Hi all,

Real.com has picked up our new game, Hamsterball, but we're not getting much beta feedback yet.

Would you dexterity folks be good enough to try out this beta and give some feedback? Some recommendations on how to make the controls easier would be good.

It's a game similar to marble madness. Screenshots can be found here:

http://www.raptisoft.com/images/HB-screenshot-1.jpg
http://www.raptisoft.com/images/HB-screenshot-2.jpg
http://www.raptisoft.com/images/HB-screenshot-3.jpg
http://www.raptisoft.com/images/HB-screenshot-4.jpg
http://www.raptisoft.com/images/HB-screenshot-5.jpg

...and the beta download is here:

http://www.raptisoft.com/download/hamsterball-beta-setup.exe

Thanks in advance!

Really well done (albeit not very original.. but hey, it's a classic)..

The only major problem I ran into was trying to exit!. When exitted, and the program asked "are you sure?" I tried to click on "Yes" and it wouldn't register unless I was in the lower right corner of the "yes" button... A minor but annoying bug..

A couple (minor) suggestions:

1) Initial music after the initro screen was quite a jarring change from the intro screen music...

2) the "clown horn" comical sound effect used when you break your hamsterball didn't "fit" (IMHO). I was expecting a "breaking" sound (perhaps this is just because I'm conditioned to Marble Madness...)

Overall though, very polished. Graphics and music are nice!

Hope you do well with the game!

Chaster

i don't really have anything constructive to say. i loved it, it worked flawlessly, and i was pretty much blown away. it's a really beautiful-looking game, and the mouse control seemed done well enough that i wasn't longing for the trackball too much. congratulations!!! btw, you used blitz3d for this??? how did you do the physics?

Wow the game is seriously polished! Nice job. One problem I did run into though was on the second and third time trial levels, the screen seemed to be looking through a semi transparent orange mask on level 2 and blue on level 3, which made it almost impossible to see where I was going.


Ok just noticed... its not the 2nd and 3rd levels, its any level I play after the first game I play. So if I start the program up and start with level 2 it works fine, but any level after that has the above symptoms.

Very well done! Very, very polished. This is definitely in the top 1% of indie games as far as that goes. A few problems I have though -- one is the same as Chaster. The exit message box wasn't working, so I hit enter and it exited. Another thing is I think you should make the opponent more distinguishable from the player hamster. Sometimes when they're very close it gets confusing and I ended up falling off a few times because of that. I also found it easier to play with the keyboard, but then at the end of the level I found myself wanting to click through the end screen (go figure), and I could only hit a key to get through it. That was a bit annoying. One idea is to just allow both mouse and keyboard at the same time, like Mike Boeh's Best Friends does. Finally, I ran it a second time and noticed that you can't click to get through the splash screen, only keyboard works. That's basically it, mostly cosmetic stuff.

By the way, what did you use to make this game?

By the way I just got the orange screen as BrewKnowC described, after playing a few times. Weird. :confused:

Hi all,

Thanks for the very fast and good feedback!

I just fixed the "click on the button" problem. Was just a sizing issue left over from when the game had a different name. Since I use the keyboard, I never would've caught it.

>> One problem I did run into though was on the second and
>> third time trial levels, the screen seemed to be looking
>> through a semi transparent orange mask on level 2 and blue
>> on level 3

Hm, this seems to be a fog problem on older video cards. Do you have the most recent drivers? That seems to fix it on all but a few cards. I luckily have a laptop that duplicates this problem, but I can't figure out anything to do about it, since all fogging is just handled by DirectX.

>> btw, you used blitz3d for this???

Oh no, it's all straight C. The physics are pretty simple collide-slide-and-store momentum algorithms. Not much different that something I would've done on a Commodore64. :)

>> [Keyboard vs. Mouse stuff]

The game originally had two player options, which were discarded... this required people to pick a controller. That kind of stayed in, but you're right, there's no reason to not allow both.

I recently downloaded Best Friends to look at it, and I wonder about implementing a mouse arrow like his. That's also a very polished game (I wish I could get his framerate), and since it's similar, I wonder how it sells (Mike, you out there?).

So far, on Real.com, the user response isn't very wonderful.

>> By the way, what did you use to make this game?

Visual Studio 7 is the compiler.
3D Studio Max for the models and levels, with a custom exporter.
Paint Shop Pro for all 2D graphics.

Great job!

I think the controls are fine, it's one of the things I really liked about the game.

I managed to fall backwards through the water wheel thing. I dropped into the hole then I fell back into it.

Hit the bell to give 5 extra seconds but the level timed out right at that point. It was level over and it had 5 seconds on the clock.

Could do with some way of scrolling back up through the tournament mode. I wanted to find out how far back I had to go to save some extra time and couldn't do it.

Glad to see it's almost finished..

I've alwasy liked the game, and never had problems with the controls. The mouse is a nice touch from the version I played previously.

BTW, what happend to the gerbil and mouse :)

How about some power-ups?

Very neat game. I love the graphics and the fact that I'm controlling a silly hamster in a ball. I'm not a huge fan of this sort of mouse control though, and it took me a while to catch on how my mouse movements affected the ball (you aren't controlling the ball directly, you are controlling the hamster that controls the ball.. mind hurts). I would love to see some story or explanation for the game. I went and did the timed mode race, and beat the first three but never really understood why I should care. Trying (and failing) to get gold did cause me to get addicted to replaying the levels over and over, but created no lasting desire to get better. The Weasel's Time is also not explained. At first I thought that the weasel was my oppononent and he was simply so much faster than stupid me that I never even noticed him (my first race time was like 30 seconds and his was 6.6s). This false idea was given further credit the second time I tried the race when I saw a yellow hamster racing me. It took a few more tries before I was sure that it was in fact a replay of the last race that I was racing against (nifty feature, just needs explaining).

