Congratulations on your success so far! It seems like the game is finding the right audience. Perhaps my concerns about the possible negative reviews were unfounded. I was worried that a few negative impressions might snowball. The more I think about it, I feel that an 'easy mode' might not be needed at all. Having a different control method or physics would only serve to make things harder deep down. I other words, it might be possible to come up with something that feels easier to a newcomer or someone inexperienced with flight controls, but this method would likely be harder to use as one goes deeper. So the difficulty curve would become compounded. This would be a disservice to someone trying to learn the game. I think the only thing the game really needs is a more informative tutorial and a notice about calibration when pressing start. If anything else maybe a no gravity, no death mode that does not record scores? That way someone could just bounce around getting a feel for the controls. Of course, the problem with a mode like this would be the fact that one could just go down forever and ruin the excitement of progression. Maybe you could limit the depth to 5,000 - 7,500, and have a message like: 'Turn on gravity to go deeper'. I really like the menus and especially the way the screen dissolves into the game. I would not want the see that changed. It would be a challenge to fit more options into the current menu system with the low resolution. If you did a no gravity/no death mode that could easily go in the gravity settings without taking up more space. I have noticed that touches on the sequencer screen seem misaligned. I have to touch about a row higher from where I want a note to appear/disappear. This is on an ipad 3rd gen. Also, I have no idea how tempo is supposed to work. I have some ideas for how the game could be expanded with different sound sets and perhaps visual elements that change with depth, such as vegetation. Priority is obviously accessibility though, and I am perfectly happy with the game as is.
The main reason I mentioned a no-death mode is so I can mess about while listening to music without having to concentrate too much or get distracted by failing. No gravity would be pretty cool too, is it possible to go back up again or will the terrain not generate?
Me too, but then you swooped in and saved the day! I did have an "arcade"-mode at one time, but my conclusion were the same as yours. I want people to learn how to fly with the iDevice so I did the light/heavy gravity instead. Heavy will yield much higher scores and give a bit tighter controls. Light is much more bouncy, esp on low speeds, it will also keep on accelerating much longer than heavy, which will max out pretty sooon on the highest speed setting. Also the landscape is a bit more open in the heavy version to balance for the higher speeds. I will probably start each player off with 1000 melodium so a little tuning can be achieved at once. I think maybe it is problematic that the game starts off so slow and forces you to progress. Options on this would be great! Yes, both of these things is top priority. I am thinking of adding a splash-screen with instructions in the form of a drawing, so you get a little introduction to the gameplay. A real tutorial would be good, but I will have to think a bit about how to solve that. I know that it can be offputting for many, and it was even classified in the puzzle-category by a site(!). I kinda liked that. That you just get dropped into this strange world and have to figure things out. But I know it's not very customer friendly, so I will have to do better. I am also working with my long time beta-tester to make a gameplay-video of how to unlock the sequencer from scratch in less than 10 minutes. He says it can be done. He is an Melodive-maniac, so it's going to be interesting. Yeah, It would be easy to add a no-gravity mode, with , but how would the game know that you wanted to return to menu? I will look into this. Think there is a diffrence between ipad2 and 3 for some strange reason. Or mayby my preference is weird? Tempo is supposed to be tap the beat to set the tempo, like it garageband, but it doesnt work very well i must admit. I think I will replace it with arrows. Yeah, I have the same ideas. It's pretty easy to plug in diffrent stuff, the hard part is to think out algorithms for procedural content. The crystals were added as an after thought a few days before submitting. Ideally I would like buildings and cities and small aliens that wave to you! Also I have been thinking about diffrent soundpacks as IAPs, like 8-bit, jazz-voices, but the music gets very fast tedious with irritating sounds. Every sound has to be carefully selected. Ideally it would be synthesised directly, without the need for samples. But please share if you have any good thoughts.
You can go up a bit, but eventually you'll hit an invisible roof, the terrain is only generated in one direction, down. I do use a few tricks to make it work.
