see the reactions from the people here without them beeing influenced by me :)
haha, this game!
Lovely work guys, but WAY too short. :(
Just curious, is there any special reward for 12 of 12 endings? I got the "ball physics" ending early on, and now it seems to be trial and error on permutations of semi complete games.
Wow, 8 smilies in one post, that can't be healthy!
From what I've played so far the gameplay is great too, not just the art (although yea, the art is outstanding).
I think part of the reason you haven’t had any proper comments is because of the type of game. People are more interested in posting spoilers. Still, I'm really surprised nobody has taken the time to comment on it properly.
And I wouldn't take the comments as much of an indicator of your chance of winning an award, the main awards are given by Jay and the JIG crew (as far as I know), and I'm pretty sure they will appreciate the quality of the game. Of course I agree, awards aren’t everything, I entered the comp knowing my chances of winning anything are next to nothing, but I just wanted the opportunity to compete with a bunch of other great games and see what happens.
Ali
to slight:
yeah, sorry :)
would have loved to make more scenes but we already had to push till last minute to get it done as it is.
and yup, there´s a small reward for getting all 12 of 12 endings :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by alillm
haha, yes, i´m sure it isn´t ;)
I know smileys should be used to express your feelings but seeing them cheers me up, so i often have many.. ;)
:)Quote:
Originally Posted by alillm
Quote:
Originally Posted by alillm
i agree, though don´t sell yourself short mate, great work there :)
ok, the first few comments on jig weren´t that positive but at least there are some guys there playing the game for over two hours now trying to unlock all endings, that cheers me up :)
don't sweat it tom. it's a very cool game and a nice slant on the contest topic. props to all involved. :)
cheers mate :)
and yup, meanwhile more positive feedback came in there, too, so i´m not sad anymore either :)
Love the game, wicked! Don't let "bandwagon comments" get you down mate. Problem is, a lot of the 13 year old n00bs that "review" games nowadays haven't a clue what they're talking about. It's all fine and dandy until some chump has something negative to say and all of a sudden everyone jumps on the bandwagon to make themselves look clever.
For example, someone may put "Erm, i didn't like the way the person walked and the inventory was stupid" or something. The next 50 odd comments would be the little gits posting rubbish like "i hated it cos the guy walked stupid and inventory is gay".
So to sum up, 13 year olds are wrong and should be ignored indefinitely. (No offence intended to the spotties of the forum!)
Rant over. :)
Thanks everybody:) I would also have liked it to be longer, but sadly we didn't have time for that. We should have started earlier with our entry:)
Who knows, if people like the game, maybe we'll make a 2nd version which will be longer:)
Just got all endings (using a walkthrough...so ashamed :p) And have to say *spoilers* the "making of" section was a brilliant addition, maybe I enjoyed it more because I myself am a game developer, but that was probably one of my favorite parts of the game :p
Wow, Jay must have been extremely flattered to see so much effort put into a game that's based around his own character.
to lightspeed: yeah, i think you´re spot on regarding some commenters :) Well,still when one releases a game after some long nights on it one values each comment twice as much :)
Well, i take it as positive learning experience, i´ll try to improve the things that were brought up in constructive criticizm way in our next game and for some comments which were pure sensless bashing i´ll take em less serious thinking o f what you said :)
to Captain:
haha, awesome you unlocked the making of section, read it and also enjoyed it :)
I added that way late and wondered if actually anyone would have a look at it :)
to walnoot:
haha, he was sure quite shocked when he played the game the first time :D
His words:
And I'm quite speechless to see I've made it into a game(!)
I don't know whether I should thank you or curse you. xD
:)
Dude, the 13 yr olds don't know diddly squat and unless the game is one of those instantly addictive shoot-em up types it's unlikely they'll ever say anything nice about it.They are definitely to be ignored. It's a strong effort, probably a high-contender to win the competition in my mind. Using Jay himself as a main character was a mistake IMO though - it might look like favouritism if you win and I'm wondering if that'll count against you in the vote.
Good luck though.
Yeah, could be the case that today´s younger ones maybe go way more for the quickly accessible more casual stuff when its about web games (i´m not yet entirely convinced of that thought though).Quote:
Originally Posted by EvilKris
Sure i could ignore those for this little game now and don´t spend long time on thinking if one can´t approach that type of gamer or not with such game types, but i got hooked by doing one, i´d really like to do more episodes for this or more games of this type now :)
Problem is as soon as i think about working several months or even jut one month on anything i have to consider whether there´s a realistic option to make any money with the result of the time spent.
(I´m sadly not yet in the position financially where i can just say, hm, ok, lets ignore any financially benefitial projects for the next 4 months and work on something in that timespan where its sure it doesn´t bring back any money at all ;) )
Then it suddenly becomes heavily important what has most mainstream appeal for one minute: Game Sites, unless they´re based on micro transactions/download content or subscriptions mostly focus on page view counts.
The more people check out a game, the better. It doesn´t really matter to em whether those people who played a game played it for a minute or for 3 hours.