A story would be really nice, my hamster doesn't even have a name. Haven't tried tournament mode or whatever it's called so I'll probably have more comments later. Definitely a winner :D

Playing the tournament mode now and loving it. You should put tournament before timed mode in the menu, so that the player goes straight to tournament. I was playing timed mode before. I love all the different contraptions available in the levels.

Fantastic, awesome, excellent, outstanding. Made with all the style and variety of the original and then some. What will this mean for Simonh though? (he's been developing his "Super Hampsterball" for some time).

I agree with all points raised, especially mouse sensitivity. I got to the top of the up race and couldn't make it up the final hill; very frustrating. I was swinging that mouse around like mad.

But they're all minor points, easily fixed, and don't detract from this terrific achievement.

[edit] Oh, I don't agree that it needs a story though. Nah, not for this kind of game.

Is it only 12 levels in the full version? (I wouldn't blame you - like the original Marble Madness each level is just chock full of variety). It's only 7 days in and already I think we've seen one of the best-made games of the year. This is exactly the level of quality we need to see more of.

The menu screen comes up fine for me, but when I make a selection (for instance, "Warmup Race" under "Time Trials"), the application immediately quits... no error, no complaints.

WinXP
Dell Inspiron 8200
Pentium 4 1.7 GHZ
GeForce4 440 Go
512 MB Ram

It's good. Best marble madness clone I've seen so far. Im glad to see you finished it. Controls need a little fine tuning. I don't really care much for the music. I think the game is a tad too easy time wise.... i never once felt like I was racing to beat the timer, but in the original marble madness I always had to try hard to beat the clock. The lack of challenge puts me off somewhat.

@anthony - hey your all praise! I thought you drew the line at clones? ;-P

Oh another thing that the original had that isnt' very strong here is the death sequences for the ball. I think you need little death animations, music and sound effects. IMHO the deaths should be more pronounced and it would add a lot to the flow of the game. Like in the original if you crashed a little hand sweeper came and cleaned up the dust, or if you feel you heard a sounds of something falling a long distance, or if you hit a slime you disolved and so on.

* I had no keyboard control whatsoever (didn't seem to work)
* Mouse control worked but click position in menus was about 30 pixels away from the pointer! (i guess this is because I have my taskbar on top of the screen, and you use window coordinates for your mouse pointer.. use screen coordinates instead (GetCursorPos) since you're fullscreen)
* I really have to move my mouse a LOT to get up some slopes..
* When a time trial game starts, you can't move until the whisle sound is over. I'd prefer if you could start moving as soon as the whistle sample started playing

All in all, pretty good though! :)

I love it! This has got to be the perfect Marble Madness remake. Everything seems right - graphics, controls, music. Love the hamster physics too - the little fella really tumbles about inside that ball!

Originally posted by Anthony Flack
What will this mean for Simonh though? (he's been developing his "Super Hampsterball" for some time).
Raptisoft kindly emailed me a while back to make sure I was OK with him releasing it with a similar name.

The games are quite different, but hey with a game this good, any name confusion can only be good for me!

:D

@anthony - hey your all praise! I thought you drew the line at clones? ;-P


Heh, I knew I'd be made to answer for this one! So I already had thought through my answer... thanks, you didn't disappoint me ;)

Well, it's actually a little hard to explain. I think if the graphics were changed, it wouldn't seem nearly so marble madnessy (after all the rolling ball concept has been used many times elsewhere) but the way it is, the reference is so overt that rather than be a ripoff, it comes across as a deliberate loving homage. But I guess what it comes down to is, this game has just had so much attention to detail lavished on it, far above and beyond the call of duty - it's a truly remarkable achievement to pack so much variety in. The original game had that too, and if anything, this game exceeds it. The environmental hazards are also original and very well done. There doesn't seem to be any aspect of trying to make a quick buck with this game. It just seems like the game was made with loving care, and stands on its own merits. In fact I would say it would make perfect sense to have Marbel Madness AND Hampsterball on your computer, side by side.

I also liked Garage Games' Marble Blast.

Wow, Anthony, that's quite a eulogy. And it is a eulogy, because initial 'favorability' tests from Real.com indicate that Hamsterball is gonna go down in flames, lol.

As for the clone/homage aspect: You're right, it is a homage. And we could've finished the game in about three months if we wanted to do simpler levels. But heck... I've been writing this game, more or less, since I was a young kid, starting with "Rollerball" on a TI99/4A, "Rolling Frenzy" on a Commodore 64, and "Zoomball" on early IBM PCs with CGA graphics, all inspired by Marble Madness. Getting a small team together to make a 3D 'final' has been cathartic and fun. When nobody came out with a Marble Madness 2000 back when they were remaking all the 80's games in 3D (Centipede, Frogger, Q*Bert, et all) I thought it was time to put one out. Sadly, the complexity of the boards kept up from releasing before Marble Blast or Overball... but looks like a lot of people had the same idea at the same time.

* * *

As for the controls thanks on the input. I will definitely enable keyboard/mouse/joystick at all times (note that you can adjust the mouse sensitivity, and also that if you plug in a joystick, joystick options will show up). Like I said earlier, "selecting a controller" is mostly an artifact from when the game could support two players.

I'm wondering if more visual feedback is needed from the control. Putting in an arrow a-la Best Friends might be a solution, but the original premise is that the hamster is the indicator-- the direction he faces is your pressed direction, even if you're rolling another way.

* * *

Hit the bell to give 5 extra seconds but the level timed out right at that point. It was level over and it had 5 seconds on the clock.

