[BETA] Freeze Pop Frenzy

[cadin]

Hey everyone,
I'm getting ready to publish a new game over at The Pencil Farm:

Freeze Pop Frenzy

("Popsicle" is a registered trademark... Who knew?)

Let me know what you think.
I'd be interested in general feedback, what you think about the difficulty and pace, and of course any bugs or performance issues.

[yeps]

i really liked the graphics.. it wasnt a bad game.. it wouldnt always work when i hit the kids.. not sure why.. nice little idea tho..

[MSrulez]

cool, though it took me a while to understand that there is brown ice cream at the sides

[ImprisonedPride]

It's a bit hard in my oppinion. Your games are becoming top notch in quality, though. For a second I thought I had the highest score, till I realized it was negative $11.00.

[cadin]

Yeah, the difficulty level is the main thing I am still working on. It was way too easy, so I changed it so it gets harder as you go, but maybe the increase should be slower.

I'm going to do some more testing with different people and hopefully find a good balance.

[Captain_404]

I found the spacebar-charing hard to control and actually fairly frusterating. What I might like to see is a system where you can choose precisely where the bar will fall by the _ymouse. left right might still be controlled with arrow keys though.


Gah! I'm going to have that song stuck in my head for days now!

[EvilKris]

Why can't the ice-cream man just give the popsicles to the kids? The losses resulting from wasted product must be hell on his total revenue.

I think you should change the kids to zombies, and the ice-creams, grenades.
Or, if we're talking really SICK, how about the kids can be mummies, and the ice-creams are babies he's kidnapped and is now throwing from a building.
Burning babies...hmmm

[cadin]

Captain:
It should be a little difficult at first. Hopefully it becomes less frustrating when you get the hang of it. ?
I think using mouseY would make it way too easy. You'd essentially just be pointing and clicking.

EvilKris:
Mmmm... Burning babies...

[Viza]

Too tired to go into any detail, but I liked it:
Graphics were great (as usual), and though the gameplay was similar to some of your games, it still felt 'fresh' + fairly original.
The only downside imo, was the instructions were a tad brief: I didn't realise that throwing a different icy-pole made a difference until I concentrated on my score, and I still haven’t worked out how/why I die (time limit, lives, etc?)
Overall though, it was quite enjoyable.

Viza

btw, what I want to know is, is how the hell did you come up with the game idea (‘piffing‘ icy-poles at little kids)??

[scheletro]

wow, thats hard !

Remind me a little bit those ORISIN games pretty game

[cadin]

I totally agree with everything you said Viza.
The gameplay is pretty similar to some of my other games. I have some games coming up that will be quite different, but I wanted to crank out a quick one in time for summer.

Writing instructions is always a struggle to provide the necessary information without cluttering the screen and overwhelming the player:
Your 'lives' are indicated by the 5 orange circles at the top. You lose a life whenever you let a kid get all the way to the truck.
You earn $.75 if you give a kid the flavor he's asking for.
You lose $.50 if you give him the wrong flavor, or if you drop one.
I think I need to write better instructions, or make these things more apparent in the gameplay.

The idea for the game came to me on the subway one day while brainstorming for a summer-themed game.
The gameplay was inspired by two of my old favorites, Kaboom and Tapper.

[Quit]

check those high scores! I kick some tail at being an icecream man!

[Sietjp]

The game is very well polished but in my opinion, it's very hard to control. Why not using the mouse cursor ? That would be better.
I saw that the difficulty progression is essentially based on more kids arriving.
Maybe you already done that later in the game, but why not using different kind of kids. Kids moving fast and changing their speed and direction. Kids arriving in formation (holding their hands). In fact a kind of shoot them up with ice as bullets and kids as ennemies

[cadin]

I just think using the mouse cursor would be too easy.
Since a couple people have mentioned it, maybe I'll give it a try. To me the current control scheme is difficult enough to make the game challenging, but not frustrating. Of course I'm biased though...