And yup, then i have to think about doing things which more work fine under those rules which means one can´t do many game types one would love to do. I still want to do different games, otherwise i could have easily earned two years money by just doing 10 monster tuck games in a row but yeah, at least when working on a new game i have to think whether this can bring any money for living.
To me JayIsAdventure feels like a fine little game by itself, but yup, could be much more with more scenes,puzzles and storyline added. Once a game is shaping up, as creative person i often start to think about and value the potential for taking it further way more than be happy about what´s there now ;)
Beeing amazed of how it all came together in such a short timespan i started wondering whether it could be financially viable to follow the episodic concept of the new sam & max series or half life 2 expansions and unleash more of the potential of this game or other games gameplaywise and at the same time not have to worry about it beeing financially benefitial or not.
So we could work on a larger global story arc or just bigger game types, but by spreading the worktime and release dates into several episodes.
I have more thoughts on such things, this is just one of those :)
I actually think many things i´d like to do but most portal clients aren´t into paying for or running on their site since it at first may sounds like bringing less or just not more vistors to the site than the next casual game fad would in the long run bring them a stronger community of returning players who want more news on one game rather than the type who only wants to check out a new game for a minute each day and leaves the site with disinterest as soon as the next portal comes up which has more new (crappy) games each day.
Right now i´m kinda in the position where we have lots of clients and even way more potential ones and all want some sort of game and many (since portals) want more and more polished single run minigames of some sort,
whereas i´m kinda sad about the thought of doing one quick one minute/ one view per person fad games and that all the time in assembly line manner "just" to ensure a propper constant income stream. I´d more like to do the sort of game i/the team want to do and we just do it without any gameplay or general content restrictions.
Well,i have to think some more about this all :)
On the rest of your comments: I´m glad you dig it, but yup, there are really lots of really good game entries there, so i´d understand it if we don´t win :)
I´m not sure whether having Jay as character could have been a bad choice regarding the contest judgment as you said, could be, but yeah, that was the idea right from the start and one main point why it was so enjoyable to work on this was that we could do anything as we wanted (well as much as it was possible till deadline ;) ) so yeah, i didn´t think about whether or not to change this or that in the game to have better chances to win, that would have kinda destroyed the spirit we had while working on it :)
Its good to be able to pay your bills, but yup, it was a great distraction for someone constantly working on stuff for [enter any big portal´s name] to work on something without any restrictions at all, i have that rarely these days ;)
Tom, there is scope for bigger games imho, with episodic content.
Look at Spooks ( ok, mini-games, but still released weekly ), Jamie Kane, Death in Sakaraha [sp] and CDX.
I'm not bigging up my own games, they're just games I can talk about with a certain degree of knowledge.
DiS broke bbc registration records at the time, and reached a really wide demographic ( I can't remember the percentage, but it was something like 40% female players ).
I know you can argue that visitors to the bbc site are a lot different to those who visit miniclip or newground, but there's still a large cross over audience.
My other half will happily play Wii sports, but if I were to say to her "Why not post a comment about it ?" she'd look at me if I was mental.
The vast majority of people just don't have an interest in posting comments or feedback. For them, a game is meant to be fun, posting about it crosses that line from pick up and play to something slightly more in-depth, and they won't bother ( Despite Web 2.0 being the only thing we ever hear about ever ).
If I go to amazon, I just want to buy something. If when it arrives and I'm happy with it, then sweet. I would never for one second think to go back to the site to write a review. I couldn't care less. Posting about games is no different for the vast number of players.
What I'm trying to say in a round about way is, the number of people who post a comment are the tiny minority. Let's say 5% of everyone who plays it ( I imagine it's nearer 0.5% ), and if half the people who post have something to bit'ch about, that's only 2.5%.
You can't just expand those figures out, and say ok half of the people who posted didn't like it that much, so that must mean 50% of everyone who played it didn't like it that much. It doesn't work that way.
Using another example, how many people have written a letter of complaint somewhere ? And how many have written a letter of praise ? It's easier to justify posting about something to pick holes and complain as if you feel that way it stirs the need to do something about it ( We've all flamed someone ).
I guess I should at least attempt to get back to the point. I think there is a market for larger more in-depth games to be sold to portals, it's just not going to be an easy sale in the short term.
There's talk of a new way of rating websites in terms of search engine position, based on exactly how long visitors stay at a site rather than just clicks to it. Sites are going to want very sticky content then.
Also it may mean dropping more ads into a game, rather than just one at the start. Yeah it sucks, and yeah we all hate it, but it's still a small price to pay to play something as good as Monkey Island.
It is like you say though, having 3/4 months to make something really cool and really large is a luxury that very few people have. But I wouldn't dismiss the "large" game genre, I've worked on a few and they've done really well, both critically and in terms of registered players. It's now just a case of transferring that from a client with a decent budget and wanting a game of that type, to getting portals to take that genre on board, and being willing and able to pay for it.
