Bowling Babes - Playable Demo

I've decided to make this revised beta public, mainly because the quantity of feedback from the closed beta wasn't very good. The quality of feedback from those who were able to play and responded was excellent, and has helped me fix a lot of issues and add a couple of new things.

http://sybixsus.blitzhosts.com/bbbeta.exe - SFX 7ZIP - No installer, no registry, no junk. NOTE: You WILL need to right-click / save as in order to get it to download.





Screenshots are all out of date, so I'll update later, but this is the most recent.


System requirements are hard to judge. I've been told it works surprisingly well on a P3-700 with a TNT2 videocard in it. It's unlikely it will play acceptably with less than 16mb of videoram, as AGP thrashing will probably kill it.



For those who beta tested, this is what has changed :


THE FOLLOWING CHANGES, FIXES AND ADDITIONS HAVE BEEN IMPLEMENTED:

1) Bug where pin would land upright in the gutter and not be recognised as "down" is fixed.

2) Camera Transitions may now be turned off completely in General Options

3) Loading Screen Added to Challenge Mode

4) Loading Screen now recognises the right and middle mouse buttons as well the left.

5) Jittery Action Replays Improved ( maybe not entirely fixed, but definitely improved )

6) Bug where some old shadows would not be cleared when skipping bowling animations is fixed.

7) Mouse is no longer centered at every stage when configuring your match.

8) Tool Tips for Graphics Options ( VERY small on windowed screen, but nice size in-game )

9) Particle Effects can be turned off in General Options

10) Shadows are now disabled by default.

11) Player Configuration Screen now uses a smaller font to ensure there are no overlaps.

12) Standard Control mode now has render tweening to keep the speed up on low-spec machines.

13) Added the ability to play all Challenge Games and Level in Arcade Mode

14) Fixed small rigging bug with Ayame.

15) Score Display system completely rewritten. Some text display effects have been sped up.

16) Mouse pointer is no longer displayed during shot control phase.

17) Graphics Menu is now only shown on startup the first time you run the game.

18) GUI Text rewritten to fix bug where mouse cursor was not recognised as being "over" a piece of text when the mouse was over the gap between two characters.

19) Beta Expiration Bug Fixed.

THE FOLLOWING CHANGES AND ADDITIONS HAVE NOT ( YET ) BEEN IMPLEMENTED

1) Add Shadows to Pins : Very slow on even the fastest of machines. Too many copyrects for Blitz to handle, I think.

2) Display scores directly on monitor texture instead of a GUI overlay. Doesn't seem to give me the kind of flexibility and readability of the overlay.

3) Increase Difficulty Level in general. Easily done, but waiting for more feedback before this is implemented one way or the other.

4) Decrease Difficulty Level. As above ;)







THE FOLLOWING BUGS WERE REPORTED BY ONLY ONE PERSON AND CANNOT BE REPRODUCED. THEY ARE BEING KEPT FOR FUTURE REFERENCE :

1) Game Crashes when skipping camera transitions.

2) Game Crashes immediately after selecting the alley.

[edited cos I've tried it out as I said I would]:

Right! I'm going to be as honest as I can.

Firstly, congratulations on an incredibly robust and polished game. Playability in sim mode is brilliant and the game is a lot of fun. I think it's a big suprise. tennis was a god awful game in my eyes but this is very, very nice!

As a game, I cannot fault it although I have found some small bits which I would like to bring your attention to.

1) tokamak logo briefly flashes back to full brightness after it fades - ewww!

2) the main player looks incredibly bored the whole time - even after a strike??? please consider adding "jump for joy" animations or victory wiggle when you score well. This will make the player feel like a job well done!

At the moment she just looks bored!

3) the scoreboard (blatantly obviously) shows a texture which is fairly crap and misleading. Since you generate it anyway, why not render to texture? it would be cool!

4) there is generally too much smoothness and a lack of excitement on the main screens. For example the text is always smoothly moving slowly and there's no bangs and stars and general anime over-the-top nintendo excitement.

All in all I can't critictise how it plays. I felt arcade mode was boring cos there's not much skill without the bendy arrow of sim mode... perhaps it's worth considering removing it altegether?

I think if you jazz up the player's reactions to every shot (ie shaking head on bad shots and jumping for joy on a strike) and generally following console excitement - ie flashes and quick dynamic text, you'll improve the pace and vibe...

I think you're onto a winner.

Oh yeah, FireFox has a proper download system, unlike IE, but most people won't use anything other than IE, so I figured safer to just say you'd have to.

There are no instructions with the game, but it's pretty basic stuff. In Sim Mode, you either use control method #1 which involves click the mouse to select the position, aim, power and spin ( right click for no spin ) or method #2 which is hold down left button, move mouse to set aim and power, these are set when you release the mouse or after a period of time, and then quickly move left or right to set the spin.

In arcade mode, it's exactly the same except that you don't get to set any spin, but you can steer the ball a little by moving the mouse left and right during the shot. Your "mileage" will vary according to how fast the ball is going, etc.

Note that some nice options like shadows and particle effects are now off by default so that people with low end pc's don't report poor performance with high end features turned on.

more comments: looks lovely with shadows. Notice that the shadow of the player doesn't have the shadow of the ball... also could be a soft shadow as using sswifts thing... looks nicer with them on.

