ArcherFire, closing a cycle

Back on 2002, I made a shooter game in QBasic. It was awesome, and boring.

On 2012, thinking on doing a different kind of game than the usual roguelike / turn based / complex thing, (and since I had a Flash programmer available) I thought on rebooting it.

It was to be a short, less than one month project, but it was not. I ended up pooling a lot of resources and time into its development, having it as the spearhead of my efforts to enter the modern social gaming arena.

Lots of things happened, and situation is very different today, I no longer have the resources at hand I once had, but I still can’t let all this work be wasted.

So, it’s time to close a cycle.

I am going to finish this game, I am going to blow all the unneeded unfinished stuff, and turn it into a simpler, more enjoyable experience.

I’m starting with this feedback I got from the nice FGL guys. If you have any comments that could help me on this, you are welcome!

Hmmm, this one has SOOO much stuff going for it. I love the look and the wingman concept. The art is cool and the music is 8bit dopeness. I did feel the enemies were paced oddly. Many times their shots traveled at nearly the same speed they did which made it odd to see. Not that is was bad, just odd. Many of the grey boss ships were like that. Firing shuriken like shots in a line in front of them. Seriously though – this game has a ton of potential and the goodness only highlights little things that seems less polished. There seemed to be missing music on the death screen and other screens (maybe it was just my browser). You should be super proud overall though – great stuff and best of luck. Your game is a huge effort and looks good!

That is pretty awesome. I was a bit overwhelmed by the options, and I tried to collect the purple death orbs, but I can see if I was a real gamer this would be a hit!

The gameplay itself seems fun, for the very limited time I was able to play anyway. The only comment I have about the gameplay is that I really want the missles that the enemies shoot to be able to be destroyed by me shooting at them. Also, I really love the whole screen shaking when the ship gets hit, but it goes on for about twice as long as it needs to. The first half of the effect is cool, but the second half of it is just annoying and distracting. So making that shorter should help a lot. Other than that though it seems pretty fun! 🙂

Unfortunately, I feel as though it takes too long to get to the actual gameplay once the game is started. It took me about a minute, and in that time most players are going to get bored, especially because it’s all sorta overwheling since we don’t know how good the game is when we’re making all of these hard decisions. It felt like I was just guessing through what I would want my ship and pilot to be because I didn’t know what the gameplay was like. It would be cool to have a test level where players could go and play through and then change their ship or pilot during the level to see what one they would like.

-Main menu should have music.
-There are no instructions on shooting.
-Mute should not restart audio.
-A way to return to the main menu needed.
-Music and sfx are loud.
-Mute should mute sfx too.

Since the idea is to NOT add new things, I’m putting myself a time limit of 1 week to have this done.