Still tons of website and promotion work to do, but its on sale, and even uploaded to the first 10 sites.


Heres the demo (6MB) (http://www.positech.co.uk/starshiptycoon/StarshipTycoonDemo.exe)

Heres the website (http://www.starshiptycoon.com)

Would love any feedback (good or bad ;))

I haven't had the time to play through the demo thoroughly, but I like it so far and will play it more later. I just wanted to tell you one thing that kinda bothered me was the way the nebula effect slowed down the game play tremendously so I unchecked the nebula effect and it runs great, but looks too plain. There must be a way to make a decent effect that doesn't hinder performance too much.

Athlon 850
WindowsXP Pro
ATI Rage 128
128 MB ram

www.starshiptycoon.com seems to be down. I got the demo from your positech site.

Here's my thoughts.

Looks nice, no slowdown with the nebula for me with a GeForce 3.

There were many occurances in the tutorial text of no space after a period or comma. I was writing them down, but I stopped after the first few. For example:
This screen is called the map screen.The

The tutorial is serious information overload. About half way through I started really getting tired of reading more and more details. I don't want to read I want to do something. Couldn't we walk through a cargo run or two, then one at a time work through the other features.

Your GUI system is very nice, what are you using?

The mouse sensativity was way too low for me. I like to be able to flick my wrist and move across the whole screen. I have to move my whole arm with this game. I'm also unable to use my wacom tablet which I prefer when I can. I assume you are using directinput - I don't see why that is needed for a strategy game.

After laboring through the tutorial I still hadn't moved any cargo or made any money. I started a regular game and tried it for a moment. I was just trying to load some passengers ( and seeing a message saying all these people wouldn't travel with me ) when it popped up with an assertion.

Here's the message.

Assertion failure
C:\data\programming\StarLinesShareware\GPlanetPassengerTab.cpp 161


Two final thoughts.

Very nice production values. Looked real good, it didn't feel 'amatuerish' like so many indy games do.

I'm a hardcore gamer and I got turned off by the learning curve. You need to make it MUCH easier to get into the game.

Oh one more thing - a check box to start the game immediately after installation would be nice.

Jack

I tried to PM you before, but I don't know if you got my message.

In any case, I plan on checking out the game when I get home, but I just wanted to know how you decided on the name.

Are you worried that your game might get confused with the Tycoon series of games by infogrames?

Nobody owns the word tycoon, any more than anyone owns the word starship. AFAIK loads of people have done tycoon games. Infograms didn't do lemomnade tycoon, for example.

Well that's true. I just thought that since they kind of made a whole series of games that used the word Tycoon in it, they kind of got this brand associated with them.

Sort of like creating some kind of RTS and calling it Age of Something would make that game seem too similar to Microsoft's offerings.

But you're right. No one owns the word "tycoon" so it shouldn't be a problem. I just think that a lot of things that I think shouldn't be a problem end up being problems for some people.

That download url is incorrect, it should be:

http://www.positech.co.uk/starshiptycoon/StarshipTycoonDemo.exe

Tested the game but didn´t have enough interest to go through that tutorial, too much text. Also game bugged on my cpu (strange images flashed time to time on the screen).

interesting...(about too much tect). I fixed that link BTW.

I agree with the "lots and lots of text and not enough to do in the tutorial" sentiment. It kinda wore me out and I wasn't all that interested in playing the game afterward.

Someone spotted a bug in the game (you can move the planets around by right clicking, some muppet obviously forgot to undefine EDITOR ;))
So whilst fixing that I've removed some of the less essential bits of the tutorial and tried to shorten the text where I can.
Hopefulyl that might encourage a few more people to try the game proper.
I'd be interested to know how far you got before you gave up ont he game though. If anyone tries the game, could they email me the file playtest.log? it basically tells me what features got used and what were ignored.
Cheers

I've just downloaded and played it but it's probably not my type of game. I tried to go through the tutorial but found it too much information to take in.

When I'd had enough of the tutorial I pressed escape, went to start a new game and it crashed to the desktop.

The text for one of the ship names looked like it was printed twice. It was the ship to do with horses. Once it had docked it was fine though.

I'll try and give it another go when I have more time.

thanks

scott