TCT:

JamesH:

I can't read the help screen on my TV.  The font is too small to make out, it's a older SD ~50 inch rear projection TV

You are right I should have thought of SD screens, somehow I thougt XBOX = HD

Any chance of posting them online so I can read them? :)

 

TCT:

JamesH:

- Tried a quick test game and it was fantastic.  Even better than I'd imagined from the video.  I can't wait to try it again tonight.

Thanks so much!!

I didn't get a chance last night, but will give it a go tonight.  Once again, thanks for releasing the .ccgame!

JamesH:

Any chance of posting them online so I can read them? :)

I just published the "How To Play" on the games website zeit2.bedenk.de for everyone who has troubles reading it in-game on a SD screen or anyone who is interested in just reading before trying the game. You can also directly access it under http://zeit2.bedenk.de/howtoplay.html

Btw the game is very easy to play b/c you just need two buttons really. Just read the hints while the game is loading and you might not need further instructions. The How To Play helps of course, esp. if you want to hit a high score. zeit² is easy to play but tough to master.

If you want some hints for how to use the time travel most effectivly you can always watch me playing in the video ;-) but I encourage you to find out yourself, its fun to get better and better every time you play!

jsmars:

Very nice work on the game! Looks like a solid contribution! Braid wasn't the inventor of timetravel, have you ever played Prince of Persia? and I'm sure there were other games before that too.

Prince of Persia was the first game I played that had time travel in it.  I am not a huge fan of time travel, and I am not sure why.  I want the player to suffer the consequences of his/her mistakes I guess!  So cruel!  But, that said, I am into high-action quick-relfex games (especially shooters) so strict consequences bump up the intensity.  And... I can't be hard on time travel, as every game has it!

Feep:

Brilliant-looking entry. My only qualm is that it's not a vertical shooter, but that's just a matter of personal preference. = D

Why do you like vertical shooters better?  And what vertical shooters do you like?  I am making a vertical shooter, but I think the ultimate shooter can only be done horizontally.

Btw, TCT, I love your plasma effects...

Matthew Doucette:

I am not a huge fan of time travel, and I am not sure why.  I want the player to suffer the consequences of his/her mistakes I guess!  So cruel!  But, that said, I am into high-action quick-relfex games (especially shooters) so strict consequences bump up the intensity.

What makes zeit²s time travel different in this aspect is that you cannot undo what you did. You still suffer most of the consequenses of what you do b/c your ghost does what you did before and all the damage it gets still affects you! Its more about using the ability to do things you could not do without it and using that tacticly. So if you wanna get really pro in this game you need to do something b/c you know you gonna use it afterwards for what you do in time travel and NOT go into time travel b/c you messed up the first time. If you like "high-action quick-relfex games (especially shooters)" and strict consequenses you are probably gonna like our game, try it and you'll see what i mean :-) You can play zeit² the easy track trying to survive or try to figure it out and use its mechanics and enemy behaviour to squeeze more and more score out of it.

I would love to try Dualty:ZF is there a ccgame available?

TCT:

Matthew Doucette:

I am not a huge fan of time travel, and I am not sure why.  I want the player to suffer the consequences of his/her mistakes I guess!  So cruel!  But, that said, I am into high-action quick-relfex games (especially shooters) so strict consequences bump up the intensity.

What makes zeit²s time travel different in this aspect is that you cannot undo what you did. You still suffer most of the consequenses of what you do b/c your ghost does what you did before and all the damage it gets still affects you! Its more about using the ability to do things you could not do without it and using that tacticly. So if you wanna get really pro in this game you need to do something b/c you know you gonna use it afterwards for what you do in time travel and NOT go into time travel b/c you messed up the first time. If you like "high-action quick-relfex games (especially shooters)" and strict consequenses you are probably gonna like our game, try it and you'll see what i mean :-) You can play zeit² the easy track trying to survive or try to figure it out and use its mechanics and enemy behaviour to squeeze more and more score out of it.

I would love to try Dualty:ZF is there a ccgame available?

Well that is cool, that you still suffer consequences.  I should not judge your game (at all) without playing it first.  I did notice that your original "copy" does what you did the first time around, so this is much different than Prince of Persia and Braid.  I would be playing your game right now but I am home without my Xbox while my partner is at work making sure our bug is fixed for resubmission.

We do not have a ccgame available, yet.  We only have an alpha demo out, not a finished game.  But if you played it, you'd get the idea pretty quick of what we are shooting for.  The feel of the game is 95% there.  I'd love for you to try it!  That's the point of these boards, eventually, isn't it?  For us all to try each others games and give feedback?  This will be a new experience for me, and hopefully a great one!

Hey everyone, I got the game up for review now http://catalog.xna.com/GameDetails.aspx?releaseId=344 so if you have time I would appreciate a review to get it through before the 29th.

TCT:

Hey everyone, I got the game up for review now http://catalog.xna.com/GameDetails.aspx?releaseId=344 so if you have time I would appreciate a review to get it through before the 29th.

