First flash game, feedback please

[justkevin]

My first Flash game in now in a fully playable state (minus sound) and I would appreciate any feedback:

http://lab.wx3.com/defender/

Screenshot:

http://lab.wx3.com/defender/screenshot2bc.jpg

I wrote it as an exercise to learn ActionScript/Flash, and as a first program, I'm fairly happy with the results. It's a "tower defense" style game where the player must defend Earth from various approaching alien craft. The graphics are mostly done using bitmap manipulation, which seems to be a bit of a departure from the more common vector style graphics in these games, but allow for some (I think) cool effects.

Any responses would be great, but particularly I'm interested in:
How does it run on your machine?
What other features do you feel it needs to be a successful game?
Is the interface intuitive?
Most importantly, is it fun?

Thanks a lot!

[biznuge]

nice. really addicitve. Would maybe consider giving some tooltips for the beginner, on upgrading, and what research does etc, but it's a cracking start. won on easy, then got defeated on normal. not sure i fully understood how my people were dying, and whether i used them up by building things???

Very nice.:nerd:

[t0w]

It's truly awesome for a first game.

I think it would be pretty cool if the globe spun around.
I think it would be nice to have a very small tutorial where it shows a build item being placed on the squares. More of an emphasis on research and more possibilities for a fail state without teching up would also be cool.

Excellent job!

[Sirisian]

The easy mode is a tad too easy. I mean you can win with like 2 cannons basically I imagine. Very addictive and fun nevertheless.

[justkevin]

Thanks for the comments so far, very helpful. I meant for easy to be really easy, but I guess I went too far.

I was thinking that keep the game interface clean, adding a tutorial and help to the webpage its in would be better than putting it in game, but maybe not.

Again, thanks for suggestions and any additional input would be appreciated.

[Iamthejuggler]

Wow. that was fantastic for a first game. Short and too easy, but damn well done :D

edit: Out of interest do the missiles do splash damage? (veteran TD player here :D)

[Sirisian]

Actually the normal was too easy. I think it has to to with the unlimited money after a few moments of playing. The repair thing isn't useful. At the end of the game I had all the little squares with fully upgraded missiles. I love these kinds of games. Once it's balanced I'm sure it will be even more awesome.

Also instead of just a final wave. Why not like a super boss?

[Iamthejuggler]

Yeah. The economic upgrades are too powerful. This screenshot is from near the end of the normal difficulty.

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a324/iamthejuggler/spaceFight.jpg

I hadn't done anything for ages ... just sat their watching the pretty missiles!

[justkevin]

Wow. that was fantastic for a first game. Short and too easy, but damn well done :D

edit: Out of interest do the missiles do splash damage? (veteran TD player here :D)

Thanks a lot!

No missiles don't splash.

In-game reason: The game space is a visually compressed representation of a much larger real space and due to the inverse cube dispersion of energy, damage doesn't reach other targets.

Real reason: For performance reason every projectile only needs to worry about a single target. If it needed to calculate range to all possible targets, the game would either be too slow or I'd have to give up some eye candy.

[justkevin]

Yeah. The economic upgrades are too powerful. This screenshot is from near the end of the normal difficulty.

I hadn't done anything for ages ... just sat their watching the pretty missiles!

Good suggestion. I've changed it so that Econ Centers give less money, and it's now a function of how big your population is, like general revenue. After some tweaking the enemy waves, it seems much less easy on normal.

[cooldude88]

Wow amazing for a first game i found though that easy was to short to really get anywhere in upgrades but very comical death message enjoyed that once the shield ships came in on normal i was done for:rabbit:

[Sirisian]

Did you change it for the upgraded economic buildings? I beat normal again very easily (upgraded all my missile silos on the map). Make a hard level please :) It's very addicting. The shields get destroyed way too easily and the enemy ships need like multiple rail guns.

OH and the bigger ships need counter measures against missiles. That would make the guns useful again. Still haven't seen a reason for the repair place. Maybe make really strong shields on some of them and make an EMP gun. (kind of like the slow gun in most TD games, but this one would just weaken shields and do no damage.

