I had some fun playing this today! Thanks for the free preview. I think this game will be quite popular once it is put into full advertisement. Clearly the current BYOND hub listing isn't very effective in promoting games since it just bumps old games off into the page three abyss. However, once I started a DragonSnot session today quite a few users (intrigued by the Live! listing, no doubt) joined up, and even the dbz guys who had never played the game seemed to have a good time at it.
That final level is something to behold. I'm amazed that the huge animation works as smoothly as it does. Kudos to Mr. Tellefsen for pulling it off. Gazoot did a fine job with the music as usual (a number of praises throughout from various people), and of course Ron, you deserve a big applause for making it all happen. I hope you guys can pull in a bit of dough from this effort, or at least get enough playtesting to put DDT on the map.
The most amusing event occurred in the 'caves' level. One player was on his way to a sure victory when suddenly another player's desperation attempt to connect up a cave tunnel miraculously worked, causing him to steal the victory. It was quite funny.
We only ran into a couple of problems. The most severe occurred again on a 'caves' level, when the game basically ended up in limbo. Three of us had died and the fourth guy entered a cave, but never came out. I think that his snot may have connected up to an existing snot trail of a dead user (ending in another cave), but we couldn't tell because it didn't show up. He was still alive, because he could place pieces. Very odd. Unfortunately there was no way to end the game, so we all had to logout and log back in. I think you either need a suicide verb or some sort of timeout whereby the game automatically ends when users haven't done something for a period of time.
As Leftley noted, we ran into a bit of confusion over the trench replacement. At one point Leftley became annoyed because I was able to replace a piece of his trench that was blocking mine and surrounding the exit. Although this may have been a bug, I actually thought it was the correct behavior because he had basically sealed the victory and with this replacement I was able to give myself a chance. I don't remember the situation very well and it's kind of difficult to explain, but I think a bit of playtesting may help adjust the endgame rules.
A couple of us also felt that, in multiplayer, it would be better if the exit location weren't so one-sided. Leftley suggested putting a hole in the center of the screen. Or maybe you could do some stuff with multiple exits, or moving exits, etc. I don't know. I don't think the current behavior is too bad, although sometimes when a good player is placed right next to the exit the game is pretty much over before it starts. Someone suggested that perhaps the exit for each subsequent level could be moved further away from the winner. That seems logical enough.
I think it would be funny if the mice could "eat" through your trenches.
Anyway, it's a great game, and I hope to see a lot of users in the future. I'll think about the advertising angle a bit as we are doing the same for the system as a whole. |
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