My latest flash game, Robokill 2 | Hacker News Reader

My latest flash game, Robokill 2

rocksolidarcade.com

122 pointsreitzensteinm62 comments

The last version of this, Robokill, got a great response here so I thought I'd post the sequel as well. We've redone pretty much everything, resulting in what I think is a much stronger product. Love to know what everyone thinks!

Last thread was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218322

Shot 1: http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/static/robokill2/shot1.jpg Shot 2: http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/static/robokill2/shot2.jpg Shot 3: http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/static/robokill2/shot3.jpg

Love it. My wife's just called me again; apparently I said I'd be heading to bed an hour or so ago :P

Few comments

- Few more weapon choices would be nice

+ price seems OK, but I haven't finished the first stage yet.

+ Edges are fine by me

+ so are traps

+ Like the idea of unlimited lives, but you lose rooms

+ Love the RPG aspect, and I'd really really like to see this taken further in a shooter (perhaps Robokill 3?) - what about being able to personalise other aspects of your robot, as per a traditional RPG, so introduce some attributes like speed, defence, accuracy etc. This way, I could work towards building up a heavily armed but slow 'bot, or a fast accurate one that's fairly vulnerable.

Oh, if I buy it, does it include a Save function?

The first version was awesome. I'm looking forward to playing this one. How many people work with you, do you make these yourself?

Also, I would love to know how many people buy the game, though I understand if you wouldn't want to disclose. Not that I would be able to duplicate this level of polish anyways.

We had a team of four working on Robokill. Can't disclose sales stats, sorry! But it is better selling the game versus using ads.

Robokill 1 is the only Flash game I have ever paid for, and I did so happily - very much looking forwards to this.

My only complaint was that by the final few levels, my robot was so heavily armed that finishing was never in doubt - it was just a matter of time. That, and that the final boss "room" was pretty lame and short.

Man, the first one ate up a lot of my productive time. Now a new one? That's not fair.

Great work-- looks good so far.

Great to see a sequel. I liked the first one so much I paid for it. Can't wait to start blowing stuff up again.

Loved the original, will definitely be playing more of this. I've got your RSS feed in my reader, so I spotted it last week already;

:) Back when we (or I, anyways) called it news.yc.

Yeah it's been a while :)

Great game.. 1:54am here and still playing xD

The game is a lot of fun! I spent a bunch of money playing Smash TV back in about 1992 and this is a lot of the same fun gameplay and a couple of similar graphics. A couple of suggestions:

* Make the weapon recharge happen automatically when the level clears or you die, so the player doesn't have to stand there and wait for the recharge.

* Disable the traps after all regular enemies are dead. There is no additional challenge or fun from killing a few slugs while you run around and collect your big prizes.

* Automatically do something sensible with charge ups and get rid of the store and equipment screen altogether. The fun factor of shopping is not high.

* Make a big cursor indicator so it's easier to see the player and the target at the same time using peripheral vision.

* I would get rid of falling off the edge.

* I kept hitting the map button on E by accident and I want to move it.

Awesome game, just spent like an hour playing haha.

+1 on disabling traps. It just makes the game slower. +1 on auto weapon recharge when dead. There's no reason that I should have to wait.

The edges are fine imo, they add a bit of challenge. Otherwise it would just be possible to randomly press awsd without looking much.

Also, I enjoy the shopping. It's fun to think about different play styles and shotgun vs blasters.

One thing is that I just ended up using mostly just blasters. Without being able to switch between 4 shotguns and 4 blasters quickly, it made more sense just to stick with blasters.

Fun game!

Not sure about disabling the traps after regular enemies are dead - I kind of like that! And a lot of the appeal of the full version is the RPG aspect, I think we'd probably do a lot worse if we toned that down. But I like the rest of your suggestions!

Personally, I like the traps staying. More easy experience! I definitely agree about the targeting indicator. I was always losing my mouse cursor.

Great game, just like the first one.

Assuming you don't mind some negative feedback:

  * It took almost 5 minutes to load

  * It gets noticeably slow and the FPS drops to a single digit on 
    the first screen with an Ambush.