[Gathan]

Very nice good job.
I really wish though there was a hard mode, I found normal a little too easy myself.
Also I kept expecting some final boss ship to come in at the end, but that never happened.
If possible could you put in a really big boss ship at the end, if so that would be great:thumb:

[justkevin]

Very nice good job.
I really wish though there was a hard mode, I found normal a little too easy myself.
Also I kept expecting some final boss ship to come in at the end, but that never happened.
If possible could you put in a really big boss ship at the end, if so that would be great:thumb:

A final boss on normal is a good idea, it's just a bit of work. Art is not my strong suit, so coming up with a good looking final ship takes some time.

Once I have a final boss for normal, I can make a "hard" setting.

[justkevin]

Did you change it for the upgraded economic buildings? I beat normal again very easily (upgraded all my missile silos on the map). Make a hard level please :) It's very addicting. The shields get destroyed way too easily and the enemy ships need like multiple rail guns.

OH and the bigger ships need counter measures against missiles. That would make the guns useful again. Still haven't seen a reason for the repair place. Maybe make really strong shields on some of them and make an EMP gun. (kind of like the slow gun in most TD games, but this one would just weaken shields and do no damage.

I'm surprised it's still too easy-- I can beat normal, but not without repair centers. What strategy are you using to beat the game? It's possible you may be playing a cached version-- you can tell if you're using the new econ model if the buildings say their revenue is $0.00x per million instead of a flat rate.

EMP isn't a bad idea. I suppose the solution to give Ion cannons more value is a wave with lots of small ships.

[theRemix]

amazing!

couple of suggestions, errr wish list items.

- score keeper, or even better a high score list
- when defeated, a reset button
- hard mode


ok gonna try again to make it as far as juggler

great job man!

[Sirisian]

Oh you just build a fortified thing in the center then put a turrent above it and one to the left and right. Sit back and research economics then upgrade the fortify building. Then build an economics building below the fortify. Then sit back and research missile or upgrade the top building. It goes to 100% health when upgraded I believe getting rid of it's accumulated damage. Then build 2 more economics and build a missile base on the top left of the fortify. Then just build economics and build another missile missile thing on the top right. Upgrade your turrets a little and and the missile things and just start building tons of missile launchers to fill the map and build a whole row of economics building along the bottom. Then upgrade them all and upgrade everything else.

The economics building is like 0.002 but when you upgrade it it says $5 B. I deleted my cache before playing.

[justkevin]

Based on feedback from everyone above, I've made some updates to the game:


Added a "Dreadnought" final boss to Normal difficulty
Added a high score board using MochiAds' system
Added a hard difficulty
Made some small changes to easy/normal difficulty settingsLet me know what you think about the new version, particularly the hard setting.

[GamerSaga]

For a first flash game I think it is great :) The only thing I will have to say is I didn't have a clue on what to do.

[edicius81]

Fantastic first game :) Well done
it took a couple of goes but i beat it on normal.

A few suggestions...
1 If the enemies had energy bars it might give a better idea to new players when they would need to upgrade
2 Make certain enemies immune to missiles. It would make balancing the building more challenging
3 Add a tutorial movie making it clearer what each unit does and why it is there
4 Instead of giving guns infinite range, make it necessary to research an 'outpost' or two to put guns higher up the playing field

All a matter of taste of course :)

[Iamthejuggler]

Based on feedback from everyone above, I've made some updates to the game:


Added a "Dreadnought" final boss to Normal difficulty
Added a high score board using MochiAds' system
Added a hard difficulty
Made some small changes to easy/normal difficulty settingsLet me know what you think about the new version, particularly the hard setting.

Ok hard is now rather hard. Haven't been able to beat it yet! Great work though. I think enemy health bars would be good, with a toggle ability like in other tower defense games. Also the range of the turrets is pretty small, but then maybe that's the point.

[Sirisian]

4 Instead of giving guns infinite range, make it necessary to research an 'outpost' or two to put guns higher up the playing field
a sattelite defense system. Like a shield to stop a percentage of bullets in a small circular area would be neat.

Also yeah I haven't been able to beat hard either. I know there might be a way, but it gets pretty hard which is just how it should be.

