Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members | Hacker News Reader

Robokill: Superb new Flash game from News.YC members

rocksolidarcade.com

115 pointsrms82 comments

Wow, thanks guys! I'm kind of surprised to see it at the top, I actually submitted this when I first released looking for some feedback, but it was buried pretty quickly.

I've talked a bit about the technical aspects in another thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203952

I'd love to answer any questions anyone has, and I'm especially interested in getting any feedback on the purchase proposition and payment process if anyone does decide to buy it.

For $9.95, I think you would do alright on Xbox Live Arcade/PS3 Network... have you thought about developing for those platforms?

We have, but we'd need to scale up a bit to be able to get on there. There's a lot of red tape involved!

If I paypal you the $10 can I get beta access to your games for the next year? It feels like a much better deal if you commit to making future episodic content or if there are community tools to make new levels. Maybe puzzle rooms that you have to reclear until you solve? I think building a level editor is the next logical step and this is a great game mechanic to develop further.

Based on some of the games I've seen on Xbox Live Arcade, this would be a massive success.

This is great. This is exactly the type of game I loved as a kid.

It must feel good to have your game to such a good spot and just have to tweak it and add cool bosses and a few more mechanics like level editors or retro zelda levels. Already a great flash game and also a lot of room to grow with a bit more work. I wish I could play it full screen.

I will buy it, but not tonight. I am looking forward to seeing the next version, where you take it from pretty damn awesome to totally badass.

Fun game, but it's missing the huge boss battles that made Smash TV so awesome (Seriously, if you want to up your conversion rates on purchases, make that last room in Episode 4 an onslaught to remember instead of four easily disposable dorks).

Good point... this game needs more Mutoid Man

And an annoying anouncer shouting out "I'll buy that for a dollar!" and "Big money! Big prizes! I LOVE it!"

Before I walked into the objective room on the first mission, I had a little fear in my stomach like I always get before a big boss battle. Then I walked in and it was nothing and I was disappointed. Like waiting in line to ride the roller coaster and getting stuck on the merry-go-round.

That's a good point. We'll definitely put bosses in for the next version.

you should have a very short domain name linking directly to the game. I tried to recomend the game and the easier way was to tell them google for robokill

I bought the game. Not just because it's a product of News.YC members, but because it's really fun.

After beating it, I think it would be more fun if...

1. later versions of each gun is more or less equal in power, but each have different perks. That way if someone loves their shotguns, they can effectively keep using shotguns throughout the whole game rather than being forced to replace them for a gun that will actually give them a fighting chance to win.

2. Bosses.Be it a really fast unit that is annoyingly hard to aim at or the big enormous monster that somehow never seems to die, the game needs some things to curse at... I mean.. make it hard and to build anticipation. Bosses are also great for continuing the story in a possible sequel. ;P

3. An upgrade you can buy that lets you jump. That would be really cool and make the game way more dynamic, especially if you make it so the grenade launchers have a little arc to them where you can sit on a safe spot and shoot ground units down with them.

4. Perhaps skills? Regeneration or added weapon/upgrades slots? The possibilities are really endless.

That's all I've got for now. I may play through again tomorrow and write another reply in here. :)

Bravo. Love the Zelda-dungeon-esque level design, the warp points make getting around easy, and the death penalty is extremely well handled. A joy to play, just lost an hour to it and never noticed the time pass. Well done.

This is quite impressive! An only usability detail: why do you need all users to approve access to the file system, if that functionality is only required for saving games? I'm sure most users will be scared by that banner.

That's a Flash problem - you can possibly use more space than the 100k default if you have five profiles, and Flash will fail silenty when trying to write to it unless you ask for the block up front.

And the Flash prompt is pretty badly worded - it's just the Flash cookies that it's talking about!

The whole thing has driven me crazy...

Edit: Oh, I see what you mean about waiting until the user saves. The game saves transparently when you walk around so there's no other good time to pop up with the allocation popup. Would have been much easier if we used a 'choose slot to save' kind of system when you are back at base.

To answer your last question, yes. I had no idea my game was being saved until I read your comment.

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 limitation.

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).

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.

Why don't you present a message asking users if they want to have the auto save feature or not? If they want, they need to enable a security option. Otherwise, they can play anyway even if scared by such option.

