This is my first go at making a game and I really need feedback .
please take a look and let me know what you think
http://www.javagamesfactory.org/views/view-game?name=spaccyman
Nice first game. 
I didn’t understand the bubbles that make the hero fly. What is it suppose to do in terms of gameplay? The hero is not very visible since it’s dark and the board too. The space is static. Maybe just animate the stars? Also, what is a bit embarrassing is that if the hero isn’t perfectly aligned with a corridor then he can’t move.
Thanks for the reply.
This is a work in progress and I am looking into improving things constantly, improving the portals as we speak.
my best guess is that the bubble is a more believable explanation of why in the original pac-man, when you moved off one side of the board, you magically appeared on the other side
Is it just me or does this game start out running really slow? I had absolutely horrid framerate (about 2 fps, I counted) until I had eaten away most of the dots, then it was about 30 or so. I’m using a 6600 gt which should be more than capable of handling twice all that at +60 fps; or so I would think. Sorry I’m sounding negative but it was a major concern. Otherwise pretty solid graphically and gameplay wise.
But like someone mentioned, you should probably fix it to a grid. So what I’d suggest is if you’re say, in a cell, and you’re a small distance to the right of the center, hitting the down arrow would move you left a short distance and then move you downward. I.e. if you’re 0.2 distance to the right of the center, and the user holds down to move down, he walks left until he reaches the center (which will be 0.2 distance), and then switches to walking down. Restrict it so that unless you’re along a certain set of lines in either direction, you can’t move parallel to them.
Good luck.
woogley . Thanks for that, I was starting to worry myself if it looked stupid .Now I feel happy about it again
nva225.
Glad you mentioned the framerate issue. I thought I had fixed it . It was something to do with the collision detection. I did change something in that area so i will look to see if i`ve messed it up again.
as for the problems getting around, I take your suggestion and I will gladly look into it. Thanks.
a few updates made . there are now 10 levels to play !!
Some people have told me that it was hard to get around corners .
Well, here is some sliding…
please let me know how it goes
Don’t work on mac.
Exception in thread "javawsApplicationMain" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no macjavaws in java.library.path
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1682)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:822)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:992)
at com.sun.javaws.MacOSLocalInstallHandler.<clinit>(MacOSLocalInstallHandler.java:34)
at com.sun.javaws.LocalInstallHandlerFactory.newInstance(LocalInstallHandlerFactory.java:30)
at com.sun.javaws.LocalInstallHandler.getInstance(LocalInstallHandler.java:56)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.notifyLocalInstallHandler(Launcher.java:995)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.continueLaunch(Launcher.java:891)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleApplicationDesc(Launcher.java:469)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.handleLaunchFile(Launcher.java:217)
at com.sun.javaws.Launcher.run(Launcher.java:164)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:613)
Game now has MAC Natives
Worked nicely on Mac, looks good.
sorry about negative feedback… 
load time is longer then I expect for a small game like this (but what do I know…)
framerate needs to be considerably improved
it seems blue horsie (or dragon… whatver he is) moves faster when going in diagonal… or is it just me?
leveling needs some life in it… like colors other then yellow for cookies you eat and brown for walls
more special powers
power cookies something more interesting then being just bigger yellow egg… some image so you get tempted to eat them as soon as you can
sound is too high, It outlouds my music player (foobar) … maybe slider for volume?
for level to complete you need to go through all portals… wans’t so clear what to do at first
like rotating board
like the portals
thanks for the feedback guys, I am looking at all the issues brought up here as well as others that I find myself. I will keep posting here when I make changes
I am currently working on improving framerates and improving level layouts. I also plan to put in some “between level cut-scenes”
nice update. I’m glad you made the bubble thing move faster (though smoothing the motion so it isn’t so SHARP wouldn’t hurt :P)
one small bug I noticed is that when you spit out the fireball or whatever, the warp portals rise higher? and then they go back down. shrug
it’s just you. and I believe that’s a yoshi 
Hmm… Just tried this on Ubuntu Linux… I get about one frame every 20 seconds. Not sure why, but it seems like it is using software OpenGL… I see the nVidia logo when the X-server starts, so I think that means it should be accelerated.
I’ll save the Linux rant for another thread
in a terminal, type glxinfo | grep “direct rendering”, if positive, you are hw accelerated
it runs ok on debian, sun jdk 1.5.0_06. Starts quite slow (less than 12fps) but as soon as the camera gets far enough the framerrate rises to acceptable levels.
One odd thing is that when you die and reapear, it might be a ghost too close to the apearing spot, so you get stuck there, diying and hearing the “argh” in a loop until a out of memory exception is thrown. Maybe can be fixed deactivating the ghost vs player collision detection for a while when you die.
Of course, how silly of me not to have known to do that :
I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 6.06 beta now… and it reports that direct rendering is on. (“direct rendering: yes”)… but I haven’t tried the game again… yet…
OK on the initial screen when it is zooming out from the player now I get 2 to 5 FPS… then during the game it is a reasonable 30 fps… when I died the game threw an exception while repeating the “uhhh” sound and it exited when I confirmed a Web Start dialog that claimed the game was unable to launch
the crashing when dying problem is now fixed . i did exactly what was suggested above and turned off collision detection during spawn time . thanks guys
i have taken notice of some remarks given and have added the following.
cut-scenes ( 3 at the moment )
better framerates (I hope)
better level transitions
user prompt when chaos time hits . (very bad font - looking for bitmap font donations please)
altered the look and position of all messages
changed background graphics
PLEASE give feedback on these updates , I know about most of the other problems