http://freakin.no-ip.com/

Freakin is an Arkanoid clone made by Outside The Box.
Among it's many features are:

- Crazy map shapes (no more boring old rectangle!)
- 27 powerups
- 5 difficulty levels
- moving bricks, funny shaped bricks, bricks you have to hit more than once, you name it.
- Scanalous humour to keep you entertained between levels
- psychadelic backgrounds & funky colors

I've just put the free beta online and I'm looking for feedback on everything - the website, the game... everything. I want to make this great game even better and to do that I want your opinions, so I trust that you will give it a try and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

download directly from here (ftp://freakin.no-ip.com/pub/freakin/demo/setupfreakindemo.exe)


PS: Some of you may notice that I posted this news a few days ago. You may also notice I got no replies. I realize now just how many mistakes I made in the first message. Live and learn!

Dan,

Most people won't download a game without seeing a screenshot; is there a screen shot on your website?

Thanks

You're absolutely right, I haven't done that yet. I will get on it post haste.

I think it's interesting but you have a number of little niggles that are annoying.

For example, in several place you have white text sitting against that yellow/white starburst in the background. One of those places is the options menu! Makes it very tough to get into the game when I can't read the text it's displaying for me.

I like the coolness of the later boards, but I think you need to ramp it up a little quicker. I was kind of disappointed when the second board was the same as the first, only tilted - the tilt didn't do much for me as a game player.

I think that graphically with the exception of the backgrounds it's very "bleh" at the moment due to the lack of textures on the game-objects. And I think you're shooting yourself in the foot a little bit by only having one colour of block for 1 hit blocks and one for the 2 hit blocks. Part of Arkanoids colourful appeal was that you could have a level of functionally identical blocks but the variation in their appearance would create a nice picture. I think perhaps showing the properties of a block via something other than just the colour will allow you to use the colours to inject more variety into the visuals.

The font colors have been on the todo list for a while now, they are currently our top priority.

The level choices are very tricky, I have been using total novices for my testing because they have no expectations, and thus will not assume anything. One of their early complaints was that the game became too difficult, too fast. I will work on finding the balance.

The brick shapes in later levels do begin to vary, but due to my inability to get hy mead around maxscript i still use flat shading for the meshes.

Thank you for your feedback :)

Well, it's not so much the difficulty that I was concerned with as it was the "interest" factor.

You have a pretty cool take on Arkanoid here, but you'd never really know it from the first 2 levels. Showing off how you're different, earlier, would be good I think ...

With a game like this, based on such a tried and true concept, differentiation is key.

I understand your point completely. The problem is that if I make an "interesting" level right at the start then people who have never played before will be all the more lost. With the current setup what i'm trying to do is gradually increase the interest.

However I think you're right that the increase is too slow. I will try to improve it.

I have fixed the font colors in my local version, but I will wait until I've finished a few more things before I update the downloadable version.