STINGOUT is my first game so i'm very fresh to the indie dev scene. It will be released for iOS. But let's keep it short here and start our little show. You are very welcome to look at our first gameplay preview:
I'm Chris and i'm living in Germany. I represent the mastermind and visual artist in this project and i outsourced the coding and sound to some very talented guys. We are fighting through the todo lists to release our baby in the next few months.
I added some images to the game gallery. More content will follow every week. But enough for today...
We love any feedback and hope you like what you have seen so far. I walked through the game list here and i'm just stunned about your work! What a great place!
Regards and thanks for your interest
Chris
Great art! What did you use to produce it? 3D rendered to texture, full 3D, or hand painted???
A few crits, from what I can tell of the video:
The text "types out" very slow, I find that painfully obnoxious in mobile games. If mobile games are "supposed to hook you in the first 30 seconds" - watching text type for that 30 seconds is not going to hook people. Make it type out, and on one tap, immediately finish the message, next tap skips to next message, so people can spam through and not read - because they're not going to read it anyway. (I have made several mobile games now, in all beta testing nobody read the instructions, ever.)
On phones, will the screen space be better utilized? theres a lot of emtpy space where the control thing for the missle launcher goes, on a phone the actual game board in the middle seems like it would be very small, or will this be pad only?
Looks really cool, again, the art is phenomenal, very polished and nice looking, that alone will sell your game!
Thank you for this detailed feedback!!
@ 3D
I work with Cinema4D. The background is just a PNG. On top of that is another PNG layer for the rails to take care about the fluid shader.
@ Typing Text
Yeah! I know exactly what you mean. You can skip that and there will be no important messages needed to read. It's just for SOME storytelling. But very gently spread. Never more text than fit into one single screen and not before and/or after every level. That would be really annoying.
@ Screen Space
The place is very well utilized because you have the freedom to grab where you want inside this empty areas. I prefer to hold the device at the middle position. In general i just cannot handle it when i'm forced to the bottom corners. But if you want to play from there, it's no problem. The pads are following and recentering from where you tap on the screen.
Another big aspect here is the free view into the square gameplay. No disturbing thumbs over the important elements. The controls itself work like a tiptronic gear shift. On the left you can see the move pad. And the shot pad on the right. Just slide up or down to move the turret or to switch the mounted weapon. In the game summary here on Slide DB you can see a combined device/screenshot for iPad and iPhone (scroll down). The iPhone pads are scaled to ensure the same thumb movement.
I will write some seperate articles about these aspects.
So thanks again. Your feedback is much appreciated!