Thanks for the feedback, Rob.

1) Yep, just noticed that. I added it quickly in case the Tokamak guys saw the demo and got a bit pissy that I wasn't giving them a mention.

2) Agreed. I haven't managed to get hold of animations of an acceptable quality yet, and I'm incapable of animating myself, but it's certainly something I'd like to add.

3) Rendering the scoreboard to the texture has been suggested, but I haven't found a way to achieve it so far which keeps it as readable as it is now. If I can make it look as good and clear as it is currently while rendering it to a texture, then I would have no problem with that.

4) Noted.

Arcade mode is probably too easy for the main parts of the game, but it does make the challenge levels a lot less frustrating. If I do decide to remove it from normal games, I will at least leave it as an option for Challenge games.

Oddly, the shadows don't look very good with soft shadows enabled. I expected they would look great because the soft shadows looked a lot better with Tennis Babes, but in this case they look blobby and not very detailed. I'll have a play though, since it wasn't effecting performance too much to use them, as an option.

I'll considering shadowing the ball too. It would have to be shadowed separately from the player ( causes problems when they're shadowed as one, parented item ) but if it doesn't seem to slow things down, I may add that.

Again, thanks for the feedback.

I think the game is well polished and runs smoothly. I got no problems with each of the gfx modes with shaders on or off.

I would have to say that there doesnt seem to be any life in the game as far as the babes go. They dont, as Rob states, jump or wiggle or any other movement to show that they are interacting with the play. The character on the other hand is well modelled and look good.

I have also noticed an annoying thing that happens in replay mode after you hit a strike. On occasion I noticed that the pin rolled up the alley quite a bit. In replay mode it took 3 minutes to complete the replay and get me back to the game. I tried to cancel the replay with escape or space but it wouldnt have it.

I also beleive (imo) that the level is way too bright looking.

Those are my gripes for the moment. Apart from those the game played well and sim mode was exellent.

:)

Right click skips anything irritating. You can even skip the shot if you want. If you right click immediately after playing the shot, you won't even get to see the ball hit the pins ( and no replay is available ) but the ball and pins are calculated just as though you'd watched the shot.

BTW I spent a long time setting up the lights of that alley to be as bright as that ;) One of the other levels is set at night and another is set in a neon alley with no light apart from the neon detail, so I thought it would make a nice bit of variety to have a nice bright alley, particularly since this is the fancy-pants alley where the final Tournament match takes place.

Everything looks really good.

Just a few things I noticed.

When I first ran it in 640x480, the credits page runs at turbo speed-- just a blur....seems to run normally at 800x600 tho..

The replay delay leaves you hanging wondering whats going on. It would be more intuitive to at least put some text up saying to click the right mouse button or something to get out of it.

Also, just something you may want to make a note of, in case any of your customers have similiar issues....

I was getting bad texture corruption at first. I *think* I've narrowed it down to being the mipmap settings I had(fastest/lowest quality)..after I put it back up a notch the corruption has gone away.

I'm pretty sure this is an issue with my radeon and blitz games. I've had various things like this pop up in the past, usually the occasional blitz game, but every once in awhile, warcraft3 will get garbled terrain textures.

Anyways hope that helps ya some.. Looking good man ;)

Yep, I added that to my to-do list as soon as Amon mentioned the long wait. There needs to be some text telling you how to skip.



Odd.. I thought I made it time based. If not, I'll just add render tweening. I'm guessing you have VSync disabled?




Doesn't sound like anything I can fix, but I'll certainly add it to the manual/faq/support etc to tell players how to fix the problem if they get it.

Ran really well here at work on a celery 2.2 with crappy integrated Intel video, this was even with aa, wbuf, and shadows + shaders turned on. It has improved a lot in both performance and playability since I last tested it. Sorry but I can't really think of much thats wrong with it for now (guess thats a good thing!).

Will there be selectable bowling balls in the final release? I thought the different pins were a nice touch so that would be the natural progression.

*edit*
Ah, don't know how I missed that. Nice to see you were way ahead of me in thinking. Just got home and it also plays wonderfully here too. Very good work Syb, if it continues to progress in this fashion and the price is right, you can put me down as a potential buyer for sure. The last indy game I purchased was Tigerz' Surviving, and I'm due to support another fellow blitzer.

Thanks Eikon. That does indeed sound like a good thing. There are selectable balls in this release. On the player configuration screen, you can pick from any of sixty balls ( some have to be unlocked first by beating the challenge levels. ) They're just visually different, they don't vary in size, weight, surface, etc. I thought that would make the game inaccessible to people ( like me ) who don't go bowling much.

I first thought that the game was a little slow ... gameplay wise. But then I discovered the second mouse button. This is a good idea.


Overall a VERY polished game!... certainly a lot better than the tennis which I didn't really like.

Good job.

Very nice game!

Thanks guys. :)

Not bad at all :). Thumbs up.

I generally liked it, though it was a bit of a chore getting through the menu screens. A more compact frontend where it only takes a couple of clicks to start playing would be cool.

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