Foon

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#1

Took a few hours from hulk to put this little idea together. It doesn’t seem to be coming off as a game, just not fun, not sure why, sounded good in my head.

Anyway, here it is, let me know what you think and where you think it went wrong :slight_smile:

Some few instructions:

http://www.cokeandcode.com/foon

And the webstart:

http://www.cokeandcode.com/foon/foon.jnlp

Tested on Windows plenty, and Linux twice :slight_smile:

Kev

PS. Note, this is still early doors so there’s no win condition right now.

#2

Works great on my windows machine. I like the concept!! You are an animal.

#3

Crashes as soon as I drag it from one screen to another; I suggest you update your rendering code to cope with mulitple displays :stuck_out_tongue:

#4

[quote]Anyway, here it is, let me know what you think and where you think it went wrong :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Ooh, something original. :smiley:

Since you wanted feedback, I tried to think of all the “problems” I could, so please don’t take this as negative criticism. :wink:

Game play / feeling:

  • You could probably speed up the movement animation of the spinning thingamabobs tenfold. A quick jump is better than a slow drift, and far less frustrating.
  • The colors are very bland and flat. Some simple lighting would fix it right up

Game rules:

  • The rules seem too simple. It seems like there exists a single best strategy, if it wasn’t for the fact that the maps are random.
  • The maps are random. I don’t think that appeals to the players who like this type of game. You don’t see many random level chess or go games.
  • I didn’t understand what those quarters were. =/
#5

No :slight_smile: Plus, I have no idea what I’d have to do.

Thanks for the feedback.

Speed of movement - thats a fine point. Noted for the next one.
Colours - yeah, its just a prototype really.

Game rules: now this is really interesting stuff. I’d actually aimed at really simple rules since this is what seems to be popular, but I guess these rules don’t lead to enough depth. The quarters arn’t actually implemented fully, at the moment you just get extra score for each quarter but the intention was that you build disks out of the quaters, for each disk you’ve built you get 5 points, that way you’d put emphasis on the certain squares.

Most interesting, random maps… you think that players of this sort of strategy/puzzle game don’t like random maps. I’d assumed it added some replayability, interesting… useful.

Thanks for the feedback (even blah!). As I said, I don’t think its really working out. I’ve another prototype I want to try over the next couple of days, see how that goes.

Kev

#6

It was a quite fun game, I spent like 30 minutes playing it, finding that:

  1. It’s way to easy (150+ points is not a problem)
  2. The AI makes weird moves (reason for #1 I guess)
  3. About halfway each game everything is decided, not much fun to continue (due to the slow gameplay)

Making the map 4x bigger (2x2) might change #3 and #1

And ofcourse multiplayer to fix #2 ;D

~~

Overall a very nice concept.

#7

…only because I know you do a lot of code re-use :wink:

Anyway, the game was nice once I got it to launch on the right monitor, but I suggst you have a look at Blokus (both a board game and online free game) for some thoughts / comparisons; the tactics are, I believe, very similar, and the gameplay at it’s core is similar (although sufficiently different to not feel too similar)

#8

Oh, btw, I didn’t really mean “too simple” rules.

Go, Checkers and Othello/Reversi all have both non-random maps and very simple rules, yet allow very varied gameplay.

I more meant something like it feeling like your choice of simple rules not being deep enough to provide the kind of fractal complexity the other games do. I might be wrong as I only played one single game. :wink:

The jump/move choice made it feel a bit similar to hexxagon, btw. I’d say that’s an excellent example of a resonably modern “new” game.