Squize.
yeah,i of course thought of Spooks Jamie Kane, Death in Sakura and CDX, i was wondering if something like that can be done for portals or self funded/released and be viable,too :)
And yup, you´re probably right about commenting likelyhood for people,way more of those who have something to moan will probably comment :)
Its just that i had different expectations for the jig audience for some reason (which yeah,actually came true after the first few comments :) )
would be great, yeah :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Squize
dunno,the advertising people are very creative when its about such things, they could also do such things like just updating the banner ads at the sides or tops of the pages every 2 minutes or things like that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Squize
Quote:
Originally Posted by Squize
yeah :)
Wow, you guys can rant on forever, huh? :D
I'll keep it short! I definitely think there's an audience for a real old-school adventure like this!
Most of the feedback concerns the length (or lack of...) of the game and the fact that you do the same things in different order to unlock endings.
Having seen the blood, sweat and tears trying to finish this game in the last days of development, I understand why some positive comments would soothe but I really do feel the game has potential!
The worst part is, that counting the hours spent on it, it's a piece of art! Give the same team a month full-time and we could almost match a full-fledged adventure game! When the engine is done, it should be straight forward to add more to the game!
I've enjoyed both making and playing this game, so cheers to us :D
wow, its game central round here atm, all the pro's are pumpin them out ;)
Its a great game, good to see that FK'ers can put there heads together and produce babies like this one.
Love the game engine and the look of the game. No idea how easy you guys made it to develop for, but looking at the team, it is probably designed very well on the backend also.
I would suggest you do more than just this game with it. I think this game sells the work on this adventure engine short. Literally. It is just such a short game for such a promising engine. It would be a real shame to walk away from it.
My impression of the GAME itself isn't as glowing. To me this is one of those 'marvel at the potential' entries. I think the content is a letdown. I didn't think the puzzles were logical. Filling the bucket with water? Sure, that makes sense, but the rest of that puzzle series just wasn't logical at all to me. One of my biggest peeves with adventure games is the 'combine everything with everything else' mentality because the solution makes no sense at all.
Let me preface this next paragraph with it being a dig on bad adventure games, not a dig on YOUR adventure game. Your game didn't have enough items to really suffer too much from this:
If you are going to make a game where you have to try near random combinations of items, there better be a good payoff for each failure. A good example of this would be Grim Fandango. Some of the combines were weird, but I combined everything with everything not just to finish the game, but because making illogical combinations usually REWARDED me with a hilarious comment from Manny. That is some great positive reinforcement. It is encouraging me to make weird combos and rewarding me for trying everything. Getting a generic 'that does not work' for every combine would instead discourage me from trying any combines, and I would resent every odd combination I was forced to make, instead of enjoying the process.
Finally, I found the game to be abit juvenile for my tastes. It seemed to be trying for the leisure suit larry humor in a few spots and missing the mark. There is little in this world less funny to me than a bad boobie joke. Different strokes for different folks. Humor is incredibly subjective. Just saying it missed the mark for me. It is hard to develop humor in such a short game though, so I do recognize you were against some heavy obstacles. Most adventure game humor is character driven and you can't develop much character in 2 screens. Again, it is calling out for a larger project using the wonderful engine.
The earlier suggestion of episodic content is a great one IMO. Good way to get people returning to a site.
to phreax re: "
I've enjoyed both making and playing this game, so cheers to us :D"
haha, cheers mate :)
agreed on all you said anyway =)
yeah, totally sweet =)Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_malee
yeah, it sadly happens way rarer these days that i get to work on such a group project due to client work (and same counts for the whole team thanks to constant business ;) ) but yup,its so awesome when one gets to it and then the team is in that vibe of the boring sounding term synergy effect punching you in the face at full force with its amazingness in action :)Quote:
Originally Posted by mr_malee
to Alluvian:
thanks for your well worded in depth feedback and yup, i agree on most of your points :)
With more worktime on the game/engine i´d tweak some things to be more easily reusable but overall its a fine setup which surely could be reused in more games of this type.
I also agree that thanks to how short the game is it yells for more scenes/episodes :)
Regarding the creating short circuit puzzle i think it would have helped to get some hints from game charcaters but yup, overall its a good idea to try to keep the puzzles as logical to follow as possible and yup, i also agree that false combination tries of players should be rewarded with funny comments, too. We tried that to some extend, would definately add way more of that with more time.
The boobie joke with the billboard and the beach voleyball girl was intended as a parody on "dead or alive extreme beach volleyball" on consoles (where the game was pimped by the makers with statements like it has extreme realistic "ball" physics) as i said in the jig comments section, but yeah, i agree, if one doesn´t know that game or doesn´t get the reference, then it looks lik a flat boobies joke only. Would try to make such references more clear in the future or try to put things in which are also more funny if one doesn´t get the reference at all :)
Regarding episodic delivery i´m currently trying to see if its feasable to get that going (financially) :)
Like it much !
Contrarly to what people are saying, I don't think the game is short if you take the goal as to discover all the endings.
Production values are quite high : great job at resurecting LucasArt in Flash :)
to lux:
Viva la revolucion! The day shall come where tentacles rule the earth :D The graphics are blatantly INSPIRED by Day of the Tentacle! ...and also Sam & Max! It's an ode to some of the games I actually stuck around to finish :D