Hi all,
Just wanted to post my first game, a long work in progress: Dragon Crossing.
Play as a beleaguered crane who has wandered into dragon country! Avoid six types of dragon to make it safely back to your flock! Use your ability to soar high above the clouds to temporarily avoid dragons. Careful use of this ability will be essential to make it safely through dragon country.
I have been working on this off an on over the past couple years through grad school and have recently decided to make the final push to make it publishable. This is my first ever game and I'm honestly quite pleased with how it has turned out.
Please give it a try and let me know what you think. Any feedback is helpful! I hope to give it a place to live on itch.io after giving it a little more polish. I would also love to give it a soundtrack but that may be a ways off.
Thanks,
Dan
Liked it overall. The slow scrolling of the land below, the dragons and their alien ways of life, the shadow cast on the clouds, all very nice.
While I can admit that dragons have their altitude of predilection, I'm curious why this bird chose to fly there when there seems to be no dragons above or below. Maybe this is the end of hot air ascending currents ? Maybe birds of prey don't dare go to the dragon altitude unless they are starving so it's actually safer there for a lone crane ?
Except when over a cloud,soaring isn't very convincing. Having the bird go significantly bigger onscreen or having the clouds and dragons shrink (or both) would make it more believable.
About game play :
-Bird inertia is a bit surprising at first but you quickly get used to it. The particle trail is a great way to get a good feel for it.
-Soar mechanics could give more feedback. The colored stamina bar is precise and informative, but looking at it is unfortunately too distracting. Ability to see on the bird when invincibility is about to stop or if it's available would be welcome.
The orange bird could start giving off more and more white sparks as stamina depletes for example. A few green sparks when soar becomes available would also help for example. The rhythm of flapping could also be used as an alternate indicator system. Or you can go super old school and use a border color indicator.(1 pixel around the game area the would be red, green, or mix of orange and red, all to convey the same info as the stamina bar, but available regardless of where the bird is.
An ability to dive back in early would also be welcome. Even if it just make you give up a little invincibility time, it would often make sense to immediately start the stamina recharge when a safe spot is reached... Or you could keep part of the remaining stamina. This 2nd option would need balancing, but a game-play where you keep on hopping from one safe spot to another while trying to stay at danger level as much as possible to save stamina might work.
Oh, and two other ideas :
multiplayer co-op
campaign mode, every bird player (up to 8 !) shares the same pool of 3xnumber of players lives.
multiplayer vs
infinite mode, each player has 3 lives, non soaring birds bump into each-other.
Thank you for the feedback! I think the multiplayer mode is outside the scope of this project but is a cool idea!
As for making changing the size of objects, I think that is outside my current ambition/token limit for the game, unfortunately. But I will try to do what I can to make Soar more clear. I think adding an effect to the bird when Soar becomes available again makes a lot of sense and should be straightforward to implement.
I also like the idea of diving back early to conserve energy! I will see if I can implement that one. It would definitely raise the skill ceiling on the game but might make the challenge more trivial. Thanks again for the tips.
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