That's a big oops. Thanks for pointing this out, it needs fixing... and the water wheel has been a thorn in our sides for a bit, since we tried several fixes to handle the inevitable embedding of the ball into the wheel. Looks like we'll have to try another.

How about some power-ups?

Whew, you're not the first to ask about that. :) The few we've tried (speedy ball, sticky ball, brakes, etc) unbalanced the game so horribly that they became "necessary aquisitions" instead of "jolly fun powerups." So we tossed them out in favor of the occasional "do this and get some extra time."

I would love to see some story or explanation for the game.

I dunno... I think any story would sound very forced ("You're Hamster Jimmy, and you need to win the cheese back from the Evil Rat Lord Sarmus... you'll find no indications of this story in the game, but don't go doubting it!"). We toyed with the idea of making it a little more world/quest based originally, but, frankly, the time it took to think up and implement the levels didn't leave us a whole lot of extra time for that kind of thing. :)

Playing the tournament mode now and loving it. You should put tournament before timed mode in the menu, so that the player goes straight to tournament.

That's how it was originally, but the guys at Real.com marketing thought it should go this way instead.

I agree with all points raised, especially mouse sensitivity. I got to the top of the up race and couldn't make it up the final hill; very frustrating. I was swinging that mouse around like mad.

Did you try going into options to increase the mouse's sensitivity? This is a very fine point in the game balancing... too much sensitivity, and you're just walking through the levels without paying much attention to momentum.

I think the game is a tad too easy time wise.... i never once felt like I was racing to beat the timer, but in the original marble madness I always had to try hard to beat the clock. The lack of challenge puts me off somewhat.

The previous complaints about the game were along the lines of "it's too hard!" For me, it's currently far too easy, unless I play on "Frenzied" difficulty, which is the prior balancing before people complained about losing all the time. Sadly, it's not the 80's any more... a video game these days is more like a book you read, or a TV show you watch... losing is not considered acceptable!

Oh another thing that the original had that isnt' very strong here is the death sequences for the ball. I think you need little death animations, music and sound effects

Well, between you and me... as far as I can tell, Marble Madness is currently owned by a subsidiary of Hasbro. A quick Google Search of "Hasbro" and "Lawsuit" will show why we don't want the game to be *too* much like Marble Madness.

The games are quite different, but hey with a game this good, any name confusion can only be good for me!

I'll link to you if you want, SimonH, though initial tests don't indicate that this game is going to sell well at all. But Anthony was correct... it wasn't made so much for sales as it was for getting it out of my system. :)

* * *

Thanks again everyone, for all the good comments. After the lambasting it got from the Real.com beta people, I was almost ready to let it die on the vine.

>The previous complaints about the game were along the lines
>of "it's too hard!" For me, it's currently far too easy, unless I
>play on "Frenzied" difficulty, which is the prior balancing before
>people complained about losing all the time. Sadly, it's not the
>80's any more... a video game these days is more like a book
>you read, or a TV show you watch... losing is not considered
>acceptable!

Well I'd say you're in trouble then.

Your saying its going to go down in flames based on real's tests and on then you're saying you have to make it much easier because people were complaining it was too hard. Might I suggest that realarcade's audience of click 3 of the same color and match might not actually be your ideal target audience for this game?

This is a case of having your cake and eating it too. You want to make an 80's arcade remake but you want it to appeal to a crowd of people that dislike and can't play 80's remakes. See the problem? If you're making a marble madness clone then make a marble madness clone. Don't try to water it down and turn it into something for the ultra casual solitaire player. It just isn't that kind of game. Those people will pretty much never buy it. You can try but you're just going to hurt yourself in the end because you end up making a game *nobody* wants to buy. To easy and dull for the 80's arcade fan and to wierd and difficult for the click three and match player.

Of course if you make a good 80's arcade game there's a bigger problem like... how DO you sell it online? Where are the right people? And can they easily be reached online? that's not trivial to overcome. That's something that probably had to be considered more carefully before the project was started. I donno.. perhaps it is possible to make a marble madness for the realarcade crowd, but Im not sure what that game would look like. It certainly wouldnt be much like marble madness.

>Well, between you and me... as far as I can tell, Marble
>Madness is currently owned by a subsidiary of Hasbro. A quick
>Google Search of "Hasbro" and "Lawsuit" will show why we
>don't want the game to be *too* much like Marble Madness.

It's true that Hasbro is litigious but I think you're well beyond that point where you should start worrying about that now. I doubt death animations is going to be the tipping point for their lawyers. Anyone can see its a clone of marble madness. The death animations are fun. Dying in your game is practically a non event. I'm not saying you have to make it exactly the same, but there's a lack of punctuation on the "you made a mistake" part of the game. Maybe it could be emphasized in a different way.

- Steve

Hm, interesting, it does indeed sound like Real is not the place to be for you. In fact it sounds perfectly horrible. Ew, yuk. Spit. Reminds me of when I worked for advertising agencies.

So, *is* there a market for this sort of thing? There damn well better be. Because it's my favourite niche. And I refuse to believe there aren't other people out there who like what I like. And I'm working in similar territory myself. And we're supposed to be filling niches right, but the niches I like are pretty sparsely populated. Dammit, there simply has to be somewhere viable inbetween colour matching and MMORPGs, and if not then I shall simply have to wash my hands of the general public and be even more self indulgent. Ah, heck, I'll probably get more and more self indulgent anyway. It's a matter of principle.

I thought this game was fun and I think most shareware games are boring (and most mainstream games too). Somewhere, there must be people who agree...

Maybe the market just needs to be established better - hey, we can do it together... who else is keen? :)

Oh, Real has been pretty good to work with so far... but during the beta process, you get a lot of feedback from Real.com customers, most of whom are not finding HB very fun.

