Frontier - Space trading/combat game.

Thanks. It's actually a bit frustrating that people like it yet I can't get it rated anywhere :p

To be honest, the opposite is true of Kongregate. They DO host your file, which is actually proving to be a problem for me, because the bugs that people are reporting appear to be something to do with Kongregate. Plus it has to be a maximum of 800 resolution which is a problem for my game - it runs full-screen on Clay.io which is much better.

I'm much happier having it hosted on Clay.io and I'd prefer to just link to that location, but a lot of sites don't allow that, including Kongregate. I'm very happy with Clay.io, you can just do everything from there, it's free and you can just distribute from there. It's a shame Clay.io hasn't taken off yet because it deserves to.

I should say that I haven't heard anybody else on these forums having problems with Kongregate so it could be an issue with my game (perhaps something to do with how big it is - it's a very big program) or just an error at my end (although it does work fine for me and on Clay.io). And you can't complain with the hits you get from Kongregate - about 300 to 500 hits even if your game is slated as mine was :(

Oh ya, that point about save games in an .exe. I'd like to know about that too, but does the .exe open up a browser? If it does, won't it just cache like a standard browser session, so clearing the cache would have the same effect as clearing it in an online session? In other words, isn't the effect identical?

In regards to feedbacks from Kongregate, the bigger the community, the less forgiving it's going to be. Sad but true, so don't beat yourself up over your performance on Kongregate. Frequent Kongregate players are likely used to higher quality games that they take professional work for granted.

Never tried the exe feature myself so I can't comment.

I guess most web games aren't as comlicated as yours, although personally I prefer web games with a bit more depth. I'll definitely look into clay.io when I get my game sorted. Just had another play on Korelos and was appreciating all the extra details, like the desctiptions of the various ship elements.

With the exe export, I thought the resulting .exe file was sort of a wrapper; so it's emulating a browser?. I'm absolutely no expert on these things though. I guess if it is emulating a brower then it should have it's own cache, in the same way that Chrome and Firefox have different caches perhaps? I'm hoping someone cleverer than me might come along...

farflamex - Great game - lots of depth which is nice to see in a C2 game. Sorry to hear about the performance on Kongregate - unfortunately, that's the downside to a large community. Just look at AppStore comments... yikes!

(my pet-hate with C2 is the inability to tweak and object after it's created until your next top-level event, that caused me loads of problems).

Can you elaborate on your statement above though? I was under the impression that the only thing you can't do immediately after creating an object was pick it with a condition - is that what you're referring to? I haven't gotten into anything near the size of your project - just wondering what issues I might run into...

Thanks guys. I am aware of course that programmers tend to be much kinder to other programmers. Even if you see a bad game, you're far more likely to appreciate what the guy is attempting to do and give encouragement. Whereas gamers are just being brutally honest. In this case, the problem was that they said the game was bugged. It seems that if you have a bug, you get a 1/5 rating and that wrecks your chances. I'm going to see if I can work out what bugs they're seeing and try again.

— The issue I'm talking about isn't anything to do with large projects, it can happen at all levels. Let's say you create a bunch of objects in an event, then in the next event you want to manipulate it, you can't do that. It's hard to explain, I'll direct you at the post with Ashley's explanation, but for me it was a serious obstacle and I spent several evenings completely stuck because of it.

I should say it didn't actually stop me completing the game or limiting what I could do. It was just very hard to work around.

Here's the link to Ashley's explanation I was talking about ...

scirra.com/forum/r102-breaking-change-questions_topic56576_post352637.html

It's hard to explain right now why this was such a major issue but it was. On some occasions you can use 'On created' as a simple solution but when it's not suitable it's very hard to work around. If you search topics I started, you'll see I came to the forums several times stuck on it :)

Thanks guys. I am aware of course that programmers tend to be much kinder to other programmers. Even if you see a bad game, you're far more likely to appreciate what the guy is attempting to do and give encouragement. Whereas gamers are just being brutally honest. In this case, the problem was that they said the game was bugged. It seems that if you have a bug, you get a 1/5 rating and that wrecks your chances. I'm going to see if I can work out what bugs they're seeing and try again.