Since you're only using a tap at the moment it could be done with a two-finger swipe or something. Just remember to tell the player before they start
This might be a good idea. New players need to learn that speed and boost equals control. If a player just sits there and tries to float around they will likely become disoriented. A splash screen type thing is all I really meant by tutorial. An interactive type tutorial is probably not needed. If you do a drawing I would make sure it matches the visual design of the game. I thought that might be the case, but I have a hard time slowing tempo back down after increasing it. I connect with the graphics on an abstract level. In terms of visual design, the game is very strong. I'm not sure how I feel about adding literal elements like cities and aliens. It would have to be very well done. I don't see the game as cartoony at all. I could imagine lifeforms that are abstract like spiky sea sponges or floaty millipede things. The abstract visual design is excellent as is. For example, now you can imagine the scale as anything you want from microscopic to massive. Similar to how you talk about texture detracting from the game, I think adding more literal visual elements may also detract. I would possibly save this stuff for a different game like a shooter version of this perhaps. Simplicity and elegance is something the game currently has going for it. I would be very careful as adding could easily detract. I was originally thinking that if you look at a screenshot of the game there is no way to know how deep that is. Something as simple as subtle changes to the vegetation could relate this. Certain types only occur below certain depths etc... On the other hand the simplicity and uniformity of the game as is has its own advantages. It gets very intense as you get deeper and not knowing exactly where you stand can add to the tension. There is also a mesmerizing quality to the layers extending forever in relative uniformity. The more I think about it the more I think the game is an elegant almost perfect statement as is.
The crystal to mushroom ratio will increase the further down you go, ideally i would like to have more of those things, just what you are saying. You have good ideas about this, I will try to keep everything tight, and I appreciate deeply your kind words! It's very encouraging I tried to make it pixel-perfect, but of course there is lot's that can be expanded and made better.
I just wanted to say that Melodive is featured as "New & Noteworthy" in the US AppStore! I am so happy!!!!! Please all Melodive-fans: Follow me on twitter @melodive and retweet my tweets to people/blogs that like strange and wonderful things!
Melodive Gameplay tutorial - from 0 to Melodive Master in under 10min... From a clean install to Melodive Master as fast as I could! Hope you like it!! http://youtu.be/JXmcCl9SYfE Abbeylution Oh, in 156 minutes from NOW encounting... /
Nicely done! Hah! I recognize that gamecenter name! That is basically the exact same way I play. I think you go a bit faster though. I managed to get below 19,000 but I think I need more speed to score higher. Very nice recovery there near the end. This is a great reference for people. Great job! Oh wow, did you see the new #1? 27,247m and 66,415,248!
WOW!!! Wonderful! As I said, lots of ships on the horizon! The Tuniverse is swarming with life!! This makes me happy, My best was 19 700 000 something... I was so nervous playing that game and I can´t belive I survived that tiny hole at the end, I got just enough melodium pieces to squeeze through - I got such a rush!!!. But I made it, mainly because i played on LIGHT settings! I wanted to make a tutorial to show how to play, I pretended I held a moviecamera.
I feel it's time that I joined this conversation. Let me just start by saying I really love this game. Everything from the controls to the visuals seems very well done to me, and I see a lot of promise in this engine. I can't wait to see what you make of this. Although, I am a bit worried about how anything you make from this will sell. While I think you have something really special here, I can't help but think that the vast majority of ios gamers want games with very small difficulty curves. This game is somewhat demanding, so I'm assuming anything made from this engine would be that way as well. I know you said that you're looking to advance the medium with this game (and I really think you've done just that) but I doubt this game or any game that comes from this will ever be appealing to anyone who isn't willing to spend a somewhat large amounts of time practicing. Unless it gets a ton of publicity like Super Hexagon got. Now that I got that off my chest, let's talk about the game. If theres one change I would want to change about this game, it would be the colors, or rather the lack of colors. I do really like how the game looks right now, I like how the color fades when the boost gets low, and I love how areas can get congested with little bits of melodium, but I feel like the terrain is only cycling through three different colors. I think adding a bit more of a variety in terms of the terrain's color will go a long way. I also agree with HWest that adding little aliens to the landscape isn't a very good idea, or at least doesn't sound very appealing to me. I think the abstractness of the environments is what really made this game jump out at me, but I will admit that I tend to like games like this. I do like the idea of adding some vegetation below a certain point though. Really as long as what you add doesn't really distract from the overall mood, I'll be happy. I also feel like you should've added separate leaderboards for heavy and light gravity. It seems a bit too easy to just sort of coast through light gravity to high scores in my opinion. After getting the controls down, really taking your time is pretty easy in light gravity, but still pretty hard in heavy. So people who take the time to get good in heavy gravity still could potentially get beat by people who last forever in light gravity. The problem with this is it really doesn't add a whole lot of initiative to play heavy gravity if one's main goal is getting the high score. Two separate leaderboards would easily fix this. The sequencer is a bit weird to use as well. Adding beats precisely is basically impossible, so getting anything to sound good is a bit of chore. Maybe you should consider redesigning this. With all that said, thank you for making this game. The target audience for a game like this is very small, so I can only assume you're telling the truth when you say you made this with the intent to raise the bar for ios games rather than to make money, and for that I solute you. Keep up the good work and I can't wait to play your future releases.
