The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I'm using opengl. I've been having a lot of fun programming the AI.  I'll be looking for some test players in a little while.  The idea is to have battles ranging from small to massive.  I want to follow the what androsynth story arc.



(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v478/bigryanjoel/screenGrabApr.jpg)

Cool! Waiting for a playable demo.  If I can suggest - and I can see the potential - put in a directional light and tone the ambient way down.  The screenshots will look a lot better.  Also if you can: put specular on everything - even if you have to fudge something like yellow specular for all the materials in code.  It'll make it look way more lively.

Thanks, Dragon.  You sound knowledgeable in the ways of opengl.  I would like to spend more time on the lighting.  Perhaps if I build a demo you and others may have some more advice...  The game is very much a work in progress and I hesitate to add a download because I feel I would get too many comments about how the game is very incomplete.

I've only implemented 2 ships, and only the primary weapons of them...  I've got models for 2 others.

I guess my question would be, would building a demo of a such a work in progress interest anyone at all in trying?  Or would people not enjoy being QA and instead prefer critiquing something more complete?

How much of a game would someone be willing to download and try?

I do need advice from the community to make this good....  but I don't want to turn people off early with a wip download...

I've been off in the internetless hinterlands^* for a while (yes, those places do exist :-\) so this is a bit of a late reply. 

The sooner you can get a tech demo out the sooner others will start running your game on their hardware.  And the first time when their configuration isn't exactly the same as yours bad things will happen.  As long as you make it clear that it is a tech demo and not a gameplay demo you should be able to fend off comments the this-ship-doesn't-turn-fast-enough-and-fires-too-slowly sort.  Make it a rolling demo and take away player controls completely if need be.

I wouldn't worry about releasing a gamplay demo too soon.  There'll be people who look at a version 0.2 pre-alpha demo and decide it's crap and never look again but - I suspect - they would have had no real interest in the final version either.  Probably no great loss.  However try and polish what you do release and make it as fun as possible.  First impressions are still somewhat important but - it seems to me - less so in the indie game world than elsewhere.

Releasing earlier means you'll get comments and criticism earlier and if there are ideas which agree with your vision it can be easier to plan for them.  Also if nobody appreciates it (and if you're writing for more than yourself) you can scrap it and redo or move on.  That said, releasing too many samey demos will cause people to lose interest.  There should be a significant improvement between versions unless you've fixed a bug - and then most people not affected by the bug will ignore that release anyway.

That's my 2 cents.

* Actually I think there has to at least be a river for that.  All there was a was a large grain silo.

Actually that's some pretty good advice.  Seems to me that even though I really want advice.  The current demo (though playable) isn't particularly fun and needs lots of work.

Advice about ship speeds etc. would actually be quite welcome.  Those are some of the more important things to tweak in order to bring balance.  I guess the idea would be to try and finish a first draft quickly, and make sure there is a big disclaimer, to let people know its alpha...

The other thing I thought would be to just release it to a smaller group of people... and have them be my play testers.

Since I seem to be getting good advice here, what about the idea of just posting a *looking for alpha testers* in a few forums with a link to a download?  Then really the only people downloading would be those who knew they were just testing an alpha...