$12256 / $11500
Hi, I am releasing an alpha/demo of my current project, a space shoot-em-up called "Die for the Empire." I am posting it here in hopes that I can get some feedback on it. Specifically, I'm looking for feedback on gameplay, art design, consistency of tone, sound design etc. I am not looking for feedback on technical issues.
With that said, this build does not run well on low-end machines, as I have not yet finished optimizing the code. This build is NOT hardware accelerated. Compatibility wise, this build has been successfully run on both Windows 8 and Windows 7.
Hopefully I can get some screenshots and a video up soon, I am currently having some issues with Fraps.
Download Die for the Empire (most recent version)
This website's content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Update: Build is compatible with Ubuntu 13.12 using the Wine emulator. It may run a bit slower than if you were using a Windows operating system, however.
It needs a lot of polishing, in my opinion.
The concept of the game isn't bad, and in terms of actual work it seems to be mostly complete, but it really does lack polish.
On a side note, I feel this would work better as a mobile or browser game than a desktop one.
1. The bugs involving the intro, controls feeling sluggish, and lasers moving too slowly are a result of lag due to unoptimized blitting code. You need a processor with decent ghz to run the game well (it could also be that their is some other reason. This build runs very slowly on my laptop without taking a quarter of the processor or RAM, while running fine on my desktop). I apologize for this and I am currently working on a fix. The lag also causes the game to be more difficult than originally intended.
2. The difficulty ramping up too quickly is something multiple people have pointed out to me, thanks for the feedback. I did also wonder about some of the sound effects sounding too old.
3. Customizable controls is not currently one of my priorities, but I do plan to add it eventually, as it is a staple of PC gaming.
Thank you for the criticism, it is very appreciated.
My thoughts after a couple of quick plays:
gameplay notes:
movement is kinda slow, even with shift held. Is the idea that you'll upgrade or try out different ships w/ different speeds as the game progresses? Feels like where it is now is ok for a starting point but I don't know if I would want to play the entire game at that speed.
I thought the bullets where a touch small for the genre. I could see them fine so it wasn't an issue.
Enemey bullets and player bullets look fairly similar, I would use the same blue ones used for your wing man for the player.
Red bullets 'blend' in a little with the red star field background.
Just my 2 cents, I would use different colors for the player bullets versus the enemy bullets. Maybe even use distinct shapes for them too. I would also make them nice and bright so they popped off the space background very clearly. Finally, I would make them slightly oversized for the ships. The goal would be to make sure the player could easily see all the bullets on screen, identify gaps, etc. etc.
Player ship should flash or something when it gets hit. Some kind of 'you got hit' feedback.
I don't know how refined the dispatch is supposed to be at this point, but it felt like it ramped up pretty quickly to me. I would start with a few more simple passes that introduce the different enemies and their flight/shooting mechanics. But then, I am not exactly a vetern of the genre, so maybe more hardcore players would like the action to ramp up faster.
art notes:
I like the font w/ the vertical lines cut through it, pretty cool!
Main ship looks cool. It does look like a bigger/slower ship, so that at least matches the feel of it.
Enemy ships look good, they do all look like they come from the same 'fleet' which is nice.
I don't know if this is true or not, but it did feel like there was some resolution mis-match going on. Specifically, the font and UI elements felt much sharper/higher res than the game art. This is especially noticeable on the title page, where the background image is notably lower res than the GUI.
Music is good.
some minor notes:
controller support would be great!
The intro text appears painfully slowly, I would speed it up or give the option to skip or scroll 4x faster by holding a button or something like that.
The pilot who speaks at the beginning of the level looks more like an alien than a human, think it's the coloring that gives him this look.
The game didn't end or restart when I got shot down, it just kept scrolling w/ the enemies flying and shooting.
The game didn't exit when I hit the close button on the game window (X) but it did stop when I hit close on the console window that started up with it. However, while this did quit the game, it caused a 'Program stopped working...' dialog to come up (meaning something in the game's exit code crashed).
I would distribute as ZIP instead of RAR but that's just me.
The 2nd starge of the title menu is a bit confusing. I figured out to click on 'Intro' because there really wasn't much else to do, but I didn't really understand what the menu was for. Is it a level select screen? Try giving it a label maybe? Also the font was kind of small on this menu.
ps
All the other ships, etc. were moving at a pretty good clip, so I don't think I was having any technical issues with running the game. As a specific reference point, the player ship seemed to be moving at about 1/2 the speed of the wingman's ship.
Hi capbros, thank you for your feedback. Would you mind sending me your system specs? The player ship moving at 1/2 the speed of the wingman's ship is certainly a bug, but I'm not entirely sure what caused it.
I forgot to mention this last time, but I couldn't figure out how to use bombs. They always went to the top of the screen, exploded, and did nothing.
Also, my specs (from Speccy):
Will this be open-sourced? I'm curious about how the engine is put together.
