[DEMO] Interstellar Quest

[Tanikaze]

Hi devs!

 

Finally after sweat and fun (I fear the blood will come trying to make it mobile-friendly...), the demo of Interstellar Quest project is up and running!

 

Lost in the deep space, can you find the way home?

Collect credits, avoid dangers and find wormholes to reach the safety of your planet, but beware! Your fickle ship will not be easy to pilot, and something other than asteroids would endanger your journey.

 

Interstellar Quest is a side-scrolling avoid&collect game. The objective is reach the home planet. The peculiar feature is that the ship will never hold the position: it will always go up or down, and the player can just invert hit. He can hold the position for a limited time, but after the ability will need time to recharge. In the full version, wormholes will separate different areas with different difficult and income levels, and act as checkpoint with the proper upgrade.

 

You can try it at http://prototypesquare.altervista.org/games/interstellarquest/

 

Feel free, in fact please share comments and tips. I'm interested especially about the art (that I've done myself) and the audio (that I've take from opengameart.org). My primary concern is that the game feels good as a whole, and that the various assets stick well together.

 

EDIT: I choosed to improve this little demo with your best tips, alongside the main develop of IQ. Here a list of the small changes:

1) Difficult lowered. Cause also demo have the right to be enjoyed!

2) Small graphical edits, down you can found the new screeshots

3) Improved tutorial

 

Now stop loafing around and let's collect some credits!

 

 

 

[AzraelTycka]

Hello,

 

I tried playing your game, got around 400 points a few times then wanted to throw my mouse through my monitor's screen. :-)

 

@ music / sound:

Well I kinda didn't like it but that might be because I heard the beginning numerous times (AAgghhh!!), just a little then. There is a very low volume sound when changing course of the ship, in comparison to music or explosion sound it's really weak. For me it just feals weird when sound levels are not leveled together.

 

@ art:

Hmm. Kinda liked it more from pictures. It just feels a little bit poor - I mean that background is a huge asset in your case but there is basically nothing happening (except stars and I'll get to them in a moment). It's such a shame, you could add a little bit of mist, planets, suns, whatever to make it more colorful. Now to stars. If nothing else I would change the size of stars, if you are randomly generating their positions check how the whole thing would look with random scaling as well. Adding to this one more thing, how abotu preparing a set of asteroids which have different colors / shades ( / shapes / how about scaling them a bit more too)? Right now your game just feels too uniform for me.

 

Well but I really have to ask, what is that yellow gloving thing you are supposed to collect and what the heck is that red up and down bouncing thing? :-) That yellow and red things felt a little bit out of place for me (perhaps just because I don't get what it's supposed to be) - can you scale / rotate the red thing the same way as your rocks to make it look like the scenery is changing a bit more as well?

 

Also in tutorial perhaps letting the ship stay in one place until most of the bar is filled would feel better, At first I didn't even notice that the ship stopped for a moment - not until I read about it here in your post ;-).

 

Well now it seems like I don't like your game, but that's not it, I actually like how you made it so please don't curse me there's just a few things that I think could make it a bit more nicer that's all xD.

[Tanikaze]

Thanks for the review, it was really helpful. Let's try to reply.

 

I tried playing your game, got around 400 points a few times then wanted to throw my mouse through my monitor's screen. :-)

Yeah, me too during testing, multiple times ;-). With upgrades, it's kinda like die, upgrade, go a bit further, repeat. The demo has no progression, so I picked an arbitrary difficult. It's high 'cause play more than a few seconds with a limited number of assets it's a bit boring.

 

@ music / sound:

Well I kinda didn't like it but that might be because I heard the beginning numerous times (AAgghhh!!), just a little then. There is a very low volume sound when changing course of the ship, in comparison to music or explosion sound it's really weak. For me it just feals weird when sound levels are not leveled together.

Right, I'm working with the equalizer, but it isn't really my strength...

 

 

@ art:

Hmm. Kinda liked it more from pictures. It just feels a little bit poor - I mean that background is a huge asset in your case but there is basically nothing happening (except stars and I'll get to them in a moment). It's such a shame, you could add a little bit of mist, planets, suns, whatever to make it more colorful. Now to stars. If nothing else I would change the size of stars, if you are randomly generating their positions check how the whole thing would look with random scaling as well. Adding to this one more thing, how abotu preparing a set of asteroids which have different colors / shades ( / shapes / how about scaling them a bit more too)? Right now your game just feels too uniform for me.

I have to admit, I thought that of all the art the bg was the one with least problem. Would be cool add a bunch of things like you said, but i feared that it would become too messy. On the other and, dark elements in the bg would not interfere with bright objects on the stage. Maybe it means adjust colors on my current assets, but at this stage that could be done.

Stars are two simple tileSprites in parallax, so randomize the stars dimensions would not be a problem (god bless inkscape's spray)

I've already create multiple sets of asteroids (also, in the demo there are two different sprite for the asteroids, but probably the image is too similar), but I never thought someone would play the demo for so long :-). Anyway this is really helpful, it means that probably the level of differentiation/randomization I thought was enough probably isn't.

 

 

 

Well but I really have to ask, what is that yellow gloving thing you are supposed to collect and what the heck is that red up and down bouncing thing? :-) That yellow and red things felt a little bit out of place for me (perhaps just because I don't get what it's supposed to be) - can you scale / rotate the red thing the same way as your rocks to make it look like the scenery is changing a bit more as well?

They are like a money-full-bag-stuff-ish... this is the kind of things that you never consider between a tricky physics bug and a flying anim that is too sloppy. Probably I will replace it with a good old supply box with a credit symbol on it. The red thing actually has an eye on it that follow the ship, but it's too small to be noticed, i will fix it.

 

Also in tutorial perhaps letting the ship stay in one place until most of the bar is filled would feel better, At first I didn't even notice that the ship stopped for a moment - not until I read about it here in your post ;-).

Thanks, this is important. Tutorials are the worst to implements :-(

 

Really, really thanks for the help!

[Skeptron]

The game is pretty well done, but I haven't been far : it's f***ing hard! Anyways good job! The art is simple but more than enough : too much details would just add noise to the seen and the player would loose focus. Controls are not intuitive but provide something new.

 

Maybe a better level design would be a big plus : level 1 doesn't need to be that difficult! Slowly increase the difficulty or you will loose 99% of your players after 30s of testing.

 

But that's just my opinion.

[Tanikaze]

The game is pretty well done, but I haven't been far : it's f***ing hard! Anyways good job! The art is simple but more than enough : too much details would just add noise to the seen and the player would loose focus. Controls are not intuitive but provide something new.

Maybe a better level design would be a big plus : level 1 doesn't need to be that difficult! Slowly increase the difficulty or you will loose 99% of your players after 30s of testing.

But that's just my opinion.

Thanks. I thought a demo didn't need a difficult progression system, but almost all of my tester said the same thing: too difficult. I will lower it with other small edits to have it be more enjoyable