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ynbniar

Excellent games...there may not be many entries but there has clearly been a lot of work put in...

Agree that Mastermind has fantastic presentation but, for me, Battleships is the most fun  ;)

Superb artwork on Draco  :good:

Ian Price

Quote from: Nobiag on 2010-Feb-18
In my opinion Mastermind is by far the best game. Its the only one that looks really polished and feels like a "real" game. I'm very critical when it comes to details, polishing and the overall feel of a game, so i was a bit dissapointed with some of the games, but Mastermind looks really really good.

The only thing i would wish for in Mastermind are drag & drop controls, i think that would give the game a better feel.

I'm not sure I totally agree with your comments, but having "played" them all now, it would appear that all of the entrants could have done with a bit more development/testing time. An interesting collection of games. Well done and good luck to all entrants.  :good:
I came. I saw. I played.

FutureCow

Thanks to everyone who's commented on BattleShip so far. I'm surprised at the different results I'm hearing about from the same code across multiple machines. I'm not sure what steps I can take to resolve the issues to be honest.
Keep the comments coming - feel free to post me a PM if you don't want to clutter this thread.

Quote from: Nobiag on 2010-Feb-18
Its the only one that looks really polished and feels like a "real" game.

Nobiag, can you be a bit more specific? I spent weeks on the "polish" of BattleShip and making sure it played as much as possible like a computer version of the board game - as I'm sure others did on their games. I don't expect everyone to love my game by any means, but could you go into a little detail perhaps on what you thought the games were lacking? Feel free to PM me if you want to point out the specifics for BattleShip - constructive criticism will result in better games but without the details the developers are flying blind.

Congrats to everyone who entered!

hardyx

#18
I'm sorry because my entry is a bit poor. I'm a beginner in this language and I didn't have much free time, but I'm working to release a better version after the contest. The games are very fun and they put a lot of work on it. Good luck and thanks to all contestants. :)

Kitty Hello

FutureCow: If you want to work on your game (after the compo), the network player thing was quite unstable when I plyed with Moru yesterday of the internet. Great fun, btw!
The client sometimes (often) locked up.

FutureCow

Hi All,
Here's my thoughts - and they're just my opinion so feel free to ignore :D

All in all some good games there, and obviously a lot of work has gone into them.

4gewinnt : A Computer player would be a great improvement as would some way to turn the sound off.

Don't be angry human - I really like the 3D board but the dice roll needs to be 100 times faster. I'd like to see it take about 1/2 - 1 second to roll the dice rather than about 5. 1 or more computer players would be great too. It's a good 3D effect though.

Draco - The graphics on this game are great. I particularly LOVE that flame effect - how did you do it?!?! The music's great too! Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to play the game. I'd like to see some more instructions - why do you turn pieces around? What do the designs on the cards mean? Can you trap other players? Particularly - how do I find a piece of gold?

GameOfTheGoose - There seems to be a problem with rolling the dice - sometimes the pieces move a totally different number of pieces. Your board looks really nice.  I know you've said it's an early version of the game. For later versions you might like to think about - more than one human player, some simple sounds as the pieces move on the board, and filling out the instructions a bit. I suppose once you played it a few times you'd know what the squares meant (eg. black plane means go back to start) - but maybe you could write on each square what they do? Or put a little icon to indicate it or something?

Hungry hippos : Clicking the moving flashing spot is painful. It would be much more fun (and like the original button masher) to be able to mash a mouse button or the keyboard continually. 2 Players (or 3 or 4) on the one keyboard would've been awesome too. I assume it was designed with the iPhone in mind in which case the interface is probably works better. I love the blinking eyes - cute touch!

Mastermind : A well presented game here. Some suggestions - as you hover over a square on the board, maybe highlight which of the four position holes (the ones that get the black and white markets) that square refers to. It's missing from the help. I couldn't work it out. Based on my screenshot attached, I thought I had light blue and pink correct, but in the last one where I put blue and pink I only got one right. Am I missing something? The board looks great though I think it would be great if you could click and drag pieces on the board.

Parchis - I couldn't play see any way to play with a keyboard / mouse so couldn't test it sorry.

Stop Thief - I love the way the pieces move, that's a great effect. It's a bit glitchy with them walking off the screen and the screen not moving sometimes though. The game plays too slow for me. I think a speed setting would be a big improvement. Also, I'd like to be able to scroll the board out so I can see it

Gernot : In regards to the network game I thought I had most of the problems fixed. I knew it sometimes crashed but I would've guessed something like 5% of the time or less perhaps? The vast majority of test games I played worked without crashing - admittedly I was playing client and server on the one pc though. I'd like to see how another game has done the network side of things. I used a state machine with the server telling the client when to change states. I know it works, but it felt like there was a lot better way I could've done it.
I'm glad you had fun with it though! That was what I was hoping to hear people say about it!

[attachment deleted by admin]

Albert

#21
Quote from: FutureCow on 2010-Feb-19
Draco - The graphics on this game are great. I particularly LOVE that flame effect - how did you do it?!?! The music's great too! Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to play the game. I'd like to see some more instructions - why do you turn pieces around? What do the designs on the cards mean? Can you trap other players? Particularly - how do I find a piece of gold?
Hi!
I made flame effect with my own little particle engine written especially for Draco. That was the first time I wrote particle engine. Tutorial used: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2609.asp
The menu item Rules is missing as the descriptions of all the icons in shields, I ran out of time, sorry.
Brief rules of Draco:

  • The goal is to collect a specified amount of gold (you can adjust how many)
  • You get a gold coin if you step into a chamber which has a shield icon with a gold coin on it.
  • There are a lot of shield with various icons, like steal a coin from next/prev player, rotate or destroy a roomcard, teleport, shortcut, travelling room, controlling another player (misdirection) and so on.
  • Every turn you can choose: Move your hero or Place a card from your hand to the table.
  • A room's arrows must not to point against an adjacent room's arrows. You can imagine it as the Hero enters a room the gate/door is slam to and cannot return to the previous room.
The game forces you to play all the 6 players. Sorry for that, there was a serious bug, and i had to comment out the "How many players" menu. (you can see it in the source). I've catched that bug today, so I have a better version of Draco, but I can't build a full Draco game because I have only a Demo version of glBasic. And the 5 minutes time limit is a bit short to play a full Draco match. I can upload it anywhere and one can build with full glBasic license for himself.
You can check the original board game here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/23107/drakon-3rd-edition

EDIT: I've just realized that the entries in the Boardgamecompetition.rar not recompiled with the full SDK, most of them has the DEMO watermark on it.

Nobiag

@FutureCow
Sorry, i didn't want to offend you. I see there is a lot of hard work put into the other games. As i said, i'm just very critical when it comes to polishing and details. Your game does play like the board game, so theres not much bad stuff i could say about the gameplay. It's more the graphics that bother me.
In the mainmenu alone there are some issues in my opinion:
- The texts of the ship descriptions are positioned at a X Value of 0, so they hit the border of the window. Same thing for the headline.
- Most of the information about the ships is useless. I know it may be a nice idea to include those informations but it looks to complex on first sight and 90% of the players won't care about those numbers anyway (once they realize they are of no importance for the game).
- In addition to the last point, the info texts of the ships just dont look good. It's all in one font (no different colors, no different sizes), even the ships names. And they are placed right on the background. Oh and the ships change too fast to read all the information anyway.
- The mouse doesn't look that great either. There are little bright pixels on its edge.
- Overall the style of some buttons, fonts, the mouse, the headline of the game just doesn't fit completely.

You see its just litte things that bother me and i know many people don't care about stuff like that or at least don't write about it on the internet. Because they try to look at things as a whole and what i'm doing is often called nit-picking. But i believe that everyone recognizes those little flaws, at least subliminally. So you just feel theres something wrong.
Thats what i mean when i write that Mastermind feels good. It feels as a commercial/professional game that could be sold.

By the way: I am currently at a school (i dont know what the school form ist called in english) for graphic designers, so i am taught to see things like that and to nit-pick.  ;)


Quote from: FutureCow on 2010-Feb-19Mastermind : A well presented game here. Some suggestions - as you hover over a square on the board, maybe highlight which of the four position holes (the ones that get the black and white markets) that square refers to. It's missing from the help. I couldn't work it out. Based on my screenshot attached, I thought I had light blue and pink correct, but in the last one where I put blue and pink I only got one right. Am I missing something? The board looks great though I think it would be great if you could click and drag pieces on the board.

Isn't that the point of Mastermind? That you don't know which exact field the black and white markers refer to?

Moru

The look of games have gone badly wrong somewhere. To me it's all about playability. Good clues on what you need to do, easy to understand instructions and above all, it has to be fun to play. The visualy pleasing comes so low down on that ladder that it's not even mentioned. Most games you buy now just looks like someone went crazy with the art, copying someone elses idea, slimmed it down to just half of the original game and released it as a work of art. I don't call that professional...

Nobiag

#24
Quote from: Moru on 2010-Feb-19
The look of games have gone badly wrong somewhere. To me it's all about playability. Good clues on what you need to do, easy to understand instructions and above all, it has to be fun to play. The visualy pleasing comes so low down on that ladder that it's not even mentioned. Most games you buy now just looks like someone went crazy with the art, copying someone elses idea, slimmed it down to just half of the original game and released it as a work of art. I don't call that professional...

