hmmm pretty bland there isn't really much that differs from the 10 million other asteroid variants out there

It's pretty obvious you didn't play past the first level. =p

naw i did but no music plus bleak grey background.....makes for a rather uninspiring game

Wow, that is insanely hard. The whole gravity changing machine can really wear you down fast XD

Definitely the most challenging asteroid game I've played, but I find the ship quite easy to maneuver than usual.

That got hard fast! 3rd level I lost. But I didn't really like it that much; "bland." Cool idea but not so cool execution of it.

Geez guys, I know it's really easy to be negative about the games, but how about offering up some constructive criticism rather than just some knee-jerk reaction?

I'd even rather you post no comment if there isn't something constructive or nice that you have to say.

It needs reverse, as well as a higher chance ot drop upgrades. More sound effects would be nice as well.

I'm a fiend for any Asteroids clone. This one is just too hard. More rapid shots would help. Tone down the gravity machine. Slow down the Asteroids overall. Maybe widen the play field or make the ship smaller and easier to dodge with. Reverse is essential. I do like that you don't bounce of the asteroids, that makes it less devastating when you hit one--you don't bounce around like a pinball.

If I could get further I would play it more, maybe even regularly like the classic BELTER.

Hey Jay! This is a completely unrelated comment! You should make an lj feed for the site!

Jasmine - do you mean add a button to add my feed to your Live Journal page? If so, I'm not sure how to do that, and I can't find any information on how to do that.

Jasmine: There already is an LJ feed for JIG.

LOL. I had set that up many months ago and completely forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder and the link, N@!

I agree the execution could've been better - background music goes a long way. I'm fine with the visuals though, they're stylish rather than bland for me.

Anyway, the idea's behind it are really appealing. The gravity machine and the snake enemies are pretty fun. It's hard, but that's not really a problem on itself. However, the pace is quite slow, the upgrades you get are few and too weak compared to how easy you can get them, and combined with the short average 'lifetime', it initially gives too little to capture enough interest. It has potential, but I think it's not balanced enough just yet.

Excellent assessment, Pieter! =)

Now that is just the kind of constructive criticism I like to see. =)

cheers!

Yeah, me too. It hardly helps anyone when people say that something sucks. Constructiveness is the point. We, wannabe Flash developers, like to hear WHY it does suck :-)

Anyway, we are planning to make a sequel for this game with new monsters, levels and maybe most of all, more fast paced action. It will come out somewhere in the beginning of 2007. After the first episode to our main project, Waking Life, has been published.

And about the lack of music. None of our games include music for now mostly because we can't afford it. Marko (the other half of ooPixel group) has a great musical talent, nintendo-like musics won't be a problem for him. Problem is the bandwidth, which is not free whereas our games are. All of our games are very small (Asteroid Adventure 45kB, Samegame 20kB and Timed Climb 23kB) and so we don't run into problems with bandwidth. Maybe at some point we can create some kind of a deal with some hosting service provider.

Thanks for all your feedback, I keep collecting feedback to make our future games better.

I always thought MIDI format would be so great with Flash games. Maybe it has sort of licensing problem or its not possible for hardware reasons, but so far Macromedia/Adobe has not done anything to include MIDI option into normal Flash player. I think it is already working with Flash Player in mobile phones.

Why is this game so hard?

Flaws: Life bar decreases so freaking fast. Also, the health pickups give you like 2% life back, OOOOH. Compared to the 15% I lost just trying to get it. No reverse, makes the gravity machine hell. Also, the powerups disappear so fast! WTH. Can't even get to them before they go poof! -____-;

Jay, you might want to add a link on your sidebar to the LJ feed. I looked only briefly, but I didn't see a graphic on livejournal's site the way you have "+ MY AOL" and "+ MY YAHOO". If you are interested in doing so, I can post to either suggestions or lj_art later on; just send me an e-mail reminder and I'll see what I can do. Then, if no one more talented than I wants to make one, I can whip something up.

ah, hello Jussi, I reviewed your version of samegame some time ago. i just realized that you made this as well =]

Man, I could not get past level five. Anyone beat it? Without reverse it's too hard to avoid shots and shoot. If the boss had a pause, it would be excellent.

