Who wants to beta-test my space-themed action/strategy/rpg?

camdog · Post by **camdog** » Sun Feb 13, 2011 11:30 pm

It's in flash, so no download, just click the following link and start playing:

http://www.sapientgames.com/games/farscape

I'd love any and all feedback, from bug and typo reports to criticisms and ideas for making it better. Thanks!

Current list of known bugs:
No audio cue is played when you save/load

RMSephy · Post by **RMSephy** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 12:41 am

Hey, I like this. Was it inspired by Star Control 2 at all? :x

I haven't gotten too far yet (can you save in the game yet, or did I miss something?). The one criticism I have is that the text could be bigger. Right now, it kind of hurts my eyes to read everything, and the writing is solid enough that I want to read everything. :x

camdog · Post by **camdog** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 12:51 am

Hey, I like this. Was it inspired by Star Control 2 at all? :x

Oh my god, so much.

I haven't gotten too far yet (can you save in the game yet, or did I miss something?). The one criticism I have is that the text could be bigger. Right now, it kind of hurts my eyes to read everything, and the writing is solid enough that I want to read everything. :x

You can save in the menu screen. Click on the menu button on the galaxy screen to get there. Based on some other feedback I've gotten so far, it looks like I'll be making the text bigger in the update.

RMSephy · Post by **RMSephy** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 3:52 am

Alright, just beat the game on Easy. Found a few more bugs, maybe.

I can't activate the event on Alpha Ceti (It says "There's definitely an advanced civilization on the planet, but the readings are fluctuating wildly!"). When I try to go down, it just makes the mouse cursor disappear.

I keep getting the same event with the Glarfians. Every time I go down, I can give the same answers over and over again and boost my ship's attack power indefinitely.

Other than that, I sometimes forget which planets I've built factories on. It's nice that you have the dollar symbols on the universe-wide display, could you have something like that for the systems-wide display as well?

camdog · Post by **camdog** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 11:25 pm

Thanks for your input! I've made the text bigger, fixed the bugs you mentioned, and added a dollar display to the solar-system view in addition to the galaxy view. I also fixed a bunch of stuff that TMC found, and you can see a detailed list here if you're interested:

http://www.castleparadox.com/ohr/viewto ... 4868#84868

If you're debating giving it another go, just remember, the game is randomly generated every play, and this includes the side-quests you see, so if you do try it again, you'll almost certainly see something different.

Thanks again!

Post by **Mogri** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 2:33 am

Making the text bigger has made it run outside of the box almost everywhere.

I really wish there were a mute button.

The custom cursor appears beneath the "real" cursor.

It's very difficult to read menu options when your mouse is hovering over them.

More feedback later - I just started playing.

camdog · Post by **camdog** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 3:20 am

Making the text bigger has made it run outside of the box almost everywhere.

Interesting. I've played through several times with bigger text and haven't seen that. Any specific examples?

I really wish there were a mute button.

There is! Click 'menu' on the galaxy screen. You can mute both the music and the sfx there.

The custom cursor appears beneath the "real" cursor.

Weird. That shouldn't happen. What browser/os are you using?

Post by **Mogri** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 6:12 am

Like I said, almost everywhere. Intro dialogue, chat dialogue, everywhere. You may know this, but Flash caching is separate from browser caching, so the only reliable way to get the newest version of your file is to completely shut down your browser and reopen it.

I'm using Firefox, Windows XP.

(edit) The cursor issue has gone away. Odd. Might be related to window-switching.

camdog · Post by **camdog** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 3:18 pm

Like I said, almost everywhere. Intro dialogue, chat dialogue, everywhere. You may know this, but Flash caching is separate from browser caching, so the only reliable way to get the newest version of your file is to completely shut down your browser and reopen it.

Yeah, but that shouldn't explain the text overflow issue; I've never uploaded a version that had that. If you're playing an old version, the text should be small. I'm wondering if it's a PC issue (I'm testing this on a mac). I'll try to check it out on a PC as soon as I can. In the mean time, anyone else on a PC seeing this?

