Here's some feedback, RobbyZ.

Are you freaking crazy? As in serious utterly out of your head nuts?

This building game is not ready for release. I understand you can say that it is done as a Beta on your own site and also on Kongregate and that only us K+ members can try it out right now but it’s not even ready for that.

Do you want to know why I consider it to be this? One extremely simple reason: Real World Money.

I hear complaints on Kong constantly from people playing games like Heroes of Gaia and Time World where people complain about the “obvious cash grab” of having a Beta game that you can (or have to) spend Real World Cash on but it looks like the next time I see such a thing I’ll simply direct them to your game so they can see how it’s actually done.

Am I being to harsh? I hardly think so.

Here’s a little example of what I’d expect most people do when they play the game:
They start playing and learn to walk around.
They get taught how to open doors.
They learn to press space to kill enemies that can’t actually hurt you as that would break the tutorial zone when you died.
They get told to jump into a pit but can’t actually find the pit until they happen to drop off of a little wall they couldn’t see was there.
They get told they just screwed up and lost the game by following the tutorial.
They get forced to respawn taking them out of the opening tutorial.
They pick up the two quests available.
They attempt to build in town only to find out they can’t build next to someone elses items, even on the nearby Dirt and Grass they were told to build on.
They swear and try again until they give up and decide to go fight LawyerCats instead.
They keep looking for LawyerCats after stepping on spikes they didn’t know were spikes.
They keep looking for LawyerCats after getting caught up in an area where they passed through a wall and couldn’t get back out.
They finally read the nearby sign that says to take the teleporter out of town and find the right one and finally find some LawyerCats.
They walk up to one and start stabbing it only to have it teleport behind them due to server lag.
The LawyerCat dies and drops some Gold but no matter how much they click it it will not pick up.
They step on the gold and nothing happens until suddenly it vanishes and they think they’ve lost out on the cash by not doing it fast enough, not realizing that server lag finally caught up and picked it up for them from being stepped on.
Maybe they learn to have “Q” pressed to pick up the gold or they notice the little text in the chat window that shows they got the gold and they run around killing more of them until they get teleported back to town for dying. What? I didn’t realize I even took damage?
They find their way back out and kill a full 18 only now they have no idea where to go to get back so they remember to hit respawn.
They turn in the quest only to be told to go kill 23 more with no reward for killing 10 (or is that 5 gold reward? Do I get that or is the zombie just a jerk the way the opening guy was?). Screw that, let’s try to build again.
This time they know where there are areas that aren’t full of other players stuff so they head out and drop and pickup blocks for a short bit to get the first quest and wonder where the first few blocks they put down went. (Little did they know they managed to increase their block count by one for each brick they attempted to place in town and those bricks vanish when placed)
They curse as they have to go the long way (or respawn again) back to the quest giver.
They talk to the quest giver and not only get no quest reward but also somehow get the Pickup/Drop quest again (or maybe another two times).
They buy from the store, not realizing how little cash they really have so they buy a few glass panels at 10 gold each.
They try to turn it in only to discover it won’t take until they redo the Pickup/Drop quest again (or twice!) more.
They do it only to end up with one (or two!) more copies of the quest to buy from the store, but at least they got to turn in the store one once only to be told to buy blocks for a house of 30 blocks.
They curse as they don’t have 30 gold anymore so instead they buy as many blocks as they can.
They go out and build as large of a house as they can and rejoice when they find they can pick up the blocks and drop them again and get credit that way. Hooray!
They go back to get credit only to find out it doesn’t allow it to be turned in because they have one (or two!) copies of the “Buy from the shop” quest again.
They redo it and finally get the sign quest only to not have enough Gold for the sign.
They go out to kill LawyerCats only to get tired after a few and decide to press the “Get Gold” button.
What is this? $5 just to get some gold? And what the heck is Platinum? I don’t get that I guess I should check out the FAQ.
Wait, it’s not mentioned in the FAQ at all I should check out the store.
WHAT? It’s for buying stuff like those spikes I stepped on earlier? And look at those prices on things! They are asking for $200 bucks in the store? Screw this, I’m going to go play one of many actually decent games on Kongregate or ArmorGames that are actually free to play instead or maybe something like Backyard Monsters that at least lets me play for hours and hours while it asks for cash that I do not feel forced to give them.

