Hi everyone,

Please check out the demo of Crazy Marble from http://www.flavorsoft.com/demos/Install%20Crazy%20Marble%20Demo.exe

Screenshots are available at www.Flavorsoft.com

Any feedback / comments / suggestions / bug reports or remarks are greatly appreciated.

thanks,

Jason
www.Flavorsoft.com

Reminds me a lot of GarageGames' Marble Blast,which is superior. Graphics are rather plain. Gameplay not very interesting to me. Had some troubles to simultaneously move the ball and the camera. This was solved better in Marble Blast if i remind correctly.
Having to start the level all over after falling down was awkward.
Nevertheless it's a great achievement to make a 3d game like this as your first game - my respect for this.

Thanks for the comment. My intentions were to make a Marble Madness type game in 3d. It is a pretty simple game. I was hoping to achieve more of a racing feel than the original MM had.

The movement is relative to the camera... for example the 4 arrows or WSAD add force and rotation to your ball relative to your direction. (Up is always forward). This was the best method of control that I could think of.

I created all the graphics, thats why they are not very polished. That is a definite area for improvement.

thanks again,

Jason

I couldn't see any difference between Marble Blast and this as far as the controls went...

I liked the game and thought it look professional, but I think you could do the game more justice if you had better textures/graphics overall. The extra fun that Marble Blast gives over Crazy Marble is solely graphic related (IMHO).
Marble Blast's cartoony look makes it feel like you're having more fun, which is debatable.
Actually, the restart problem is present in both games.

Originally posted by Jason Bryant
I was hoping to achieve more of a racing feel than the original MM had.


I think the race idea is a good one, but constantly falling off the ledges breaks the nice flow that I'd like to have in a race. There seems to be many other ways of penalising a player's bad control, besides falling off the ledge!
I'd personally like a level without any ledges, just on the ground, maybe with lots of the fun bits of the game like the speed-ups and so on. For me, they're the fun part of the game.

The frontend style looks nice but I thought it was very cluttered. There was high scores, buttons, options, gametype (which I could work out what it did) all on one screen. Maybe splitting them up might be better.

Thanks for taking the time to check it out.

I completely agree with you in regards to the graphics. They are very simple and not very impressive.

The menu design could be improved as well. There just seems to be too much there in the limited space. Maybe a separate screen for the high scores would be an improvement instead of having them on the actual menu.

I'm thinking the game is more difficult than I originally thought as well. I'm so used to the handling of the ball, I think that my perspective is skewed.

The gametypes are disabled in the demo version... Basically the survivor mode is 1 life to live with the timer counting down so that you have a limited amount of time to complete each level. The single level play mode lets you play each level by itself as many times as you like.. Maybe I should allow you to play these modes in the demo as well.

Thanks for the feedback. :)

Jason

For the menu you could use a smaller font :-)

The second demo level is way too difficult (which means I fell twice where there is the "fly" bonus; there's no way I can go up there catching all the diamonds at the same time... and I got fed up of restarting from the beginning the second time).

A tutorial is missing, too. There should be at least a dialog box reading "collect all the diamonds" or whatever.

The HUD graphics are a bit dull.

The sounds are too old-school blippy-bloppy IMHO :-).

I liked the simple 3D look of the levels on the screenshots, which is why I d/led it, but in game IIRC the colours are a bit dull; maybe you could add some objects too. And the first levels could have low walls to prevent the ball from falling, so that the player can enjoy the speed.