I'm not really sure I understand your bandwidth concerns... these days you can get a terabyte traffic allowance for less than 10$ a month (dreamhost.com being a pretty decent host). While it's pretty impressive that you can fit your games in such small sizes, I think allowing a bit more in order to be able to polish the games some more might go a long way.

Some ideas for spicing up the presentation that come to mind are:
I think the spaceship would have a nicer feel about it if it showed some engine flames when the user applies thrust... visual feedback. Ideally, you could increase the intensity of the engine flame or its length when thrust is applied for a prolonged time, versus short flames for short bursts. Extra points for showing little steam bursts at the sides of the ship when the user rotates, for even more of a modern sci-fi show feel. :)

Another simple thing you could try is to have the shots flicker. Instead of using a single frame for the shots, use two or more alternating frames showing different brightness, making them stand out more and feel more dynamic.

You could also try giving the ship and enemies slight shadows to make them appear as if they were hovering over the ground. This is probably a matter of personal tastes, but I think it would add to the overall style.

I agree about what has been said regarding background music. It's a pity there isn't any.
Gameplay-wise, I also think it's too hard, and that the levels take a bit too long. Personally, I'm not much of a fan of flash games that make you replay levels you have already played after gameover. I don't think that's what people play these games for. I think most people play flash games for a quarter of an hour, then move on, and the more fun stuff they see in that time, the happier their experience will be. I died at level three and even though those mines looked really interesting, I don't think I'll play it again because it would take too long to get back there.

One more point that is somewhat more of a marketing-related thing: I would guess you are losing a small but considerable percentage of your players due to the design of the first level. When I entered the game, the first thing I thought when I saw two asteroids and a spaceship was "been there, done that", tempting me to close the browser tab. You have some really interesting and cool ideas in the game, and I believe you'd get a whole bunch of players hooked that would have otherwise gone away, if you'd show one of them (any of them) in the first level.

Excellent ideas, Philipp, and I agree with every one of them. Very nice.

And as far as Dreamhost goes, they are great if you don't mind an hour or two of downtime every couple of days.

I agree that their uptime isn't stellar, but it isn't as bad as you make it look.
Yes, the last few weeks have been rather shaky, due to their power outages (heat wave), blown generators etc., but I've been with them for several years now, and from what I've noticed, uptime is close to or better than the 99.9% most hosts guarantee (which isn't all that much, if you think about it).

Sorry for derailing this discussion off topic, but...

"uptime is close to or better than 99.9%"

Maybe your site is on a server that gets that kind of reliability, but the sites I have hosted with Dreamhost surely do not. And with a high traffic 24/7 site such as this is, downtime is just unacceptable. Period.

I have experienced a dramatic improvement in reliability of this site since moving it from Dreamhost to MediaTemple in January, though I continue to use Dreamhost to serve media content from my other domains.

Believe me, I wish Dreamhost's reliability were better than it is, for I would switch this site back to the very generous plans they offer. MediaTemple is great, but the reliability you get is very expensive.

Wow. That's what I want hear; constructive comments. All of it is very true and will be kept in mind when next version is made. Thanks Philipp.

What comes to hosting. Yeah, there surely are alternatives which make it possible to create bigger games. Our current service provider is free but surely we could pay something if we had enough bandwidth to include musics. As our next game is Zelda like RPG game, musics would give it a big plus. We will have to check options. As Jay said, downtime is something we would like to shrink as much as possible.

GREAT asteroids variant. Asteroids never held my attention, both because it got boring quickly, and the controls were quite frustrating. This remedies both. I just wish you could reverse your ship!