POLYMANIACS - Alpha Demo [Feedback Request]

I don't know if something's changed, but the view felt much more restrictive than I remember, as if the camera's too narrow, or close to the car, or something.

With accelerate/brake on the right Xbox stick, I wanted to swing the camera around the car by pushing left/right (especially when stationary, eg. up on the 'tri-bridge').

There was no incentive not to keep the boost held on the Knight Rider car... how about a depleting/refilling gauge?

I wanted the camera to swing more in the direction the car was pointing/moving on the ghost car track, as it's hard to line up coming out of curves. It's a bit 'bobbly' too, but maybe that can't be helped. (Is it possible to interpolate between track sections and position the car based on that, assuming it's because of this?)

The menu's dead easy to use, though Esc should work as Back and Enter as Next, I think.

Some chunky square red/yellow/orange particles in collisions would be nice!

Will the game be saving controls settings etc between restarts?

In windowed mode, the windows mouse pointer needs to be hidden.

I got 50 fps the whole time running in 1680 x 1050 res. The only problem was that at that resolution I couldn't press the buttons on the bottom or right hand side of the screen! While running in other resolutions I could. It was quite odd. Nonetheless, this was a great game. I love the graphics style

I also got Integer Divide by 0 when I shrunk, reopened, and began a game...?

Hosted here!

I noticed right off the bat that the UI doesn't scale vertically with the resolution on 16:10 monitors.

I simply had no fun driving around there beside of looking at the graphics. As it is it's just not my type of game. I would go after a different gameplay.

One thing i would try to optimise for sure is the camera.

One bug i've experienced was that if i fire with the humve(?) as the blue player and shoot then i instantly killed the red player although i wasn't aiming at him.

Two player game, 30/42-50 fps, 2 teams, 15 vehicles, 8 objects, all with defaults. The GPU seems to be the limting factor on this machine, GeForce3 and P4 2.8 with HYPERthreading.

The camera is too close to the vehicle. Pull it back and make the field of view wider so we can see more of the game world as we drive.

It's silly that vehicles drive through water. I drove through a lake and saw 4 other vehicles driving along the bottom. Computer AI should avoid water; player vehicle should stall out and need to be "reset" if you crash into a lake.

Perhaps more impact and bounce upon landing after large jumps would help?

nice...when I try to change controls (Special1 key) whole thing freeze and crash..

The camera is too close to the vehicle. Pull it back and make the field of view wider so we can see more of the game world as we drive.

As far as constructive criticism goes, I think the controls are too convoluted on the helicopter. I wanted to fly it with just two analog sticks but for some reason I had to hit the "Special 2" button to change elevation. So I could move forward, strafe, and turn with the analogs but I couldn't move up which was annoying because having to hit the extra button takes all the fluidness out of the controls.

I was also confused about detach and posses. Now that I'm writing this I'm guessing that detach would drop the springy bomb things but posses I would expect to take control of another vehicle and it didn't seem to do anything.

I really think it would be a lot more approachable with simpler controls and maybe some little clues that pop up as you're playing. If when I had picked up the spikey ball thing it told me to release it with detach or whatever the functionality is that would be good.

The weapon targeting could possibly be better too. It wasn't bad but I had the feeling you could improve it more. I'll have to play it more to tell you anything specific. I think I'll show this to a few of my buddies and we'll get back to you with more feedback.

A classical GUI consists of 2D images for buttons with some common gadgets such as a drop down list etc. I cannot say much about design because it is subjective.
I believe that the GUI can run on a graphics resolution such as 640x480x32 which is a common place for all systems. It is not necessary to run on the same resolution as the main game unless there are special reasons.

I did notice also that the menu has some issue in widescreen. The mouse seemed to have to be some distance further up the screen than the actual word I was trying to click on to get it to accept the click (at the bottom of the screen).

Also I don't know if you knew this but if in-game you press something like the Control key or Windows/Alt key, which switches instantly to the Windows desktop, when you flip back all of the entire landscape colors and objects are solid black with just the sky having a single color. It stays that way permanently until you exit the game and reload it.

