

My latest flash game, Robokill 2 - reitzensteinm
http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/games/robokill2/

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reitzensteinm
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>

~~~
jacoblyles
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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
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.

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bcaulf
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.

~~~
momoro
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!

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huhtenberg
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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
All good points, thanks!

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sker
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.

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

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pan69
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!

~~~
reitzensteinm
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.

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novum
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.

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BjornW
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 ;)

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gus_massa
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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Both are good ideas, thanks!

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

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nex3
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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Hmm, I might have a look at disabling it.

~~~
cubicle67
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?)

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WilliamLP
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.)

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

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

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city41
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.

~~~
xsmasher
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.

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tayssir
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. ;)

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joshhart
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!

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acgourley
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.

~~~
reitzensteinm
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).

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mattmanser
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.

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Bolyuba
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.

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drhodes
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.

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

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JabavuAdams
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!

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Mathnerd314
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.

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idlewords
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.

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

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

Gold Coins (Mario style)? Diamonds?

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vaksel
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.

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

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Mathnerd314
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.

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oliveoil
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.

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

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

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

~~~
reitzensteinm
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).

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

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allenbrunson
hrm, obvious ED209 influence on the robots there.

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zackattack
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

