Dinopoke's Game - Play and Evaluate!

[dinopoke]

Hi guys, I've this small game for a Year 12 assignment. It's called DangerZone and it's a simple top down, multi-directional shooter. Part of the assignment requires me to acquire user feedback and I would like you guys to do the honours. It's really short and won't take more than 5 minutes of your time. It would be great if you could do it as soon as possible as I don't have much time left for the assignment. It would be much appreciated.

The game can be downloaded here: http://www.mediafire.com/?z2wxngzgn20

(It's a small game, under 30kb. It's a VB game. My assurance is probably not enough so do a virus scan on it if you feel so inclined.)

Once you have played it for a bit, please do my survey here:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229FBLTM8VH

Thanks, this is all going towards a good cause (ie my grades >__>).

[SOX]

How do we know this isn't a virus?

EDIT: Lucky I scanned it first you ****er

EDIT: I lied.

Now for real feedback.

1. No help menu
2. Bullets get caught on invisible/invincible boxes
3. Invisible/invincible boxes kill you
4. No polish
5. Annoying you have to type your name in each time
6. It seemed to delete all of your scores after I put 1 on the board
7. The scores aren't kept once you close the program
8. Bullets fired as you die appear in the next game

[dinopoke]

Well if we had pep, you would know that I am a trustworthy poster. :P

BTW, I screwed up the survey, make sure you pick only one answer per question, please.

[SOX]

Didnt even read your whole post :P
I'll do the survey now!

[Spudzilla]

You HAVE to have a midi version of the song Danger Zone as the menu music.

[Xanafalgue]

There is an (or some) invisible blocks on the left hand side that I kept dying on. They were there everytime I played.

[Mike-Towns]

Downloading now, will fill out survey thing after mang.

DOWNLOADED...gonna play the older version first, ha HA.

You HAVE to have a midi version of the song Danger Zone as the menu music.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xywr3yzGs8g

[Spudzilla]

xywr3yzGs8g

Now you have no reason to not put it in.

[Mike-Towns]

DAMMIT SPUD, I forgot about YT tags when I linked :(.

Anyway:

http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/4615/dangere.png (http://img188.imageshack.us/i/dangere.png/)

Game sucks.

[Slippery]

Played, evaluated.

Oh, I forgot to mention it really needs sound effects and music (dangerzone song pref)

[Fenrir]

'ey, this reminds me, I've really gotta get back to that top-down shooter I was making.

Part of the assignment requires me to acquire user feedback and I would like you guys to do the honours.
Sure, for my part I'd say it's good to see someone in their year 12 Software Dev class actually doing something other than playing cracked videogames all day. What version of VB did you write this in?

It's a nice simple game. I'd've thought about adding powerups and rewards and such, as well as some varying opponents, to keep the gameplay varied; but it has the basics down.

By the looks of it, there seems to be a bug in the disposal of defeated enemies - they disappear, but they become what SOX called "invisible/invincible boxes" which absorb bullets and kill you, still. They don't seem to move upon being defeated, you're just not purging them from the system properly. As it is, the game quickly becomes a minefield of invisible deadly corpses, so I can't really get a good idea of the quality of the gameplay concept as it stands.

Once you have played it for a bit, please do my survey here:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229FBLTM8VH
If you're able to make changes, I'd prefer to wait until you've ironed out the bug properly.

BTW, this might be a good moment to fire up the coding thread all over again; I'm not sure if you're allowed to request help troubleshooting your code, though.

How do we know this isn't a virus?

EDIT: Lucky I scanned it first you ****er
dinopoke's been around for a while, I wouldn't be too worried.

Now for real feedback.

1. No help menu
2. Bullets get caught on invisible/invincible boxes
3. Invisible/invincible boxes kill you
4. No polish
5. Annoying you have to type your name in each time
6. It seemed to delete all of your scores after I put 1 on the board
7. The scores aren't kept once you close the program
8. Bullets fired as you die appear in the next game
Agree with #2, #3, #5, and presumably #6; but for the others, maybe we should remember that this is a year 12 student? I doubt the guys trailing behind in 2nd place in my yr12 SDD class back in the day could've built this.