[justkevin]

Some really good suggestions. Right now, I'm going to focus on fixing any bugs I find, getting sound working, and preparing a final version for general release.

But I'll keep a feature wishlist so I know what to add for the next version.

[Iamthejuggler]

Damnit i can't even beat normal anymore. I just lose so many population when the huge waves of small enemies arrive. Gonna try again.

In other words the game is ****ing addictive. good job!

edit: It's changed again, now normal is too easy again lol. Balancing this kinda game is pretty hard!

[Iamthejuggler]

Even hard is now too easy. I had all the spots filled all upgraded and then it crashed my firefox. No idea why, it was the only tab open though apart from kirupa.

[Sirisian]

yeah keep balancing it. All of the levels are too easy now. I liked when it was "impossible". But yeah adding more things would add more strategy. At the moment missiles are so much better than turrets that turrets have no purpose. In order to make them equal give them advantages that the player must learn.

[justkevin]

There was a test version that slipped out where the player started with $2000 B, instead of $200 B, which maybe seemed too easy.

While waiting to find out about permission for a music track, I'm looking into adding maybe one or two more features for game balance. Nothing definite, but I'm considering anti-missile lasers for both Alien and Human to balance out the advantage of upgraded missiles.

[Iamthejuggler]

I think maybe $200 B is slightly low. But yeah $2000 B was far too much. Maybe $300-400 B? It's nice not to be scrounging in the first stages of the game.

[gregmax]

Holy cow, this is simply amazing - really addicting. May I ask where you learned how to do such a complex game that involves a lot of movement on stage (links, books - preferably). Great job, and if this is your first one, I can't wait to see what the next one will be.

[Sirisian]

It's just bitmap rendering with pixels and a separate bitmap that he draws the smoke too. Same effect used in most fireworks in flash.

The idea is to render the smoke to a bitmapdata and fade it out or blur it and draw it back onto itself. I had an example somewhere, but I'm not sure.

Also pixel rendering is extremely fast on bitmapdata:
http://www.assaultwars.com/flash/pg2/pg2b.html

You'll find tons of things about bitmap data if you search on this site. There's some random ones on how to correctly handle rotating objects too. Remember that it's all about the fill rate. Drawing small objects is very very quick.

[justkevin]

Holy cow, this is simply amazing - really addicting. May I ask where you learned how to do such a complex game that involves a lot of movement on stage (links, books - preferably). Great job, and if this is your first one, I can't wait to see what the next one will be.

Thanks for the positive feedback!

Sirisian is correct, the game can handle a lot of on screen action by drawing directly to a bitmap. Actually, two bitmaps. One bitmap that is cleared every frame where particles and frame based animations are drawn to using either setPixel32 (for particles) or copyPixels (for animations like ship explosions). This is very fast. A second bitmap never clears-- instead it is faded by applying a BlurFilter. This is what creates the cool smoke trails effect. Virtually all of the CPU usage in the game occurs in a single call to BlurFilter. The function is so CPU intensive that I only call it every other frame.

So while it looks like there are a lot of Sprites on screen, there are only a few, and these don't do much moving.

My #1 resource for learning ActionScript was Colin Moock's "Essential Actionscript 3.0" published by O'Reilly. My #2 resource was Adobe's online reference for the language.

Thanks again, and I hope to have a "release candidate" up today or tomorrow.

[justkevin]

Okay, v 1.07 is up. This version features a music score by Puggin, full weapons sounds, anti-missile lasers, and tweaked game balance. Let me know what you think, I'm hoping to give this version a wider release if there are no major bugs found.

[Iamthejuggler]

Love the music (does the author have a website?). Missile defence (and that on the enemy ships) is awesome, and i like the sound it makes. The music playing bugged out on me after i paused the game though so i had to turn it off. Balance also seems to be getting there. Haven't been able to play too much because of work, but all in all it is really looking very good all around. :D

edit: It would be nice to turn the music off, but keep the sound effects. I like the music but after a few goes it gets a bit boring.

And hard is just right so far. Still haven't beaten it after 2 tries but it doesn't feel impossible.

