Hi!

I am a founder of small developer group from Ukraine. We release our game last Autumn and still have low number of purchases. So I would like to ask you to "spank" my game and to tell me what is wrong with it and what I can do to increase sales.

Our site url:
http://www.emotionrays.com

Game url:
http://www.emotionrays.com/fillers.php

Download url:
http://www.emotionrays.com/soft/fillers.exe (5.6MB)

Best Regards,
Kostya

OK, I'll offer up the first spanking. I have a GeForce2 and the game wouldn't even run on my system. The screen went blank for a few seconds and then I returned to my desktop.

Same thing happens on my Radeon 8500. I can see how registrations might be low.

We are ready to work with any software publishers. We agree to implement ANY addition to this game to make it better and then to sell it through publisher's network. Our marketing and English skills are poor, so we need some strong experience at initial state.

We currently order music and sounds from professional musician because many users said that music is bad. What else you can advice us to do?

Best regards,
Kostya

On top of the fact that I can't run the game, just looking at the web site and reading the requirements, they seem a bit harsh for the type of game it is. Geforce or Radeon, DirectX 8.1, 5.5MB download. Any one of those requirements alone is likely to scare away half of your potential customers, but all 3 can't be good for your conversion rate.

Hi!

Can you describe your computer for me? What version of Windows, DirectX, drivers? I want to find out why this game doesn't work on your computer...

Nice game!

I'd prefer the graphical style of 2d games from Dexterity though and a smaller download size.

That being said, perhaps you could add some special squares. For instance teleport squares. If you flip one of the two teleporters in a level, you own the other as well, so you can expand further (or you may get to choose a square on the board you want to own). Or explosive squares. If you flip one, you destroy a number of squares around. Or multicolor squares, that will be flipped if you owe a square of one of two colors next to it.

You can also make some triangle levels, where you flip equal-sided triangles instead of squares. And hexes.

You can try to start a level with more squares owned by each player and then let the players decide what square they want to flip.

And a good help system like Arcade Lines has would help. Pop a messagebox explaining why I cannot press the button of the same color as the enemy. And add some more cheerful colors to the buttons. And make them sensitive to the mouse passing over them, I had a hard time understanding what I needed to do (I can't be bothered to read rules)

Personally I really enjoyed the game!

Its the kind of game that I wouldn't sit down and play for hours on end, but I would thoroughly enjoy a few five minute games throughout the day. Kind of like Solitaire.

A few things that could put people off registering:

- VERY high system requirements for this type of game! Could you remake the game using direct X 7 instead of 8.1?


- Since a few people here have reported problems when running the game, there may be other technical issues which need resolving.


- Quite a large filesize. At least half of this seems to be the music/sound files. Considering they are playing a more background, "elevator music" type role within the game, are they really worth doubling the download size?


- The registration page which opens when you click "register" within the game makes buying it seem overly complicated.


- The order page also contains a totally unrelated banner ad to another website/product!



The following are things which a casual computer user may think:


When you complete purchasing, we will send you a message to your e-mail box with the further instructions about how to remove game restrictions. What are the further instructions? Maybe I won't understand them or be able to follow them... Better not buy it after all.


It usually takes from few minutes to one day for us to arrange this message. So if I buy a game from someone else, I will have it in less than 10 minutes, but if I buy this game, I have to wait an undisclosed ammount of time, up to one whole day, before receiving it. No thanks.


Sorry for this inconvenient, but this is the only way to protect our software from hackers attack. Hackers attacks?? What are hackers attacks?? If I buy and install the game will they hack me too??



I still like the game though :)

Originally posted by kosty
Can you describe your computer for me?

Windows 2000 Service Pack 2
DirectX 8.1 (ver 4.08.01.0881)
P3-350MHz
320MB memory
64MB GeForce 2 drivers 6.13.10.3082
Sound Blaster Live drivers 5.12.01.3101
PS2 Keyboard
USB Intellimouse Explorer
Over 1GB free space on every drive.