Thus far, the "weak points" that Real.com suggested that I address have been very reasonable, and I tend to agree with them. I even agreed with making the "normal" diffculty a lot easier, mostly for the sake of kids playing. That's who I envision as the target audience: kids.

I have nothing against Real whatsoever (except maybe as competition for eyeballs), but I do believe that they target a specific audience and that the audience that they have isn't too likely to go for a kids game or an arcade game of this style. Its just a matter of targeting. I think the game is great. Just not tweaked well for me. I'd like a harder game that forces me to learn the levels to succeed. No game is fun without some challenge.

Soo-perb!

However I had a couple of bugs:

1) I backtracked from the tournament to the main menu and it sounded like there were two music tracks playing at the same time like it forgot to cut out one of them.

2) On the Escher level (which had be laughing and grinning like a loon, btw - almost as much as the jump scores on the previous one) on the pipe which enlarges the ball after it's shrunk, I popped out the side of it first time and therefor wasn't enlarged, meaning I spent the rest of the level in titchy form.

Also, are you going to include analogue joystick support as climbing hills is nigh-on impossible with my mouse but easy with keyboard. Or is it already in there and it just didn't appear because I notice my joypad ain't plugged in at the mo'.

Anyhoo, can't wait for the full thing! How many levels is it gonna' have?

PS. Any chance of making it so in tournament mode you can play any previous level without having to roll back to it? I'd rather try and better my times on the first few levels to improve my aggregate time without having to roll all the way back and then do (possibly worse) on the subsequent levels. But I suspect this is something you've already considered and dismissed.

PPS. I notice you have a ghost mode in there, I'd look into this a bit more as CodeMaster got in legal hot water with Atari over having this feature in Micromachines on the PlayStation and they had to pay money over it. Whether Atari is still an arse about this I dunno, though.

When I tried to uninstall Hamsterball through the WinXP Control Panel Uninstall Program feature, it failed. It gave me an error saying "cannot find Files/Raptisoft/Hamsterball/install.log"

If I uninstall through the "uninstall" shortcut which was added to the start menu for Hamsterball, it seems to have worked.

You'll definitely want to fix this bug because it is a MAJOR turn off for myself (and many other users).

But, hey, good job with the game!

Eric

Definately a great job!

I think the controls are great, but what would help is if there was an arrow indicating which direction you have turned the month...also of course if there was a brake button ;)

Alex

Ghost mode a problem? Ah what a world we live in. Still I'm sure I've seen it in quite a few games since so perhaps the cat is out of the litigious bag now.

I was thinking more about the controls... I did have the mouse sensitivity right up, but it still wasn't enough. My mouse sits on a very small ledge and hasn't much room to move. But I hear what you're saying about the sensitivity making it too easy.

So I propose you give more sensitivity, but you put a cap on the mousespeed. So it wouldn't do you any good to set the sensitivity to high and then swing the mouse around like it was on low.

I'm really not sure why people feel it would help to have arrows showing what direction they just moved in though. How would it help you?

Really nice game!

I haven't read all the comments, so I don't know if this has been said before, but I would always enable both keyboard and mouse. When using a joystick it would be nice to be able to control the menus with it too.

While doing the time trial (using the keyboard), the cursor at "Choose a time trial race" keeps going back to the top which often made me accidentally restart the wrong level, so that the ghost was gone.

Maybe you should disable Shift+W in the high score name input screen.

In the DIZZY RACE, I fell through the waterwheel and just kept falling so I had to quit.

One more thing I just noticed: when you alt-tab out of the game while using the mouse as the controller, it doesn't release control of the mouse back to windows.

Oops, I just found a bug too. On the odd race, when you go through the tube that makes you big again, and you come out on one of two spiralling ramps. The first time I fell off the right-hand ramp and smashed. I was then respawned at the top of the LEFT hand ramp. And from then on, every time I went about 1/4 of the way down the ramp, I would smash again. Even though I was still on the ramp.

The game exits after a second of loading here. WinXp/AthlonXP1700/GF3, mail me at marin-at-domain_in_the_sig if you want a complete dxdiag report.

Nice game. I'm quite sure there's a market for it, even if it isn't Real's audience.

Two problems I noticed:

- Game slows down the longer I play. Is it leaking perhaps?

- My start menu has a shortcut to PopCap.com in the RaptiSoft->HamsterBall part. I'm guessing that should maybe be RealArcade.com?

Best of luck with it

SC

Alt+enter/options to switch in window mode doesn't work very well, a restart is required for the surfaces to be reloaded correctly. ( else it just displays garbage )

pat.

Hi all,

Thanks again for all the feedback. Many of the bugs are fixed now, but a new upload won't go up until I get a web page together.

escotia: As far as I know, there are no memory leaks. I don't have the most foolproof leak-detection software, but it usually tells me if there *is* a leak, even if it can't tell me exactly where. Does it slow down when you play just one level, or if you switch around a lot? If it's during time trial, and playing one level, then there's a sort of 'natural' memory leak, because it's recording the position of the ball to act as the ghost next time you play the level. However, that is a tiny amount of data, I can't imagine it ever getting big enough to actually slow things down.

patrox: I don't suppose you'd mind giving me your system stats, would you? I have four computers here, of varying age, and none of them have a problem with fullscreen-to-windowed (or vice versa). Actually, I'm using DirectX's native "managed resources" so in a way it's out of my hands completely... but I'd sure like to look into it to see if I can fix it!

Atlhon 750+radeon 9800.

pat.

That game needs reset button and when resetting I want to start immediately don´t want to always wait that ready set go.

Put so that you can also click to get rid of that first loading screen?

Some problem with "want to exit game?"

Number four looked strange (I will give you picture about it)

and here´s the picture of exit window problem.

