DoPo said:
Arcane Azmadi said:
Maybe the guy doesn't get that Jim is TRYING to hinder his game because he's trying to save poor gullible saps from wasting their money on his piece-of-shit excuse for a "game"? If you make tripe like that and expect people to give you money for it you DESERVE to lose sales. Especially if you react like a complete and utter prick to any and all criticism, like this guy.
I think it's highly likely this is the case.
OpticalJunction said:
i'm on the dev's side. the game itself doesn't look that bad and jim is not doing the gaming industry any favors by ridiculing indie game devs who are doing this more out of love and passion, than money. game devs do have a right to defend their own games. jim was being extremely disrespectful.
The game is bad. Like, technically bad. The thing I can say in favour of it, is that if this was somebody's major project, it would pass and could get them good grades. But that is also damning it with fine praise, as a lot of major projects don't quite work and it's the write-up that's really important anyway, in fact, having a project that doesn't quite work gives you a lot to write about. What went wrong, how and why it went wrong, how would you fix it, did you try to fix it, how would you prevent it in the future and what would you do differently if you were to start over all give you a lot to write about and would probably give good marks to redeem the project, too.
This dev, though, seems to not consider the failings to be...failings. In fact, the dev seems to revel in sheer blissful dismissal of criticism. Valid criticism. The game has flaws and they show. Heck, Jim conducts one of the cheapest and best test any software can get - grab a random person and have him use your software. Jakob Nielsen suggests 5 for optimal results [http://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/]. Well, also for more complex stuff probably more, but anyway...Nielsen also says to test regularly and often. The dev clearly has not done that - not only that, there seems to be little, if any, QA on this product at all. Furthermore, the manner in which the dev dismisses the complaints (e.g. "But sound can be turned off" or "Obviously, you only get ammo for the current weapon you're holding") shows clear lack of any thought for the players. Jakob Nielsen also has words on it...well, many and said on many occasions, also echoed by many, probably a conclusion reached by many, many, people independently (in fact, I'd say, most computer scientists I know, at least, would know a variation of it), but here is one particular instance:
you should be sure to judge the designs based on empirical observations of real user behavior instead of your own preferences. (Repeat after me: "I am not the Audience." )
(no modification was done on the text) Taken from the end of this article [http://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/].
The dev doesn't do that. Moreover, the dev doesn't even acknowledge this rather basic tenet. This attitude goes beyond unprofessional well into not a good developer territory.
I struggle to see what the developer's "side" even is - the game was bad - it clearly needs more polish, yet it's sold, and sold for 10 bucks, with no acknowledgement anything is bad, no acknowledgement anything can, or should, be improved, just unfocused angry defence of faults which any developer worth their salt would recognise and would have been addressing instead of turning a blind eye on.
The game was rushed. It is clearly evident by both the developer's attitude, the game's state, and the release date. It only came out when it came out because the developer thought it was "good enough" to go for the Halloween sales market. Other games have done the concept and better and some of them are even cheaper. Or free, as
Death Illustrated which I mentioned before.
Yeah, there's far too many people complaining that it's not that bad. If this was someone's first experiment with software, I'd be sympathetic. When you abuse the greenlight system by promising keys to voters to get your shit onto the steam store where people might actually be fooled into buying it, that's when you become accountable. They're charging for it, they're asking for it. This shit embarrasses ACTUAL coders. It takes time and effort to learn to code, and it takes time and effort to learn to make a game, and this person did neither, and then added insult to injury by trying to drag devs in on his side. No-one who's ever done any serious amount of coding would want to be associated with that shit.
Yes. Yes it is that bad. I'm not sure that it'd even count for a major project, since it looks like it's in Unity, so apart from splaying some assets around, there really isn't that much that has been done. A counter for health, a counter for ammo. And these are misleading (The ammo counter is misleading for the two weapon system, and covers a large portion of the screen, for no reason). It's not like they had to code a physics engine or the vectors for movement, and all the maths involved (Arrays, Vectors, Trig, it's University level Calculus, applied in extreme depth. Most software does it automatically in simple to use devkits, because that was once the biggest barrier to entry), and draw their graphics by the pixel (Which was my major project in Java for a 1st year programming class, making a game. I made a 2d platformer inspired by Portal. A friend made Battleship. Another made Bomberman (With multiplayer.) If we wanted gravity, motion, physics, we had to code those in. If you wanted bombs, velocity, timers, you had to code those in. If you wanted graphics that wouldn't flicker incessantly on the redraw, you had to implement double buffering. If you wanted AI, you had to code that in. And at every stage, people gave each other feedback. We played so many broken games, and broke so many games, and that told the person making that what they needed to fix.
But the fact that the objectives are unclear, and posted in a box in font which doesn't blend with anything else, and has a lazy darkened transparency background is poor UI design, and poor game design. The box looks like a debug box. It doesn't match the rest of the (Ugly as fuck) UI.
The blood effects have been seperated from their background layer poorly, because they're a random item from a google search, and they're not actual assets with a transparency layer. The dev has taken no effort to fix this (Usually, you'd remove all the white, and applying a blur can fix the edges. Alternatively, just have the screen filtered with a red that gets darker, the same effect, less shitty, for no effort).
There is no indication that ammo pickups are only for the gun at hand, and no reason for this to be the case (It's not a feature, you can switch weapon to change it so it doesn't add difficulty). It's a result of lazy ass coding. It's a bug, that should be fixed. There's cash, but no indication of what it's for, and it lies on the ground, whilst the ammo seems to float. Health decreased below zero carries over, because the dev is too lazy to understand you can't just add 100 to the health to respawn, you have to reset the health (Either make it impossible to go below zero, or set the health to zero and then add 100, or set the health to 100. This is an embarrassing failure to understand WHAT A VARIABLE IS). The gun moves at a different pace to the fixed point reticule. There's no reason for that, particularly as there is no indication the game takes into account turn speed or recoil based on weapon position, like say, Killing Floor or Red Orchestra (The former being what the game looks to be ripping off.)
There are strange glowing particle effects which rise from corpses, for no discernable reason. These effects are not diffused, they occur specifically in visible pillars with a cutoff. The bodies continue to spasm and squirt blood, again, for no reason.
The music covers important audio cues, and is fucking annoying. The sound design in general blows. There's little in the way of feedback, when you collect ammo, or you run out of ammo, or take a hit.
The pause menu doesn't pause the game (Not because it's a feature, but because it's easier to bring up a menu than to pause the game). There are no control options in the menu, which is doubly damning because that can instruct players. There's an option to turn music off, but no volume option, so you can't balance the audio so that the game is playable with all cues.
The game includes features that aren't even working (If features aren't working at release, comment them out and put them in later. No-one wants to try to work out how your mines work).
And that's just basic errors in implementing graphics, and mechanics. These are the things that should come out the minute you test it (You, the DEV, should notice the problem with the blood. It's not working, so get rid of it, or fix it.) That doesn't even go to a direction for the game to go in, or even being fun. For instance, they game should direct the player to some objective to start, and they should have enough ammo that they won't run out so quickly and be forced to hunt for scattered ammo in stupid locations, running into Zombies, when the game so clearly wants you to kill large numbers of them. Is it DayZ or Killing Floor? Just being able to spawn some enemies and have them move towards the player, and giving the player the ability to shoot them is NOT game design. Give anyone a little while with an engine and they can have enemies stagger towards you for you to shoot. That is NOT a finished game. And this isn't someone trying to learn to make games, this is someone trying to make money off broken shit.