So that’s multiple times giving up on what they were doing during the what is considered the tutorial section of the game. That’s also at least once but possibly twice that the DEVELOPER of the game has played a joke on them (the GAME OVER screen, the 5 gold quest reward). They’ve had to fight with the controls to be able to build anything and had to resort to trial and error to find valid places to do that building. They’ve run into multiple bugs, multiple times that even though the server has almost no one on it they get poor response due to server latency and at the end of it all they discovered that either they have to kill the only enemy over and over again to get money or they need to start forking over cash for a game that was advertised as FREE to play. We’re not talking a small amount of cash here either. For five bucks they get some cash they can use to buy things in game to build until they run out of them and that’s it. If if they dropped ten bucks for to get a town stone they get a little area they can be mayor in.

In comparision that same five bucks could get them a copy of another game from a Steam sale like Terraria that will let them build to their hearts content without ever asking for more money. It could have gotten them a copy of Defender’s Quest (during the beta sale) which has actual stuff to do and a good storyline. It could have gotten them a burger and fries from a local fast food place and gotten them more enjoyment with less frustration than giving money to the game developer.

Someone came to try and play your game and took in your sales pitch (or plea for development cash) and walked away disgusted. They might not have even bothered to play the game if it was free, let alone something to be paid for as you’ve got to compete with many other games that actually are free.

i can’t believe i installed java for this :/

Here’s a little list of things I found myself troubled by:
1.) Your game says right on the very front page when you go to login (on both websites) that the game is free to play. That really means it’s free to run around and not do anything more than explore. Yes, it is possible to build using the money you start with, the daily login cash and the cash from killing LawyerCats but this cash goes almost nowhere. Want to buy a half a brick? Go kill 20 cats. Want a single square of carpet for your house? Another 20 cats. Want to buy a spike trap to mess with other players? Sorry, this is not available for free. As if this was not bad enough on Kongregate the game has a lovely “Your progress might not be saved” message right above the window like all K+ beta games have which brings a set of questions to mind:
Does the game store what cash you’ve purchased so in the event that the system has to be rebuilt for future improvements people can get their (in game) money back? Just imagine the great reset button gets pushed and all their work is reset. Are they also out any cash they spent?
Is there any way to get your login password created when first joining from Kong in case Kong stops hosting the game or is down and we want to play?
For that matter right now there is only one server but if the game gets going there would need to be more than one otherwise it will be too tough for new players to do anything.
Do you have a way to stop people from griefing by creating an account in the name of a person on Kongregate before they play so when they attempt to play it fails? (Kong only server fixes this, which is why a lot of games do that).
Heck, what happens to someone who paid you cash for the game when you decide it is no longer worth it to run the server anymore?

2.) Your quests barely work. Apparently the killing quest just keeps asking for you to kill more and more LawyerCats for seemingly no reward (maybe 9 gold it’s so impossible to understand if that’s a joke or not). The building quest is a lot better as it actually does attempt to teach you how to build. However, somehow I ended up with three copies of the building quest going at the same time and they seemed to interfere with each other so I had to complete each one three times to move ahead once.

3.) The user interface is insanely terrible.

3a) Opening, closing and moving windows:
You have the option to use keyboard or mouse to open and close the various windows in the game. Keyboard always forces you to take your either take your hand off of the mouse to hit the keys only to have to put it back to do anything or to take your left hand off to press keys on the right hand side of the keyboard. (Note: I’m a righty so it might be better for a lefty but I’d bet that’s worse) Your other option is to press menu, find what you want and click it to open the menu and then do the exact same thing to close it. Why is it that the only menu that’s easy to close happens to be the Gold buying menu? You can even move the menus though it’s also very possible to move them off screen if you get bumped and then they stay there until you refresh the game.

3b) Moving blocks:
To place a single block you need to move to the right location using the keyboard and then press “I” (or choose Menu/Inventory) and click the correct block type. Then you likely need to press “I” again (or choose Menu/Inventory) as the Inventory window takes up such a large amount of screen real estate that it gets in the way. Then you need to press “R” (or click the Drop Active button) to make sure you are in selection mode. Then you need to hope to God when you Click your mouse key that you aren’t building somewhere wrong as if you are it clears your active selection making you do all those steps over again. There’s also no way to determine if you are in the wrong spot except to go through these motions and build. There’s no way to see what blocks are available for you to pick up without just randomly clicking. There also appears to be no way to build and rebuild a house with a friend without slamming head on into permission issues.