What's wrong with that 4?

Everyone else has beaten me to the punch already, but I just tried it out ... and WOW, this game looks and feels great. It's one of those games that just deserves to do well, dammit! :)

There were many times when I smiled at the coolness of your level designs. I think you did a great job at taking the marble madness designs one step up.

One bug I found was that music seemed to not always be stopped on time - I think I had two tracks going at the same time at one point.

And out of curiosity, I visited your site to see what the full version includes, but found only old Dynomite info instead - did you also write that?

Cheers,
Patrick

Well done,great physics. The colors of the levels are too monotonous. For example in the castle level everything is yellow. Even the backgrounds have a similar color.
A question: Did you implement some kind of automatic tracking? It was rather easy to get around some small curves without falling down at the sides (which is a good thing).

I think this beta is the full version...isn't it?

Yeah, I think it's just a couple of levels in a row (Odd Race & Toob Race) that run slowly so it seemed as if the game was slowing.

The slowdown on Odd Race is intermittent suggesting that there's perhaps some caching going on?

Toob Race suffers slowdown right from the start.

I'm running a Athlon 1Gig, 512MB, 32MB GForce2 GTS, Win98.

SC

The colors of the levels are too monotonous. For example in the castle level everything is yellow. Even the backgrounds have a similar color.

Ah, some people just don't understand...

Fun game, I had no problem controlling the ball with the mouse (well, no more than with marble madness at least :p).

I think I don't have much to say that hasn't been said already... well... got several graphical bugs here but people usually just tell me it's because my graphic card (ProSavage 4) is too old and I should buy another one. Just in case you're interested: the shadow is badly draw (I'll see if I can make a grab), the (windows) mouse pointer is blinking in the menues, and during the game there is some rectangle of garbled graphics at the mouse pointer position (only in full screen, not in window). And there is z-fighting too.

Oh, and I see that the textures are looping on the border of the ellipsoids under the timer (you can see the bottom line of the texture on the top). That can be fixed by offsetting the texture coords by half a texel.

Otherwise, the game is a bit jerky but playable :-).

Ah also got the sound problem: I died in the mouth of some monster in the towers level, and the "gnap" sound of the monster went on in the menu (and the in game music too, indeed).

Originally posted by Anthony Flack
What's wrong with that 4?

I didn´t say that there is something wrong with it, I said that it looked strange, that empty space on top left looks strange to my eye.

Originally posted by Anthony Flack
Ah, some people just don't understand...

Sorry,what don't i understand?

You know... One thing you may want to consider is slowing the game down just a tad. It seems as the player in this game I make big grand sweeping decisions with my moves like rolling down an entire spiral loop instead of controlling the smaller movements of the ball. The ball in marble madness moved much slower. I think maybe that made the game a little more accessible and fun... I'm not sure if it would help, but it's worth trying.

lakibuk: You don't understand (or don't respond to) the strong aesthetic effect created by making it all one colour like that (aside from the homage aspect). I'm sorry, it's just that some people will see the beauty in it and others won't. I don't mean that as a put-down, it's just part of how people are different. It's kind of hard to say that without sounding like a jerk but it's true. We discussed this at length in art theory class and it turned out that the assistant lecturer actually had no detectable aesthetic emotion (which was only strange because he was an assistant lecturer in a school of fine arts). A lot of people get angry when you talk of the aesthetic emotion, and I've had a few people quite strongly insist that it doesn't exist, so I hope you don't get mad or take offense. And I'm not saying you don't have any aesthetic appreciation either, just perhaps you don't respond in this particular area. Sorry, I shouldn't have said anything. But I wanted to defend the author's good taste.

Alex_code: It's just one of those kind of 4 that isn't joined up at the top...

I had this same argument with a few other people (who will remain nameless :-)) I don't mind the colors but they said it looked flat. Somone suggested just using a simple gradient in the background would help. (even if it was say just a gradient of all yellow) - I'm ok with the graphics as is though. The original game actually had a number of different colors so the two tone effect is more or less unique to this title.

When you play through time trial map and then return to menu, background image won´t change back to "Hamster Ball" it will just be the same solid color that was in the map.

Anthony Flack: Whatever, I don´t care should it look like that or not, it still looks strange to me.

I don´t have any interest to continue talking about this subject, I just said my opinion.

I think most of the level graphics are fine but the harsh castle level yellow I could happily do without. A level with so much yellow just doesn't look too good, and combined with the castle look, which is normally associated with greys, browns, and greens, it's very disorienting.

The oddball level slows down on my machine, regardless of graphics settings. Athlon 850MHz 512MB RAM GeForce 2 GTS any ideas?

Anthony Flack: Whatever, I don´t care should it look like that or not, it still looks strange to me.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come across as attacking you in any way and I hope you didn't take offense. I sincerely wanted to know what I was supposed to be looking at, when I asked what was wrong with it. ...Okay, we'll leave it at that.

I really don't want to squabble with people over matters of personal taste, I'm afraid I have to watch myself like that. Sorry.

Lizardsoft - you may be right though, that yellow could stand to have a little bit more red mixed in; make it less eggy.

Played Hamsterball yesterday with a friend and his girlfriend. We had a lot of fun. Would be nice to have a competition mode where players can compete for the best times. We played time trial and wrote down our times. (And yes, the 4 looks like there's a piece cut out of it,but that's not important.)

Would be nice to have a competition mode where players can compete for the best times. We played time trial and wrote down our times.


Sounds like a winning idea to me! Taking it even further (and perhaps a little too far), you could have a LAN/internet option where a whole lot of hamsters run at once in a race. You could also have the option of having player-to-player collisions or not.

Online play would rock :) I get the impression it was designed originally to be a 1-2 player game, so it would be nice to see that feature eventually added.

