Iphone Game (would love some feedback)

frettchen

Hey guys, I stopped updating my sculpting thread as I wanted to try and get my iphone game finished - its built in unity and I had pretty much no experience of modeling / texturing / rigging before so its been a hell of a learning experience

I'd really love some feedback on the meshes as well as the textures, I'm pretty dumb when it comes to colours so I'm not sure if the things in the level fit together that well at the moment. Hardest part for me has been the ground texture, I just picked up a copy of ArtRage at a friends recommendation and have been using the sticker tool for laying down things like flowers and rubble to make it a bit more interesting

Youtube video of it running:
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEm6LON6p-k[/ame]

Scenery objects I'm using in the first level:



A shot of the level setup in Maya:



I really appreciate any feedback you can give!

brandoom

What program are you using? Unity?

Looks pretty sweet. I like the style. The only thing i disagree with right now is the blood that appears when shooting the monsters. To me I think the style and game play isn't mature (as in mature audience) enough to need blood.

Looks good though.

Matroskin

lol, that is cute :P
The bear with a rifle.

Is the game finished? If so, just from the gameplay popint of view i did not really see how enemy projectiles affect u. Only in the end u got your healthbar getting red a bit. No "hit" effect on main character either.

Form visual point of view i like it alot. The only suggestion would be to play with vertex color more because some areas lack depth even though in geometry it is there. For example, when u go accross the huge crack in terrain it is hard to see if it is a crack actually. Some darker vertex color could be good there.

frettchen

Brandoom: Yep it's all done in Unity, I lay out the levels in Maya though and then in Unity I have a script that replaces the maya meshes with prefab objects I've setup in Unity with all the colliders and things on.

A couple of people have commented about the blood - I want it to be a cartoony game but at the same time I want it to be quite funny and over the top, I've never really considered it a kids game or anything. As soon as I get some people playing it properly I'll do a version without and see how people feel about it then

Matroskin: No the game is faaaar from finished. This is just the first level I think I almost have done - for the final game I'm hoping to have a survival mode, several campaign levels, 4 more enemy types and also another 2 or 3 droppable weapons / items.

I'll look into the vertex colour stuff, I'm not quite sure how Unity handles it - at the moment I'm just having all geometry with the normals set to 180, and then I have a single directional light in the scene... I shall have a tinker with it!

Any thoughts on the texture colours and things? Does it look like its all working together?

Priske415

Models and animation are adorable, my only complaint is how the game is just one path. Try and make more variety in the paths the character follows, maybe give him some options in what direction he goes ect.

DrunkShaman

Nice work frettchen..

Looks like extremely low poly model used for Iphone video game.

Shogun3d

I like the style! As far as colors and style goes, I think you're mushrooms are too "static" in nature and really small in size. It seems like you exxagerated sizes for a cartoony style so why not make some cute, bent mushrooms and perhaps some large flowers as decals?

frettchen

Nitewalkr: It's low poly as I'm aiming for 30fps on the 3G iphones (currently its around 24fps idle, and 20fps when theres movement and shooting going on)

Kaburan: Awesome, I will see if I can give those models a little more love

serialkiler

Priske415 wrote: »

Models and animation are adorable, my only complaint is how the game is just one path. Try and make more variety in the paths the character follows, maybe give him some options in what direction he goes ect.

POWER TO THE PLAYER :thumbup::thumbup::thumbup:

xD

hawken

you should definitely ramp up the detail on this. 3G phones are old news.

for making more interesting gameplay mechanics, you could make it so that the player moves forward automatically, you can steer him and you get a "brake" gauge that is limited and/or replenishes.

Would make for less painful thumbs too!

frettchen

I can't remember where exactly but I read something about the market share of the different iphones and the 3G still had a much bigger userbase than the 3GS

I kind of want to get this one finished and can think about something a bit more graphically intensive for the next. Another reason for the super low poly stuff is not knowing how to model, so hopefully by the end I'll have a bit more experience to try something more complex

As far as gameplay stuff goes I won't be changing it too radically, I kind of wanted it to be like Ikari Warriors on the NES, but I'll be trying to add some extra flavour to the levels so it isn't too simple

I hope to post an update soon

xvampire

I love the idea
hehehehe guilty pleasure, remind me to happy tree friend

but here my crit :

fix the GUI, it seems dominating the screen,
especially for action game, it should not using big gui.


about the color , maybe im right or wrong, but try to
tone up the main character color, you dont have to change the overall main color but make it more stand up against the enemy.

