Flash is uncooperative, here’s a demo
I did not get nearly as much done on this as I wanted to. This is because Flash and Flixel apparently both hate me, and would not cooperate when I tried to do a test run Flash comic page, or tweak enemy behavior a little bit. So the game has one level less and much less nice beginning/ending art as I wanted it to at this point.
Still, it’s a thing. It works.
Arrow keys to move. Up jumps, down hits the brakes. Space attacks. Z checks a message if your phone is buzzing. X dismisses the message. You may get info from checking your phone that will affect where you go, but you will also be distracted by it.
Space/Mouse to go through intro and outro sequences. R restarts a level if you’ve died, or the game if you’ve won.
(Summary of things I wanted but didn’t get: Wanted to do the intro comic in Flash, since allegedly Flixel can embed other SWFs. Also wanted there to be similar outro comics, and color and suchlike on them, but I took too long trying to make Flash not be my enemy. Definitely going to revisit that, even though it’s too late to present those things. Currently the intro jumps around a comic but not as nicely as Flash would, one of the outros uses the ingame speechbubble system, and one is an image.
The other thing that’s missing is that the robots are supposed to turn around when they hit things which should be INCREDIBLY EASY but then Flixel deprecated half its useful functions and I spent too much of yesterday trying to make that work. It’s not super integral, it just makes the cafeteria level a little weird.
Oh and sound. Sigh.)
The controls are extremely smooth and I get a good feeling just from moving around. The jump felt a bit ‘floaty’, but otherwise the movement and attack system was executed well.
Like you said above, the game seems unfinished, but I think the material you have here is a great start. You might try introducing other kinds of robots, as the current ones seem a bit easy to beat.
It seemed to me like the jump mechanic was overpowered. I stopped using my stick and just jumped around because I couldn’t take damage if I was above the bots. Also I forgot how to answer my phone, so I just never answered it.
Clearly not what you wanted it to be, but what you had was pretty smooth and the story had a beginning, middle, and end, so you have my props
I really liked the smooth animation and lackluster attitude of the protagonist. I only wish the robots were a little more challenging. I could just mash space and destroy them without really trying. The different ways to kill the robots were really interesting though (basketball goooo).
I did not exactly understand the story but I was impressed with the animations and controls. I probably answered only half of the texts for reasons like moving past to fast or being busy fighting robots. Perhaps that would have been useful for the story.
It wasn’t quite spelled out, but reading your texts can result in getting different final levels. In an expanded game, there would be choices of which level to do next, which would be influenced by the player’s knowledge from the texts.
Of course, you don’t know which texts are the important ones, so you’ve got to decide whether it’s worth the distraction to check a text 8]
I forgot this was a demo. I like the visuals! Really awesome style. The cell phone feature was a great idea but reminds me a bit of kim possible.
Can you make the text easier to read?
The ending is brief.
I’m probably going to throw in a different font for the text messages at some point, as well as expanding on both endings.
The main character has a really cool animation. I thought the hand drawn style in the beginning and end was nice. The robots were infinite which was a little bit annoying. I liked the scenes as well. And the ending was also fun where you get no explanation about anything and they steal your cell-phone.
The visual style is effective, and i really did the aesthetic and motion of going around smashing robots with a hockey stick on rollerblades. The motion/sliding is really nice, and you have really nice environment interaction w/ basketballs and trashcans. I’d love to see some variety in attack animation, and maybe some cool combo counter when you fight to add to the fun chaos of just destroying things, especially w/ the basketballs. But that may not fit the genre. Cool comics and casual/fun story.
I could definitely see throwing another attack type or two in in the future, it fits pretty well with the idea of beating up robots with a hockey stick.
No, we don’t blame tools here. I’ve seen all sort of things made with Flixel.
This is made with Flixel: http://www.oldspicesavestheworld.com/
Regardless of the cutscenes and the missing level(s) I don’t have much to add to what I said months ago. The style is nice and appropriate with the theme but the gameplay is shallow and beating the robots is way too easy. Adding the ability to go up and down would have helped a lot and wouldn’t have entailed a complete redesign.
Story-wise, having the game itself declaring that the story doesn’t make any sense is not a satisfying justification for me – and it’s not that funny either. Maybe I’m just out of touch with the Millenials’ humor.
I’m still baffled that you moved from a immensely complex and ambitious project (wolves) to such a simplistic one-liner as if there was no middle ground.
I didn’t get that answering the phone was triggering different levels.