The readme file reasonably addresses #1; #4 is getting a bit anal; #7 is expecting a yr12 student to develop a textfile-based record add/update/delete/read system; and #8 is a subpoint of #4. Being at the other end of a double degree, maybe you're lacking perspective?

Unless we were meant to be zero-tolerance professional critics, here, in which case you probably could've been harsher.

EDIT:

http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/4615/dangere.png (http://img188.imageshack.us/i/dangere.png/)
You don't have the .NET Framework installed.

That also narrows the VB version down to a version of VB.NET.

[SOX]

dinopoke's been around for a while, I wouldn't be too worried.

I was just mucking around with him :P

#7 is expecting a yr12 student to develop a textfile-based record add/update/delete/read system

I just saw some file call scores.cfg (cant remember and on diff comp now) so I assumed it wasn't working correctly.

I was just saying things that could be fixed. Like I didn't know if he knew about the invisible boxes or the bullets continuing on after the game or the scoreboard being bugged.

But realistically you'd probably get a good score for that even with the basic appearance!

[fishfishmonkeyhat]

It closes after I enter my name I don't know if that's been pointed out already didn't read thread.

[Mike-Towns]

Downloaded the .net framework to use Paint.net anyway so I tried it again, nice little game you have here.

Submitted my feedback

[sausage]

My graphics card melted...




Just joking; downloaded, played for a while (600 some points) and submitted some feedback.

No bugs encountered at my end. Relatively enjoyable dinopoke. Thumbs up.


It does need music though. Not stupid dangerzone though - that's just retro-wank and would get old real quick.

[Fenrir]

No bugs encountered at my end.
Upon gunning down an enemy, keep firing at where that enemy once was. If your bullets disappear at the location once occupied by the enemy (rather than travelling off the edge of the screen) then you have just reproduced the bug.

[sausage]

Oh-ho yes I see now. I guess it was present when I first played but didn't notice it heh.

[dinopoke]

What version of VB did you write this in?

.NET 2005. Our course hasn't upgraded to 08 yet.

By the looks of it, there seems to be a bug in the disposal of defeated enemies - they disappear, but they become what SOX called "invisible/invincible boxes" which absorb bullets and kill you, still. They don't seem to move upon being defeated, you're just not purging them from the system properly. As it is, the game quickly becomes a minefield of invisible deadly corpses, so I can't really get a good idea of the quality of the gameplay concept as it stands.


If you're able to make changes, I'd prefer to wait until you've ironed out the bug properly.

The older version doesn't seem to have this bug. For some reason, I must've made a change which turned off enemy disposal. Unfortunately this was the night before the assignment hand in.

Agree with #2, #3, #5, and presumably #6; but for the others, maybe we should remember that this is a year 12 student? I doubt the guys trailing behind in 2nd place in my yr12 SDD class back in the day could've built this.

The readme file reasonably addresses #1; #4 is getting a bit anal; #7 is expecting a yr12 student to develop a textfile-based record add/update/delete/read system; and #8 is a subpoint of #4. Being at the other end of a double degree, maybe you're lacking perspective?

The scores were supposed to update properly and read and write to the .cfg file. It was working fine when I handed it in, I have no idea why it's not working now.

I felt that I should have placed an ingame tutorial or instructions but time let me down. There were a whole lot of features I wanted to put in and polish up but I was too lazy and ended up rushing the whole thing in under two weeks. I was planning a Audiosurf - like game where the music affects the enemy movement etc. I might work on it in my own spare time.

It closes after I enter my name I don't know if that's been pointed out already didn't read thread.

I assume you are running Win7? For some reason, it doesn't work on that OS.

[fishfishmonkeyhat]

Vista.

[dinopoke]

Are you on 64 bit or 32 bit? I'm using Vista 32 bit.

[fishfishmonkeyhat]

sixtyfour bits

[dinopoke]

Yeah, it sounds like it's not compatible with 64bit. :(

[Watchers]

Done, same glitches as previously mentioned. I couldn't do better, so I'll refrain from being too harsh :p