Other than get feedback from all of us, what will that do for you?  Is it something we should do or try before it closes down?  I wasn't sure if we were going to submit our for review or not, as we still have known issues in our game we want to fix before reviewing.

Matthew Doucette:

Other than get feedback from all of us, what will that do for you?

Matthew Doucette:

Other than get feedback from all of us, what will that do for you?

I think our game is pretty much ready to go public like it is (a little long loading times when you start it up).After the 29th the beta review  will be closed but you will still be able to download games that have been reviewed. So if zeit² gets passed in time ppl can try it between the 29th and the time the real CG are released. Also for the real CG we will have to convert it to XNA 3. Basicly i would like to have ppl have a chance playing it and for us get some feedback of course.

The game is technically very good. I played till level 4 if I'm not wrong. So it's just about the beginning levels for now, but here's what I think (as someone who would have played the demo before considering buying for instance ;)): Pros: . Great graphics . The time travel does have a big impact on gameplay, I like it when I take 2 lines of ennemies simultaneously, or when I clear the screen exploding my shadow ;) . No level seperation, we never stop playing: that's cool ! Cons: . Where's the big huge invincible boss of end of stage ? Level 4 and still no boss :'( . Ennemies are too repetitive, predictible pattern, new ennemies appear too late . All ennemies appear at the right end of the screen, they never suprise me So the final word is, I would probably not buy as is if you were to release it now. I would think it's a great realization, but a shame to waste it on so few content (or coming too late, too rarely, I can't tell), and I would not expect the future suprises to be worth the buy. I'm convinced you can turn this into a great game by spending just one more month just adding content, and why not a story with multiple endings. Add replay value.

I designed a lot more than what is in the game right now. Big huges bosses, time travel to the future, nebulas, other mechanics, more variety in background, story are more or less ready to be implemented. But we decided to cut features and make the game really feal polished and one piece. I think it is very good like it is right now, but you are right that the game could be even better with the mentioned (and planed) additional features. But if you wanna make all that work right and make it polished thats gonna take a lot more than just one month of part time work (we all have our day time jobs and study). Right now the game is closer to a high score attack title like space invader than it is to r-type where its more about seeing all the crazy bosses, but like you said you get the idea of its mechanics and its really fun to play. The replay value in the game is proceeding in the levels and most of all attack your own high scores. If you try it more often you see how much you can improve. You can pretty much double your score every time you play after figuring out some moves. Nevertheless I would love to add more content (it was really so hard to let go of every little feature for this version hahaha) and I can understand where you are coming from. Thanks for the feedback :-)

There are a lot of differnetly behaving enemies (actually every enemy has something special to it) and patterns where we combine the enemies in tricky ways, so maybe we really introduce them to slow. I can almost guarantee you some patterns that take you by surprise the first time they come up. That is just from looking at our game testers. Almost everyone steps into the point trap or needs some time to figure out the time ghosts, realzise how to avoid the mines, get extra score out of the carriers... Looking at it from the aspect of a game demo you are probably right, we would have to show off more stuff right at the beginning. We tried to make it progressivly harder and some of the enemies would just be too frustrating in the beginning.

Just played zeit^2 for the first time.  I played two games.  Be aware that this review is plagued with my personal 2D shooter tastes.

I feel you move too slow, and the acceleration amplifies this.  I also feel weak, not poweful enough to kill everything on the screen.  But am I missing the point?  If you could kill everything on the screen, what's the point in time travel?  And, no big bosses, the classic hallmark of shooters!

I wasn't sure why I died... do the enemies suck my energy from me?  At first, I thought I was sucking their energy.

My 2D shooter ideas are probably a different sub-genre than yours.  I am wanting to produce Thunder Force 2 style (reaction based) gameplay, whereas you have more of an R-Type style (strategy based) gameplay.

Your presentation is amazing, as are your special effects, and the potential of a unique shooter is definitely there.

I want to hear your feedback on my feedback...!

haha feedback on the feedback. I am a little torn apart, on the one side I miss the big bosses that i already designed, on the other hand i do think the game works like it is. But strategy surely is important for zeit². I tried to introduce some new concepts like the energy sucking and even loosing plasma through shooting to not have the same kind of shooter all over again. And it really helps to push the need for time travel. If you have a feature like time travel you wanna also have reasons for the player to use it and one big thing in the game is not have any enemy pass you. It would be way to easy if you could just fly around everything. But like always the risk with new mechanics is that players need time to adopt them. Thats why we tried to keep everything else like the controls simple.

 

One of the most exciting and powerful things to do is cause a special shot. Instead of having different collectible weapons that you switch with the press of a button, in zeit² we introduced something like “the double jump” of shooting. Actually, it is a triple step mechanic. You shoot bullets by pressing the shoot button. You can cause a multi-directional shot by simply firing at your time ghost while time traveling. To get the maximum potential you need to hit “yourself” 8 times. That will cause a shock wave destroying everything on the screen and adding a multiplier for a certain amount of killed enemies.