  * The openings in the floor are way harder to recognize as such 
    compared to version 1. When I fell through one, I honestly 
    thought it was just a pattern on a floor.

  * The Inventory screen needs to some tweaking. It took me a bit 
    to understand where the Sonic Pulse weapon should go on the 
    left hand side.

Overall, purely from the "user's perspective" it does not look like a super improvement over v1. It is more of an opposite given the lag and the loading times. That's not to say it is not beautifully done, it certainly is.

All good points, thanks!

Playing it here on a 4 year old iMac (2.0GHz 32 bit Core Duo, 1GB RAM) and it's running great

Man.. I pressed Menu and then Main menu and it took me out of the game. It didn't even ask me if I wanted to live. I was about to finish level 4, now I have to restart level 4. Great game but that really killed the mood.

I accidentally hit the back thumb button on my mouse and lost the whole level. =(

Very nice. Great effort!

If you don't mind me asking I'm curious about the business side of this. I don't expect you to put any real numbers out here but can you make a living of this or is it something you do in your spare time? I would be great if you could elaborate on this a bit. Thanks!

You can make a living at it. It's not easy though, at all, since so many people are willing to do it for free.

I'm really impressed with it overall. Great sound in particular - love the the level up sound. After a few falls, I sure wished those edges had railings.

I'm a sucker for statistics and I'd like to see some more on my gameplay: total damage dealt, item usage, favorite weapon, and -- of course -- my very own (in)effectiveness ratio: total rooms lost to death / total rooms captured.

How about a confirmation when clicking main menu? I didn't realize that would forfeit all my progress on that mission.

Nice! Reminds me of Alien Breed on the Amiga. Ah those were the days...

Could you tell us perhaps a bit more about the creation process of this game? After all this is hackers news and not an indie games forum ;)

Rooms should not disappear from the map. It is OK to hide unknown rooms, but once it has appeared on the map it should be visible forever (perhaps grayed).

Mark rooms where you have died with a little sign in the map. So you can avoid them for some time.

Both are good ideas, thanks!

Why can I fall off the floor in the first place? What purpose does it serve besides annoying the player?

Agreed. I was happily playing through until, in the course of a particularly involved battle, I paid too much attention to my enemies and stepped a little too far up and had to go back two rooms. This was frustrating enough that I decided to move on and stop playing.

Hmm, I might have a look at disabling it.

I didn't mind it. At first it caught me by surprise, but then it's just another thing in the room to beware of. I'd leave them there, but perhaps make the danger markings around them a bit clearer (less dirty yellow?)

would definitely be more fun getting killed by a monster than the floor edge.

I don't think it's bad; it makes you have to pay attention to how you maneuver when stuff is getting hot and heavy.

Nice, I like the "bio" direction here! I bought the first Robokill, and was a fan, and may buy this one too.

1. Are uncommon and rare items gone? I didn't see any through the first base. If so, why? That was one of the most fun features.

Edit: Nevermind! I see they do appear.

2. Please please please don't listen to people who want all the frustration gone, e.g. you can't fall to death. Perhaps recognize that not all gamers are equal, and give difficulty settings, e.g. on normal you can't fall to death but on hard you can. Heck, I was a fan of hardcore (restart on death) no-shop runs in the first game, maybe you could even unlock this kind of thing as an actual mode on beating the game (for the extreme masochists.)

This. Is. Awesome. Great job! Are you going to sell better weapons or something for real money? Future content?

Probably not - even though it may be more lucrative in terms of CPM, it's kind of cheap.

I think a little bit of parallax could help with the falling off the edges (making the edges more obvious), and give a nice added feeling of depth.

Agreed - there were some comments about putting in railings; don't do that. The falling is good and adds to the challenge if the player can clearly see the edges. Find some way to make them stand out.

Unfortunately being software rendered we had to pull too many performance tricks to make parallax even remotely possible. In hardware we'd probably have used many layers.

Hi, great game! Just a few thoughts:

* In Act 2, things get more expensive, but I don't seem to pick up much more money. I think many people would stop playing at this point, as it's harder to tech up. (In particular, it makes it harder to casually experiment with weapons. Which of course may fit the theme...)