Fun is the most important thing of course, but for me those details and the look and feel of a game is part of the fun. A game that looks and feels cheap to me, has to have a very good gameplay concept with some new ideas to really entertain me anyway. And thats hard when you have games based on board games.
Ok this forum is about programming, not about game-design as a whole, i guess. You can see that just by looking at some of the games. And for One-Man-Productions they are ok and all, but this is a competition, you can win a wiz and there was plenty of time. Thats why i really expected to see more games as polished as Mastermind.
And dont get me wrong, i dont need what is called great graphics today. I like retro-style graphics for example. Programmers dont have to be great graphic artists, but when you plan to make a game all on your own, you have to work out a concept first, consider your own skills and should not set the goals too high. And then you should at least have a bit of sense for aesthetic looks and a nice feel.

oh and btw i think draco is ok too.

Neurox

My work is programming, GLBasic is for my hobby and little things.
In GLBasic forum there are over 1300 users but who write are 200 plus or minus.
This is not a polemic but only 9 users made a submission and the others ... destructive criticism ?
Yes, the level of the games aren't too high but this 9 programmers have made a game and the others 191 ?
I've dedicate my spare times to programming my game and the others ?

ponder people, ponder ;-)

Paolo
Paolo Borzini | paolo@borzini.it
The WhiteFly Software | www.thewhitefly.it
Service on line for screen printers | www.4pellicole.it

ynbniar

I understand what Nobiag is saying, I planned to finish my game 3 weeks before the deadline specifically to add polish.

I think perhaps Nobiag is underestimating the difficulty in 1 person writing a game...I did too!!!  ;)

I spent a lot of time on the graphics for the board, a lot longer than I expected and I still didn't finish...I'm pleased with the result though...it is true to the original...I also had pathfinding algorithms, CPU player AI and thief AI to write and debug...there is a lot of work in these games that is unseen.

As for time, I think it was fair, but "plenty of time" depends on the person...if you have nothing to do, yes 4 months is plenty but if you have to work, walk the dog, enjoy Christmas time can be fleeting.

I enjoyed writing this game and I hope to have a "polished" version soon.  :good:

Ian Price

Neurox - I think you are mistaken in believing that everything said here is negative criticism. I too congratulate each and every entrant.

I know just how difficult it is to actually create something in a short timescale for a competition (I won the GLBasic comp a couple of years back). I disagreed with Nobiag about his obvious graphical snobbery, as to me gameplay is and always has been everything. However, to be fair not all of these games are fully playable, hence my comment. There are numerous bugs and design flaws throughout, but these only show how difficult it is as a lone coder to re-create a classic game in such a short space of time - I'm pretty sure that given extra time, each entry would be significantly better.

There should be no criticism here of any games here, or of the coders. Each and every one should be thanked for putting in so much of your extremely valuable time and effort to increase the number of games produced with GLBasic.

THANKYOU  :)
I came. I saw. I played.

Neurox

[@FutureCow]
Quote
GameOfTheGoose - There seems to be a problem with rolling the dice - sometimes the pieces move a totally different number of pieces. Your board looks really nice.  I know you've said it's an early version of the game. For later versions you might like to think about - more than one human player, some simple sounds as the pieces move on the board, and filling out the instructions a bit. I suppose once you played it a few times you'd know what the squares meant (eg. black plane means go back to start) - but maybe you could write on each square what they do? Or put a little icon to indicate it or something?
Yes, you're right.
These are all changes / additions I need to put in the next version.
When my little free time permits.  =D

[@Ian Price]
No I am not mistaken, it demonstrates the constructive criticism of FutureCow, he understood clearly what is missing.

However, I'm very surprised to see so few games.  O_O
I expected that some very active programmers in messages to show their prowess but ...  :whistle:


Paolo
Paolo Borzini | paolo@borzini.it
The WhiteFly Software | www.thewhitefly.it
Service on line for screen printers | www.4pellicole.it

FutureCow

@Nobiag,
I've taken on board what you've written, thank you for the feedback. I think you may be using the term "polish" incorrectly (at least in my book anyway!  =D) - to me polish is all the little details that round out a game. They're not necessarily graphics. Polish includes things like getting all your sounds the same volume, having clear and concise instructions, making sure there's no icons getting chopped off or breaks in consistency. It does include graphics, but it doesn't mean graphics.

Having said that, while I may not agree on all your points (for example, the font for all the details on the ships was deliberately kept the same so as not to draw attention to facts that are interesting (all the details there are the real details!) but irrelevant to the gameplay. They were there simply to give a feel to the game so I didn't want to bring attention to them. I do take what you've written on board though, I appreciate you going to the effort to provide the feedback, and I will keep it in mind for the next game I write.
Thank you again.

Ian, thank you for your support of all the entrants.