We just went beta with our game "MicroMan's Crazy Computers". It's an update of an old-school 2D platformer that has been relatively popular with kids (and adults playing the game with their kids..."lapware").

If you are interested in checking out the beta, we would love to get any feedback, suggestions and/or bugs report you come up with.

Specifically, anything you find confusing, overly complex, irritating, etc., ...we'd like to know about. While playing the game, you can press Ctrl+S to bring up the Stats info--the bottom right corner will display the "Zone" and "Area" you are in. Please provide those numbers when reporting problems with a specific area.

You can view a brief description and a few screenshots at:
http://www.hipsoft.com/mmcc.html

You can download the beta from:
http://www.private.hipsoft.com/beta
username: tester
password: kkjp1289
(the file is 3 megs, and it's *not* on our fast server at this time)

Thanks for your help!
-Scorpio

Writing this as I play:

The 60 minute free trial thing is a bit frustrating, unless it's 60 minutes of actual game time (ie reading your Buy My Game notices and otherwise not playing the game doesn't count). In which case make it clear that it's 60 minutes game time.

The tutorial could be handled better with in game messages that appear without having to activate the little question buttons. I was hoping the keys would be listed to me when I entered the tutorial (no I didn't read your instructions in the setup, most players wont either). I had to figure out the keys myself. I managed to figure out Ctrl is shoot and spacebar is jump (imho they should be the other way around). If there are any other keys then at this point I don't know of them. I managed to grab the first ? button, but unfortunately the jump key is the same key as the default button for the message box, so I accidentally double-hit and lost the message box before reading it. Right now I'm in the second screen of the first level (implement smooth scrolling maybe?).

Hooray I got the second ? button. This time I managed to read the message. Parts of the screen of the game turned black when the message box appeared and didn't repaint themselves until I hit OK. A person could think the game has crashed or just get the impression that it's buggy or sloppy.

I just passed the health area of the tutorial. The tutorial levels aren't too bad, although some like the falling one seem a bit long and patronizing. The description for the hud is too much text all at once. Maybe have little messages pop up beside each hud item, instead of scaring the player with all that text. The robo dog rocks. You should put an obstacle that harms the player before having him collect the health. Collecting health on full energy doesn't give the educational results that are desired.

I just beat the tutorial, overall nice job and good luck with it. I don't have time to play the actual levels right now but I might do so later.

Hey Scorpio (if that is your real name :)),

Seems like a fun little game. I installed the game + the music upgrade. My comments...
1. In the initial install I selected a non-default location in my start menu and that worked ok. But, the music upgrade didn't ask and put a un-install icon in the default location. Nothing too major, but probably worth fixing.
2. In the game - in the menu you get when you hit escape or click on the screen, if you click on the help button, it does nothing. F1 works ok for me.
3. General feedback - I found the windows dialogs (for help and a few of the other menus) pretty distracting. A consistent in-game UI would be nice.
4. Seemed like quite a few menus getting into (and coming out of) a game. I didn't count them, but that was my feeling...

Good luck,
-Jeff
www.evertt.com (http://www.evertt.com)

Thanks for the great feedback guys!

Lizardsoft, I am unable to repro the black-screen-redraw issue you mentioned. Can you describe your system for me? If you do run the game again...can you see if it happens with every dialog/message that comes up?

-Scorpio

good job. i like the game very much. it brings back a lot of 2d scroller memories...

wish you good luck and sales on it!

Yes it happens with every message box, but not always. Without knowing anything about your code, I'm guessing your drawing loop isn't running while the message box is displayed (since that's how message boxes typically work). For whatever reason, part of the screen gets invalidated, and the black effect appears. It's the geometrical equivilent of randomly blting several large (possibly the size of the messagebox...possibilly) overlapping onto the screen.

I also found a similar problem with your alt-tab. Sometimes when you alt-tab back in (which I did a lot writing that other post), the screen is black, and while walking parts of the screen get redrawn (the parts that your characcter walks, animated parts, and borders of walls) but others do not. What is probably happening there is your assuming that data will be on the backbuffer after you blt it there, so you dont blt the whole screen every frame. Personally I prefer to just blt the whole thing, since I'm not sure if you are ever guarenteed that the backbuffer will stay the same after it's been flipped to primary and back. After the alt-tab occurs, the primary and back buffers are both trashed (probably recreated) and most of the image is missing as a result.

Hope that helps.

Lizardsoft, thanks for the info.

I'm actually using GDI, not DDraw surfaces, and I just respond to WM_PAINT messages when returning from an alt-tab or when a dialog box is moved...so that's why this is a little perplexing to me (I haven't seen this problem on any other machines we've tested on). It may be something to do with WM_ERASEBKGND, I will take a look at what I'm doing there (I can't remember off-hand).

What OS and video card are you running?
-Scorpio

GDI? Impressive, you had me convinced this was DirectDraw :D

I'm running Windows 2000 Professional with a Gigabyte GeForce 2 GTS 32MB.

Lizardsoft, would you be willing to download the new version I just put up (same site/user/pswd as above)?

http://www.private.hipsoft.com/beta
username: tester
password: kkjp1289

Thanks again for all your help!
-Scorpio

Alright I've tried it and haven't been able to reproduce the problem after playing through all of Level 1. You'll have to use your own judgement to determine if that's enough to conclude the bug is gone.

