Hello to you all! I've done little on these forums in the past but one of my colleagues, GUNNMBA, is a frequent visitor and he has suggested I come here to talk about a game I'm making, called Rimscape.

I have it working as a Java Applet as well as a standalone jar, and I'm currently researching getting it to render with OpenGL to give it that extra boost in performance at high resolutions. The important thing I'm hoping for from you guys is advice on where to go with my game, seeing as how you guys know what good games look like ;)

So here's my game, give me any response you can spare the time to type. The game portion is almost done, but the rendering is still undergoing optimizations. I'm currently pondering extra features to add to the game, but right now my todo list only has one AI logic addition left, so really the whole thing is about finished as far as what has been planned for the game. I'd really like suggestions for additional features to go into the game or just some comments/complaints about how the game works.

I've only had a few people play it through all of its current development so I'd like to start exposing the game to other crowds to get some extra advice. Here's a quick list of things you'll want to check out:
- arrows move, space bar is the brake
- Enter fires primary weapon, ' fires secondary
- \ does an action. If you're over a planet, you'll land. If you fly far out and leave the system, you'll get a star icon at the top left of the screen and this button will load the Navigation menu.
- [ pulls up the Main Menu once you're in a game
- most menus have a Help icon that can give you more info about whatever other icons/buttons are available. Viewing item info, planet info, and space system info can all give you good advice on how to best profit when selling items.

Game saving is turned off until I get the GameLizard php out of testing mode and released to the actual site, which might be a week or so.

http://www.gamelizard.com/test/rimscape.html

I hope you enjoy the game!

The game looks pretty cool. There are, however, a few things you could improve:

- What is the point of the game? Just to kill all the other ships? I have no idea.
- After a while my ship stopped firing. Was I damaged? Or did I run out of ammo? After playing a little more I figured out that 2 of the bars in the bottom left were ammo indicators. I think it would be good to have a default weapon with unlimited ammo, since it is always fun to fire weapons.
- At first I thought my ship's back was the front and vice versa.
- Sound effects would be nice

Thanks for the reply! Things to do in the game are, for one, to kill things if you choose to. Attacking ships of a particular faction (their indicators are marked with their color), our "government" term, will worsen your disposition towards them. Selling items to a planet of a particular faction will improve it. Also, lowering your relations with one faction will improve it with their enemies. This system affects what kinds of prices you get in trade. The more the faction likes you, the higher the prices, and thus profits. If you try to sell your stuff in a system of hostiles, you'll get poor returns.

Also to be found are ship upgrades and expensive weapons with special modifications to enhance their effects. Ship upgrades compound their effects so having more than one of a single type is not at all a waste of space.

So basically you can trade for money or you can fight, resulting in ships with cargo dropping their items when you kill them. Similarly transports, when attacked, will often flee, dropping cargo behind them hoping you'll leave them alone. A lot of the fun in the game is the hunt for cool items to make your ships better, and to buy better ships than the one you start off with. Some of the models are REALLY cool :)

As for the bars. The top one, the yellow one, represents secondary weapon ammo, which has to be refilled at a Shipyard on a planet that has one. The next bar, purple, is your energy. Nebula's double your recharge speed, so does being over a gas giant. Certain ship upgrades enhance the recharge speed as well. Movement uses energy. The more forceful the movement, the more energy required. Primary weapons also use energy, so combat is a tricky balance of smart moves and sometimes not moving to save energy. This also makes secondary weapons very useful. Energy also goes to your shields which will take the brunt of damage inflicted on your ship. When your energy is gone, not only can you not fire, but you're open to heavy damage from attacks. It's best then to run and let out some secondary weapons while you do. The last bar, green, is hull strength, or hit points. These can also be repaired at a shipyard.

As for the back looking like the front thing... yeah when I put the art in the game I actually put them in the other way. My artist was like, "what are you doing they're in backwards!" So I was confused about that too... but hey, it's his art, and he also designed the game, so I guess I'll go with it ;) You get used to the look quickly though so that's good hehe.

Sound effects have been made, but the Java Sound API is a horrible thing. OpenAL will be my saviour their. I'm working on it while I work on the OpenGL thing. The resulting Applet version (which can't support OpenGL/AL) will probably have some basic sounds for the player's ship and not the other ships since I'll only be able to play sounds one at a time.

Hope that answers your questions. Thanks for all that, this is the first time I've actually put all this information down into words so it's helping me to figure out how to explain the game :)

Sounds quite full featured. You should definitely incorporate all of that info into a tutorial of some kind.

Another thing: It would be nice to be able to see a bigger area. I know that the applet probably makes that hard to do. Is the JAR version fullscreen? I think that would be the way to go.