After all even I really want bosses in this game. And i would really like to implement some of the ideas that i had for future time travel. They would make it even more strategic though. Then I had the idea of fogs where you cant shoot while you are in or else being attacked and similar stuff. I have definatly more ideas than resources for this game. Most of all I wanted to make it a new experience and not do the typical shooter all over again. So time travel and some other stuff was way before the big boss on my priority list. I still think the game can stand by itself how it is now while having potential to get more audience with some additions and classic shooter qualities.

TCT:

Right now the game is closer to a high score attack title like space invader than it is to r-type where its more about seeing all the crazy bosses, but like you said you get the idea of its mechanics and its really fun to play. The replay value in the game is proceeding in the levels and most of all attack your own high scores. If you try it more often you see how much you can improve. You can pretty much double your score every time you play after figuring out some moves.

I didn't read this before playing.  But now I understand your game better.  It's more like Space Invaders (score attack) than R-Type..

Matthew Doucette:

I wasn't sure why I died... do the enemies suck my energy from me?  At first, I thought I was sucking their energy.

This confused me at first too, but once the instructions were online so I could read them it made sense.  I think this is a great mechanic..  

 The time travel aspect reminds me a lot of this game:  http://catalog.xna.com/GameDetails.aspx?releaseId=13  zeit is kind of R-Type with time rewind Rift is kind of Geometry wars with time pause.

The game is really pretty, and I like the concept a lot.  My only beef at the moment is that all the important info is being drawn outside the safe area of the screen, so on my HD CRT (ghetto, I know) I can't make out any of the numbers or whatever on the edges of the screen.

spookyjon:

My only beef at the moment is that all the important info is being drawn outside the safe area of the screen, so on my HD CRT (ghetto, I know) I can't make out any of the numbers or whatever on the edges of the screen.

That surprised me, since we have quiet some room sourrounding our title safe area. Could you maybe take a picture of it?

TCT, your game crashed on my Xbox.  After your games loads, which takes quite some time actually, it crashed after not even a second, and booted me back to the dashboard.  I tried your game again, and it crashed again, same way.  I rebooted my Xbox and tried it again, and it worked!  All I could think is the Xbox was in a bad state from previous XNA games I tested (including my own), and the reboot cleared it.  I hope the judges reboot the Xbox's for this reason.  To further debug the issue, I played my game a few times, just as I had done before playing yours when it crashed, and then played yours, and it did not crash.  It appears it wasn't my game.  But who knows?  It could have been any prior game I played.  It could be your game.  I have no idea and I'm sorry I couldn't debug it further.

XNA games I potentially may have played before playing yours:

- Duality: ZF
- Bloc
- Just Dice
- Artoon
- Insane Game 3

Can a game mess up the Xbox and crashed a future game?

I had crashed it in review by accessing the menu with the dashboard (the middle button) while it is loading. That happened with a few xna games, actually. Could it have been that?

arrogancy:

I had crashed it in review by accessing the menu with the dashboard (the middle button) while it is loading. That happened with a few xna games, actually. Could it have been that?

I have not tried such things with any games.  I wonder if the judges will?  There are lots of polish that could be tested, but may not be:  Unplugging the controller.  Using controller #2 as main controller.  Etc.

My brother found a bug in Zeit^2, first time he played, on the same Xbox.  The time/life bar was stuck at 2:00 (flickering to 1:59 I think), and the time travel bar was stuck at 4.3 seconds, even though it could be used up and not have 4.3 seconds left.  He was indestructable.  He got to the infinite stage.  We left it running all night with the button down to see if you would ever die, and you couldn't.  The score was 4,170,500 when I quit it this morning!

arrogancy:

I had crashed it in review by accessing the menu with the dashboard (the middle button) while it is loading. That happened with a few xna games, actually. Could it have been that?

No, it wasn't that.  I left it to load completely untouched.  (Sorry, missed your question until right now.)

How did zeit^2 and other XNA games crash while accessing the dashboard?  They just booted you back to the dashboard?

Hi,

thanks for trying to figure out some of the bugs. I had the game crash in earlier versions but not the latest one. We will have to do more debugging. I know of some little bugs during play though I never had the invincible bug. Actually that might be a feature. It is veeeery unlikely but maybe you accidently activated the a the "konami cheat code" that we included in the game ;-) But Its good to know of some of the things that happened to you while playing it gives us hints where we should look for the bugs. Btw. it speaks for the stability of our game that you could have it run all night without a glitch (besides being invincible :-) thanks for running that test.

I hope you enjoyed playing anyway! What are you high scores so far? After playing it a couple of times to what level can you get. These things would be helpful to know to evaluate the difficulty.

Zeit crashes every time you cancel out, or close the dashboad panel, at the storage device selector panel, you can bring this up by putting a 360 memory card in and starting your game.