3c) Walking on blocks:
It it hard if not completely impossible to tell what is a block you can take a step up on (half block) and what is not one. If found myself getting stuck on objects that looked low and vaulting over objects that looked high. Walking speed also increases on Street blocks which is nice but it’s super easy to fly clean over a one lane road. Falling off of a block that you didn’t realize was an edge is also terribly easy. Heck, if there wasn’t a sign inside the room just after the Tardis the player would think they were trapped in an empty room.

3d) You can’t see from more than one camera position.
This makes it so that you can very easily build houses that have hole in the wall to walk through. It also makes it quite simple to think you are building blocks next to each other when in reality you are building blocks into some strange Escher-type arrangement that falls apart the moment you would rotate it. I’ve even had it decide to build a half block inside of a full block (or at least I think it did from the way it made me pick it back up). This also makes a very simple griefing method possible where a player builds a wall in front of someones building that is tall enough to cover the building and stop them from picking up their own blocks. This also makes it tough to tell the difference between a block that’s just floating in air and one that’s solidly against the ground, leading to the roofs vanishing in a random looking way when traveling.

3e) Terrible Fonts
There’s one ULTRA HUGE readable font, one normal readable one, one tiny harder to read one and one (antialiased?) font for in game characters that can barely be read. Going from squinting at the NPC name to being assaulted by their text is very hard to take. I get that the world font was meant to be 8-bit style but there comes a point when you have to ask yourself if it’s a good idea to destroy readability for an art style.

3f) A lack of a standard scale.
Block selection in the Inventory screen seems to depend on clicking the block itself, not the square the block is in. This leads to clicking empty space that looks like part of the block without is selecting it (signs and the sword especially). It also leads to large blocks escaping their cell bounds and overwriting parts of the other tiles.

3g) Chat window doubles as a game message window.
People chatting should not be scrolled off the screen by you talking to an NPC, picking up a gold coin or stepping in and out of town.

3h) Console style text input to do important things.
There are a bunch of things that you can do if you type things into the chat panel. Sadly, they aren’t extra nice things but important things that you need to have if you are going to play the game.

3i) Lack of any sort of map system.
It’s terribly easy to go exploring and get lost and while having the ability to port home is nice will you ever be able to find your way back to that interesting place? What if you only wanted to go back a bit?

4) I know this game is not about story but instead about building but it’s got an utterly horrid set of text tutorials. They are filled with lame puns & cheap jokes at the expense of the player. In fact some of the signs right next to the start are better written than the actual tutorial. This game seems like it was written by a first time developer due to the utter thoughtlessness of the writing.

I’m sure I’ve got more to say (esp a section about things you can do to help fix it) but it’s getting way too late for me to keep going now.

Hi Solsund,

Sorry you had a bad experience. Thank you for the detailed feedback. I’ll factor these into my work going forward.

The problem is not that I had a bad experience Robby, it’s that I can’t understand why you built your cash model the way you have and I can see it driving away a ton of people who would otherwise be willing to give the issues the benefit of the doubt.

If you simply wanted people to help you fund your game there are great ways to do so and you can even provide them with some sort of in game item to cover it.

Most of the games that have a marketplace in them do one of two things:
1) They ask for small amounts of cash in return for a permanent reward. Things like extra maps, new upgrades or little hats you can wear in world that show off you supporting the developers. These games tend to have a fully functioning game that is playable without having to spend a dime so they’re considered to be “Selling the gravy, not the steak”. A card game like Tyrant fits in this category as well, for the card packs.

2) They set the game up with artificial roadblocks that slow down the amount of things you can do while playing the game and then sell things that help speed that time up. These games tend to be hated as they create the “Free to play, pay to win” mentality and tend have very inflated prices so that the 5% of the people who pay for things cover the costs of the 95% who do not. Kong’s multiplayer game section is practically all made up of these type games.

The thing that both games have in common is that they both have a functional game that can be played without having to pay for anything at all. While it’s true that you can play this game without having to pay for anything at all the sheer grindy nature of killing the same LawyerCat packs over and over again to build up gold leaves you with two options: Be bored or spend money.

I’ll repeat that once again as that is vitally important: The only real option you have if you do not spend money but want to build is to be bored playing your game. Why would you want to do this to your players?

Seen from my above wall of text I appear to be saying that I hate this game and everything in it and that’s not really true. I just ran out of steam after having so much to say. This game has decent potential if the cash system were redesigned, the bugs ironed out and more content added. It’s just that as is it’s barely even worth trying let alone paying for.