I run:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit SP1
AMD Phenom II X4 820 @ 2.8 ghz
8 GB Ram
Nvidia GeForce GTX 760, 4GB ram, Driver Vers 344.75
Playing it again, the speed difference between the two ships goes away if I hold shift. So basically the default speed feels slow, but the 'sprint' speed is fine.
btw
the player's ship's explosion is another good example of resolution mis-match, the pixels in the explosion are noticeably smaller than the ones for the ship.
Alright, I have made a small update to the game.
1. Player model flashes briefly when hit.
2. When the player dies, they are faced with a quit screen, and can choose whether to restart the level or quit to main menu. You can also press escape to view this screen.
3. The boss now has a sound effect for when it fires its blasters.
4. Tutorial has been improved, and the initial difficulty has been slightly decreased. Bombs still work, but are not mentioned in the tutorial as they are essentially useless and will be replaced with a different gameplay mechanic in the future.
5. A sound effect plays when the player fires the super laser (work in progress).
6. Some fairly unnoticeable memory leaks were fixed, along with a couple other small changes.
7. Saving inexplicably no longer works. Fuck. If you want to automatically skip the intro, find the file named "save.txt", write the number "1" in the first line, and save the file.
I wanted to do a lot more for this first update, but I am predisposed with school for the next 5 days, and will be unable to make any progress. Thanks for the feedback, and thanks to everyone who dowloaded the game. I plan to add a second level and several major gameplay changes by May the 17th.
With regards to technical issues, I am beginning to suspect that the problem might be related to running an intel processor. At the very least, the game seems to run much better on AMD than it does on Intel.
Download the most recent version
I have made another small update.
1. Bombs have been replaced with a bomb powerup.
2. Super laser now has a complete sound effect.
3. A bug where sound effects would sometimes not play has been fixed.
4. Pixel width on main menu background was changed.
5. Level 1 has been expanded.
6. Saving now works and has been improved.
Download the most recent version
getting an 'invalid zip file' error everytime I try to unzip the latest build (v1.3). :(
Re-uploaded it to sourceforge, it should be fine now.
Hey! You didn't mention you put this up on greenlight!
v1.3 was a nice improvement on the original build, although from the looks of the greenlight trailer you've added a lot more good stuff since then!
For whatever reason, playing this time around the controls seemed to make more sense, some how a switch went off for me and I realized they're basically your standard FPS controls and then they made perfect sense. Guess I'm just not used to FPS controls for a SHUMP, but that's probably just me.
Still found the the game pretty tough. the 2nd and 3rd wave of enemies just destroys me every time.
One minor point, the secondary fire (big electric charge) renders beneath the enemy ships. To make it more impressive, you might consider rendering over top of the enemy ships. Going beneath them kind of creates the impression that it is not hitting them.
Anyway, good luck with your campaign! I gave you a vote!
Thanks man. Apologies for not mentioning I put this on greenlight, here is a link for anyone who is interested.
So I actually got it greenlit and on steam. Here's a link to the storepage: http://store.steampowered.com/app/537090/. I'm seriously grateful to all the people who put up CC3 and public domain assets, and the people who maintain OGA; I couldn't have done this without you.
If you're one of the people who's assets I used, PM me and I'll send you a key.
that's awesome! Congrats! Been through the greenlight gauntlet myself so I know what a rollercoaster it can be!
Just picked up a copy, game looks like it's come a LONG way since that first demo!
Looking forward to dying for the empire a few times tonight! :)
Could I bother you guys to make a post outlining what happens in the "geenlight gauntlet"? I think a lot of people would be very interested to know what's involved and what to expect.
--Medicine Storm>Utumno
Please have my baby. Anyways, it's still murky as hell even after going through it myself. What I can tell you is this:
1. Yes votes do matter, atleast somewhat. Lots of yes votes will get you noticed by Valve much faster. So marketing is key.
2. Just because you got a lot of yes votes doesn't mean Valve will agree to work with you. An obvious example: community bait tend to be rejected, even if it dominates greenlight for over a week. So make a good game, basically. Or atleast one that you can make look good on the store page.
3. Don't give up. It took about a year before Valve greenlit my game, by then I had given up hope and moved on to other projects.
4. Don't trust 'publishers' who offer to market your game for a fee. In my experience they are useless. If you are going to work with a publisher, you need to get them to agree to put money down, not you.
@MedicineStorm: Started writing a little about the roller coaster ride and it turned into a vertible book, so I went ahead and made a separate thread for it:
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/greenlight-memories
@TheBlackSword: Finally got a few moments free to Die for the Empire a few times.
First, the game has come a LOOONG way since that early demo! Congrats and hats off for all the progress you've made on it!
Second, where did you get all that art and music? Is it all yours or OGA stuff? It's awesome!
OGA, mostly. The UI is partly my own work, partly OGA. I remixed one piece of music a bit as well.
I actually have all the artists and musicians credited at the bottom of the store page if you are curious.