Kids Next Door - Pirates Game

Hi Guys,

We have a new game which is just about to go live:

http://carto
on-network.skive.co.uk/site/

It's kind of a 3rd person shooter, but with pirates and
water pistols!

Default keys: arrows to move & turn, z & x to dodge
(strafe), space to fire. You can redefine them if you want
though.

There's six levels, and six types of weapons to collect.
Collect all the sweets in each room to open the door to the
next. You lose a life if you get completely soaked
(indicated by the meter on the right). You can run out of
ammo (water) and fill up at sinks. 

Note the fullscreen option on the title page.

As usual, any bug reports, gameplay criticisms or comments
of any kind are greatly appreciated!


- Ben


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Takes a long time to load but is pretty awesome.

I wish for quake style keys.


On Jan 18, 2007, at 1:39 PM, Duck wrote:

>
> Hi Guys,
>
> We have a new game which is just about to go live:
>
> http://carto
on-network.skive.co.uk/site/
>
> It's kind of a 3rd person shooter, but with pirates and
water pistols!
>
> Default keys: arrows to move & turn, z & x to
dodge (strafe), space  
> to fire. You can redefine them if you want though.
>
> There's six levels, and six types of weapons to
collect. Collect  
> all the sweets in each room to open the door to the
next. You lose  
> a life if you get completely soaked (indicated by the
meter on the  
> right). You can run out of ammo (water) and fill up at
sinks.
>
> Note the fullscreen option on the title page.
>
> As usual, any bug reports, gameplay criticisms or
comments of any  
> kind are greatly appreciated!
>
>
> - Ben
>
>
> _______________________
>  duck_at_robotduck.com
>    www.robotduck.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> dirGames-L mailing list  -  dirGames-Lnuttybar.drama.uga.edu
> http://nuttybar.drama.uga.edu/mailman/listinfo/dirgames
-l

- Zav
http://goat
s.com/store/zoom/internet.html

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Thursday, January 18, 2007, 8:07:06 PM, Alex wrote:

AZ> Takes a long time to load but is pretty awesome.
AZ> I wish for quake style keys.

Thanks 

You can redefine the keys, but I guess you mean
'mouse-look', right?


- Ben

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   www.robotduck.com   

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It looks and plays well. Here's some thoughts:

The arrow keys might turn you less quickly. You often get
into a 
situation where a brief key press turns you either side of
the pirate 
in front of you.

The sound off icon during the curved world loading screen
isn't 
useful, as the cursor is spinning at the time anyway. Is
there some 
way to do your loading without it being a tight repeat loop,
so that 
the sound off icon can then work?

A few times I sprayed a pirate completely through the wall.
One of 
them was holding a more advanced weapon I think, and so I
couldn't 
pick that one up.

I'm a few rooms into level five, and it claims I have one
sweet to 
find, but there is no sign of any. There are several water
tank 
weapons, but I can't pick those up.

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Take that Sticky Beard!

I liked it...very fun.

Gene

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Duck" <duckrobotduck.com>
To: "Alex Zavatone" <zavpublicmac.com>
Cc: "Director - Shockwave - and Flash Game
Production" 
<dirgames-lnuttybar.drama.uga.edu>
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2007 12:13 PM
Subject: Re[2]: [dirGames-L] Kids Next Door - Pirates Game


>
>
> Thursday, January 18, 2007, 8:07:06 PM, Alex wrote:
>
> AZ> Takes a long time to load but is pretty
awesome.
> AZ> I wish for quake style keys.
>
> Thanks 
>
> You can redefine the keys, but I guess you mean
'mouse-look', right?
>
>
> - Ben
>
> _______________________
> duck_at_robotduck.com
>   www.robotduck.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> dirGames-L mailing list  -  dirGames-Lnuttybar.drama.uga.edu
> http://nuttybar.drama.uga.edu/mailman/listinfo/dirgames
-l
> 


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Hi Ben,

Very nice game ! I like both the graphics and concept, and
it was fun enough for
me to play 'till I killed the big boss 

One problem I had while were very noticeable slowdowns, I
think the first one
occurred on level 3 in a part of the level where there is a
plane ? Taking the
items that were lying on the floor stopped it. 
Most others occured when a door opened and I approached it.

Those slowdowns seemed "not right" given how
smooth the game runs the rest of
the time. Picking up items seemed to help stopping most of
them if I remember
correctly. The biggest slowdown occured on the boss level,
it dropped to maybe
3 or 4 fps for quite a moment and after that there were a
few weird things
happening : I couldn't see my shots anymore, or just the
ones near my cannon...
very hard to describe for my french brain :P

I also noticed the "flame thrower" type weapon did
stay on the level even after
you picked it up (the tank part, floating in the air).

my setup : Celeron 3Ghz - 784MB RAM - GeForce6600 GT -
Firefox 1.5

great job still !

