Monkey trouble - beta testers required!

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#21

I had another thought about the control issue today. What might be a good idea is to allow cursor keys to rotate the row or column that the mouse is hovering over. This allows you to keep your eyes on the area you are manipulating, and easily return your eyes to the action if you do need to look away, but still manipulate the rows quickly and easily.

Any thoughts about a control system like that? I personally think it will allow people to play a lot faster and more accurately.

#22

I found today when updating JVM that this is a featured game on Sun’s site.
http://java.com/en/games/desktop/index.jsp
http://www.crystalsquid.com/games/mt/monkey_play.php

System: Win2000Pro, Celeron 500Mhz/256MB, JRE 1.5.0_07, Firefox1.5.0.4

Game works fine, animations and sounds are smooth even in my very lowend machine. Is this Java2D game (using bufferstrategy now?) or hardware accelerated dx or ogl game?

What I found a proof of excelense was how developers handle game startup. It was like an instant Flash or Shockwave game’s splashscreen load. Splashscreen then displayes progress bar and downloads additional resources in a background thread.

This will give a nice perseived effect that game actually started immediately within few seconds. All java games should follow this pattern and we would not see that much “java is slow” complains I think.

Such splashcreens could give users a way to read few instructions pages how to play and resources are still downloaded in a background. Then after we have read few help pages all resources are up and ready.

#23

AMD 2400+, GF4ti, 512M RAM, it’s smooth as butter 8)


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         Monkey Trouble
 
(c) 2003-2005 Crystal Squid Ltd
      All rights reserved
 
      www.crystalsquid.com
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Detected JAVA version: 1.5.0_06
Using 1.4+ compatibility mode :)
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edit: I like the gameplay, especially how you can survive the first few levels without really knowing what you’re doing. It’s better than a tutorial. The most difficult is mastering the controls. Perhaps you could allow the mouse to drag ? That would be the fastest way to move monkeys: simply drag it left, right, up, or down. I wouldn’t need to aim the mouse on those little arrows on the side.

Also, the very first game I played lasted 20 minutes. Action/puzzle games like this should probably aim for a maximum duration of 20 minutes, not minimum :slight_smile: