My first "real" game made beta! Yay! I would love feedback or any bug reports. It can be downloaded from here:
www.nutrigames.com
It's called Hyper 21 and you can also download the reg program so you don't have to see nags all the time. Thanks, I look forward to everyone's feedback.

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Josh Samuels
www.nutrigames.com
josh@nutrigames.com
"Our Games Are Yummy!"
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I think one of the most important things is to make it easy and quick for the player to start the game. You should definitely get rid of those long intro animations. And I really agreed with the statement "No more nag screens". :) I think one nag at the very end would be enough.

Since we've done a couple of cards games, I was interested to try your game.

Right off the bat, it's over 10 megs for a card game. That seems way too big IMO. If it's because you have tons of great sounds and music, I would consider using lower quality (and/or compression) and then doing a free high-quality audio add-on.

The initial loading of everything was kinda long on my 550Mhz. For a card game, I was not expecting such a long load time.

The intial nag screen was annoying, but tolerable. When the second one came up, I normally would have exited and uninstalled the game immediately...that was too much IMO.

The fade effect kind of had a cross-hatch pattern that looked a little odd...it didn't look like a smooth fade.

In the menus I was getting some flickering when I ran full screen (I later switched to Windowed-mode and didn't have any flickering problems).

The "shatter" screen-wipe effect was *really* slow on my machine (a 550mz, GF1--not the fastest machine, but this type of effect should probably be time-based to I don't have to wait).

Alt+tabbing seemed really slow and when I came back, my cursor was a black square.

Also, after returning from an Alt+Tab and then selecting "Resume Game", only the cards were redrawn and the word "menu" in the lower-right. Everything else was black.

After alt+tabbing, going into the options just brought up a black square (probably where the options box was drawn).

When you start a new game, the help screens say "Click the mouse to continue", but the mouse is not visible (which isn't really a problem, but seemed a little odd to me).

Exiting the game starts rolling the credits, which is kind of irritating since I wanted to exit, not read the credits (and since I also had another nag screen to sit through).

The rainbow colored spinning CD is really cool. I like the fonts and sounds you are using.

I would consider doing a compability pass, lots of alt+tabbing, reducing your download size, and removing some of the nags.

I hope this feedback is helpful for you...Good luck! :)
-Scorpio

Thanks for the feedback so far. I'm going to make some updates that should reduce the size around 4 or 5 mb. But this may take a day or two. Until then I'd love to hear more comments! Thank you.

Josh