Very impressive! Unfortunately, I can't give any higher praise than "a well-executed dungeon-crawler with style." I'm having a blast now, but I get the impression I won't look back after beating it.

In many ways, this sci-fi, shooting, dungeon-crawling RPG reminds me of "Virus Hunter," a walk-through example used in the Game Design program of "Cybercamp," which I enrolled in when I was 10. Is there some common inspiration I'm not familiar with? I highly doubt Virus Hunter had much originality...

As a comic side-note, I initially thought the Light weapons meant they fired light as their projectile.

P.S.: I must compliment the decision to jump straight from one mission to the next. I initially told myself I'd stop after beating mission 1, but, with the game offering no natural breaking point (e.g.: "Congratulations! Save and continue?" or some other kind of pop-up exposition or prompt -- an analogous phenomenon: it's easier to put down a book between chapters than one paragraph into the next chapter) , I found myself telling myself "I'll stop after beating this mission." As mission 3 rolled around, I found it hard to force myself to quit. It's the game designer's job to get the players addicted, and you certainly succeeded there!

There is no higher praise for a video game then "a well-executed dungeon crawler with style"

OK I checked it out. And by checked it out I mean spent three hours and beat the first four missions. What an awesome game. Smooth gameplay, intuitive UI, etc. Thanks for that.

One idea I have -- cut the demo off after the first two missions. I'm kind of burnt out on the game right now and needing a break; not in the mood to buy the game and play it some more. After two missions I was deep into it and most likely to convert into a sale.

As for myself, I thought there was barely enough free content... I would have found it really cheap if you could only do the first 2 missions, especially since they're so easy. I didn't die before the 4th, which is significantly more challenging.

Superb new Flash game for News.YC members: http://www.egg-attack.com

Backgrounder: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/19/ballmer_eggs/

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=49451

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.

This is killer. I played for about an hour right out of the gate. I'm loving it.

Constructive criticism: 1) The ambush's seem lame without bait. Put a dollar bill at the far end of the room, or something. 2) In at least one situation I got a key that was just used in the next room I was going to in the logical progression of things. This doesn't add much to the game since I don't have to go find it and seems superfluous. 3) The Flash permission-ask is lame, but that's already been talked through elsewhere in this thread. 4) Where are the really hard fights in the objective rooms? Get bosses or REALLY pack them with baddies.

Kudos, overall, though. "Superb" is an apt description for this flash game.

I love the game. My only problem with it is that when Flash gets busy (lots of items on the screen), the controls get sticky. I've fallen off the side several times because I let go of a button while Flash was bogged down and it didn't register... so I kept going in that direction.

I'm on a dual 2ghz G5 with a gig of ram, running in Safari, in case you're curious.

As a side note, I'm an AS3 coder and though I love my current job that has nothing to do with games, it's stuff like this that makes me entertain thoughts of game development. I'm gonna go read the technical notes from your link now....

I'll be coming back to play again... Neat! Can I ask how long it took to build, how many of you there are, and if there is any engine over the flash? I've never built a game before, so it's all foreign to me.

It took two of us about 3.5 months to build. There wasn't any engine over flash except for what was built during development. A lot of development time went into optimization, caching etc though (I talk about that in the other thread I liked to here).

Are you guys working full time on this?

I don't know if you are still reading comments here but:

The robot the spawns bugs should have a cap on number of bugs. Otherwise you can sit there killing bugs that drop shield recharges as long as you want. You can fully recharge your shield, and also build up exp for free.

If you finish a room you get a recharge, if you kill a box with an ambush you get a second recharge.

The store seems pointless - everything is far too expensive to actually buy. i.e. when you finally have enough money to buy something, it's weaker than the gun you picked up from the floor.

All the extra powerups, like riot shield and the others, are pointless - you don't have enough spaces to actually use them. It's a no-brainer to have the shield rechargers always equiped. Unless you want to constantly switch them on and off, which is a big hassle and detracts from the game. (You get about 1 second after killing everything before it recharges, so you theoretically could swap them every single time, but that really ruins gameplay.)

Have dedicated shield recharger spots, and then spots for everything else. The reasoning is that recharges are used after a room is finished, but everything else is used during a room.

I kinda of enjoyed playing it, but the balance was poor.