It seemed like a fun game and pretty cool graphics style, reminds me of the Amiga, but I wasn't so sure what the object of the game was meant to be so I just drove around doing nothing.

Hmmm ... I thought you said the models were generated in code before using algorithmic poly ops.

1.As soon as I finish the first lap, it gave a MAV.

2.I can self destruct continuously without destructing the vehicle. You can change it with recovery so it teleports me back to the track.

And yes, the widescreen issue seems to be resolved. Played in 1920x1200 quite happily.

BTW, did you fix your post on indiegamer.com so it's not attempting to show dead screenshots and link to a dead file? :o)

where's the fun in the Police Chopper? No weapons?

The game is locked to 50 fps.

Tank - seemd way overpowerd as far as killing stuff goes, in a game where you gain points by killing stuff, this seems like the ultimate weapon.

helicopter - well... hard to control, extra so when im using arrow keys and fire-ing with ENTER(defult). constantly found my self spinning around and round. however... the uber-heat-seeking missiles still made this bad-boy an almost impossible apponent. and as far as i could tell, only other helicopters with heat-missiles could hit you(?).
you could very easily just stay on a high attitude and trow out missiles in random directions and still kill lots of stuff, and never get hitt your self.

I want something different in the controling of helicopters, i just dont know what...

Kit - haha awsome, got to love the Kit car ;)
however... maybe i missed some aspects of the game, but it seemd like a rather useless car for killing other cars, and it was speeding so fast it was almost impossible to control him most of the times.
still.. it was great fun to jump up a hill and fly half throw the map with the afterburner ;)

and btw, that "bulsing" "light" at the front, should it not be Red? and not blue ?:P huh

For the helicopter controls I highly recommend using the WASD or cursors along with the mouse for steering. This way you can move forward and back or strafe on the keys and then turn with the mouse. Also you could use one mouse button to shoot and another to elevate. That would be very easy especially for PC gamers who are used to these sort of controls.

the AI might need some work tho, even tho i spend allot of time laughing at cars stupidly running into tree's right infront of them, like radio-cars bumbing in to eachother... hehe

the second map also had a HUGE problem with that vulcano in the middle, ALL cars turned up in the hole, and almost never more than 1 outside at any given time, and ofcourse... the second one car is in the pit, all other are magneticly drawn to it ;-P

something that i noticed after 30mins of play, was how enoying the police&ambulance siren's become, i dident check for any audio turn-off settings, and some background music might have soften it out, i also anderstand the reason for them ofcourse(nice to know where the amulance is).
but maybe you should add some sort of map or pointers on screen in direction of amulances insted of constant "waow waow waow" sounds?

One thing you must do though is allow the menus to be navigated with the keyboard and mouse or the joystick without taking your hands off whatever input device you're using

A nother interesting thing was, that i had to close the game becus i started to feel dizzy(lol), something that almost never happens to me, and i Play LOTS of 3d games and fps'es, not sure how this could be solvable... all the driving round&round feels like a part of the game play.

I was just attempting to explain why other people were put off by the controls.

The targeting still needs work

Are you going to add networked multiplayer to this?

Copland is also great fun. I can't really see anything wrong with that mode. It's just a blast flinging the spikey ball around into all the little cop cars which are going nuts. Truck hunt was fun too. The tank controls and the truck controls seem fine.

helicopter - well... hard to control, extra so when im using arrow keys and fire-ing with ENTER(defult). constantly found my self spinning around and round.

"We don't normally include alpha versions of games in these hallowed pages, but Polymaniacs impressed us enough to warrant such coverage.

Think back a few years now to Offroad (issue 102) a racing game where you traversed various types of terrain while trying to achieve various goals. This is almost exactly where Polymaniacs is coming from, just that it is doing so for free and looks far more like Micro Machines as it does so.

Even at this alpha stage, there are an impressive number of options available - time trials, deathmatches, team games and so on - and we can only assume these will be fleshed out with more maps and vehicles as time goes by. The graphics are simple, but that's the point - it doesn't play up it's devotion to polygons for nothing.

As it is, Polymaniacs is definitely one to keep an eye on - it could turn into something special, especially if they add some kind of online multiplayer to the mix.

Have they assumed too much?