Icarus - Wave Attack

This is eventually going to be my submission to the Newgrounds Construct 2 game jam.

Today I finished up the art assets and have replaced most of the placeholder graphics with these new ones.

I'm looking for feedback, especially in the area of performance! My goal is to eventually turn this into an iOS game, but I'm a bit worried the number of objects on screen might make that kind of hard.

PLAY THE GAME HERE

First devlog

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UPDATE: The full .capx to this game is now available in the Tutorials section! Just an update: the full .capx to this game is now available in the Tutorials section!

Wave-Based Space Shooter With Asteroids And AI Enemies

This is a nicely polished game, and I didn't have any problem with it performance-wise from my laptop. It has a bit of a load time though (which may be even worse on some mobile devices), but other than that, it's great.

Thanks!

The load time is something I am aware of but not sure how to fix.

I know Ashley says to not worry about optimization, but I believe I am at the point where I cannot ignore that anymore. The load time on a mobile device is ridiculous, and I need to start optimizing and learning some of these tricks that aren't written down anywhere.

nice...me like.

good controls, well made graphics and you can blow up stuff. what more can you ask for...lol.

Thanks to help from philx and others, I believe touch support is now working. Please play this game on a mobile device if you can, and let me know your average FPS, device, and browser!

I'm glad you got the touch controls figured out. I enjoyed the game. Here are my comments.

• It took about 4 minutes to download on an Iphone 5 over LTE
• 30+ FPS (usually more)
• The controls took a few rounds to get used to. It's probably because I've never really played a game using this control scheme. The first few times I played, it made the difficulty level seem higher than it was.
• It was hard for me to get a look at the high score list since a new game would almost immediately start as soon as I died. I'm not sure if this happens because my finger was still on the screen, or I accidentally tap the screen one too many times. It might be worth waiting a second before accepting touch input on the high score layout

Good luck with the game!

Hi zatyka, thanks for your feedback!

Controls on a mobile game are one of the absolute hardest things to get right. I'll keep working on it if people think it needs tweaking.

I'll look over the highscores screen for the next update.

Hi Excal,

Just tested the game on my ipad 3. It took about two minutes to load, which might put a few less patient players off. Then again, its always a pity to have to sacrifice graphically quality. It's looking good, and plays smoothly. I did find the controls a bit awkward to start with, but once I got a bit more used to them they started to feel quite intuitive. Hopefully I'll be able to do a bit more testing soon, though I'm still trying to finish up my own game for the competition (I'm at the 'polishing and trying to hunt down game breaking bugs' stage).

Best of luck with it - it looks like a promising contender.

Hi Dave,

Thank you for your excellent feedback! The load time definitely will put people off, and this is honestly why I question the viability of HTML5 games as a platform until Internet connection speeds drastically increase. Nobody will want to wait two minutes to play a game, whereas if they download an app, a two-minute download is perfectly acceptable. I intend on turning this into a full-fledged space shooter with a story after the game jam is over, but I won't be targeting HTML5 as a platform because there is little to no monetization possible with adless HTML5 games at the moment, and the load time is also a huge factor.

I noticed you are currently working on a board game. Would you be interested in collaborating on a project in the near future? Such as a turn-based strategy game? :D

Some people have complained that the game sprites on smaller screen devices (even the iPhone 5) are too small, so I've adapted the game to scale down if the screen size is 1136x640 (iPhone 5 resolution) or smaller.

I've also cut the game download by 2MB, according to Construct 2.

Please try on mobile and let me know what you think!

Hi Excal,

although I'm tempted by the idea of a collaboration, I have a ridiculous amount of projects to get through at the moment (I was just five chapters away from finishing a novel, when I decided to start making a computer game instead!). I might be able to help out in a limited capacity, though.

well done in cutting your project size by 2mb. How big is it in total at the moment? It might be worth trying out some of the larger art assets in different file formats to see if that makes a difference (such as turning anything from png32 to png8, or jpg; you can do this from the sprite editing screen)- I managed to trim about 5mb off my project that way (though you can lose a little quality, that's probably better than having players give up before playing the game due excessive load time).

When I get the chance I'll give the game a test on my wife's ipod touch (which is the closest thing I have to an iphone) and report my results back to you.

Anyway, keep up the good work.

Construct 2 estimates the total download size of the game to be 16.2MB; previously it was 18MB.

Excal

that doesn't strike me as being too big; my own board game was close to the 15mb mark at one point (before I optimised it a bit, got rid of all oversized objects, unused SFX and compressed some of the images to get it down to 9mbs). I'll time the load on my ipad during my tea break, and let you know what I get.

Just had a play on PC for the first time, and the game handles brilliantly with the keyboard controls; I love the ship thrusters, and the enemy ship a.i. and difficulty scaling is pitched just right.

Anyway, a cuppa and a computer game beckons!

Dave,

Thanks for the wonderful comments! I've spent the past two (was it three?) weeks redoing a lot of it. The enemies actually have a 'behavior' and don't just use pathfinding AI to chase after the player all the time, haha.

You can read the latest devblog post here: http://www.exeneva.com/2013/04/icarus-game-jam-submission-almost-ready/

I'll be doing a video devlog soon as well.

Excal

just tested it on ipad3, and it took exactly 1 minute and 30 seconds to load (using Chrome browser, though that probably doesn't make a difference), which isn't that bad (if you get get it down to a minute, you're laughing!)

One thing I did notice (which may have been mentioned elsewhere by others) is that on the PC, the scoreboard stays up when it's game over, and you can review your progress. On the ipad, the scoreboard vanished instantly and the game began again. This is probably happening because on the PC I needed to click the screen to start, whereas on the ipad my fingers were already 'in touch' on the screen so it thought I was wanting to begin again.

This problem can easily by solved by putting a well positioned start button on the highscore menu, located away from the edges of the screen where the players fingers are likely in touch, rather than having it be 'touch anywhere' to begin.