Awaken - finaly finished! Ver. 1.0 aviable

Hey! Thanks for feedback! It got some very valuable points and i owe you download key when the game goes full, hopefully this weekend! (and if you ll ever come to Pilsen have a stop in our whisky store for free degustation;-))

Now to your points:

"It takes too long till i have control over my ship" - hold on! Its just first mission, no intro sequence in next ones! However i would like to throw player in to the action as soon as he pushes the button but i dont know how to skip forward the audio track as every event durring missions  is more or less tied to music track.

"I died 90% of the time because of ships rushing from the back into my ship." - its should not be possible as enemy ships that come from behind have collisions turned off until they reach their destination as i knew this was the thing that annoyed me in most other shooters so i applied this counter measure since begining. Might happened you hit enemy bullet your eyes missed while trying to dodge enemy ship. As i said above, it should not be possible, but i ll definetly check if everything works as intended.

"blink on hit" - damn, how could i forgot this basic trick! Thanks for reminding, now i have to think about how to do that without need for adding whited out fariant for every animation frame. Guess there ll be something i could use in drawing category.(edit:brightnes effect did the job)

"I didnt understand how to exchange weapons in the shop" - The thing is you cant unless you unlock them. There is lock icon above all of them(guess its my fail its not clear on first sight). For every completed mission you ll unlock pice of equipment.

As everything elese is positive i ll just thank you for your time and feedback i really appreciate it.

Well, the fullscreen, i spent on day working on it trying every possible configuration combination until i found this(see picture in attachment). Noticed it also helps to start the game in fullscreen as when using toggle fullscreen block i ve been experiencing glitches similar to your description. Hope that ll help!

Thanks for the invitation
I dont know if i will make it to Pilsen but you never know!

Some further thoughts and comments:

"It takes too long till i have control over my ship"

I died very often in the first mission (the game is not too easy). There for my impression.

"I died 90% of the time "

Ah okay. I guess so. Is there actually a health bar?
Maybe you want to start with some less enemies in the first mission at the beginning so that i can understand all the functions.

"blink on hit"

You can do this very easy and fast applying "sepia" or "negative" effect and removing it after 0. 5 or whatever seconds on hit.

"I didnt understand how to exchange weapons in the shop"

Ahh..now that you mention it. I didnt recognize the lock. It blends too much with the icon right now.
I would make it smaller and much darker. I would also madd a tooltip which says (unlocks in next level).
I thought that i need to collect points which are a currency to buy them. This would make maybe a bit more sense because then i could grind for the new weapon and master the gaem even if i am not super good. But just an idea.

Regarding Fullscreen: I tried all of that but it looks like a bug to me because some parts of my game just dont show up. Weird.
Take care and good luck!

Oh and i forgot one thing: Think about making the "warning" in the beginning skipable on click.
Cheers!

Hello again!

Thanks Bombini for additional feedback! Unfortunately version 1.0 was allready released and is aviable on itch so i was not able to implement all the improvements you are suggesting however most important features and improvements are there, i ll summarize what was added to the demo release.

- every enemy except "popcorn" enemies and bosses now blink white when hit
- torpedoes rebalanced, now they have more power however they do not destroy bullets anymore as bossfights were too easy in solo mode
- added notification to check the controls when the game runs for first time
- Adjusted HUD font size so now shield level is more visible and obvious
- screen shake when destroying enemies reduced to half. When destroying small enemies its hardly noticable now but still give the game desired feel
- epilepsy warning screen can now be skipped by pressing mouse or space
- improved ship handling and removed all friction
- various bug fixes
- decided not to make difficulty adjustments as some ppl were complaining game is way too easy, some the oposite. Thats why i decided to make a compromise and keep it as it is as inhouse testers(both experienced and inexperienced gamers)confirmed the same.

In the end i ve got feeling i rushed the release a bit and now im only waiting for desura to accept the game at their store and the things are going in the right direction negotiating with humble store right now. But still, there was a lot of stuff left to be done but unfortunately i run out of time.
I know my self and im forced to take a break right now and would not be able to come back to this project to finish it couple of months later. Dont get me wrong, im not abandoning this project and im pretty sure there ll be few more patches but i ll dont have time for more than that in following couple of months.
Why? We are moving to bigger place as me and my gf are tired of living on 30 square meters with bunny, 4 parrots and about 200 shrimps. Unfortunately i have to rebuild the new place and repurchase most of the furniture and other stuff, take care of security as we are moving to ground level and in addition im probably getting married.

