moomanmatt's messages

Hey, so here’s what’s up as far as Go Fish is concerned. Looks like this is your first game, maybe? Don’t see any other uploads from you yet. Definitely a good start–A lot of game design is just trying things and slowly getting an understanding of what does and doesn’t work. I’m going to talk about things in terms of game design to give you an idea of how I’m dissecting this thing, so hopefully you can start to think about games by their tiny individual parts instead of just thinking “this game is fun” or “this game isn’t fun.” It’s all psychology–How does each element affect how the player is playing the game?

The game is simple, but that’s fine–Complexity and quality don’t always go hand in hand. Having the powerups and extra lives is a good call–Without them, you’d just be avoiding everything, and it’d get boring really quick. The powerups are pretty rare, though, so they don’t seem to help as much as they could. It might be interesting to have a whole lot of powerups, and make them worth more points if you get more than one in a row without letting any go past. It would add a game within the game, because while your main goal is to stay alive, you’ve got the secondary goal of keeping a combo going.

Technically speaking, the game works just fine, with a few really minor hiccups. The most noticeable is that it looks like you forgot to embed some fonts, so the powerup’s “S” shows as Times New Roman, which is pretty ugly when it’s not intentional. Google “Flash embed fonts” to see how to fix that up. It’s really simple, but it’s one of those things that you just have to remember to do whenever you have a dynamic or input text box. (The “get ready” lines have the same problem.)

Looking at the main gameplay (avoiding fish), it works, but it’s not hugely interesting. Having more than one type of fish would certainly help. Maybe some that go up and down as they move left, etc. It’s also worth noting that the submarine is pretty big, and so are the enemies. Many of the times that I lost lives, it was purely because there wasn’t a hole big enough to fit the relatively massive submarine through. It ends up feeling a little clunky, like trying to drive a tank around a race track. I’d recommend making the sub smaller, and spawning more fish to compensate for the change in difficulty. Something to keep in mind in general: It’s more fun to run a very agile character through a complex challenge, rather than run a sluggish (or in this case, overly large) character through a simpler one, even if in the end they have the same difficulty.

Something else that sort of got to me was that the submarine is locked exactly to the mouse. It’s the most precise way to control it, yes, but it seems really odd for a submarine to start and stop so quickly. Consider putting in some easing so it smoothly follows the mouse (even if it follows pretty tightly to avoid making it feel too weighted). This little tutorial is written for Flash MX, which is way out of date at this point, but the code isn’t all that different from the current version, so you should be able to translate it without any real problems: http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/followease.htm

You’re off to a good start, for sure, so keep it up! Keep making games, and always pay attention to feedback that people give you, regardless of whether it’s good or bad. Don’t be one of those guys that hears bad feedback and brushes it off like the user doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The user ALWAYS knows what they’re talking about! If they say they didn’t think it was fun, then it’s because they didn’t think it was fun! Try to figure out what it was about the game that they didn’t like, and consider ways to fix similar problems in future games. The most important skill in game development is the ability to learn what you’re doing wrong and fix it later.

Hope all that helps, and best of luck!