* It might be nicer for weapons in the store to be more sorted, so I can more easily look at what I want and compare similar weapons.

* In pitched firefights after a while, when I'm keeping the mouse down, the frame rates go down. Which is usually great for me, since it's a lot easier to do ninja things like strafe while grabbing money and dancing with bullets. Dunno if that's a bug or feature. ;)

I really like this. I paid the $10, and I don't buy software often.

On Ubuntu Karmic, the game runs slowly, but that's mainly a result of poor flash performance. I have a Core 2 Duo at 2Ghz and an Intel GMA 950 running it. On Windows the game runs very smoothly.

When I booted into Windows to play the game, I couldn't access my character I was playing with on Linux. Why don't you have the option to save files on a server? I was really bummed out by this!

I enjoyed playing/beating the first one. But to be critical for a moment, I do feel like 10 bucks is a little steep for a flash game. Even though the fact that it's flash vs directx vs anything else shouldn't matter.. it does.

On top of that, Torchlight launched at just 20 and quickly fell to 10 and even 5 dollars overs the holiday Steam sale.

It might be a bit high compared to some of the Steam sales, but I think we're well into the territory that, for US customers at least, it's an impulse buy. I'm sure volume would go up at 4.95, but not sure about by 2x (plus there is overhead like support etc).

I enjoyed it, good fun, one small bug report. Though it might be a working as intended:

If a trap is triggered and cleared after clearing the room a second shield recharge is triggered. It's a fairly easy way to get full shield again after some of the tougher rooms as it's fairly obvious which are trap tiles.

Lots of lovely little touches in it.

If I am in a room on a balcony and there is a key on a bridge (i.e. I cannot get the key without using matter magnet), then I am stuck. I cannot teleport and cannot get the key (to "clean the room") without matter magnets.

Most impressive! reminds me of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smash_TV. Wish there was an in game cursor (sights) to help track where I'm shooting.

The last robokill was the best flash game I ever played.. Very impressive work.

I bought the original, and loved it. Nice work!

Sometimes I'd let the splash screen just sit and loop, so I could listen to the pounding theme song, and watch the gun particle effect. So simple, so good!

Small bug on 3rd "mission" (after collecting/using 2 red keys): the map shows that 3rd room below starting point as connected to the room on the left, when it is in fact not.

Why do American dollars, of all things, drop when some enemies die? I understand the game mechanic, but seeing cash appear on Mars when I shoot an alien is a little jarring.

Coming up with a recognizable, small icon for cash is actually kind of hard.

"Coming up with a recognizable, small icon for cash is actually kind of hard."

Gold Coins (Mario style)? Diamonds?

btw there is a knockoff floating around:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Badim/red-storm

btw if you want a really addicting game to "clone", do something like this: http://www.addictinggames.com/skystorm.html

i don't think there are any otherquality plane games, that are played from that perspective...it's always side or top view always moving...which gets boring.

Yeah, we saw that. The author considers it not a complete clone, or something along those lines.

It would be nice if excess XP was preserved. I had maybe 3 pixels of empty space in the meter, then fought a huge battle, but the meter was empty after leveling up.

I love it. Also whenever I see the word 'leviathan' it makes me wanna go install and play ufo: enemy unknown all over for some reason.

robokill is the game that reduced workplace productivity to 0% last year! glad to see you made a sequel.

Bloody brilliant. Reminds me of Alien Breed personally, but has a nice balance of good stuff all round.

Is the cash pickup sound effect the microsoft freelancer transaction sound effect?

Game sounds all come from more or less the same big professional libraries, so frequently you do end up using the same sound as another game (or movie, tv show etc).

it's really fun. i got tired of falling of the edge though.

hrm, obvious ED209 influence on the robots there.

I hate to be the only one who is ragging on the thread. It's really slick & clearly the product of hard work. But...

1) on a laptop the controls are cumbersome (hard to aim with mousepad) 2) the game takes forever to load and then does not fit inside my screen resolution..it's just a tad bit too big 3) the store graphics are hard to decipher (blue on black) and it's not clear how much starting capital i'm allocated

love, zack

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