Market Value
Community Forums/Showcase/Market Value
| ||
 Partially inspired by 'The Apprentice', Market Value is a financial matching/strategy game that challenges you to trump other players online in your quest for vast amounts of wealth! For more info visit the official Leadfoot Productions site! |
| ||
| Looks interesting but a -small- comment here: I would redo the third screenshot. Having a guy on top of an internet scoreboard with the name "ICHEAT" won't inspire people to play. It looks like your game is easily hackable and will turn people off. I would also lose the "Mom" entries as it looks like nobody is playing but you and your friends. Just my personal opinion... |
| ||
| heh good point lol, Jeremy needs to reset the scoreboard lol |
| ||
| Um... that's a screen shot from the beta scoreboard ... try the new one ... All fixed! Thanks ;) |
| ||
| Partially inspired by 'The Apprentice' Your fired! :) |
| ||
| My completely honest opinion: As it stands, Market Value has some serious game design issues. Because you can't remove bad deals from the play field without buying them, the game board will end up clogged up with high priced items if you only go for the good deals. When the average market value of the items on the game board is high, the best strategy is to simply buy everything. You make an incredible amount of money by simply diregarding price and buying random items as fast as you can. When the average market value is similar (or a bit less) to the price of the items on the game board, you have to play tactically - and the game board will soon be clogged up with overpriced junk. When the average market value is less - you're screwed. The only thing to do is hit the skip round button. Market Value needs (in my opinion) two things: a) A visual indicator of the price of the item with respect to its market value. b) When you buy two items, instead of the items inbetween being purchased as well, they should be taken from the game board - *without* being purchased. This will mean you can spot the good and bad deals easily, and tactically remove the bad deals. The market values would have to have a higher median and range to compensate, but you will end up with a much more enjoyable game. Right now, it is just a question of buy everything or buy nothing. |
| ||
| > the game board will end up clogged up with > high priced items if you only go for the good deals. Yeah but that's the point of the game though. You're NOT meant to just keep buying low priced ones. |
| ||
| Actually, it's tactical to fill the board up with say TV's because they are a bad deal and then swing the market to something preferrable for TV's and capitalize fully on them. What you said could work ... but then there's no loss (or way to fill the board and capitalize on them by waiting and strategically keeping them around) and in business you have to take calculated losses sometimes. For example if the board is filled with books that are a bad deal but there is a good deal on sporting goods ... take the loss on the books to make room for other items. |
| ||
| I didn't find that the prices swung nearly far enough to make the current system tactical. They just seemed to go down between rounds. With my suggestion, you would still have to make bad deals to get rid of even worse deals. |
| ||
| Something to think about ... either that or tune the price generator a bit more. |
| ||
| Also... I'm hoping that you are prerendering the items. 1400 polies for the car? :) |
| ||
| Nope, although we're talking about also doing a 2D cross platform version (with prerendered sprites) once BMax comes along. This particular version Adrian was keen on using the lighting and 3D gamepieces. The original prototype was 2D in 3D but then we moved to full 3D. The game seems to run fine though even on the humblest of video cards (my cruddy 16 MB laptop's s3 handles it) because there's only the rendering and I don't think it ever goes beyond 50,000 polygons. It's requirements are less than those of AA. Of course doing it in 2D would have been the optimal solution for sales but ... then there's the artistic essence ... |
| ||
| the game seemes to work fine on what we consider a low end system. I doubt if I'd have made the game it I didn't have fun doing it, and the extreme low end takes all the fun out of my work. When we do a 2D version, it will take a couple of hours to render the current objects onto a texture page and a 2D backdrop to replace the 3D UI. could probably just take snapshots of the game rendered in blitz for the final 3D graphics, so long as antialiasing is on. I think this is probably the lowest spec 3d game I would want to make, as I'm not really in it for the money, even though I do need the money, I'd rather to some hard labour than a game thats not fun to make. This one was a bit borderline as far as fun factor in development, but I believed in the game concept. If it sells quite well in its current state were both quite willing to make a dumbed down graphics version. probably our first cross platform blitzmax game. Either that or have both a 2D and 3D version in the same EXE if Bmax gets a 3d module pretty quickly. |
| ||
| You're wrong, or didn't test enough. The low-end PC I used (which is a popular Dell model of about 3 years ago), is choking on the graphics. The speed is sluggish, and the colors are completely messed up. I can't even READ the market values. On the other end of things, games like Collapse, Shape Shifter, etc. play perfectly well on this PC. No offense, but doing this with a 3D rendering pipeline was a mistake. In my opinion, you've dumbed down the graphics when you went the 3D route, and limited your market. This game would do well on an MSN, or Popcap. It's the type of game that appeals to the crowd. Unfortunately, a good majority of this crowd also has an under-powered PC similar to the one I'm playing it on. By the way, if you're interested, this PC is a 700 MHz Dell OptiPlex with on-board graphic.. Intel 82810E graphics controller. Running the most recent drivers and DX 9. |