Hope some of you ll enjoy version 1.0! Thanks again for your support/suggestions/critique!

Cool and good luck!
Please let us know how the game is doing on Desure and Humble.
This is a part of development which is not covered a lot in the Stencyal forums.

Cheers!

Tryzna, I'm really curious how well Awaken has done over at Itch.io I have a page there myself and getting ready to release a few things on it.

Tryzna, I'm really curious how well Awaken has done over at Itch.io I have a page there myself and getting ready to release a few things on it.

Hey Wayne,

Well i quess you are asking for sales figures. In one word, they are "terrible" ;-) If your game is unknow(just few positive reviews) like mine and you consider marketing annoying think you dont want to do then welcome to my club and listen what you can expect.

Itch: 0 sales for first few days, no marketing, no propagation. Just one tweet announcing the release. Its released for about a month now and i sold 12 copies. Positive reviews did not help and i guess only hardcore fans of the genere got the game for their collection.

Indie game stand: game is there for about two weeks, sold 8 pices so far, again, no promo and stuff around it, not even tweet.

Humble: 0 sales till now.

To shorten this, its not what i was expecting(was hoping for double of current sales), but im still glad about it as stencyl license is almost payed(half of the game budget) and i did not even started with any promo or advertising as i was waiting for Desura release(their aproval time is terrible) and game release is now scheduled for 1st of next month. I was holding back that long and ll continue to do so for another two weeks as i realy want to sell majority of pieces on desura as they handle VAT for you and all of that awful stuff i hate even more than doing marketing.

Will write more about month after desura release as im planning to promote the game a bit and im willing to share the data with other stencylers to give you all idea what you might expect from projects like this.

However, while sales figures are terrible right now im glad about them. More than half of my expenses are allready payed if i include sales of some of the assets on envato and if i ll consider desura release and its potential im expecting this game to turn profitable week after desura release. Not much, but i never expected im gonna be rich from this and main benefit i got from working on this game is all the knowledge and experience i learned while working on this project and if the game is going to generate me some extra pocket money, then i ll be even happier.



 

Thanks for that detailed feedback.. one thing I'm considering is possibly teaming up with a popular lets play youtuber and giving them a free copy.. then let them post a vid about it.. that might be one way to increase exposure.

Yes.. I'm not a fan of having to promote my work. I'd rather just make it and let someone better at it handle it..

Have you tried to put together a facebook page for the game?

Best of luck!!

Also.. show your game to someone like "Devolver Digital". I know right now they are full up on indie developers and titles.. but that could change at a moment's notice.

http://www.devolverdigital.com/games/page/

Yes, the youtubers is one of the thing i was saving for desura release. However i belive the game is not good enought to contact any publisher. I did not even tried steam green light even when the game was doing pretty good on steam concepts page(70% of voters chose YES).  Another bad thing working against me here is that i dont care about money(i really really shoud change this)  and i treat all of this as a hobby and im happy if i can get a good burger and bottle of single malt whisky as a reward for year of work;-)

Hope i ll be get better with all of this for desura release and especialy next project i started working on as first prototype test version is allready shaping up.

It probably would sell much better on Steam.

The extra monies that you don't really need that comes with it,
you can always donate them to charity, or fund other indie developer who really needs them.

Looks like Awaken is about to cross its finish line within few hours as it ll be released on Desura store. When i look back i found ridiculous i spent year working on it and unfortunately 80% of the dev. time was eaten by endless reworks of everything, but in the end i learned ton of usefull stuff during the process and i can use all gained skills and experience in my future projects and thas coolest thing that happened during that year.

Awaken on Desura: http://www.desura.com/games/awaken-underwater-odyssey



Sales update:

Not much changed, but the game just paid it self, so im now sitting at 0, no loss, no profit and im glad about it as if i look realistic at it, a lot of  "first" projects dont have that luck to pay them selves before main release.  Sales on desura are big question, but right now income from the game is enought to pay my photoshop subscription and if desura ll add something extra then woks on my next project ll be even more comfortable.
Not that little ammount of income matters, but it gives person that important feeling that the stuff i do in my free time makes sense and every time email announcing another sale arrives makes the day a little brighter;-)



Thanks & see you by next project as this is probably last Awaken related update.
 

Thanks for the updates! Your work is amazing and I cannot wait to see your next project