Post by **Bob the Hamster** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 4:49 pm

I haven't had a chance to play beyond the very beginning, but I did see the overflowing text twice.

I am using Linux. I have Flash 10.1 r102 in Firefox.

Here are screenshots of the overflows that I saw.
<a href="http://james.hamsterrepublic.com/galler ... verflowing Allric text</a>
<a href="http://james.hamsterrepublic.com/galler ... verflowing tutorial text</a>

Post by **Mogri** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 5:13 pm

Weird: I was getting horizontal overflow and couldn't read the last word of each line. You're getting vertical overflow and it just looks bad.

It's happening on this computer, too: Firefox in Windows 7.

camdog · Post by **camdog** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 6:10 pm

Ok, this is an awesome bug. I think I worked it out though. Flixel doesn't have great text display support (well, the new version does, but since I've been working on this a while, it's a fairly old version...) So, I had to roll my own word-wrap routines. I did this by using some built in flash routines that checked the length of a string based off the system's default font, and I'm thinking this 'different line length' issue is caused by different system fonts (mogri is using windows, I'm using mac os, and james is using linux). Hopefully I can fix this by specifying the mac os default font, so everyone sees the same thing I do. Have to wait till after work for the fix, though.

Post by **Mogri** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 6:52 pm

General gameplay comments:

- The core mechanic of building factories and gathering resources from them is solid and very addicting. If this were all there was to the game, it would still be fantastic.

- The battles are my least favorite part of the game. They take too long and a single mistake means your game's over. I wish that you'd do at least one of the following:
-- Include a no-battle mode (I'm not sure how this would work, exactly)
-- Add a shields upgrade that lets you survive +1 hit per level
-- Reduce the penalty for losing a battle - perhaps you lose all your resources and/or some time
-- Make the battles shorter

- I haven't found any other traders yet, which seems to indicate that the initial system is the only place you can buy fuel. Depending on the layout, this can really screw you over. I'm not sure what to suggest here except that maybe the starting system shouldn't be allowed to be in a corner.

camdog · Post by **camdog** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 7:02 pm

The core mechanic of building factories and gathering resources from them is solid and very addicting. If this were all there was to the game, it would still be fantastic.

Awesome!

- The battles are my least favorite part of the game. They take too long and a single mistake means your game's over. I wish that you'd do at least one of the following:
-- Include a no-battle mode (I'm not sure how this would work, exactly)
-- Add a shields upgrade that lets you survive +1 hit per level
-- Reduce the penalty for losing a battle - perhaps you lose all your resources and/or some time
-- Make the battles shorter

There is a shield upgrade that does just what you say, actually.

I like the idea of reducing the penalty from a game over to just resource/time loss, though I worry it will make the game too easy... Maybe that can change depending on the difficulty you've chosen? Also, it's pretty easy to just reload, I wonder if that would make adding this feature an exercise in futility (ie, would anyone accept the loss without just reloading?)

- I haven't found any other traders yet, which seems to indicate that the initial system is the only place you can buy fuel. Depending on the layout, this can really screw you over. I'm not sure what to suggest here except that maybe the starting system shouldn't be allowed to be in a corner.

Yeah, that's the only place to trade in the game as of right now.

RMSephy · Post by **RMSephy** » Tue Feb 15, 2011 7:55 pm

Well, it's actually kind of a pain to reload. Depending on how often you save, you can lose a lot of progress, and reloading a saved game usually means simply retracing your steps and doing exactly the same thing you did before.

You could possibly give the player an option to "retry" a battle if he loses. It wouldn't make the game any less difficult, and it would cut out the need for a lot of needless backtracking.

The battles do tend to be on the long side. One thing you could try is adding a countdown timer to let the player know how much longer he needs to survive. A health bar for the bosses could be useful for the same reason.