[Early Beta] New game - need your comments!

[pseudobot]

Hey there!
I've been developing a new flash game, Protist X, with my friend. The game is similar to the cell phase of the game Spore.

That means, you make your microbe/protist with certain parts, and play the game with it, will constantly "evolving" it. There is a lot to be done to the game still, which are:

*Add a map
*More levels, that are in different places [eg raindrop, tide pool, sea...]
*Help & Instructions
*Better particle effects
*More parts
*More detail on graphics
*Better music (I suck at composing anything! )




What I want to know from you guys is what you like so far, what needs a lot of work, etc. If you want, you can list some ideas from parts aswell, and describe what they do. Thanks guys!

Note: I left the sounds out at the moment, since I will only upload the version of the file here until me & my friend make some progress, and it makes the file exceed 300kb when zipped.

[renderhjs]

any online swf link without the need of:
download > unzip > extract > find file > drag in browser > watch
?

[pseudobot]

^Not at the moment... sorry.
Do you know any swf hosting site that displays it on there site, and that I can take the flash movies down any time?
I'll upload it there then. Thanks!

[Draxus]

The cell stage was by far the best stage in Spore. Though it's short and simple, it's the only stage in which the morphology of your creation matters at all, which is really what the game should have been all about given their insane creature creator and the whole evolution theme. An expanded version of the cell stage would be awesome, so I wish you the best of luck

Anyway, It's hard to critique since I know it's still early in development, but here's some thoughts:

-Movement needs work... it feels a little too fast, and your creature should stop a little before he reaches the mouse (right now he keeps going till he's centered over the mouse)

-Seems to be totally herbivore at the moment... carnivore path would be nice.

-Hostile creatures should only chase you if you're close by, and should kill and eat other non-player creatures and/or eat the plants, stealing them from you.

-Scaling your body or switching body types should reposition parts so you don't need to re-place everything.

Good work... I'm anxious to see the final product

[pseudobot]

^Yep, I'll do that with the movement right now!

Carnivore path will be added soon too.

Hostile creatures should only chase you if you're close by

Yep, I'll implement that too, asap.

The other things will be done in a while, once there are a variety of enemies & diffrent scenarios [levels]

Thanks for the comments Draxus, they are useful!

[The Helmsman]

Looks interesting. I was a little bit confused of what to do in the beginning, seems it because I'm not familiar with spore game. But then, when I guessed out what I need to do the rest of the game was smooth.
Here is my suggestions list:
- Add description of what every upgrade suppose to do. Actually I played until I was able to purchase everything and then stop playing. And even when I got everything, still don't know what some of them do. (HINT: The most useful was the one which can kill red creatures
- What is the aim of the game. To get all upgrades? To pass all levels (which you are planning to add later)?
- Bring some balance. IMHO it's too easy now.

[pseudobot]

Anything else guys?

[Pazil]

Grrr...I was planning on doing a Spore game, though I was aiming for the animal phase...(by the way, which is the same as the cell phase except for the game play itself (evolving still matters)...

As for the game itself, it's not too bad, except that you don't actually travel the world, and the cell should ease to a stop, not suddenly stop...it just feels really static.


P.

[pseudobot]

^All these things have already been archived.
Map has been added (needs different levels though), good music compositions, more parts, and things like slowing down, faster the more the mouse cursor is away from the creature, etc etc. Now around 1/3 of the people in the college library play this game, every day (with some different people). Guess thats quiet a good achievement since most people play games on gaming sites before the game was released.

Btw, now My friend is integrating a php script for downloading pictures of you creature...

[Wattz]

I wanted to do something similar, except break it down closer to how organisms are believed to have actually become multicellular...

I wanted specialized cells and to build the player's organism as a sort of functional puzzle, so that the placement of the cells on your organism mattered. IE, digestive cells, flagellum cells, sensory cells, "hard" structure cells, etc.

[everfornever]

Do you know any swf hosting site that displays it on there site, and that I can take the flash movies down any time?

www.truimagz.com/hosting

no ads or anything, it's just there for people like you, have any questions pm me.

Very cool game, I love tower defense type games, and I like the feeling you get from your design after you play it for a while. The color red you chose was really good.

[Pazil]

Hey Wattz! I had an idea like that...basically you could maybe have the generic spore creature editor, but then for specific attributes (and abilities), you could edit a DNA tree, basically make different patterns from the 4 types of sugars that make up DNA strands...

In fact, pseudobot, you should add in special abilities, or powerups. For example, swim faster for a while, make attacking stronger, etc.
Another thing that would be cool would be missions to do for a large DNA bonus (eat this many plant things in this much time, kill this many of this type of cell, etc.)

Please keep updating that game! It actually was fun to play!

[Xploder]

pseudobot, nice game. I started a spore clone in 2006 (before it was released). My approach was similar. Get the creature creator and then test drive it in a cell phase type of thing. Via php all the creatures were saved online within a text doc, containing a list of nodes. The simplest of creatures took up 36bytes. Last thing I did was, rewrite it for AS3 and load multiple creatures from multiple text-files to generate an environment of user-created content. User-created content is what I'm obsessed with.

Anyway, my suggestion is to create 3 nodes for the body itself and using some basic IK movement code, make the creature more live like. Here's an example of my game using IK movement: http://devkiwi.com/archives/15
I'll throw the spore clone up later, as I moved hosting and some files seem to be missing.

[pseudobot]

^I'll look into IK, never used it before.
Thanks!

[barrax]

Good work, I was quite addicted to it and suddenly lost half an hour. I agree with the previous posts about the movement (how it needs improvement), but apart from that i'd say this has got a lot of potential. Stick at it!