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Well, given all the talk about negativity on HN and what-not, I thought I'd take a harder look at this to give some constructive criticism. The graphics. Good,
by ZoFreX 14y ago
Well, given all the talk about negativity on HN and what-not, I thought I'd take a harder look at this to give some constructive criticism.
The graphics. Good, from a traditional RTS perspective. Limited and dated in comparison, but c'mon it's HTML 5 and runs pretty smoothly. However, I don't think you're going to get the traditional RTS market, a few minutes in they'll get a whiff of the skinner-box-ness and run off. I assume you're going for the more traditional Facebook game market, in which case I think the graphics need to be made simpler and larger, and also more distinguishable - the units all look quite similar. Think TF2 or Plants vs Zombies.
Speaking of target market - is there any point in using HTML5, really? It impresses the hacker crowd but I'm not sure if there's any actual benefit to your users - plus they'll all have Flash installed already and be used to using it, to use your game they may well have to upgrade or switch browser.
As for the game content, it seemed a little fast paced to me? Perhaps give the user more time to click around and fiddle with things between dialogs. Definitely get them to repeat essential actions - maybe look into Valve's "rule of 3" to make things less tutorial and more learn by doing. I can't be certain about the pacing though as I haven't played any FB games recently.
Lastly, a couple of technical considerations.. please adapt the game window to my screen size! Either the top or bottom controls are off the screen at any given time for me (1440x900 display), and please don't crash the game if my privacy settings are locked down!
- it33 14y agoThanks for the feedback! Agree on many of the points you raised, particularly the tutorial changes needed. Urg, sorry about the issue with your display. May I ask what browser you're using? Also, sometimes browser add-ins cause issues, and if you figure out if one might be responsible, we'd love to know. In terms of crashing, wondering if you might remember the error message received? I'm not aware of errors related to privacy settings, but if we have one definitely want to fix it. Thanks for taking the time to help us improve!
- ZoFreX 14y agoI'm using Firefox 14 on OS X Lion. Just triggered the error again, I got: Communications Problem Sorry, there has been a temporary network error. Please reconnect to Mars Frontier. (code 0650)
- it33 14y agoThanks ZoFreX, yeah, this can happen sometimes when a network connection has a hiccup. It's pretty common for connections--particularly on WiFi--to go down briefly and randomly. You typically don't notice when reading a web page, since your requests are intermittent, and streaming video hides it with buffering. We need to get smarter here. Thank you the feedback.
- ZoFreX 14y agoIt's definitely not my connection hiccuping - I only get the error whenever the game tries to do something with my friends, and I assume it's not a coincidence that my privacy settings prevent it from doing so.
- it33 14y agoOh, that could be different. We're probably missing a case. Appreciate your letting us know. Is this for inviting friends or messaging them? If your privacy settings prevent this we should be more graceful in catching the error than a connection failure.