Introduction
The game has been live since my last post and it has received mixed reviews. Some people loved the aesthetics, the difficulty curve and the concept, yet others disagreed. The overall rating on Newgrounds.com is 3.11/5, which isn’t bad, yet it isn’t great. During this post I’m going to analyse The Orb Collector and explain how I could improve it.
How I could have improved this game
Everyday hundreds of games get uploaded to these websites, many of which will get poor scores and fade away. Getting your game noticed is an impressive feat in itself. Because there are so many games, first impressions mean everything. Gamers on these websites only spend a few minutes to test the water and if there is something they don’t like, they’ll most likely skip to the next one. This is where I went wrong.
My game was easy for the first two levels, but the difficulty level shot up. Most people commented on the platforms being too far apart in level three, but what they didn’t realise is that the character needs a run up and not jump from the idle position. There were many sections in that level where this rule applied. Again, because there are so many games to play, people tried this a few times, jumped to the conclusion that it’s broken and then skipped to the next game. I should have eased the player in and made them realise this mechanic, instead of expecting them to pick it up instantly. After reading these reviews and noticing it was a big problem, I re-edited the level and added more platforms. Unfortunately, by the time I made these changes, the popularity had already died. It was too late.
Another mechanic that could frustrate the player, is taking away their ability to backtrack and pick up orbs earlier on in the level. This is something I managed to eliminated from the earlier levels, but remains in the later, harder levels. Hopefully by this point the player will start using the 'Area Report', which displays how many orbs are in the level. This is why I chose the genre description as Puzzle/ Platformer, because the user has to collect orbs strategically.
Two people commented on games with one hit kills and the lack of power-ups. If I were to re-make this project I will NOT add lives, energy bars or power-ups, it does not need them. This game is not suited to these features as the levels are incredibly short and fast. This style resembles Super Meat Boy’s, where the user needs patience. I am a huge fan of this type of game and I find the challenge appealing.
If you look back at the Flash greats; Alien Hominoid, Super Meat Boy, Flash Portal and many others, you’ll see a pattern. Yes, the gameplay is fantastic, but most of the games have chunky, funny, cute characters and a comical tone. Other popular series are spoofs of existing franchises, like Sonic, Mario, Halo and Streefighter. A big mistake of mine was making a game that has a serious tone. People want to dip into a Flash game and feel good, yet my setting was dark, serious and the music was a little depressing. So in my next project I will take this information and make a less serious game.
Alien Homonid (Fig 1)
Super Meat Boy (Fig 2)
The Orb Collector was missing a scoring system – A high score table made up of peoples’ completion times would have been ideal. This gives the player an incentive to continue playing the game. People could compete with friends and people all over the world. regrettably I didn’t include this feature, because I thought adding it would cause too many problems. I'm still kicking myself.
The Orb Collectors' controls are not perfect. There is a big problem with the jumping frame. The frame itself is wider than the rest of the character's animations (please see fig 4), and this can cause problems when jumping onto smaller platforms. Because it is wider, the foot can sometimes give the illusion that the character has made the jump, but only to pass through it (please see fig 3). This makes the player want to track me down and punch me in the face. Next time I’ll have the main character tuck his/her/its legs in as he/ she/ it jumps, so all of the frames are of equal size/ width.
Zimmer passing through a platform (Fig 3)
Zimmer's frames of animation (Fig 4)
Due to my lack of practice in Flash, I had problems with the programming early on. One of these problems was the fact that every time the player jumped onto a platform, they’d sink a little into the ground (please see fig 5). This will happen three times and on the fourth, the character will land on the correct area and then process repeats. This is only a minor issue, but it is still annoying at times.
Sinking depth (Fig 5)
After creating the full game, I looked at the project and thought, “wow, it's running smoothly”. Then I uploaded it to a Flash site. It was not smooth, it stuttered, badly. This game needed trimming. I deleted the intro stills, all of the unused items and I also cut down excess code. It’s better now, but it’s still not perfect. Again, I’ll learn from this mistake.
I am very pleased with the audio in the game, but ideally I would have let my friend design all of the audio. his work is well thought out and it always fits the project. This game had a great track, but it only had one throughout. If I had more time and space within the project, I would have had a track for each of the five areas. but because of the memory limitations I had to cut back.
Conclusion
So the overall changes I’d make are:
- Keeping the jump frame the same width as the rest of Zimmer's frames.
- Add a Scoreboard listing the players’ fastest times
- Stop the character from sinking into the ground
- Add more music tracks
- Try to reduce the frame-rate problems
- Let the user backtrack to collect passed orbs
