I''m working on a asteroid mining game myself but its in 3D.

I just tried Asteroid Miner. That is a cool game. A lot of fun, except the controls could be better. I kept wishing I could use the mouse to turn my ship. The game seems to require almost pixel perfect accuracy in picking stuff up and the arrow keys are a bit imprecise. I also had trouble telling which way the ship was facing in a pinch.

I did try StarLines a while back. It didn''t last long my system though. I kept getting fatal errors. Is it in anyway related to KombatKars? I''m just curious since the error boxes all said "KombatKars Error."


You know you''re a programmer when your computer is like family. When it''s more like a lover, you need help.

Yeah thats lazy coding by me. Good ol cut and paste
Ive fixed that though. And I reuploaded KombatKars to my main site tonight with some minor bug fixes. Its a pain not having your own QA dept!

http://www.positech.co.uk

Atleast you get to sort through your own code, with my engine I have to sort through other people''s (and everyone has a different coding style) and its always annoying trying to figure out what a portion of the code is doing. Just sort of sitting there thinking "What the heck was this guy doing? Was he high when he wrote this?" ... And then realizing its your own code. But anyway, I''ll have to retry kombatkars now that its fixed.

Sorry, Kombat Kars still doesn''t work. It just exits when I try to start playing. It looks like some kind of problem with sound. I have an AOpen Sound Card with 3D Sound support. The sound debug text file sais this:

Sound System Initialised Ok
Play Sound error - NULL sound ID was 1
Play Sound error - NULL sound ID was 1
Play Sound error - NULL sound ID was 1
Play Sound error - NULL sound ID was 1

Star Miner, a great game, have been playing it for ages(determined to get past the first level ) but very very difficult, in two ways:

1) The controls(as mentioned above): it requires a higher degree of accuracy than the controls provide.

2) Its just too difficult: the percentage of people being able to complete the first couple of levels would be too small.

One thing that puzzled me with Star Miner was, how does the shareware version improve through registering? Usually many benefits are given through registering.

Also, through my intense fustration of getting owned so quickly by the relatively good AI(bit backstabbing though ), I decided to open the EXE and see if I could change any values to make it easier, although... you might like to look through the EXE yourself, theres something in there which shouldn't be, I'm assuming that everybody here is honourable enough as to not use it.

[EDIT]
Just downloaded Starlines, 800x600x32 surface creation failed on Voodoo3 3000, looks a good game aswell
[/EDIT]

[edited by - zanthos on July 25, 2002 6:55:47 AM]

hmmmmm I think these errors are to do with D3DX failing to get the right Stencil and Z buffer values. I left em at D3DXDefaulkt but as i dont need em they should be set to zero. I might upload a fix for this today when i get a chance.
Agreed about star miner being hard, Im loathe to tamper with that game though as like I say, it does sell... I might just make the enemy guns a bit less deadly.

quote: Original post by Zanthos
Star Miner, a great game, have been playing it for ages(determined to get past the first level ) but very very difficult, in two ways:

1) The controls(as mentioned above): it requires a higher degree of accuracy than the controls provide.

2) Its just too difficult: the percentage of people being able to complete the first couple of levels would be too small.

...which explains why the registrations aren''t piling up.

The first rule of commercial entertainment is: "Hook The Customer!" It''s like fishing: your demo level is your attract mode -- your bait. Its design defines how attractive it is to the player. If you get it right, the player ''bites'' and performs the requested "Insert Coin" operation.

It''s a shame design books don''t talk much about pragmatic design issues like this. Difficulty curves are carefully designed for the target platform and sales model. For arcade games, the trick is to make the game hard, but not impossible. Make it too easy and they''ll only ever put one coin in the slot while hogging the machine. Make it too hard and they''ll give up too quickly.

For console games, most players want a game they can get their teeth into without too much aggravation and tooth-grinding pain. Today''s console games have a reputation for being ''easy'' compared to older titles, simply because they''re aimed as much at the casual gamer as to the hardcore joystick fetishist.

Shareware games have to strike a balance between the extremes. You need a demo level that''s challenging, but not so hard that it puts people off. That same level also has to introduce the gameplay to the player as smoothly as possible -- it''s a training level too -- so this also needs to be considered.

It''s very hard to achieve such balance without testing the game on other people first, since you will likely become too experienced in playing the game to appreciate how hard your level is to a complete newcomer. Use beta releases if possible. (www.smallrockets.com is a good example of a company that is making money from ESD; they use beta-test releases regularly.)

Aside from that though, it''s a neat game. A few tweaks in the right direction and you may find that sales start to pick up.

Uhm, anyway. I''ll shut up now.

--
Sean Timarco Baggaley