I had my wife try it really quick on her computer (win 98/TNT2 Ultra 32MB, Celeron 266, 144MB) and it works fine. She played a few quick games, then I tried a few. Here are my comments.

First, the game seemed to load a bit slow. The screen went blank then went back to the desktop. I thought it had crashed on her machine too. Then about 3 or 4 seconds later it went black again. It stayed that way for a few seconds, then the music started, but the screen was still blank for another 3 seconds or so. Then the menu popped up and everything was fine after that. It was just that several times we were thinking "uh oh, is this gonna run?".

The first thing I noticed was that there was a NVIDIA logo in the bottom right corner of the game. Are you displaying that? I went and checked the display properties and the checkbox to display the logo was turned off in the drivers, but it was still showing up in your game. She doesn't play any directX games, so I had nothing else to compare it to.

In the game, the tiles that you click at the bottom don't match in color to the tile colors in the game (the ones at the bottom are a bit darker). It would be better if they exactly matched the actual game tiles. In addition, because they were somewhat darkened, it was difficult to tell which of the clickable tiles were active and which ones were disabled.

Your in game were hard to see with the game board in the background. They didn't stand out enough. Then when you choose to end the game in progress, the background is too transparent. Its hard to read the yes/no (or whatever) options with the game board AND the parent menu behind it. Maybe remove the parent menu and make the black background less transparent

On her machine (probably because its lower end) there was a slow transition from menu to menu that was a little annoying. I don't know if there is much you can do about this, but if you could fine tune it, that would be good.

When I started the campain, the thing that annoyed me was that I started out with a yellow tile and the only adjacent tile to me was purple. However, the AI's starting tile is also purple, so I couldn't actually take anything. My first turn was a complete throw away. I couldn't do anything. Of course, the very first game we played we were both thinking "OK, what just happened? How exactly does this game work?" (remember, no one reads instructions) We were able to make moves after that, but it was several turns before we grasped the concept of "you cant take your opponent's color", so it took us a long while to figure out why we were stuck that first turn. Until we figured that out, we were really unsure how to play.

Is there any way to lighten up the AI at the beginning levels? It took my wife many tries before she was able to win even the first level. It kinda left her with a "this is pointless" feeling initially. If you could at least make the first level a bit easier to win, it might have pulled her in a bit more.

All in all, it was a fun game, but I think the systems requirements were VERY high for a game of this style. This is a pretty casual game. The people that enjoy this probably arent going to have the type of graphics card you need. They probably wont have DirectX 8.1 either (thus, your demo essentially becomes a 16MB download). Any way you could drastically reduce the requirements would help....

As RedClaw mentioned, start with the music. Personally, I barely noticed the music was there. I see you included 2 songs for the levels in the demo. I probably wouldn't have noticed the difference between 2 songs and 1. Remove the second song for the demo. That will drop 700KB right there. Maybe you could also cut the remaining oggs to have quality for the demo. It probably wouldn't effect quality a whole bunch (I suspect not enough to notice), but you could save yourself another 1MB. Of course now that I am proofreading this, it just occurred to me that you use a reg key rather than separate demo/registered versions. However, if you could drastically reduce download size (you could probably cut it in half or less) it would be well worth considering moving to separate versions.

Then, see if you can drop back to a lower DirectX. Going to 7 would be great. The downside is that I know DX7 is a lot more difficult to program that DX8 (I know, I'm writing a DX7 driver for Miko & Molly right now). At the absolute very least, reduce the requirements to DX8.0 (but I still recommend 7).

In game, looking at the tiles I'm wondering how many poly's each one is made of. It looks like at least 12 triangles per tile. If you could at least provide an option (high quality/low quality) to flatten the tiles, you can cut the poly count by 1/3. If you could also find some way to detect lower end machines and make the low quality the default that would be much better (because a lot of people probably wouldn't go looking for it, so they game would still run slow for them).

OK, I think thats about enought spankings for you young man :D Hope this helps.