Matse


Selon Duck <duckrobotduck.com>:

> 
> Hi Guys,
> 
> We have a new game which is just about to go live:
> 
> http://carto
on-network.skive.co.uk/site/
> 
> It's kind of a 3rd person shooter, but with pirates and
water pistols!
> 
> Default keys: arrows to move & turn, z & x to
dodge (strafe), space to fire.
> You can redefine them if you want though.
> 
> There's six levels, and six types of weapons to
collect. Collect all the
> sweets in each room to open the door to the next. You
lose a life if you get
> completely soaked (indicated by the meter on the
right). You can run out of
> ammo (water) and fill up at sinks. 
> 
> Note the fullscreen option on the title page.
> 
> As usual, any bug reports, gameplay criticisms or
comments of any kind are
> greatly appreciated!
> 
> 
> - Ben
> 
> 
> _______________________
>  duck_at_robotduck.com 
>    www.robotduck.com   
> 
> _______________________________________________
> dirGames-L mailing list  -  dirGames-Lnuttybar.drama.uga.edu
> http://nuttybar.drama.uga.edu/mailman/listinfo/dirgames
-l
> 


-- 
Mathieu Sénidre
MatseMedia
Développement multimédia online/offline

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Hey Ben,
> As usual, any bug reports, gameplay criticisms or
comments of any kind are greatly appreciated!
>   
It worked fine for me. Only comments I have are the ones you
don't like 
to get at this stage , but here
we go none the less:

The loaderbar went past 100 for me. or at least past when I
thought the 
graphic meant to say when it was done.

I really like the cartoony style. It's a bit rare to see a
game where 
the actual ingame stuff looks a lot better than the cutscene
stuff.
I think the art style could have been more the same
troughout the game. 
The icon of the guy in the right bottom for instance, has a
lot less 
black outline than the guy himself. His colors are also
washed out. 
(maybe this has a gameplay reason that I didn't find yet, I
only played 
the first 3 levels). The backgrounds of the inbetween flash
scenes don't 
really look good either imho.

The wide fov works really nice. I'd like to see the camera
pointing 
slightly more forward instead of down like it does now.

Where the tree goes trough the house, you can look down, and
you can see 
the bottom of the "world", where the textures of
the trees that you see 
from the windows stop.

the music gets really old really quickly.

gameplay went very well, I don't miss having mouse look at
all, I think 
it works really well like this. I did got lost often, it
might be nice 
for guys like me to have an arrow pointing to the door that
just opened, 
maybe for just a few seconds.. I kept running back to where
I came from.

Alltough most comments might seem negative, I think it's a
really well 
done game, sweet graphics, and fun game play.

good job!

Lucas
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> I'm a few rooms into level five, and it claims I have
one sweet to find, 
> but there is no sign of any. There are several water
tank weapons, but I 
> can't pick those up.

I'm stuck on level 5 as well, with 1 sweet to go.

Overall it looks really nice - music got very tedious almost
immediately - I 
do wish people would spend more filesize on decent music -
at least 
something that doesn't loop within 10 seconds!

Controls were a bit twitcky, as in each key press moves /
rotates / 
sidesteps a bit much. I also found the curve to the sidestep
a bit 
disorientating but it does help in circling enemies I
suppose.

I did see quite a lot of visual glitches (ignoring the alpha
channel sorting 
stuff), notably overlaid planes (more noticable on level 4,
where whole 
large faces had the z-fighting issue) and vertices not
matching up (cracks 
in walls etc).
On the other hand, I ran it fullscreen at 1600x1200 which
may well make it 
look worse than it is at normal size. I second a 'return to
normal size' 
button - my CPU isn't very hot and some of the cutscenes
(particularly the 
intro) crawled, so I had to shrink the window manually.

Also, again probably an issue from the fullscreen thingy,
but I felt your 
time interpolating code wasn't very good - there were quite
a lot of times 
when the game simply slowed, both frame-rate-wise and
(seemingly) 
game-logic-wise. Are you assuming the game runs at a fixed
refresh rate? 
Frame-rate drops are almost impossible to prevent, but the
game should (to a 
certain degree) compensate.
While constant 60 fps is nicer than constant (say) 30 fps,
I'd actually 
prefer constant 30 fps (or lower) than the game slowing down
and speeding up 
which is quite disorientating.

Anyway, I really enjoyed it (until I got stuck on level 5),
liked the 
in-game style although I think some of the visuals could be
tightened up to 
remove the doubling, cracks, alpha sorting issues on scenery
(you can always 
do manual hacks like adding individual triangles further
away to 'force' a 
depth sorting), things like the sinks floating? The 2D stuff
didn't do the 
3D justice though for sure.

Great game, despite my seemingly long list of comments!

Barry
gerbiltheburrow.co.uk 

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Hi All,

Just wanted to say thanks for all the comments regarding the
'Kids Next Door' water fight game. All very valuable, and
even though the game was almost out the door, I was able to
squeeze in a few fixes and improvements based on your
feedback, most notably:

* Directional indicator pointing towards next
baddie/sweet/door

* Water tanks now dissapear when you collect the weapon with
the backpack water tank.

* Few collision bugs fixed

* The keep-firing-while-filling-up-by-sink cheat is fixed

* Game should no longer lose count of sweets, I think... not
entirely sure though, because I couldn't directly reproduce
this bug that was reported, but I found a big which made the
game lose track of which room you were in which may have
been causing it.

Anyway, thanks again everybody, for playtesting and for all
the feedback.


- Ben

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