[Iamthejuggler]

Woohoo. beat hard on the fourth try.
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a324/iamthejuggler/hardbeaten1.jpg

How is the score calculated? Because I got ~50k and someone has about 78k. Was just wondering what was used to calculate that (so that i can go back and beat the bugger :D)

[Iamthejuggler]

One more thing. I just beat it on hard without using any missiles or repair thingies, just to see if you could. When i hit submit it got stuck on the screen below:

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a324/iamthejuggler/hardbeaten2.jpg

It has been on it for about 10 minutes so i assume the call to "submit" timed out. You need to have something to handle this eventuality.

[rumblesushi]

Very, very impressive for a first game.

What is your background Kevin?

[justkevin]

One more thing. I just beat it on hard without using any missiles or repair thingies, just to see if you could. When i hit submit it got stuck on the screen below:


It has been on it for about 10 minutes so i assume the call to "submit" timed out. You need to have something to handle this eventuality.

The high score leaderboard is handled by MochiAds, I'm guessing the problem may have been caused by a problem connecting to their servers.

[justkevin]

Very, very impressive for a first game.

What is your background Kevin?

Thanks a lot!

I've been doing web development for the past 10 years, but almost exclusively with server-side programming such as PHP. I experimented with AJAX a bit last year, but this is my first foray into client-side graphical programming.

The things that helped the most in development was a good familiarity with OOP, plus once I start working on a project I get quite obsessive with it.

[justkevin]

Okay, I've uploaded a new version. This one adds:


Planet Shields, protect planet from most incoming energy attacks (not missiles).
Added "apocalypse" difficulty level. Haven't beaten this yet myself (hopefully it's possible).
Made changes to normal and hard difficulty waves.
Increased "near" effect of repair centers.
Decreased economy bonus of both Adv. Economics and Economy Centers by 20%.I'm hoping to submit the game to some of the major portals in the next few days, so let me know what you think of this version if you get a chance!

[Iamthejuggler]

You're gonna get me fired! I can't resist the game, even when at work. Must resist!

[Charleh]

Yeah this ones good stuff, I liked the premise and graphics were good, it doesn't have a great amount of depth but I think if you put too much in a game you complicate things and the playability suffers - maybe make it so that some ships are more susceptible to guns than nukes - I had a full screen of nukes and the little ships that come out the big ships don't get shot at by the nukes, but they hardly do any damage to your planet so you can leave them to just blow up on their own!

Good game, really good for your first! Well done!

[Iamthejuggler]

Woohoo. Just got the #1 all time score on hard. 85,110. I love this game :D

And yes i know it's hardly a great thing seeing as you haven't really released it yet, but anyway. yay!

[justkevin]

Woohoo. Just got the #1 all time score on hard. 85,110. I love this game :D

And yes i know it's hardly a great thing seeing as you haven't really released it yet, but anyway. yay!

Didn't you say you were supposed to be working? :)

Thanks much, though! Feedback like that makes me want to improve the game more.

[Iamthejuggler]

Hehe. I got home from work. First thing i did was load up the game :) Still curious how the score is calculated though, because unless it has changed in the last build i won that last game with fewer population and money than in previous games, but got a higher score.

I assume you changed the way the score is calculated in the previous release?

edit: Oh and i emailed it to a friend who says he is also now hooked. I have always loved TD type games, but this is the first that ends before it gets so laggy you can't see what is going on!

[Gathan]

It looks like the alien hordes in apocalypse didn't bring enough ships:)
http://jared4481.googlepages.com/apocalypsebeaten.PNG

[justkevin]

It looks like the alien hordes in apocalypse didn't bring enough ships:)


I haven't even beaten Apocalypse without cheating yet :thumb2:. I'm thinking of maybe creating one last boss for Apocalypse for anyone who makes it that far.

[Iamthejuggler]

You have no defense bunkers? Whenever i try that my pop just dies so quickly.

Apocolypse level is bloody hard!

[justkevin]

Thanks for the input and suggestions from everyone who played PlanetDefender. Version 1.12 is the official "release" version, up on Newgrounds:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/438297

This version features a new final boss and slightly different ending on Apocalypse. If you enjoyed play testing the game, I'd appreciate it if you voted for it on newgrounds or gave it review.

Thanks again for all the feedback!