| ||
| the lowest spec desktop system we have is a Pentium 2 400, with a Geforce 2 or Jeremy's laptop which has a 16mb S3 chipset. The game should run fine on anything with a DX7 generation video card, but there are problems with some DX6 cards as they don't support all DX7 features correctly. Some have problems with brush tiniting, vertex colours, 2X multiply, additive textures etc. My guess is that the intel graphics chipset isn't 100% DX7 compatible. we noticed on some really early cards, lighting is different pre Geforce1 and comes out washed out. also the various methods of tinting we used don't seem to work, vertex colours or brush colours. Which are used to tint monochrome textures in many places like the colour animated backdrop. As far as the 2D side goes, I'd never start off a project in 2D, I'm simply not interested in 2D graphics outside of traditional painting in acrylic and oils. But I'm quite happy to take snapshots of the 3D version and make a 2D game out of it in a couple of hours. Which is something we are considering doing later. |
| ||
| A Geforce 2 is still very powerful! It wouldn't choke on those high polies - but onboard cards probably would. |
| ||
| yeah, but I wouldn't make a 3D game for anything less, if there's a demand for it, we will make a quick 2D version. Allthough the car model is actually the wrong one, there is a sub 700 poly one somewhere in my 400mb market value work DIR :( none of the objects are supposed to be over 1000 polys, and most are in the 300 - 700 range. |
| ||
| B3D Tweak is your friend... :) |
| ||
| anyway looks like were going to probably add a choice of 2D or 3D to the loading screen, which will stay resident when the game has finished loading. so that those people with ultra low spec computers may have a chance to play the game too. |
| ||
| Although we knew full well the problems with what we released and were willing to take a gamble. We did proper testing. |
| ||
| As far as the 2D side goes, I'd never start off a project in 2D, I'm simply not interested in 2D graphics outside of traditional painting in acrylic and oils. But I'm quite happy to take snapshots of the 3D version and make a 2D game out of it in a couple of hours. Which is something we are considering doing later. The game is 2D. Seems like overkill that apparently limits who can play the game. 3D when it's not needed adds an unneccessary layer of complexity, on both the design AND system specifications. But hey, that's just my opinion, and those are like a-holes. |
| ||
| can't wait for 3d to die to be honest lol. and all those old video cards. Was amazed to hear that some Vaio's had TNT2 cards till just recently. Anyway, the games still 3D, but we have a low spec option that gets rid of the nice stuff and uses blitz rendered versions of the 3d graphics mapped onto quads. Maybe when windows finaly goes full 3d people will upgrade and make me happy :) the oldest system I tested on is almost 6 years old, with a couple of 4 year old mods. Was high end back then though. My high end system is only 1200mhz with a GF3 and thats what I typically consider low end. But then were talking about shareware I guess. Anyway, we should have an updated game within the next couple of days I recon. It's almost finished now, but I do like to give myself room to move in :) |
| ||
| Fast work Evak... I'll test it for ya when you get it up and see how it works. |
| ||
| Cool! |
| ||
| can't wait for 3d to die to be honest lol. Me neither. Back to the copper and blitter I say! |
| ||
| I just downloaded and attempted to run the demo. I get a MAV as soon as I pick high or low spec (neither works.) Arial Antics didn't work either back when I tried that. It seems pretty odd since I assume both are working for other people. Oh, and the uninstaller doesn't work. The uninstall.exe goes away, but everything else is untouched. EDIT: Hm, something just ocurred to me regarding the login for my machine. I'll report back once I've tested my theory. 2ND EDIT: Okaaay, that made it worse. I've not tried Market Value yet because my computer froze when I started Arial Antics, and even ctrl-alt-delete doesn't work. So much for my theory; I normally login with a restricted user account, so I tried logging in as the administrator. I've known this to have an affect on some software, so I figured that might be the problem here. |
| ||
| Something I've worried about for a while actually is the directory thing ... appdir() that might be something we need to update on both our titles ... but quite a few people are able to run them so... Anyway, should be interesting to see what your theory is. |
| ||
| Well, now the uninstaller works :P I'm guessing it's because this time I installed to C:\Program Files, whereas last time I did not. If you have things hard-coded to C:\Program Files you should rethink that and use relative file locations. For example, a lot of people use a separate Games directory for installing games. I ran Market Value and I am totally lost. Are there instructions anywhere? I eventually figured out, through semi-random clicking, that if I click on two of the same object the row disappears or something like that, but I still can't tell why. |
| ||
| Instructions are on the Intro to Level 1 screen. Directly above where it says Level 1 ... it tells you how to play ;) I don't actually have anything hardcoded to C:\ Program Files ... but there's one thing which I can think of that might need fixing ... but I don't know ... what I'm using should work. This could be a big problem though. I might try that appdir thing. |
| ||
| On my computer it works no matter where I install it ... I'm not quite sure what the problem is on your system. |
| ||
| I do not have a system that will run the demo (running NT4), but based on the info and shots, it looks like a fun game :c) |
| ||
| i just tested MV (the high spec mode) on a 733mHz pc with a GeForce2 and less than 512mb ram... ... it ran great. looks like fun too... --Mike |
| ||
| Thanks Red and Papa Smurf! |
   |