Richard Kain

If I were you, I would seriously consider developing your next game with higher-resolution models/textures. One of the advantages of Unity is that it is easy to port your games to other platforms. Having a PC or Mac version of your game would give you other potential revenue streams, as well as the opportunity for self promotion. And they are working on porting Unity for use on the 360, so in time you could also port your game to XBox Indie or XBLA.

If all of your assets are designed for a low-perfomance device like the iPhone, it will look like crap on platforms with superior screens. If you design it for those more robust devices, you can always down-scale the graphics for iPhone.

wizo

Looks like fun,

I would suggest going into seomthing more stylize, like torchlight.
The cartonny look in the game right now is looking rather generic, play with the proportions a little more.

Keep up the hard work!

Noors

Maybe i'm wrong but it looks like you've painted the ground on a big unique texture and not using "prebuilt" modules to make some kind of big lego. It doesn't seem to be flexible and fast to build entires level this way, plus the ground resolution is lower than the rest. (yeah i've heard about carmack megatexture but i'm not sure it fits to iphone ^^)

aesir

Love the style, but I think it just needs one more layer of complexity to really become fun. Like a dodge roll to the side if you tilt the iphone crazily. And faster bullets. Right now, it's just really slow paced and not so challenging looking.

I do love the way it looks though. Keep it up

frettchen

Thanks again for the feedback guys - as far as the style I might try and redo the enemies to see if I can make something better for those two but I'll probably wait until my other ones are finished first as I really want to keep marching forwards as much as possible

I could probably stylize the trees a lot more though so thats something I'll start thinking about :P

As far as gameplay goes, I've sped up the movement and increased the droprate of different weapons, this is all likely to massively change once I have other people playing it though (I'd like to get at least a couple of levels finished and then get some playtester volunteers to muck around with it and see what they like / don't like)

Spent a little time tonight on sketching some ideas for the health/ammo bar and then spent a bit more time making a rough version and getting it ingame so it changes when you get hit.... the ammo bar on the right hand side isn't functional yet though. Also removed the leaves bar from the bottom of the screen, maybe I'll redo it with better art at some point but based on the feedback I could probably just leave it off.



I'm planning on making it so the bears face changes when you shoot bullets, and also changes as you lose more and more health (total ripped off from Doom of course).

Thumbsticks are made a bit smaller but the art stuff is still totally placeholder

Orb

very cut and bloody game , as ppl said you need more variety to make it a lot more interesting. In environments: adding diferent trees, textures variations, and more enemies, maybe a bigger monster, kind of boss of the end door. Adding some sound for specific enemies and change that interface wich is too "aqua web 2.0" imo, make something more cartoon and simple (green fluo hurt eyes also) (EDIT: ok i didnt see it was placeholder, just think about the cartoon style so x), keep it up! i like the gameplay and the style!

(i hope my english isnt too bad)

KazuyaMochu

I think you'd be better off making a tile based terrain, and I meen both 3d and 2d tiles (for textures) and assembling your level like that. It allready looks like you've gone for a stylized, iconic look, which you can easily mimic with 3d tiles.

frettchen

KazuyaMochu: I originally had the game running tilebased but I just had trouble getting it to look the way I wanted and also had a lot of seam problems - I'd like to stick with a hand made method for the levels just so they all feel really unique (I'll be changing the other levels, every level is a different theme sort of)

I worked loads on the game this weekend but have very little to show for it



Remade the cliffs as the last ones were horrible and also remade the cave (although I still don't like the texture)

Most my time was spent in the code hooking up the ammo to the UI so it all works now. I also changed the way the camera works so it actually follows the player as he moves up/down in the level as well now and keeps the same height (also after comments from people I unlocked the camera so when the player moves backwards it follows him then as well)

I also remodeled the ground plane and took it from 230 verts to 99 by removing where the groundmesh moves into the cliffs (it was leaving an ugly line I didn't like and works much better now with the cliffs going directly into the floor)

frettchen

I thought I'd quickly make a tree stump and a variation from modifying the trees I already have. Texture is super messy but they're so small onscreen I don't think it will matter too much - I'll start populating a level with them and see how it goes

Japhir

great project! keep it up!
at first i thought the bear had a hollow stick, shooting paper buds or something . something like this

frettchen

Japhir: hah I didn't even notice that until you pointed it out

I think I'm going to make something better for the gun, at the moment it's just a cube as it's quite small on the screen anyway but I think if I make it bigger and with cartoony proportion it would read a bit better