I've noticed two other things that I sort of noticed before but wasn't able to quantify accurately. The game tends to pause for about half a second or so every once in a while, approximately every 2 screens or so. I have no clue what could be causing it, since the character can be doing anything when the freeze happens (I may or may not have to be pressing a key, in a game like this my fingers are never really off the keys though so it's too difficult to tell). There is also definitely a collision detection bug with the elevators. I've managed to jump through them on multiple occasions, which can be very frustrating in those areas where you have to successfully navigate several elevators to get through.

On a gameplay note, you might want to consider altering the design of level 1 (haven't tried other levels yet) since there is a lot of walking involved and very minimal interaction with enemies (I'm playing on the middle difficulty btw). Adding more "stuff" to each screen could really liven things up. In particular the area where I have to get the CD using the hidden blocks, go back and up an elevator by jumping up and down on it, then across the gap on another elevator and then fall off is kind of a drag. Adding obstacles along the way could really help. Basically anytime the player knows the area can be beaten on the first try (either due to lack of enemies, or its simply very easy to beat), and it takes a while to walk through it, it becomes a chore. If you haven't played the old Commander Keen games, those all have examples of excellent level design. The easy stages can still kill you if you are too cocky, and they can be beat quickly (seeing how fast you can get through level 1 of Keen 4 on a pogo stick is quite entertaining no matter your skill level). All the elements required for a good platform game exist in MicroMan so all you need to do to improve the levels is make use of them more and not be afraid to make the player work for their victory.

Again, thanks so much for the detailed feedback Lizardsoft!
-Scorpio

Oh, Lizardsoft, one more thing, can you try turning off the sounds in the options to see if the pause goes away? I have never seen this but another tester also reported the same problem...but he was running a very low-end system...but the problem was also much more severe. :|
-Scorpio

I tried turning off the sounds, doesn't appear to have done anything to help. It also doesn't appear to be related to how heavy the action on the screen is, since I've gotten the problem even when barely anything is happening.

I have an Athlon 850Mhz if that helps. I tried running Grand Theft Auto 1 right now and it worked fine so I don't think anything is broken here. If I need to boot into my XP partition in the next couple days I'll try it under there too.

I just repro'd the issue on a Win98 machine. I think it's actually related to a tricky way I'm using Armadillo to do time-limited software protection, even tho they don't really support it. I'm going to try a few things eliminate the problem. Thanks again!
-Scorpio

No problem, gives me something to do while waiting for full rebuilds to finish (been having to do too much of those today).

Lizardsoft, I believe I've found and virtually eliminated the problem.

If you have time to let me know if the pauses are gone, that would be great. As a bonus, we just put in the real end-game screen which has a comic-book style picture of MicroMan with his helmet off (you can just end your game via the in-game menu to see it).

Thanks!
-Scorpio

Works great :) The mirror screen with the four MicroMen was neat. I can still jump through an elevator if I get too close to the edge (wrong size collision box?) and I think some of the level areas with the elevators could be reworked so they aren't so frustrating (took me 10 minutes to get through the one with like 6 elevators going up and down). The game over screen is neat, if you had more drawings like that and a developing plot as the game progresses, that would be good motivation for the player to keep going. Good job.

Jumping seems a bit off to me. With most games, even if you are mostly hanging off of a ledge, as long as your foot is still partially on the ledge, you don't fall. In MicroMan, once you get ~50% off you fall. This made it very difficult (frustrating) to me. I'm usually very good at jumping games, but I kept falling because I'm used to having a split second longer to jump. Not to say that the way you did it is wrong, but it just feels very awkward to me. It doesn't feel consistent with other jumping games.

I also got very frustrated in the 6 platform room. I kept missing the jump from platform 4 to platform 5. It was frustrating to do 3 seconds of work and then 20 seconds of waiting for platforms, over and over. I think I was there well over 10 minutes. Then I got to the screen with spikes all across the bottom and took almost full damage. I made it to the next room, and almost got to the energy and died. The thought of going through those 6 elevators again made me just give up.

Overall, I do like the game. I just found myself getting upset with the jumping (and once you start losing patience, it makes it even more difficult to make the jumps :) )

Thanks for the helpful feedback LordKronos. I wish we had made the first level last because the game's scope changed a bunch.

We're going to do some re-design on the first level to make it (hopefully) more fun.
-Scorpio

I downloaded the newest version, and I seem to be doing much better with the jumping. Not sure if you changed anything, or if I'm just getting used to it.

It would be great if you could add a continue option at the end of the game. It's annoying to have to end the game, go through the stats screen, the end game screen, return to the main, menu, and load my last save.

And on the topic of saving, there is a serious bug here...If you save, die, and then reload a game, you can backtrack and pick up discs you already got. Its how I was able to get 293 of 295 discs in level with only finding 1 of 4 secret areas. Man, those secret areas are hard to find. I was hoping to find the other 3 and impress you by finding more than 100% of the discs :)

It also seems like when you get the triple shot, all 3 bullets count against your accuracy, so if you fire and hit 1 out of 3, your accuracy goes down. This seems odd to me. It discourages you from grabbing the powerup (maybe that's intentional).

Also, the boss at the end of level 2 is VERY HARD. I made it to him with about 95% energy and couldn't beat him. Although, maybe thats what I get for choosing difficult mode (I forgot I did that :) )

LordKronos, you can press Ctrl+L to bring up the load dialog...but I agree that the process is generally a pain (and nobody will know about the Ctrl+L hotkey).

We will look into the other issues you mentioned. I wonder if you were originally playing the pre-pause-fix version and that was making the jumps more difficult.

Thanks again for taking the time to write up your feedback!
-Scorpio