Beyond Negotiation

[h3ckboy]

amazing game!!! I was shocked and amazed when I played it. are you only a hobbyist?

[Scarzzurs]

Heh, I'll take that as a compliment.
But yeah, making games is my hobby.

I'd like to make money from my products, but that have failed so far.
I haven't earned anything, but i haven't spend that much either, so i guess it's ok...

Anyways, all comments and suggestions are welcome :-)

- Scarzzurs

[h3ckboy]

you may want to have misiles. but they can only be used every once and a while.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Eli Delventhal]

Pretty fun! However, when I press esc it shouldn't quit the entire game and force me to restart. 

[Scarzzurs]

@Demonpants:
Thanks. Yeah, you are right, i'll look into it soon :-)

@h3ckboy:
Hmm yeah. I don't want to have activated weapons though, so i'd have to be activated periodicly or something similar...
Thanks for the suggestion :-)

- Scarzzurs

[mh114]

Very nice game, I enjoyed playing it - got (barely) to TOP 10 on my first try!  I will play it again, for sure. Only problem was that the game was running quite slowly.. It worked somewhat smoothly when there was only my ship and no bullets on screen. Whenever there was some action, it got quite choppy, I'd guess below 20 fps or atleast way below 30. It made playing a bit difficult, unfortunately. The screens between stages were the slowest, but since you had some heavy alpha blending going on it's no wonder.. You're not using OpenGL, right? Perhaps it would be faster on Windows (as the 2d gfx accelerations tend to work better there), I'm currently in Linux.

What does the cache gfx option do in this case? I tried it, but it didn't seem to make much difference. I noticed some of the explosions were different (and not transclucent).

I would suggest you add more variety to the background, like some nebulae / space dust clouds drifting around. If the game was running in pure OpenGL, that wouldn't be a problem, but I can see it degrading the performance quite a lot otherwise (I was thinking of alpha blended clouds). I used something like that in my game Funguloids (ok, it was C++ and Ogre3d, but anyway ) and it looked quite nice in motion, if I may say so myself.

Anyways, keep up the good work! It's a nice game.

[Scarzzurs]

Hey mh114

Thanks for your feedback. Glad you like it :-)

It's a shame it doesn't run better on your machine. However, since you are running linux, i think it might be a good idea to try the OpenGL version of the game. Atleast all the symptoms you mention are often cured when running that version. I'd like to hear if it improves the performance if you test it :-)

The "Cache GFX" option stores tranformed images to try to improve performance. However when using the OpenGL pipeline or something like it, performance actually seems to decrease. So this option will most likely be removed in future versions. And since you don't experience much of a performance game it is even more likely to happen soon.
The explosions introduced in later versions doesn't work well with caching, so that's why they look different in the two versions.

I absolutely agree about the background. I have been planning it for a while, but due to the current story-line it didn't seem like such a great idea. However now that you remind me of it, i think i'll rewrite the story and change scenery every once in a while. :-)
I'll be sure to check out your game, sounds like you have some good ideas :-)

Again, thanks alot for taking the time to provide feedback :-)

- Scarzzurs

[mh114]

It's a shame it doesn't run better on your machine. However, since you are running linux, i think it might be a good idea to try the OpenGL version of the game. Atleast all the symptoms you mention are often cured when running that version. I'd like to hear if it improves the performance if you test it :-)

Darn, did you just add the OpenGL version or have I managed not to see it before..? Either way, it works much better, only stuttering occasionally. My second play was much better as the game ran smoother, managed to get to the 3rd place.. Perhaps you could even make the OpenGL pipelined version the default?

I absolutely agree about the background. I have been planning it for a while, but due to the current story-line it didn't seem like such a great idea. However now that you remind me of it, i think i'll rewrite the story and change scenery every once in a while. :-)
I'll be sure to check out your game, sounds like you have some good ideas :-)

Another idea which might (or might not) improve your game is wrapping play area. So the area is limitless in a sense, you can fly straight endlessly and the game world keeps repeating around you. It would make the game easier though, as you couldn't get cornered anymore, so I don't know.

Again, thanks alot for taking the time to provide feedback :-)

No problem, it's a great game.

[h3ckboy]

my friend saw me play and he likes it.

[Scarzzurs]

@mh114:
The OpenGL version has been there for longer than i can remember, but perhaps i need to make it more visible...
I'm glad to hear that it works better now. :-)
I can't make it the default version though, as on certain machines (mine f.x.) the user will get invisible windows and whatnot. Hopefully Sun will make it the default pipeline or come up with something similiar for more systems in the future...

About extending play-area, possible through wrapping, i've tried it early in development, and it didn't seem very good. The problem was, like you said, that you couldn't get corned. I tried adding a "base" you had to protect, but this didn't work very well either. Thanks for the suggestion though :-)

@h3ckboy:
Good to hear :-)

- Scarzzurs

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Cero]

btw the ship that drops mines, are insanely laggy in terms of sound, when they appear you can basically forget about sound, and when they dissapear all the sound that would play back then plays now... all together ^^

btw note the highscores =P

[Scarzzurs]

Hey Cero.

Concerning sound: Yeah, i noticed that aswell. I did a fix that i have yet to upload, will try to upload soon. Thanks for noticing however, it could have taken me a long time to realize it. :-)

Good work on the highscore. I'll have to see if i can beat it before i upload a new version of the game. :-)

- Scarzzurs

[Cero]

you might wanna take a look at this game

http://gamejolt.com/games/action/voidgale-arena/68/

in case you are still working on Beyond Negotiation

[Scarzzurs]

Hey again.

Thanks for the link, i'll take a look later.

Concerning BN i fear that the gameplay isn't worth putting anymore work into.
At the same time i'm now working on a school project using the same game engine as used in BN. That means that i'm still working on stuff that will improve BN in the future (I recently implemented a working JOAL audio engine for the game engine). But it also means that i have less time and motivation to code on my private projects for the moment...

I'm still open to suggestions though, if nothing else, it will be something i can bring to my next project. :-)

- Scarzzurs

[Cero]

dont ask me, if you would ask me
I would always suggest for an ambitious story-game project

I think one should not waste all that time for just a minigame of that no one really thinks of and stuff

just my thoughts =P