Were you inspired at all by Escape Velocity? It is a very cool game that has many of these elements.

I get a grey box in the Java area on the page and "load: class com.gamelizard.util.GLApplet not found" in my status bar on IE.

Worked for me, but seemed really slow, this was on a p4 2.4gig with gf4ti and 1gig of ram under win2k.

In Firebird, I'm just getting a grey box with a red X in the top-right corner.

In Firebird, I'm just getting a grey box with a red X in the top-right corner.

Same here with Mozilla

Possibly due to an older version of Java? go to www.java.com and click on Download Now. An automatic loader will start if your jvm is out of date, otherwise it'll tell you you've got the latest. If your stuff is current and my game still doesn't work... then let me know

The rest of my site checks to see if your version can run the game first and prompts you to update if necessary, however, this game isn't part of the main site and was just plopped up on a page for you guys to view it, sorry for the inconvenience!

The full version release, when it's ready for sale and all, will have natively compiled versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac (OSX), so no need to worry about Java version then. As for right now though, for simplicity's sake, I keep all my most current updates (which changes like 4 times a day) in the Applet version.

I tried your game in Mozilla. Doesnt work. I tried it in IE. Does work.

My first impression: The game looks nice, but I have no idea what you are supposed to do in the game. I was completely lost. Gamers dont have the patience to be reading instructions, and it should not be a requirement to play the game. Gamers make the decision of liking the game through playing. If they like it, they may read the instructions.

Here are some things I saw that can be improved.

Long load time - I have a 3Ghz P4 and a broadband connection. The game took minutes to load. With Java, I dont know if this can be improved.

Cursor disappears - In the lost focus screen, the mouse cursor disappears. The screen says "Click to ...", but I couldnt see the mouse cursor. Also, the cursor disappears in-game. Because this is played in a browser, I think the cursor should be visible at all times. There will be people that think your game broke their computer and exit as quickly as possible.

Weird buttons in Option menu - At the bottom of the options menu, there are 4 buttons. They have strange pictures on them. I have no clue what they do. They need text to say what they are.

In-game UI - There are 3 energy(?) bars, I have no clue what they are. If they are important, label what they are or get rid of them. Also, there were icons in the corners while playing. Again, I have no idea what they were. They also look like your UI buttons. I thought that they were clickable, but the mouse cursor disappears in-game. Bug? Feature?

You will not be there to explain every feature and button to every player that plays your game. The UI needs to be intuitive enough where a player can figure things out just by looking at it (whether it be a casual or hardcore gamer). The UI should not get in the way of playing the game. Fix the UI.

The game itself looks really nice. You obviously spent some time working on it. Spend some time on the UI and you will have a great game.

I tried the game in Mozilla myself, and it didn't load. My other games work in Mozilla, so I know it's a problem specific to this game. Thanks for telling me guys, I'll fix it as soon as I can figure it out :)

As for not knowing what to do in the game, I do see some things I could do to help that. For one, I could set some more intuitive controls, like instead of starting with / to do your action (land on a planet, open the nav menu, drop cargo) I'll change it to Enter. That makes more sense to me that when I want to really DO something I'll hit enter. Similarly I can think on the other controls for a better layout. I'll also try to think of some more interactive features to subtlely teach the user how to play, like some initial pop up hints.

As for the load time, yeah, it's too long. There are some options I can take advantage of, and I will do that. The massive download of course is intended for a full version game with all the large scale art, but I have it in the Applet form for testing and for easily sharing it with people like you guys :) Still, I agree, I need to do something about the long load, so I'll work on that.

The cursor disappearing when the Out Of Focus image comes up definitely needs to be fixed. Thanks for pointing that out, I totally agree with that one. The lack of a cursor while you're flying around in a game is because there the mouse can only get in your way and serves no purpose in game. When you open any menu or land on a planet the cursor comes back because it has a purpose then.

In the Options menu, and most all menus, when an icon is highlighted, the name of it appears at the top of the menu. The names tell exactly what the buttons should do. I'm not sure how to make that more intuitive. If you want to know more, click on the ? icon (labelled Help when you put your mouse over it) and then click on another icon you want to know more about and you'll get a full description.

In-game UI, good call on that one as well. I can draw text over the bars that will fit with the scheme and be unobtrusive while at the same time detailing the purpose of the bars, so that's done. As for the icons on the right, they're the icons representing the weapons you're carrying. They do serve 0 purpose... so I'm asking the game designer for permission to remove them ;) Thanks for pointing that one out too. There's no pretty way to make those intuitive and I don't think I need to since they don't serve any purpose there. When you care about what weapon you're carrying is when you have the chance to buy/sell weapons, but when you can do that, you have those icons drawn in your inventory, so the icons serve no purpose in the game UI.

