Easier :)

Community, I need some help again ;)

I've been trying to make Aerial Antics playable and enjoyable for both my 52 year old father and my 11 year old sister.

I changed one major apsect which has made the game much easier and I also added and tweaked some controls. I added true analog gamepad support (it's nice) and I lowered the default mouse speed making the game much less twitchy.

The big thing I changed which completely changed people's ability to enjoy the game rather than pull their hair out is that the rings are now collisionless and slightly alpha'd. My 11 year old sister and father can now both beat the levels although they could not before. Even my older brother (both can beat the game) and I both find the game much less stressful and just more fun this way.

Please give a test and let me know your feelings. Some people may think it changes the challenge, but really it only changes the annoyance level ... I swear. You still need to be accurate but you don't need to have crazy skills.

Anway please have a look or a second look :) I'm dedicated to getting this right before we go full force to the public.

(5.1 MB now)

http://www.leadfootproductions.com/Install-Aerial-Antics-Demo.exe

I LIKE!

Much better! Very enjoyable..

Tracer

Definitely a much better control method than the last.

I tried it just now for the first time

Hilarious! love it! difficulty is spot-on

GGGrreat ! we gave it a right going over here at work.
A few staff + a good assortment of different machines.

Couple of things we thought might help:

1) A reset button for the jets position
(so it returns to the down position)

2) Somekind of indicator on the HUD showing the position of the jets.

3) Perhaps some smoke effects from the jetpack when your not using them. (a visual guide to the jets positions)

4) A graphic effect menu, some of the older machines we ran it on - struggled. (GFX 4 MX, 1.4 Athlon - perhaps an option to turn off that reflective water ?)

5) For younger kids, have a kiddies option to do away with the jet controls - instead just controlling the man in the direction he's facing.

Great game though, we loved it.. think you've just got yourself a couple of sales.

Much better than the first version. The hoops, were really annoying before, now they are great!

The gui could still use some work though!

Thanks for the input! We'll be taking all of it into consideration, for now I'm just glad everyone likes the new rings ;) Much more fun!

OK, I've softened the camera, you can control the GUI with a gamepad, and I have now made the game remember your name so you don't have to enter it every round.

There are graphics effects options. Try turning off the dynamic shadows and lowering the resolution. On a computer that fast the default settings will be quite high. The reflective water isn't anything facy, just flipped geometry. We've had the game run just great on a 400 MHz machine with a GF2 card so I can't imagine it'd struggle on the above mentioned machine ... very strange.

Kiddy difficulty is something I thought about and will probably save that for the GUI update which will probably be after our next game. I'm going to get AA to the point now where it's enjoyable and the major gameplay concerns that I've heard from at least 2-3 different people will be dealt with.

I do plan on adding a different color on the underside of the jets, something that will serve as a subtle visual cue to which direction the jets are pitched. Actually, I just added it and it seems to work really well. You don't need to focus on the jets to see how they're pitched.

Hopefully, now the game will be good to launch full force with more polish updates to come later. I'm feeling much better about the gameplay and overall smoothness. One thing I should mention before posting the link. At the begining of the round the camera zooms toward the player from afar. If you want to speed that up simply hit the jets and the camera will zoom up quick so you can get on with playing.

New features now available, please report any bugs:

http://www.leadfootproductions.com/Install-Aerial-Antics-Demo_test.exe

Cool...

Andy

The new jet colours certainly help. :)

Perhaps one more thing for you to think about..

How about a setting that allows you to adjust the stabilize ?. It feels like 'cheating' when you suddenly stop dead.

Be great if you could gradually come to a halt, perhaps adjust the amount of time it takes with a skill setting ?. (or maybe even adjust itself as you get further into the game ??)

Ban, The main concern with the graphics slowdown isn't the pc speed - it's the graphics card.

The game flies on my Geforce2 *GTS* but probably won't on an MX :)

Yeah, Mx's are lite cards.

Hmmm... My brother has a GF 4 MX card and it flies on there too. It might be drivers and or the default settings. For example on my laptop (only a 16MB integrated graphics chipset) the defaults set the res to 1024X768 but the laptop really doesn't like that high of res and likewise the shadows come up by default. The game will run on it but it's better to set the dynamic shadows off and the res down a bit. On some machines with similar specs though the game flies so the profiler is only an approximation.

As for the stabilizer ... you'll be thankful on later levels ;)

Nice game! However, I seem to have some difficulty with the direction of thrust after landing on the ground/grass. When I take off again, I am thrusted in the original direction, whereas I thought it might be more appropriate to reset it to thrust directly down (the default). Good luck with the game.

It does reset if you are sitting on the ground for more than 200 millisecs(). I have it set this way because otherwise everytime you touch the ground or a ball or something it stops you almost dead in your tracks (only a little momentum but much is absorbed by the impact). Actually, the way it works is that when you skip the ground they point down to get you back off, and then they flip back to the old position (this is all with the mouse as it's a tricky beast) to keep your momentum and not stop you dead. However, if you sit on the ground for about two warning bleeps it will completely reset the jets postion to the default down. I had to tinker with that stuff a lot!

I am running the demo on a first generation Geforce 256 DDR and it seems to run just fine... A GF2MX card should be about half the speed of mine, so there could be 'issues', but not with the Geforce 256.

Andy

All I know is it should run on nearly any card ... It runs on a 16MB S3 integrated chipset. It would probably have issues on a Voodoo card that's about it.