Yeah, it was gonna be 2P at first. But after adding the tournament stuff (with rollbacks, etc) it just got too 'weird' to have two-player in there (rollback player one, continue with player two? Who, how, what???). We might release a patch later with some networking in it, like we did with Eggsucker, but right now, we're quite tired of Hamsterball over here, lol.

BTW, I wonder if anyone has an opinion... the way the game works, we can slow the game down, completely, at any time, and make it run at half speed, etc. While we don't want to slow it down too much, how do you all feel about the game being slowed down slightly? Or is the "tearing through the levels at top speed" part of the game's attraction?

I lowered the speed to 80% of normal, and it's slighty too slow for me to really enjoy. But lots of people complain about things happening too fast for them to control the ball.

Put it in but only on the pitiful skill setting.

Wow I'm still playing this game, even though I hate the controls! I've managed to get to the Toob race finally in tournament mode, but both Toob and Oddball work very jerky, making it hard to do well in those races. I also don't have the mousepad size required to be able to do the pushing up in Up race or when you have long stretches of straight road. I wouldn't want to see the game slowed down, there just must be a way to make the control system more sensitive. I really love the hamster racing through the levels, but it's no fun when I find my mouse hitting my coffee cup and being unable to do things like dodge that hammer (finally managed to do it actually, but it's frustrating with the mouse). I tried the keyboard controls and those instantly made me believe that mouse is the way to play the game, but somehow the control system must be implemented more elegantly.

I agree about the keyboard controls! I played with the mouse and got frustrated by the lack of sensitivity - then I switched to keyboard and decided right away to stick it out with the mouse!

Raptisoft, are you capping the maximum mouse speed at all? You should be able to make it so that, at maximum sensitivity, you can move the mouse 1cm very quickly for maximum effect, but moving it 2cm in the same amount of time won't make any extra difference.

Hm, it does look like the controls represent a bit of a bottleneck. Personally, I only use a gamepad or keyboard. But since so many people use the mouse, I suppose some form of scaling, or something else, is in order.

The big problem is coming from that hill on Up Race, eh? Maybe something can be tweaked there instead...

Raptisoft, are you capping the maximum mouse speed at all? You should be able to make it so that, at maximum sensitivity, you can move the mouse 1cm very quickly for maximum effect, but moving it 2cm in the same amount of time won't make any extra difference.

There's a pretty fierce algorithm governing the ball's speed. The premise is that the hamster can only make the ball go so fast... but a downhill slope can accelerate the ball well over the hamster's max speed, since it's gravity doing the pulling. At that point, the hamster can slow the ball DOWN by running in the other direction, but can't speed it up in the direction it's going. If it sounds simple, try implementing it. ;)

Scaling the mouse movement is probably a poor option from my end. Even adding .01 to the ball's movement speed throws off all the times terribly... and rebalancing at this point is a terrifying thought.

But, we have a lot of other tricks up our sleeves. If the primary problem (it's the one everyone keeps mentioning) is the big hill, then we can do a few tricks to make that hill easier to climb.

(One of our "mouse sensitivity" problems is that a person can also go into their windows setup and increase the mouse sensitivity as well. At one point, one of our more l33t alpha testers had configured his mouse to the point where he essentially had no momentum)

Not sure if you care since I've had no answer, but just a few precisions about the gfx problems on my pc:

- the shadow is drawn ok when the gfx quality setting is set to max, and then gradually becomes worse and worse when it is decreased. I've of course got no problem with the quality becoming worse, that's what the setting is for, but the shadow really looks weird in the lower setting!

- About the decals z-fighting problem, it only happens when the view distance isn't set to the maximum.
And BTW, I've noticed two days ago that there is an article about tweaking the projection matrix to avoid such problems in Game Programming Gems 1 (written by Eric Lengyel; it's also in his "Mathematics for 3D game programming and computer graphics" book I think).

Hi Stan,

Sorry, I didn't realize I hadn't replied.

The graphics "quality" is really just a mip-map bias. It probably doesn't even belong in the game any more (we don't see any speedups/slowdowns by changing the quality on our worst machine here). So that will probably be torn out before release.

As for the decals, we're working on that. We get different results on different machines, which is no fun, of course. So we're trying to find some common solution.

I'm assuming your fierce algorithm starts with a simple x and y velocity from the mouse though, right? So why can't you just cap the maximum and minimum values that these velocities can be? It should solve your windows mouse sensitivity problem too.

Oh, there's a dozen reasons. Minimum velocity is 0. Maximum is 1. Mouse movement decides whether it's 0, 1 or .27574.

In a way, it's already capped. If you move the mouse yea much, then the hamster will push in that direction at his maximum. If you don't move the mouse, it's 0. So perhaps I misunderstood the question... yes, it's capped, but the sensitivity of the mouse determines where you are between 0 and 1 with a certain sized motion.

Ah, okay. So how was it that that your tester was able to remove inertia altogether? He must have been generating 1s with every slight movement, right? Is "1" too much?

BTW, just found one bug: in Sky Race I feel off one of the first loops and kept falling into infinity (kept falling and falling and the timer ran out).

Well, okay, let "no momentum" mean "so little momentum as to make momentum immaterial." :)

Yes, he had set his mouse up so that he was generating near 1 every time. We haven't been able to come up with a satisfactory way around this... the closest we've been able to come to stopping it is to sort of profile the mouse-- but the process is so unreliable that it'll screw up normal players just to stop the hacking few. Since there's no online high scores, it doesn't really matter if someone wants to screw up their own game, but we want to make sure we don't screw up any honest players.

Also, as I said before, tweaking this even slightly throws off all our carefully balanced times. Right now, easier to give the ball less inertia in areas where you need to climb than to simply make the ball more powerful. It's an ugly hack, but it allows the game to be released this century.