Or just dont play it? ._.

wow… I read these rants and was still not convinced that the game was that bad… but he’s right… it’s awful.. I’m sorry developer dude, RobbyZ, I’m sure you’ve put a bunch of effort into the game, but there’s so many little glitches, bugs, and unpolished aspects of it, that the guy is right… I don’t even know if I would call this a Beta… I’m a software developer by trade… so as I said, I can sympathize with how much work you’ve obviously already put into this, but you need to do more… quite a bit more… before I think anyone will take this seriously.

Honestly Solsund, what did you expect from this game? It’s clearly very early in development. It sounds like you want him to pull a 10/10-star game out of his flank. Can you? I don’t think so, judging by the game you made.

Solsund, most of your arguments didn’t happen to me, so it WAS your experience. My experience was that i started a game to a funny start, and then got greeted by quite a in-depth tutorial, which i had no problem going though. Then i went out of the tutorial and was delighted to see there were two more NPCs who both gave quests, and i talked to Draco.
Yes, i was confused when the tutorial told me to build on grass and dirt, but i READ what it had said on the chatbox, and moved the wilderness, and starting building.
The first few minutes i thought was very confusing, but then i started to get the hang of it, and had a fun time, whilst no lag or server issues kept me from having fun.
So for me, most of your arguements are irrelevant, because i haven’t experienced them yet.
I only agree with the permission issues.
Other then that, i thought this game is awesome, since it is in Beta.

Solsund, I have to agree with you on most points. While I didn’t experience all of your issues, and worked around others (You can put down blocks, then pick them up and put them back down again for the ‘lay blocks’ quests), the fact of the matter is, I would not spend money on a game this early in development.

Frankly, I wouldn’t have released it to non K+ players at this point. It’s…well, it’s not a broken game, but it feels like the finals assignment for an ambitious Java programming student.
If I were the professor, I’d give it a B- for effort, but poor performance and execution.

As for the brony up there, it’s a ridiculous logical fallacy that says you have to know how to create something to judge it’s quality. You don’t need to know how to build a car to know if a car is a piece of crap. If the engine falls out of the car if you drive over 55, or the tires randomly explode, or if you turn the headlights on and it disables the brakes, you don’t need an engineering degree to figure out, “Hey, maybe they should have worked out the problems with this car before selling it to me.”

I have to agree with most of Solsund’s points. These points may include repeats of what he said, but here are my issues:

-At this point, you have to walk an obnoxiously long time to be able to place blocks

-Notifications, such as “You’ve gained one coin” or “PvP is enabled”, as well as the entirety of signs’ and NPCs’ messages, show up in the chat box. This clogs it up, not allowing me to see actual chatting.

-There is no way to set a home point. I was almost laughing when I realized that you didn’t include this. Why should I have to venture out so far to build if I’m never going to be able to find the place again?

-Certain items, such as the door that can only be opened by the one who places it, require real-world money to obtain. I’m all for giving gold out for money, but if you restrict what I have to work with in the game unless I pay you, especially after you claim that it’s free, it really doesn’t sit well with me.

-Lawyercats, the only enemies you can fight outside the tutorial, seem to be floating int he air. When you approach them, they pause and lower down to ground level. This means they warp several spaces downward, away from where I would be aiming.

-The lag in the game causes me to be hurt several seconds after I get hit. This results in me running away thinking I’m safe, followed by the cat doing its attack animation and me warping to the origin. It’s impossible to tell if you’ve been hurt until several seconds after it actually happens.

-Picking up gold coins does not always work. At best I’ll have to walk over them several times, at worst I’ll have to abandon them because they won’t pick up.

-The explanation of the z-axis is, frankly, terrible. I was told to hold shift and click for something different to happen, but nothing is different. I may just not be doing it right, but the explanation wasn’t helpful. In order to put a roof on my house, I had to lay down concrete blocks, lay roof tiles on top of those, and remove the concrete blocks from under them.

-It is very hard to place blocks accurately.

-The GUI is not very good at all:

1) The names of the other players are very hard to read.

2) The menu system is terrible; the menus are much too big, and in order to select a block form the inventory/shop I have to switch over to the mouse. This, coupled with the fact that block placement is hardly accurate in the least, breaks the flow of the game very severely.

3) As mentioned, the game’s notifications are thrown into the chat box.

4) The same button is used to operate signs and warp pads. This creates awkward situations where a warp pad is adjacent to a sign, and I’m never sure which will trigger.

5) When scrolling up an reading through the chat logs, the entire chat box scrolls down whenever a new message is chatted. This happens very rapidly, making it very hard, if not impossible, to read previous messages.

6) Other players’ movement is very jumpy. If this game is going to feature PvP, this must be fixed.

