[tef]

Hi everyone!

I am Stefan from the indie game studio named Fula Fisken. We are currently developing a game called Astroflux. Now we need to test our game and I was recommended to post in this forum by a friend (who is active here) to get some quality feedback and testing.

edit: I forgot to mention that we are living on oatmeal, thats how indie we are!


About the game
The game is an MMO Action Space Shooter with numerous weapons, upgrades and abilities. A large part of the game is also about exploring planets and discovering new worlds to gain resources for new technologies.


Feedback / Testing Priority

• Critical Bugs
  
• Weapon Balance
  
• User Interface

Any help is greatly appreciated and I hope you enjoy playing the game!

Play Here


Screenshots

[Stann]

I'll give it a try. Registering right now. If my email starts getting flooded with spam, I'll know who to blame.

[tef]

Stann, on 30 May 2012 - 01:19 PM, said:

I'll give it a try. Registering right now. If my email starts getting flooded with spam, I'll know who to blame.

You don't have to worry about that. You can even register a fake email adress right now. There is no validation required.

Let me know what you think :]

[Kaffe Myers]

Hmmm, I thought that people would be far more interested in this than has been shown. Maybe the community hasn't really ventured over to this section in a while to see if anything new is going on?

[Stann]

I'm still playing, I'm going to wait for a while before I make an official judgement. Making a mental list of everything I like and dislike.

[Stann]

So far, I'm really enjoying the game. I have a few issues with the game though.

I dislike the controls. Asteroids is 30 years old, we can make better controls these days.

Picking up floating resources is incredibly frustrating without buying the tractor beam. Not only the fact that you have to literally touch them with your ship to pick them up, but the bad controls makes it even harder.

Your ship turns in starts and jerks. When you're fighting the super tiny ships, it is incredibly hard to hit them with the primary gun. A single tap of the left or right keys will overshoot your target more often than not. This is negated once you get the auto-tracking weapons, but it sucks in the beginning.

The enemy AI is horrible. They will often just chill and watch you blow up their orbital bases, friendly ships, and anything else until you trigger their aggro. Once they're aggressive, all they do is fly directly at you and fire their weapon.

On the topic of orbital bases, after you defeat the defense of a planet and land on it, the defenses will often respawn before you leave the planet. When you finally do leave the planet, the base is restored and all the ships are flying around again, and you get placed right in the middle of them all. If you had a tough battle to beat them in the first place, you might not make it out alive especially since your shields don't regenerate while you're on the planet.

Some of the territories you can explore on the planets take so much time to explore, and there's no obvious reason for it. There were two territories side by side, at a similar level, yet one had an estimated 3 hours to explore and the other had 2 minutes. This is real-time I'm talking about, so I would have to come back in 3 hours to see if they succeeded or not. That's just ridiculous. You can pay some space dollars to clear it instantly, but the amount that it costs and at the rate at which you gain them, you would need to play for 30-60 minutes just to clear one zone this way. I'm assuming you will be able to spend money in the final release to get these space dollars (I'm assuming this game will be using the free-to-play model) but that's not something I'm interested in personally.

Enough about the bad parts. This game is incredibly addictive. I played for a good two or three hours without realizing it. I can't quantify it, but something about this game is awesome, lol. Despite the bad controls, the combat is fun. I think the enemy ship's damage output could be increased a little bit to give the combat more tension, but it's still fun.

I'd suggest anyone give it a try if they're into 2d space shooters.

[Vanish Mantle]

I will definitely check this out when i have a better connection.

[tef]

Stann, on 03 June 2012 - 03:40 PM, said:

I dislike the controls. Asteroids is 30 years old, we can make better controls these days.

Picking up floating resources is incredibly frustrating without buying the tractor beam. Not only the fact that you have to literally touch them with your ship to pick them up, but the bad controls makes it even harder.

Your ship turns in starts and jerks. When you're fighting the super tiny ships, it is incredibly hard to hit them with the primary gun. A single tap of the left or right keys will overshoot your target more often than not. This is negated once you get the auto-tracking weapons, but it sucks in the beginning.

The controls are like that mainly because we wanted the game to be playable on laptops. We could of course give an option to use mouse controls instead but It might be slightly OP in PvP though.

Quote

The enemy AI is horrible. They will often just chill and watch you blow up their orbital bases, friendly ships, and anything else until you trigger their aggro. Once they're aggressive, all they do is fly directly at you and fire their weapon.

On the topic of orbital bases, after you defeat the defense of a planet and land on it, the defenses will often respawn before you leave the planet. When you finally do leave the planet, the base is restored and all the ships are flying around again, and you get placed right in the middle of them all. If you had a tough battle to beat them in the first place, you might not make it out alive especially since your shields don't regenerate while you're on the planet.

Some of the territories you can explore on the planets take so much time to explore, and there's no obvious reason for it. There were two territories side by side, at a similar level, yet one had an estimated 3 hours to explore and the other had 2 minutes. This is real-time I'm talking about, so I would have to come back in 3 hours to see if they succeeded or not. That's just ridiculous. You can pay some space dollars to clear it instantly, but the amount that it costs and at the rate at which you gain them, you would need to play for 30-60 minutes just to clear one zone this way. I'm assuming you will be able to spend money in the final release to get these space dollars (I'm assuming this game will be using the free-to-play model) but that's not something I'm interested in personally.

The game is hack n' slash mostly. We have more advanced AI later on, with flee, charge and kamikaze abilities. But in general they are simple because we want as little synchronisation between server and client as possible. We might add new abilities in the future though, such as ambush, kiting and patrol.

Quote

Enough about the bad parts. This game is incredibly addictive. I played for a good two or three hours without realizing it. I can't quantify it, but something about this game is awesome, lol. Despite the bad controls, the combat is fun. I think the enemy ship's damage output could be increased a little bit to give the combat more tension, but it's still fun.

Thanks! We are working on making the game more diverse and we might even add changes to the controls. *no promises*

Thank you for testing and giving us good feeedback.

[Kaffe Myers]

Well, I see I was completely wrong about the engagement this community would give this indie game, but that's just a fail moment on my part.

Nevertheless, here's the video I made for the game!

[FFTA]

this is really well made, and I really like the controls! Makes it much harder.

Kaffe, nice video btw.

Also, what is this coded in?

[tef]

FFTA 707, on 24 June 2012 - 08:29 AM, said:

this is really well made, and I really like the controls! Makes it much harder.

Kaffe, nice video btw.

Also, what is this coded in?

Thanks!

Yes, it can be quite challenging in some elite areas and in PvP

The client is coded in AS3 (flashbuilder) and the server is coded in C# (visual studio #2010 express). We also use the Player.IO multiplayer service to run our servers and as a basic message system for the client-server model. I can really recommend them if you ever want to build a multiplayer game. They are really cheap and easy to use.

Just ask if you want to know more about the development of multiplayer games.

Cheers.

Stefan

[tef]

New Massive Update

We just released a huge update mainly to improve the experience for new players, but also weapon balance and game play.

1. Mission system
2. Play as Guest
3. Auto-aim (slight) on projectile weapons
4. Redesign of first solarsystem

You can read the full patch notes here: Patch Notes

Dev blog with images: Dev Blog

[Augestein]

Oh wow. I think I'll give this a shot when I finish up moving stuff around. It'll be awhile, but this looks kinda cool.

[ciskzoots]

Зачит тут говорили по поводу покупки кафф, вероятно я куплю каффы, профессионально показано и сделано.