I find it hard to be played with the touchpad of my laptop.

What isn't hard with a touchpad?

(besides Emacs)

My MacBook Pro's trackpad is totally awesome. No more mouse pains in my hand from using my computer a lot. Most trackpads suck, but a good trackpad beats a good mouse, I think.

AWESOME GAME! Wayy better than 95% of the flash games out there.

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).

Can anyone give a more insight on how these games are build ?

Where to begin? Do you know how to program?

I would guess download Flex and start coding.

Yes I do. I am not a game programmer though.

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.

I'm guessing deciding on the game's look&feel, designing and integrating the graphics and tuning the difficulty is the hard part.

Definitely. A good rule to follow is that almost everything that turns out to to be hard is something you never thought of before you started the game.

So my advice to anyone who wants to make a game is to just start, there's not really any other way to learn.

That is also why it is so much fun ;-)

I thought of some more things:

- inputs are usually callback events, so the thing I usually did was accumulate all inputs in the callback events and then processed them in the processInputs() method. Accumulate was something simple like pressedKeys |= pressedKey

- updateScreen() is usually just a call to repaint() or something like that, which makes the Operating System call your applications paint() method. My paint method looks like

paint(Graphics g){

drawBackground(g);

drawCounters(g);

drawMonsters(g);

drawPlayer(g);

}

and so on... Flex does things in a slightly different way, so it really depends on the technology you choose.

Glorious game.

My only question is why do the robots carry cash?

Real questions: why is there a shop in the middle of a warzone?

Presumably, there is high demand for supplies in the middle of a warzone.

The graphics in this are above and beyond anything I've ever seen in a 2D flash game. Breathtaking!

Congrats for making the good experience list: http://goodexperience.com/games/

Their original submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84191

I really want to like this game, I really do. But the keyboard controls make it unplayable. They have a habit of sticking in the game, so I walk straight off the ledge or into a robot swarm. Does anyone else get this?

Sometimes. I think it's a Flash thing and it depends on the speed of your computer. Perhaps key up events aren't being fired correctly.

For some reason the CPU usage is very high and sometimes controls stop responding on my system (Athlon 3200+), which is annoying in big fights / when you fall off a cliff. Great game though!

Multiplayer mode would be beyond awesome. Flash-based MMORPG, maybe?

Ella Fitzgerald at low volume behind the gameplay music? Brilliant!

...if I pause to change audio settings, the first option throws away my progress without warning. Happened twice to me, doesn't make me want to keep playing.

How do I save my game? If I can't, then I'll have to leave my browser open. Don't want to risk going to the main menu without knowing what will happen.

If you go to the main menu you can start at whatever mission you are on, but not mid mission

I found it annoying that you couldn't pay the shop to regenerate your shield. If it was low, you'd have to die before the game went on.

Fun game, but it's weird that the Level 2 Weapon (the shotgun) has a lower DPS than the level 1 weapon.

Why would anyone want to use the shotgun then? :P

it does spread damage of course. I found several situations where I'd equip multiple shotguns and sit in a corner and let all the bugs come at me. :D

Well done, gameplay is just fucking muhwhuaaa!

Thanks a lot. I just spent the last hour playing. Very cool though! Great job.

Can't play with my Flash Security settings. Why can't you at least let me play a demo, before I adjust the security slider?

Downvoted for reporting a bug?

I tried the first level and it looks exactly like one of the castles in zelda for snes.... At least the map layout.

Very fun, though there needs to be a way to turn off the sound without quitting out of the game.

A lot better than I thought it would be. Thank you for exceeding my expectations.

This game ruined my productivity for about 2 hours last night. Thanks a lot!

Great game, very addictive! Will definately play again when I'm bored!

one issue I have is the mouse-for-aim requirement. If I could hold control to turn, then release to move, that would be much better. I have trouble with using the mouse for action...

Very cool game, well done.

What language(s) did you use?

Cool game - reminds me of Smash TV

> Cool game - reminds me of Smash TV

Which in turn should remind you of RoboTron.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron:_2084

nice one... i love it... is it completely coded in flash?

I love this game. This is exactly the kind of game I want to play when I want to kill time but not learn something complicated. It's easily the best flash game I have played.

You should have some bosses, and some retro zelda dungeons or something though.

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