Imps vs Fanboys
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Wow actually made it into the top three, and got published on the Escapist to boot. This makes me happy on so many levels. I hope you all enjoy the game.
With regards to Yahtzee's comment about the blue and red bars:
The bars along the top are your resources. Each imp requires various amounts or Red and Blue to be summoned. You can get more red by deploying imp type 1 (the gamer) and more blue by deploying imp type 2 (the forum troll).
The Bars above each imp indicate how much life and time it has. Red is life and goes down when a fanboy hits it. Blue is time/mana which goes down over time. Clicking on an imp to activate its special attack will cause the blue bar to go down faster
I apologies for not making this intuitive enough to grasp on the first viewing. I like to think that the added complexity makes this a better game even if it does make things harder on new players.
With regards to Yahtzee's comment about the blue and red bars:
The bars along the top are your resources. Each imp requires various amounts or Red and Blue to be summoned. You can get more red by deploying imp type 1 (the gamer) and more blue by deploying imp type 2 (the forum troll).
The Bars above each imp indicate how much life and time it has. Red is life and goes down when a fanboy hits it. Blue is time/mana which goes down over time. Clicking on an imp to activate its special attack will cause the blue bar to go down faster
I apologies for not making this intuitive enough to grasp on the first viewing. I like to think that the added complexity makes this a better game even if it does make things harder on new players.
This is pretty good, but it's hard to tell what is going on. Like whats your "money". What are the red and blue bars, and what do they do. What dose each imp do. And so on.
A decent riff off the Tower Defense titles, definitely has a fair amount in common with Plants Vs. Zombies. (in terms of structure)
I like the premise, I think it is a good use of the source material, and ties in well with the humor that Zero Punctuation is known for. The way that you use enemy types derived from the show itself is also a nice touch.
The gameplay is surprisingly solid. It's clear you put a decent amount of time and thought into refining it. It feels quite a bit more polished than some of the other entries.
My biggest criticism is the graphics. There seems to be some rendering issues with rotated sprites. The animations aren't bad, but they don't look as clean as the gameplay feels. The GUI graphics are actually fine, and work well with the rest of the game. I'm not sure what manner of rendering you used, but the more animtated elements seem to suffer because of it.
Despite these drawbacks, I feel the title is very solid overall, and I agree with its placement in the top three. Congradulations, hamster!
I like the premise, I think it is a good use of the source material, and ties in well with the humor that Zero Punctuation is known for. The way that you use enemy types derived from the show itself is also a nice touch.
The gameplay is surprisingly solid. It's clear you put a decent amount of time and thought into refining it. It feels quite a bit more polished than some of the other entries.
My biggest criticism is the graphics. There seems to be some rendering issues with rotated sprites. The animations aren't bad, but they don't look as clean as the gameplay feels. The GUI graphics are actually fine, and work well with the rest of the game. I'm not sure what manner of rendering you used, but the more animtated elements seem to suffer because of it.
Despite these drawbacks, I feel the title is very solid overall, and I agree with its placement in the top three. Congradulations, hamster!
its a good game, difficult but managable, until you get to sunday, i was playing for ages and found it funny seeing molenuzes(however u spell it) face then he disapeared and i just kept hearing "have at you" and lighting totaling my imps, i was doing well for ages but just gave up because he never reapered, so good game bad final level, or atleast thats wot happened to me
Excellent game, I liked it better than the first. It's a Plants versus Zombies rip-off, of course, but it's a damn good one 
I agree that the resource bars are confusing, and the only time they even mattered for me was during the (awesome) boss battles, which is kind of depressing, and I felt waves lasted a little longer than they should. But other than that, the game is perfect. Great work with the source material, Yahtzee screaming from the top floor is incredible, and is the house a redrawing of the childish drawing Yahtzee uses whenever he means "a construction"? Pretty well done, and I salute you, sir.
I agree that the resource bars are confusing, and the only time they even mattered for me was during the (awesome) boss battles, which is kind of depressing, and I felt waves lasted a little longer than they should. But other than that, the game is perfect. Great work with the source material, Yahtzee screaming from the top floor is incredible, and is the house a redrawing of the childish drawing Yahtzee uses whenever he means "a construction"? Pretty well done, and I salute you, sir.
