Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members

rocksolidarcade.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 84 posts

Re: Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members

#51

Post by swivelmaster »

Another game design criticism: I feel like the rooms where you start on a narrow path and get shot at from directly in front and have nearly no room to dodge... are kind of cheap.

It may just be me, but I much prefer the big rooms with obstacles and lots of baddies - they let me exercise a lot more strategy. The narrow corridor rooms just make me think "oh crap oh crap oh crap I'm going to get hit and there's nothing I can do about it!"

Perhaps in the sequel (if you do one) you can add moving platforms and rooms that change structure. Conveyer belts. Maybe a garbage compactor like in Star Wars. Muahaha.

edit: Also - perhaps more visual cue from the grenades? Maybe a little circle with trails. Also, try getting a few more explosions and picking them randomly instead of using the same one each time.

Re: Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members

#53

Post by DanHulton »

I think I would have purchased, had there been boss fights. Also, it's pretty easy to get yourself into a bad situation if you enjoy trying different weapon loadouts - since weapons sell for so much less than you buy them for, the more you experiment, the worse your gear. And there's a few rooms on the fourth level that are "Gear check" rooms - if you can't put out enough damage, you simply can't progress (narrow path, many blue enemy spawners).

Re: Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members

#55

Post by siculars »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #39
teamonkey wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you store the save games on the server? You can easily store a unique access key in the default 100k for casual users (and I assume that registered users log in).

Well, that ends up as a lot of data on the server. One of the people behind the casual collective just released his tracker stats that show 100 million plays (loads), which would be 10 terabytes, assuming of course that each load resulted in a store. We don't have a full time server guy so I'd prefer to stay out of that kind of thing, for now anyway! I think next time we'll just design the game around a strict 100k l…

use amazon s3

Re: Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members

#56

Post by teamonkey »

siculars wrote: post #55
reitzensteinm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that ends up as a lot of data on the server. One of the people behind the casual collective just released his tracker stats that show 100 million plays (loads), which would be 10 terabytes, assuming of course that each load resulted in a store. We don't have a full time server guy so I'd prefer to stay out of that kind of thing, for now anyway! I think next time we'll just design the game around a strict 100k l…

use amazon s3

...And an expiry time for unregistered users.

Also, think about reducing the size of the save game file! Many PS2 game saves fitted into 32K.

Good game though :)

Re: Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members

#57

Post by rsa »

wlievens wrote: post #44
Tichy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all you need is a game loop (that is the difference to web programming). while(isGameRunning){ processInputs(); processMonsters(); updateScreen(); } It really is quite straightforward. Start with something simple like Tetris.

Good advise. I'd recommend starting with something like Asteroids, because it's even easier than Tetris (no tricky rotation/bounds logic) and more rewarding.

Thanks for the advise. I'll try that.

Re: Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members

#58

Post by reitzensteinm »

teamonkey wrote: post #56
siculars wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

use amazon s3

...And an expiry time for unregistered users. Also, think about reducing the size of the save game file! Many PS2 game saves fitted into 32K. Good game though :)

I think that's exactly what we'll have to do - design the save files to fit in 100k. This wasn't by design - this was 1 day from release, where we discovered that amazingly enough there's no way to tell if a save was successful or not in Flash, so we couldn't ask people to up their storage only when needed (which should be rarely).

Re: Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members

#59

Post by reitzensteinm »

siculars wrote: post #55
reitzensteinm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that ends up as a lot of data on the server. One of the people behind the casual collective just released his tracker stats that show 100 million plays (loads), which would be 10 terabytes, assuming of course that each load resulted in a store. We don't have a full time server guy so I'd prefer to stay out of that kind of thing, for now anyway! I think next time we'll just design the game around a strict 100k l…

use amazon s3

We could, but that ends up being a lot of traffic. We'd expect the average person to save a lot more than once (in Robokill it's automatic), so you're looking at at least 100tb of traffic - a pretty big hassle.

If the game routes through rocksolidarcade.com (which is probably a good idea) to save/load things, traffic ends up being 38 cents a gb - 10 for upstream/downstream at Softlayer, and 18 at S3. I think that's pretty close to being impractical.

I'm going to design the next game around the 100k limitation and explicit saves, so this problem will go away anyway.

Post reply on HN