   First game  -  Feedback required
  It's a game (7Mb) that me and two artists have been working at for some time now.It's a 'build your city' game. Don't start laughing when you lauch it, it's intended for children aged 4-8 years.Your opinions and comments are welcomed.[Edited by - Calin on January 7, 2006 3:56:48 PM]
  Hey,I would try it out, but I don't have WinRar.  Sorry.  The screenshot that I saw though, looks cool though!Chad.   ;  I've moved this over to 'Your Announcements' as it's a more suitable place. The DirectX forums are more for technical/coding related questions.Congrats on getting a game finished - the screenshot does look pretty good to me [smile]Cheers,Jack   ;  I'm not nessisarily a critique, but it does seem pretty good for a first game. A few issues I notice is the animating water gets jaged against the sand. It could use a little user interface refinement (even if it is for younger children. It's not bad, but it could use some work :) (It took me a bit to figure out hwo to rotate and move objects, and when you move buildings and such it now longer follows the grid like placement, so it makes it hard to make circular buildings, etc)On my machine, I got about 200fps with nothing on the screen except the basic interface. Placing lots of things around the screen put me about 103fps.My hardware:P4 2.40ghz512MB DDRGeForce 6600 GT   ;  Thanks for your input!Flimflam:    I'm aware of that jaged water problem, I can't find though a solution that wouldn't crash down the FPS rates. I might end up using some render to texture method instead of moving polygons.Quote: It could use a little user interface refinement.   I was planing to work on that snap to grid issue . As for interface as a whole, we tried to make it as intuitive as possible. I can't think at any obvious enhancement we can make. I definitly can't use those methods from 3DS Max and other modeling programs (they work fine for an adult but I don't think they are suited for children.)  We will still work a little on the game so when it's ready I'll post it in the same place.   ;  I really like the idea. I think letting kids freely build their own city helps developing creativity skills.Running:First I tried to run the game on my laptop with an integrated Intel Graphics Accelerator on the Intel Mobile 915GM Chipset. The game wouldn't start which I belive can be fixed with some simple tests at startup (like if to use hardware or software vertexprocessing)Instead I used my brothers stationary computer (2 Ghz Pentium, 512 Mb Ram, 128 MB Radeon 9200 SE) and the game ran fine (initially 160 fps and after placing  lots of stuff on the map it ran on >50 fps).Before I could run it there were some issues tough. When extracted, the game looks runnable (with .dll's, an exe and lots of data files), but you appearently had to run the setup first, which wasn't obvious.I also had some .dll issues after installing, which probably was my fault, but it was strange anyhow. The game needed d3dx9_26.dll which I didn't have, but after searching for it, I found a .zip containing that file. After extracting that .dll to system32, it worked.The game:Here's some things I liked:The stacking feature which allows you to build tall buildings.The diversity of objects.And here's some things to improve the gameplay:Being able to specify simple routes for people and cars, or at least make them move randomly. I think this would spiff the game up, as it would be more fun to watch.Create a much larger building area.User interface:Yay! My favorite part!Here's a list of things that I think would enhance the user experience.I strongly suggest to limit the area of the interface. The current solution, with yellow interface borders around the entire screen makes me feel confined. I suggest having a popup like behavior, where the interface only consists of one interface border (I would prefer to have it on the left) with popup menus. You would get a larger view of the city, and it will feel more structured.Why limit mouse navigation to only small parts of the screen? The navigation arrows occupies precious interface space! I suggest comlete removal of those arrows and instead let the entire screen egdes have navigation functionality.Keyboard navigation wouldn't hurt.A seamless zoom is not too hard to implement, and I think it gives a more fluent feel.Those cubic pink blocks with green dots seems to be placed to compensate the lack of lots of diffrent blocks for each category. Well, I think you should just remove them. This will be more natural with a popup like interface at least.To summarize, try to make the interface take up less space, and make it more consistent.Bugs:In case you didn't discover these, here's a list of bugs.The height cap of the buildngs seems to be based on height instead of number of parts, which makes the last part go half down the second last part, at least when building with the brick block.Rotating the bottom block of a multiblocked building doesn't rotate the entire building.I think there's not much point in being able to rotate single road blocks. To be able to build roads in all directions I rather suggest a startpoint-endpoint building mechanism for roads.Who can build the largest city? Who can build the crazies city? Who can create the most effective infrastructure? etc. Kids love that.   ;  Enselic thanks for your detailed analysis.  Quote: First I tried to run the game on my laptop with an integrated Intel Graphics Accelerator on the Intel Mobile 915GM Chipset. The game wouldn't start which I belive can be fixed with some simple tests at startup (like if to use hardware or software vertexprocessing)   Thanks for picking the bug. Quote:Before I could run it there were some issues tough. When extracted, the game looks runnable (with .dll's, an exe and lots of data files), but you appearently had to run the setup first, which wasn't obvious. The game doesn't have a installer yet. There are some instructions on the download page but I guess I should have posted them here too. Quote:I also had some .dll issues after installing, which probably was my fault, but it was strange anyhow. The game needed d3dx9_26.dll which I didn't have, but after searching for it, I found a .zip containing that file. After extracting that .dll to system32, it worked.   You only had to launch DXSetup from the Setup folder.Quote:And here's some things to improve the gameplay:Being able to specify simple routes for people and cars, or at least make them move randomly. I think this would spiff the game up, as it would be more fun to watch.I'm planing a RTS on the long term. Adding some intelingence to people and objects would be a nice intermediary step. We'll keep this for version number 2 though. Quote:I strongly suggest to limit the area of the interface. The current solution, with yellow interface borders around the entire screen makes me feel confined.You are not the first persion to mention this, which makes me think seriously at redesigning the interface.Quote:Why limit mouse navigation to only small parts of the screen? The navigation arrows occupies precious interface space! I suggest comlete removal of those arrows and instead let the entire screen egdes have navigation functionality.It was like that initially. We had some kids play the game.  All of them had a hard time pressing the interface buttons,  each time they would move the cursor over a button the cursor run on the screen edges  because of their inacurate mouse manipulation. This made the camera move and rotate in all direction. So we decided to change a little how you control the camera.Quote:Those cubic pink blocks with green dots seems to be placed to compensate the lack of lots of diffrent blocks for each category.This is only a beta version, in the final version there will be objects instead of boxes. Again thanks for your detailed analysis. 