That's actually really fun, I got to the last level and then got raped, it's actually pretty difficult.
I like the little ground popper guys.
I like the little ground popper guys.
Hey Hamster, did you create your animations using code, or using frame-by-frame? If I had to hazard a guess, I would say you did it mainly using code.
I am sorry the last level bugged out on you. He is supposed to disappear and reappear in a different row 5 times before being totally defeated and the ending credits showing up. In the last 6 hours of the contest where I did my QA I never saw that bug show up. I replayed the game the moment Escapist posted it and did not encounter that problem. Also from the comments I believe other people were able to complete the game. Bug reports post launch make me sad.Droa said:
Thank you. The house was drawn from scratch, but when it came time to choose a color pallet I recalled Yahtzee using a green house with brown trim in the Halo review when he refers to angry Halo fans coming to take revenge on him. Hence the green walls. He has reused that same house several times in his reviews and is probably the one you were referring to. So congratulations on catching the reference.The Random One said:
I created movie clips using the key frame animation tools in the flash suite. I then imported each animation into my code and made judicious use of the "gotoAndStop()" function to render the sprites at the specific location it was needed. The Fan boy torsos were a separate movie clip inside the animation movie clip. As they took damage I would set them to the appropriate frame.Richard Kain said:
On a side not I am not a very good flash programmer. My preferred language is C++, I know just enough flash to emulate the functions and utility I take for granted in C++. There may be better flash ways of developing a game than the ones I used; but the main reason I completed this project on time was I made it as similar to an OOD C++ program as I could.
Ahhhhh...that explains a lot. There were probably more effective ways to implement the animations. But all of those other methods would have required that you create the animations in a program other than the Flash IDE. And I can certainly understand the desire to use a familiar tool, especially on a time-constrained project like this one.hamster mk 4 said:
I'm not about to rip on you for your coding. Your game's mechanics are very good, I was honestly impressed by the level of polish in the way the game behaves. Dealing with the coding principles and practices you know is just good production.
If you decide to do another Flash game, I would suggest investigating Flash's drawing routines. The characters in this game could have been constructed entirely using code, which would have improved the rendering, and decreased the file size dramatically. (not to mention the natural benefits to animation frame rate)
What are the controls to this game? I don't know what anything does? How do I send out imps? how do I do all these different thing?
The resource thing was put in to prevent users from spamming the best units. The game is much easier to beat if you just throw bombs at the incoming fanboy zombies. Originally I was going to give the user a set number of each imp per level. However I found that to be not very fun, since a player would never know how many fanboys were coming and how stiffly to ration their imps. The resource thing was thrown in at the last minute to allow players to spawn an infinite number of imps, but restrict high level imp spam.
I never played Plants vs Zombies, but I heard it uses one resource, Sunlight, which is generated by Sun Flower Units. As to not copy directly, and to one up pop cap I put in two resources, Joy and Rage, which I explained in the instructions (nobody reads).
As for the imps fading out. I wanted to try and add something new to the tower defense genera. It was always my plan to limit the time the towers spend on the battle field. This was to force economic decisions on the player. By using the Imps super move (clicking on it) the imp?s timer (blue bar) looses a large chunk. So when faced with a situation where an imp is under attack, the player has to choose with activating the super move and decreasing the imp?s life span or letting the imp fight normal style and loose health (red bar).
If the super move was free players would be clicking the imps as fast as they could or wondering why the imps super moves were not their default attack. If the super move drained health the player would have to choose between loosing health and loosing health, which is no choice at all. I could have decided not let the blue bar go down over time, however I wanted to impart a sense of etherealness to the imps. Players tend to get attached to a unit if it is doing particularly well. I wanted to give the impression that even if a unit does all that is expected of it, it will still fade to nothingness.
The level with the boss is the last one. There have been two people who complained that they could not complete it due to a bug in the game. While this saddens me there is nothing I can do about it now. There is an ending sequence which I will spoil for the people who can not reach it:
After defeating Molineux his head falls off and it is revealed he is an alien with a human mask. Yahtzee goes to a generic game studio wearing the mask. After a brief conversation described with pictograph text bubbles, Yahtzee (disguised as Molineux) successfully convinces the studio to make a game of his design.