As for that sky race bug, thanks for pointing that out-- we've taken care of it.

Hey Raptisoft,

HamsterBall rocks! It's very cool, I've been working on a similar style of game ( ie rolling a ball around ) using Shockwave 3D and it's Havok Xtra, although it's quite a bit different from yours ( and definitely not as well polished! )... I wish I had put a hamster or similar small, cute furry rodent in mine!

http://www.candomultimedia.com/3dStressBall/shotA.jpg
http://www.candomultimedia.com/3dStressBall/3DStressBall.htm

I was going to put a monkey in it, but that might have been a bit cheeky! ;)

Very nice control etc, for controlling 3D Stress Ball I had to devise a visual method of allowing the user to tilt the landscape using the mouse in an absolute fasion, and try to keep the mouse cursor within the 3D window, as you can't override the mouse position within Shockwave. I did this by using a simple overlay, which stops when moving the mouse further away from the ball would have no effect. If you are looking for a similar alternative style of mouse control, this might be useful.

As for this style of game and it's general audience, a lot of people like these styles of games, but they do tend to be somewhat more hardcore, rather than the general players ( on RealArcade and Shockwave.com, check out the amount of 2D games, especially card and simple puzzle games ). However, I believe the "niche" market is still huge, and is something that you will hopefully be able to sell a lot of SKU's to.

As Real etc don't require exclusive licencing, consider using something like eSellerate.net or SoftWrap, and start selling it yourself ( that's what we're going to do with 3D Stress Ball ).

Best of luck with your game in the meantime, I wish you great success! I'm following this thread with a great interest now!!! :)
Mal

I've also tried this game, and its superb... All the issues i've noticed (exit box, fog, music) etc... have already been mentioned...

My only gripe now, which i haven't seen mentioned is the fans. Don't they blow a tad too hard... I find that no matter how high i set the mouse sensitivity, or how fast i run, or how close to the fans i am, they always blow me off the ledge...

I'm only playing in normal mode so far, so i guess they get even tougher ???

The game oozes quality throughout, and is well implemented and very smooth.

Great work... Hows about this fixed up version or your new site ?

The next version up will be the release... should be January 28th, but take that with a grain of salt, of course. ;)

Hamsterrific indeed!

1) When the ball rides inside tubes the shadow should be disabled - on "Odd World" when I enter the shrinking spyral the shadow can be seen on the ground before I actually get out of the spyral.

2) After I lose a game and press "play" the game should "rollback" without asking me that messagebox.

3) When I try to quit the buttons on the "really quit?" messagebox will not become pressed if I press directly in the middle of the button.

Cool game, loved Marble Madness :) A few probs I've seen are (not sure if they've been mentioned)
- Alt tabbing wont give you windows cursor controll unless you are in the menu.
- Sounds sometime keep on going when you go back to the menu
- the shaky screen effect will keep on going if you escape to the little menu while it's happening (does your head in :) )
- I can get stuck in the second level on the first curvy corner. I can reproduce this everytime (only on the first one, not the second), by jamming hamster inbetween the curve and the wall edge (see attached pic). He spins madly when he's stuck, hehe.
- on wobbly it started oncw with the view offset (tournament, worked in timetrial). My marble was at the very top of the screen, so for a bit I didn't know where I was and kept falling off.

Some suggestions
- it would be cool to show the ball spinning a bit in relation to your mouse movements. So it would look a little like there's less friction on the ground (although you wouldn't actually need to change the physics). This would give a better indication of what sort of pressure you are putting on him. Plus I think differing friction areas would be cool too.

- Have the mouse button make the mouse act as if it has maximum sensitity. That way on lower sens amounts you can still kick it when you need too. But generally high sens seems abit fiddly, but you can't really do some bits without it (the scaling mouse suggestion may work here)

- I found going up hills on anything but highest sens to be too hard I think.

- hill physics in general seem a bit weird. eg I can easily slowdown going down a hill, but if I try and slow down coming off the hill I can't (even if he's not really bouncing much)

- One cool suggestion in ghost mode would be the ability to save them (like Elastomania), which would give this game a much higher online presence and it's a crackup to watch worldrecord playbacks in Elastomania :D


Overall a cool game. The speed is a good thing but I think the physics are a little 'light' for my tastes (gravity, inertia etc, but I'm too used to MM :) ), although I got used to it.

What can we expect in the final? Are you going to fix the performance problems on Oddrace and Toob Race? This is a great game that I'm still playing, it's very fun when having others over. Things that need to be fixed for me to consider buying full though:

- More races (pretty please, with cherries)
- Mouse controls that don't require a 2 by 2 foot mouse pad
- Toob race and oddrace slow down on Athlon 850

You have a really awesome game here, can't wait to see the finished product.

How about a replay from the p.o.v. of the hamster?

What tools did you use to create the levels?

- Toob race and oddrace slow down on Athlon 850


Hey Lizardsoft... glad you liked it. To answer your questions:

- More races (pretty please, with cherries)

We wish! But the psychological costs of putting in more races is astouding. I think I said somewhere else, that the amount of work (both creative and grunt) is mortifying. We sort of made a choice in the beginner to do fewer, more interesting races, instead of more, simpler races.

Our current plan is, if the game isn't a total loss on the sales market, to put out a free update with three more races in it, bringing it up to fifteen. But right now, we're literally creatively exhausted.

- Mouse controls that don't require a 2 by 2 foot mouse pad

We've tightened these up a bit. Honestly, I am shocked that anyone plays this game with the mouse. Mouse control was left in mainly for people who have trackballs!

