Yeah, I didn't realize there was a timer until I ran out of time. And I wasn't even sure after that what I was supposed to be paying attention to. I think, in general, if you mashup two very different genres, there's a chance you're going to alienate some people.
Sorry, had a weird autocorrect. What I meant to say was that when it appeared you had run out of time, the bar had long since stopping moving, so it was rather unintuitive. As I mentioned before, I think I'd be more willing to give it a go if the timer were taken out (as an easier difficulty option would be fine, like I said). And AU, the video has value to me, and I presume to others, not necessarily because you love it or don't, but so we can see the gameplay represented. There are plenty games I loath that others rave over and vice-versa. For better or worse, 2.99 is out of impulse range for most people from a dev they aren't familiar with.
@Misguided yeah I guess I went a little overboard with the warning messages since that seems to be the consensus . The blue bar running left to right across the bottom is not a timer, it's the energy used for your hacker powers. When you activate the hacker power (yellow circle), it'll destroy an enemy firewall and consume some of your energy. The timer is represented in the background. You may notice the background shrinks vertically, changing from grey to black. When the background reaches the bottom, the hack times out. I was trying to keep the user interface clean and minimal but I guess the timer representation was too subtle. The timer scales in difficulty. You have more time with fewer nodes. It was designed to maintain tension during the hack so you couldn't sit on a node forever. Yes some storylines do have persistence! Some missions persist between lives, others reset, so your decisions do have long lasting consequences. I'm loving these questions, I could talk about the game design all day!
I appreciate you being on TA as a developer and reaching out to AU Asher voice us respected on the forums. Congrats with your game launch and coming from an indie developer this looks interesting. I'm usually a sucker for hacker games and I enjoyed reigns. I agree the $2.99 is a bit steep with IAP as an impulse buy but will wait to see additional resonses from others before getting the game... Congrats again and thanks for answering a number of questions on TA and providing some clarity to some game mechanics and game ui. Good luck with the game launch!
Glad to help, Misguided! And Jeff, your playtesters needed 8 reminders for the factions getting high/low but needed no explanation for the timers? # I think the game can explain that once -- and the blue bar at the bottom, so we're not guessing what they are. It's just odd that the hand prompts continue to appear to tell people to choose one of the options, but then more abstract mechanics don't get explained. (If it explains them and I missed it, I apologize.)
@imdakine1 Thanks for the kind words. TA has always a been a supportive community. In the freemium world of the app store, $2.99 is steep. It's a struggle to come up with a fair price. I ultimately decided on the current price based on other similar games on the app store. @AppUnwrapper Yeah I went overboard with the faction warnings for sure. My testers had a really difficult time realizing they were supposed to balance the power. Often they would just keep playing a have a game over without realizing what happened. The energy was explained briefly when the player is taught how to use powers, but I wasn't clear enough. I'm probably missing pointers directly to the blue bar. I also agree I can remove the hand prompts completely after a few missions have been completed. Luckily a lot of these can be fixed with a patch I really appreciate all of the feedback. It's great to have a discussion with people after being heads down in development for so long!
Nice game! I like the way you've worked a fun time-waster type mechanic into an actual game narrative where your performance has actual impact.. too many mobile titles just stop at developing a single mechanic without adding any substance beyond that. I'd really like to see more simple mobile mechanics make their way into fully realized titles. Downside though has to be the iap... this game is AU$4.49, and for that price I didn't expect there to be a currency system... depending on the type of content iaps can be fine, but purchasing currency for power ups kind of blows. It hasn't turned me off the game but I know my interest in playing will fade a lot quicker knowing that the dev is technically expecting me to buy my way out of my mistakes. Food for thought #