I think the games will sell well. The six axis (motion) controls were awful on PS3. "That Game Company" made a game called Flow. It wasn't a huge hit, but some people really enjoyed it. The next game Flower was even better, and their last six axis game Journey is one of the best games on the Playstation Store.
Unfortunately I haven't had the time to play any of these games, but I watched a lot of gameplay videos for Journey, didn't know they had similar controls though. I will check out Flow and Flower also. I feel the iOS-devices are perfect for this, but tilt-control has gotten a shady rep due to awful implementations. Anyhow I really admire their work and would like to explore these kind of controls. The question is of course how to you tutor people? For some it's a completely new experience, it has to be learned. The bio-feedback loop needs time to function, so how do you make it attractive for people to progress?
Just wanted to say that Abbey is my long time beta-tester and he sits here laughing in my face, because the suggestions you people come with he agrees with completely, and he's like: TOLD YOU SO! . Actually for a little time I thought maybe Hwest was him in disguise, because the opinions was so similar! And then lukepolo joined the gang with even more of the same! Oh my, I will have to do some work now, and not only try to promote the app (a lot of work it turns out).
Thank you for joining and congratulations on your amazing high-score! Can you share your tuning please? Especially light or heavy? It could be, but the controls could be something complete different also. It's just a lot easier to do tilt than touch, but the controls depend on the game. A RTS could be done in my engine (graphics-wise) and then touch-controls would be needed probably. But of course, flying is the most easy to implement as it doent need much interaction with the terrain. I would of course love a real physics-engine, a nice freeride skiing game is something I would like to do. I could probably do a new flying game in two weeks time time if I worked on it 24/7 because all the parts are there, I would only need to change some stuff and add some other stuff. A skiing game would be much harder probably unless you know someone with some serious math skills. I think a lot of gamers are getting tired of the commarcialism in the appstore. The latest suck-out apptempts from EA and the general freemium-vibe is stinking up the whole place and people may be starting to look for alternatives. Gaming is moving towards mobile and that means what passed as a good mobile game today will not pass as a good game tomorrow. I think all of this feedback is excellent, and will try to implement it all in the next release. I tried to balance light/heavy, but if you took your record in light I have obiously failed. I will add another leaderboard. Aliens are out, any ideas for additional vegetation? Also the sequencer is a mess, I know. It was added as an gimmick more or less and did only recieve a little bit of love. I will need to rethink it a bit. You are most welcome, I really appreciated your feedback. I just want to have fun and share this. Hopefully it will gain some traction and lead to something wonderful! Please stick around and help Melodive improve!
Too much suspicious activity in this thread that makes me uncomfortable, enough to prevent myself from purchasing this.
Hi there, would you care to elaborate? Maybe my english got in the way again? The only person here I know is Abbey. He is my longtime beta-tester and I have prevented him from participating. But we felt a gameplay-video was needed so we did one, and then this new guy got this crazy hi-score, so everybody (or at least me and Abbey) got a bit excited and housewarm. I have been working with this for four years, so when people actually love it I do get a bit worked up. Sorry if that gave you the wrong idea. If you like I can send you a promo code and so you don't have to spend a dime. It's not about the money for me you see.