Thanks for all those comments, they were very helpful! Your comment about not being able to immediately understand what to do in the game has given me some good ideas for some more interactive features that I can put in, so a big thanks for that!

Keep the comments coming guys, this is really helpful. Oh and GameStudioD, your suggestions will be coded and up by the next time you play :)


EDIT: The Mozilla bug has been fixed now. It was an html issue.

- What is the point of the game? Just to kill all the other ships? I have no idea.
- After a while my ship stopped firing. Was I damaged? Or did I run out of ammo? After playing a little more I figured out that 2 of the bars in the bottom left were ammo indicators. I think it would be good to have a default weapon with unlimited ammo, since it is always fun to fire weapons.
- At first I thought my ship's back was the front and vice versa.
- Sound effects would be nice

The game is about combat, trading, etc. Kill ships and grab the items, or buy and sell cargo on planets it's up to you. It's intended to be non-linear and a "sandbox" game. Want to be a pirate? You can be one. Want to be a bounty hunter shooting down pirates? You can do that too.

Secondary weapons use ammo (the yellow bar) while primary weapons use energy. (the purple bar) Energy is used for your primaries, shields, as well as accelerating/decelerating. Technically all of your primaries have unlimited ammo.

The front of your ship is where your weapons fire from :) Reverse and forward speeds are equal to allow you and the AI to pull some fun manuvers.

Sound effects have been made. Since this is also going to be a phone game they haven't been added in yet.

I tried your game in Mozilla. Doesnt work. I tried it in IE. Does work.

Sometimes I've had problems with the game in Opera, but most of the time it works. I'm sure Malokhan will get the kinks out.

My first impression: The game looks nice, but I have no idea what you are supposed to do in the game. I was completely lost. Gamers dont have the patience to be reading instructions, and it should not be a requirement to play the game. Gamers make the decision of liking the game through playing. If they like it, they may read the instructions.

Pretty much the instructions that will be needed will be things such as explaining that you can do whatever you want, then explaining the controls, and a basic menu/GUI explanation.

However, since people don't like instructions we have tried to put in a lot of in-game help in most of the menus. However, the main screen doesn't have this, we're thinking about ways of doing a tutorial to explain the basics.

Here are some things I saw that can be improved.

Long load time - I have a 3Ghz P4 and a broadband connection. The game took minutes to load. With Java, I dont know if this can be improved.

Load times are also long in the .jar version, that's something I've been hoping can be fixed too.

Cursor disappears - In the lost focus screen, the mouse cursor disappears. The screen says "Click to ...", but I couldnt see the mouse cursor. Also, the cursor disappears in-game. Because this is played in a browser, I think the cursor should be visible at all times. There will be people that think your game broke their computer and exit as quickly as possible.

The out of bounds thing (Click to Resume) is just something on the Gamelizard site for all of the games. I'm not sure why the cursor disappears for that. :)

The cursor disappears when a game is active when in the main game screens because the mouse is not used in that menu. It is a feature and not a bug. The mouse being there, wasting screen space would get more complaints then about it vanishing. Having the mouse fade in and out when not using it might be a good idea, and clicking on things with the mouse brings up online help. However, since we're doing a phone version and we want to keep things consistent (phones don't have a mouse) this would be a feature not possible on both versions.


Weird buttons in Option menu - At the bottom of the options menu, there are 4 buttons. They have strange pictures on them. I have no clue what they do. They need text to say what they are.

When the mouse or arrow is over one, the title describes what it does. Similarly the help button can be used to get the info on what something in the menus do.

In-game UI - There are 3 energy(?) bars, I have no clue what they are. If they are important, label what they are or get rid of them. Also, there were icons in the corners while playing. Again, I have no idea what they were. They also look like your UI buttons. I thought that they were clickable, but the mouse cursor disappears in-game. Bug? Feature?

You will not be there to explain every feature and button to every player that plays your game. The UI needs to be intuitive enough where a player can figure things out just by looking at it (whether it be a casual or hardcore gamer). The UI should not get in the way of playing the game. Fix the UI.

The game itself looks really nice. You obviously spent some time working on it. Spend some time on the UI and you will have a great game.

The icons display your current primary/secondary weapons. The bars would be labeled and there would be a lot more labels if it wasn't for one fact: We're designing this as a cellphone game and they have very limited screen space. The high resolution version is just a scaled up version of the phone.

We're trying to get the needed info on a small screen, and sadly that means that we can't have as much feedback as desired.

If we had more screen real-estate (say it was intended as a PC game only) the GUI would be very different and (hopefully) more accessible.

If you have suggestions for reworking the GUI, suggestions that would be consistent between both versions and would be both functional and pleasing to the eye, I'd love to hear them.