- Toob race and oddrace slow down on Athlon 850

I wonder if you'd do an experiment for me, since we're trying to track this down (those races don't necessarily have more geometry than other races). Do the slowdowns still occur if you play them on "Pipsqueak" difficulty? Right now, we're sort of looking at the 8-balls as the cause.

Thanks!

How about a replay from the p.o.v. of the hamster?

Ho ho... seeing a replay from the Hamster's point of view would reveal shocking things about the levels that we did to speed them up. :)

What tools did you use to create the levels?

3DSMax, with a lot of custom plugins for exporting and making level pieces (and checkerboards that line up, etc). If we ever do a Hamsterball2, we're going to put in a level editor, tho.

Originally posted by Raptisoft
Mouse control was left in mainly for people who have trackballs!

- Toob race and oddrace slow down on Athlon 850

I wonder if you'd do an experiment for me, since we're trying to track this down (those races don't necessarily have more geometry than other races). Do the slowdowns still occur if you play them on "Pipsqueak" difficulty? Right now, we're sort of looking at the 8-balls as the cause.

Oddrace works fine on Pipsqueak, and Toob race still slows down at the top, with the giant rotating toobs.

The keyboard controls in Hamsterball never made sense to me, and I think mouse control is part of what gives the game its charm. :)

Oddrace works fine on Pipsqueak, and Toob race still slows down at the top, with the giant rotating toobs.

Ah, definitely the 8-balls, then. We have a sort of fix in mind that should take care of that. And I'll have to look and see what I can discover about the top of Toob.

I could never relate to the keyboard controls either; and I usually use the keyboard for games...

I think, given the current situation with PCs and the controllers people have (ie. usually none) and the state of people's coordination in general, mouse control will probably be the choice of somewhere around 90% of people - so, definitely worth getting right...

Oh, by the way, you say the mouse generates a velocity between -1 and 1 on each axis, right? So what velocity do the keyboard controls generate?

Keyboard/joystick generates -.65 to .65 (because the pressure is steady).

A funny bug my sister found: when the ball hits something and breaks, the screen jerks violently for a very short while. But if ESCAPE is pressed at that exact moment, the screen keeps on jiggling.

This is cool; my mates also enjoyed it.

My laptop's Savage IX messes up the fog. Its hard to see because the fog is very near.

A graphics 'safe mode', or an option to disable fog, would be nice.

It's been a while since I've laughed out loud after starting a game. I've been a hamster owner in the past and I've always had a sort of forbidden urge to roll the guy down the stairs :)

Some initial thoughts:

More diversity in the levels (props) like having a living room level, back yard, etc.

My single most wanted feature would be to be able to change the coloration of the fur of the hamster -- at least to be able to pick from a few different colors/patterns - you could even have the different hamsters have different speeds/friction.

I love this game!

More diversity in the levels


Oh man, that's cruel. You're one tough audience!

If I move to the forward edge of the waterwheel, it works fine... but if I move towards the back edge, I fall through and die.

Beautiful game, btw.

Actually, now that I've been playing the game more - I rescind the request for changes in the levels - I only played about 4 when I made that comment. Things are great.

One "buggy" thing I've noticed is that there are many times when 2 soundtracks are playing -- after you run out of time in a level and then go back to the main menu, the level music keeps playing, while the menu music also does. Sometimes it can be jarring...

My kids are eating up this game (ages 7 and 6).

It's really great but the sound is LOUD. I don't know how you're controlling it but if I put it on the lowest level, I can tolerate playing with headphones on. Otherwise I'd have to use my speakers on low volume.

That's my biggest issue. Otherwise it's pretty good ^.^

Ack, not sure if this has been posted yet, but there's a pretty serious bug in the game. Sometimes a level won't load. It will just sit there and the game will think it's playing, but it'll sit there saying the race name and no race appears. You just see the background color of the map and some of the interface and the music will play, but no race :/ Really bad in tournaments since it's impossible to restart a level without getting disqualified.

I absolutely love this game.. when is the registered version gonna be available?

The only prob i had with it, was occassionally falling through the world, due to slightly dodgy collision.

(and the level where you go up walls is rock).

.. Other weirdness was the "par" for each course keeps changing??!?

eh?

Erm.. any cheats? I'm stuck on last map.. ;-)

In the DIZZY RACE, I fell through the waterwheel and just kept falling so I had to quit.


This has happened to me quite a few times also...

Hey, you guys got mentioned at BluesNews! I'm so jealous... ;)

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=46741

I also mentioned your game on our site...

Retro Remakes (http://www.remakes.org)

A great site with millions of links to all games retro !!

I wanted to try out this game but it looks like I'm a little too late. The beta has expired? Any ETA on the demo?

It expires today i think, just set your clock back a few days and it works again...

I rolled back the timer by a few days and it worked. This is a very, very well done game, I can see why everyone is making a big deal about it. Like people have said it's very similar to 3D marble madness, but I also think it feels kind of like a 3D sonic game as well. I hope this sells well.

hmm, I think the mirror tournament just screwed up a bit. When I got to the crazy escher level it wasn't mirrored and none were from then on

Hello Raptisoft,

Nice game, I loved Marble Madness, Spindizzy on the C64.

I also thought of coding a Marble Madness clone a few years ago,
but I never had the time to start coding it
:D

Question :

How long did he took you to design & code this game ?
(Have you done it part time or have you got a day job?)

Keep up the good & fine works from you

Best Regards,
Tarek

PS : for your information your game has been showned today on TV, in a show called "Game Zone" which is broadcasted by the French Cable TV channel www.gameone.net
They put your URL for a while,
tell us if that has increase the number of your French customer :D

im wondering, is there somewhere an online highscore, or a forum where people post their scores? i made 6.0 on the first lvl, and i think it's quite quick ^^