This is more or less a QA thing. Raising standards and vowing to put additional work on hold until the current version is stable prevents masses of bugs from piling up later on.

Before release, stress test extensively. This seems to be something you did not do, and it's evident to gamers who want a smooth experience. Remember, you are not making games to make the players go 'Oh wow, you have talent', you are making a game to give the gamers a fun experience. This is impossible without stress testing. I understand making games is a lot of work, but you cannot simply say you have put a lot of work into it and don't feel like testing, just release immediately. That may bode well with other programmers, but your target audience is not going to appreciate that. If you are wanting to make money with the game, you aren't making the game for yourself. You're making it for gamers, so that means you have to release it in a state that they will enjoy, not one that you personally feel satisfied with.

Well in fairness to myself, I stress-tested it heavily and it's completely bug free. Or at least, I thought it was. What I didn't and couldn't account for was bugs being introduced on Kongregate. The only way to do that was to release on Kongregate and that's when the bugs appeared.

There are a few IE bugs which I should have spotted but that's not what happened. It just doesn't work on Kongregate and I still don't know why.

The people there do seem to have the same impression - that I'd simply released it with lots of bugs, but that's not true. It's running bug-free on my machine and on Clay.io and I put lots of work into clearing up bugs.

It's a learning experience, but I have to say I still don't see a solution for Kongregate. Since the only way of finding bugs is to release it, what else could I do?

Honestly, I'm not sure. It's weird because releasing on Kongregate shouldn't cause bugs in and of itself unless you had to modify it to fit their platform.

Yeah it's strange, I think it may be due to the size of the file or something. Having said that, it currently is crashing in Firefox which I hadn't noticed (only started recently) and there is a bug with the keys locking in IE. Now Firefox and IE are probably 25% of users, and if 25% of users came across those issues, that's like 100 people, which is enough 1 ratings to wreck it.

I'm trying to fix those issues (I think the browser does lock on Kongregate if you lose focus, so I just did a refocus which seems to have fixed that), and then I'll repost it.

Nobody actually said they didn't like the game, they just complained about the bugs. So if I can re-release it without the bugs, hopefully it'll do better.

farflamex

Can you share a bit more about how you created the atmosphere? How many layers are you using? I think I am seeing:

-Very slow moving background

-Slightly faster moving background (some planets or so)

-Fast moving atmosphere/gas

-Gameplay layer

Is this correct?

Yes, it's several layers. There's a static background (the stars and nebula), a 'nearly static' planets/sun layer (they move at different speeds depending on their orbit, but are all slow-moving), 6 to 8 smoke images on a single layer (opacity set to about 25 and moving at different speeds) and then various gameplay layers at the top.

farflamex

I was just checking out a few games on Gog, and there's a new release titled Ring Runner which instantly made me think of Korelos. It's probably worth checking out the video on the site, as it looks like they've got the space combat sussed and it might give you some fresh ideas.

http://www.gog.com/gamecard/ring_runner_flight_of_the_sages

Thanks. It does look very good. I think Korelos would basically need a rewrite with better combat and an all-round simpler gameplay. When I did Jovian War, I was thinking I could somehow combine them - a simple shooter with a very upgradeable ship which reacted to damage. I suppose you could tell your ship where you're going (e.g a new planet, an asteroid field etc) and then fly there 'vertically' in a shoot-em-up fashion. But then I don't think it'll work if it's too simplified.

I'm not sure, I've stopped working on games right now. I love making games but at the same time it can get frustrating and very time-consuming so right now I'm chilling and just playing games instead. I still don't see any hope of getting any success with games unless you go for the real dumbed-down kiddy games, which is difficult because you need lots of very cute sprites which I can't do. But ultimately I think you want to work on very simple games which work on mobiles and I'm not really into that.

We'll see though, I'm sure I'll get the bug again soon :)

How's Board Horde going?