OK, yeah I can tweak the minimum magnet force no problem.
Wow, yeah I don’t know what I broke. All sorts of weird stuff happening now.
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Have you tested allowing your cursor to pick up drops with similar magnetism too? I bet it will feel better.
Tried 1 hit death?
It seems like rounds might be better if they happened faster / you rushed the player sooner.
Did not read entire thread only played. 
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OK, whew. Back to working again. I casually messed with things-man-was-not-meant-to-know, AKA the appmanifest, and instead of failing to build it made random things go haywire, though there were other things that I just messed up. @Alex_8BitSkull A stupid typo meant some bullets were never getting deleted, so it probably hit the sprite buffer limit around wave 6 or so. I also now put a 10% minimum on the magnet pull, so it doesn’t go down to nothing at the edge.
@pkeod Hey, thanks for playing! Now that you mention it I realize it’s traditional in a certain type of game to pick up money with your cursor, but I don’t think it would work for this game. A lot of the challenge and balance is based around not being able to reach the money because it’s too dangerous, making you buy more speed or magnet range. It could be a cool idea for a special ability to be able to grab money remotely though.
Gotcha, yeah, I probably need to speed it up a little in the beginning. 1-hit death is a bit too hardcore for my aims, though it could be an extra challenge/achievement mode. I want it to be quite easy in the beginning, to not turn off casual, 10-minute-web-game players, but it shouldn’t be boring either.
I also need to either reduce some of the upgrades or make the end-game harder. Right now if you equip all the highest combat upgrades, you can pretty much survive forever.
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So, plays full speed on my rubbish Android phone now, so whatever you did, it works!
In short, it’s awesome! I’ve only been able to play it on mobile, so not sure if the controls are different on desktop, but it works really well. The auto aiming is nice.
For some reason the upgrades don’t carry between rounds, they’re supposed to, right?
I also could only play it in portrait, would have been much better landscape (or if the level filled the screen in portrait).
In short, great game! I can see it becoming hectic when you’re more upgraded and there are a lot of enemies on screen.
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@totebo Nice! Haha, I am impressed you are playing it like this. FYI you must only be getting the first ~30% of the game. The upgrades are not supposed to carry between rounds, but you are supposed to be able to open the shop again whenever you want to buy more. You need to press a key to pause and open the shop, so there’s no way to do this on mobile (unless you have a keyboard hooked up).
I will start looking into these issues today to see if I can get it working for you. Thanks for playing!
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I have really loved playing this today!!
edit: okay, and now constructive feedback.
- it would be cool if the color of the robot reflected their health (or if remaining health was displayed in some other way). Lots of games like this have floating health bars.
- I also found the buy/equip thing confusing at first. It might be better if you can’t buy anything unless you have a free slot? The message would be something like “no free slots: unequip or buy more slots to continue” because buying something usually automatically equips it.
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I have a challenge for you… make this again in 3d with a 3rd person perspective camera. I know you could do it well considering you’re the one who made RenderCam. 
Game sim would be the same, still a 2d plane of movement, but your shapes could be meshes with nice shading and squash/stretch in engine scaling. Remember those matcap tests I did a while ago? I think something like that + extra lighting on top might work really well.
You could use same ground plane but give it distance falloff for shadow. Maybe put it on a terrain mesh with a lot of polygons and then give it a very slight height map offset where it makes sense with the textures but only for visual effect not movement.
Movement could be similar, like you always move in the direction the 3rd person camera is facing and still autoshoot whatever it closest or however it works. I imagine on mobile it could play well.
UI could be the same though I’d scale it up a bit more. The circle UI around the player and movement direction could have a dark version just above the ground and the grey version a little higher.
I’d do the particles all as individual game objects with their own logic since particlfx still doesn’t have 3d camera facing options.
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New Version Up - Better rights for mobile yuppies!
Changes:
- Got it working nicely on mobile.
- To make it show in landscape and with a better layout, all I had to do was check some options on Itch…
- Tweaked some CSS a tiny bit.
- Used a little javascript from Pkeod to check if it’s a mobile device, and enabled a small “shop” button in the corner if it is.
- Dang fingers get in the way like crazy, but I guess you’re used to that?
- To make it show in landscape and with a better layout, all I had to do was check some options on Itch…
- Disabled vsync - On my test phone it was running in slow motion.
- Tweaked some sounds a bit.
- Added some color key thingys to the shop - I’m still trying to get away without limiting mechanics or adding a proper tutorial…
- Reduced the double-click threshold time a bunch (apparently I double-click really fast).
@88.josh Thanks for the feedback, glad you like it. I like the idea of showing the remaining enemy health somehow, that could make it a bit more strategic. I think having floating health bars on everybody would be a bit cluttered, but I’ll mess around and see what I can come up with. The shop… I dunno. I’d rather not limit the mechanics, and I’m kinda lazy to add a real tutorial…
@Pkeod Hahaha! Well, I have been wanting to make a 3D game with Defold. I never really did anything with my FPS project. I should do some performance tests. Now that the editor actually supports 3D, it would be way easier. Jhonny made that demo with cast shadows too. We’ll see. Rabid Robots is almost wrapped up, I’m starting to think about a next serious project. I guess I should get back to figuring out rotational camera shake and rewriting things for Rendercam 2…and rewrite my ancient GUI library…hmm…
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Completely irrelevant tangent. I’m considering downloading Unity to help some friends…
Defold in it’s entirety is smaller than just the Android Build Support for unity…(and that’s just the download size.) Who the heck uses this ridiculous bloatware?! And you still have to add in Linux and Mac support, good grief! Heck, Photoshop is only 1.2 GB altogether.