7) On the log-in screen, the option “I’m feeling slanted” is perplexing. It appears to just slant that single screen to the right. It doesn’t change the game itself at all, so…am I missing something, or is it really that pointless?

-Every so often, the game will freeze up and stop responding. The only way to tell if the issue has stopped is to either mash the space bar to see if it works or keep an eye on the chat box.

This game has potential, but right now it has some serious improvement to make.

Yes, this game has some bugs, but everyone’s computer is different, Sim9 needs us to give him feedback, and notify him of them. This game would be literally UNPLAYABLE if Sim9 didn’t let people test out the game. As for the money issue, i WOULD donate to him, but Platinum is too easy to steal especially if your part of a town and you place platinum objects, as shown yesterday when members of the DaggerQuill army started looting the town, and taking all the blocks and some platinum objects.

Thanks for the detailed constructive feedback Metaright

Originally posted by larrs:

Honestly Solsund, what did you expect from this game? It’s clearly very early in development. It sounds like you want him to pull a 10/10-star game out of his flank. Can you? I don’t think so, judging by the game you made.

Well, it’s very clearly early in development and yet is asking for money. That’s my real beef with it. I’m completely fine with him asking for money for a game that he has made but I wouldn’t think he should be building the game around real world money purchases until the game is actually far enough in to qualify as a Beta. If he’s looking for help funding things he could be asking for donations or running through Kickstarter or something else. Remove the Real World money aspect from the game and I’d still have a lot of feedback but it would not likely be as bad as I’d be judging it by the standards of an Alpha game. Instead by building the game around cash I was left to judge it as a quality level it clearly is not.

And certainly don’t judge me by the game I made. I didn’t even give my own game a 5/5 star rating (I think I went for 3/5 as I judged the game by my own rules) as it is nowhere near anything that I’d release as quality. The game is really a technology demo for making a Maze game that doesn’t allow one of the many many cheat methods, that’s why I provided the source.

Plus as a general statement even that top post wasn’t my own experience. I used that as a semi-worst case scenario to highlight a lot of the issues I saw. I was not trying to bash RobbyZ but trying to help teach, which is exactly the point of releasing a game into Beta. Your Beta users can teach you things about your game that you managed to miss when making the game. Even with my own crappy game I learned more from the feedback people gave, especially from where people were confused.

I am kind of scared about ChickenDelight’s statement about DaggerQuill looting the town. I was not a member of a town and I had not kept up with the way the game has been updated since my first post but I would have thought the block permission system should have stopped town looting cold. If it’s somehow possible it sounds like a bigger problem than the “Block Wall griefing” that I posted about before.

Originally posted by RobbyZ:

Thanks for the detailed constructive feedback Metaright

No problem. I do enjoy the game a lot as it is.

Aren’t most of these problems fixed now? At least the bugs?
Also, to calm some nerves.

I am kind of scared about ChickenDelight’s statement about DaggerQuill looting the town. I was not a member of a town and I had not kept up with the way the game has been updated since my first post but I would have thought the block permission system should have stopped town looting cold. If it’s somehow possible it sounds like a bigger problem than the “Block Wall griefing” that I posted about before.

Sim took care of that. Now not even the ‘free grass’ is free to steal like it used to be. If someone else clicks on your block it immediately goes back to you. So that is now out of the picture.

Also, since it has come up, there are two towns to my knowledge that will provide land for new players to build on. THe first being Stultorum-my town-the second being Noobshire which is run by Grim Master Death. I believe Cats are relatively close to both of those locations in large quantities.

As for the bugs and glitches you just have to wait and be patient. Sim has a life outside of the game development so bear with him if it takes awhile to get around to things.

Now, as far as that ‘free to play,pay to win’ strategy is involved-I can do more on 8bitMMO in 30 min than I could do in Time World with 3 hours. You can actually play this game and not run into “resourcement wait times” and “This can only be unlocked with <insert premium currency here).”
It is that fact that disqualifies it from that genre of games. Yes, it is frustrating taht you can’t be a mayor without coughing up some green but you can still build a fortress that rivals everyone else.

I do not write this with the intention of putting the Development critics down. I understand the importance of Constructrive Criticism and I realize people give it in different ways. I write this merely for the potential new player who may peruse this before deciding to play. This game is, can and will be better than most other MMO’s you shall find on Kong. Just be patient and enjoy the ride despite the bumps that come.

I should also mention I am a newb when it comes to making these posts, so bear with me since I did not use a green quote box.