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We hide those numbers for you, but this is basically what the extender server has to deal with
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Yeah, true. I didn’t think about that until after the shock wore off. Fair’s fair.
I set it to download overnight. It gives you no data/sec, no current total, no total amount, no time estimate, no status indication, just an untitled little progress bar. I wake up this morning—nothing. No error message, no stalled download, nothing in the download folder…you pay people to make your own custom downloader, and it’s worse than every browser on the planet? Complaining about unity is the best part about it so far! 
(okay, I’ll keep it to myself now).
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Minor update, a new build is up with a few tweaks:
- Enemy health bars: Going with 88.josh’s suggestion, I made the enemy sprites show their current health, in 25% increments. It’s not terribly visible on the small enemies, but otherwise I think it’s just enough to do the job. I like how it affects gameplay. Now you can be tempted to take a bit more risk to kill an enemy that you know is almost dead.
- Added one new enemy in the late-game and tweaked some enemy stats and spawn chances here and there.
Future Plans
That almost wraps this up (it’s been a pretty good week!), though I’m still open to feedback if anyone has more. Basically the only things left on my list are to paint a cover and icon for it.
So, my plan is to release this for real on Kongregate at the beginning of next month. Kongregate runs an automatic contest every month—the top rated 15 games get cash prizes. It’s not making-a-living money, but it would be cool to make more than a few dollars from a game for once. I’m curious to see how it does. And you get maybe $1/1000 plays from ads on the game page, so that might get me a pizza or two.
I’ll be taking down the Itch version once I publish it on Kongregate.
I just counted. I have 29 game projects plus 8 utility programs (3 of which I still use fairly regularly) from the last 4 years. It’s about time I got serious!
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Well, I guess it’s out there now…
https://www.kongregate.com/games/Ross_/rabid-robots
I really appreciate everyone taking the time to playtest! It got way better!
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Oh, and unfortunately it seems like Kongregate doesn’t like mobile devices much. If anyone wants to play on Android, let me know. I can probably make a native build.
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Rated 5 stars!
You should add css to disable the canvas selection unless that’s intentional.
Also it’s probably possible to detect the cursor position outside of the canvas with JS directly… might be worth trying to implement.
I hope you did all of the things to increase your ad share to 50% because this game will probably be a winner on this site.
Are you capturing script errors currently? I had the game soft lock on me , cannot click Play
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Great game! Really fun!
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@pkeod Thanks! I returned the favor. 
OK, I just upgraded it to the new HTML5 template, that should fix the canvas selection and probably a bunch of other things I don’t know about.
Hmm, that’s true. It would be nice to not get your cursor stuck on the edge.
Yup, I should get the 50%. We’ll see, I’m really not expecting anything.
Uh oh, that’s not good! No I’m not. Umm, how do I do that? (man I’m a noob!) (sys.set_error_handler?)
@britzl Thanks!
You should add https://github.com/GameAnalytics/GA-SDK-DEFOLD then also use it to collect gameplay events. It gives good insights.
And here is for collecting script errors
Then the errors show up in the game’s log like
You can also use Google Analytics extension, it can collect script errors (and crashes) https://github.com/britzl/defold-googleanalytics
After playing a bit it’s immediately obvious this game would play well with mobile tilt controls / slide finger to change direction too most likely. So I hope you release a mobile version as well… you need to add more self-promotion in game, like tell people to follow you on twitter. If you have the spare $100 put it on Steam too as a $1.99 game. I can help you if you have any questions.
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Thanks! I will start looking through this stuff.
[Edit] You know…you tell me to release a mobile version, but then your own game thread is pretty much a string of horror stories about how awful it is to release a mobile game!
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Don’t let my honesty discourage you! Even though mobile is hard it still has massive potential and in the long term you can get lucky with it even without doing anything extra. F2P with banner ads + rewarded video sounds like it would work for you. Making it $1.99 on Steam would also be good since you can do 50% off sales to 99cents which when you get good review ratings make games sell really well there.
Did you already talk with Kongregate people directly about your game? I sent an e-mail to someone there about it to be aware of it…
Are you currently detecting window focus events? If not you should and auto pause the game. I think currently it’s possible for enemies to somehow shoot super long bullets if you leave a tab with the game on open and then return to it… Which would be a cool bullet type to add if enemies are not supposed to be able to do that. I have not been able to reproduce it yet but it was like a tube bullet like multiple bullets were shot out after each other from an enemy. You might be able to reproduce it if you make your character invulnerable, spawn a bunch of shooters, and leave the game’s tab idle.
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