Hat Quest

Category	Rank	Score
Coolness	36	16
Audio	65	2.92
Humor	66	2.70
Community	130	2.67
Fun	139	2.58
Graphics	157	2.50
Overall	170	2.50
Innovation	182	2.25
Theme	237	1.55

johnfn 2010-12-20 16:46

Cool game. It felt very solid, and I didn't notice any glaring bugs (or in fact, almost any bugs at all - nice work!). The music and sound effects were good, and it does seem like you put some care into the details here.

On to the gritty details: two things would have helped me enjoy it more. One, you could die so fast! A tiny slip up and instant death. That's no fun! Also, the collision detection felt like it wasn't being very nice to me at times. This was probably just confirmation bias or something, but it's always good to have the collisions slightly in the player's favor so that they (I?) don't get grumpy over these things.

I just wasn't fast enough to stop all the little bots, and after they fell back down once or twice then they were going like 10 times faster than me, and things would just get insane. It seemed to me like after you jumped on one, you couldn't do a combo jump (and jump on another), which made things tricky...

After playing a while, I managed to get fairly decent! I never survived for longer than about a minute, though.

thristhart 2010-12-20 21:03

Collision was a bit finicky, but maybe that's just me. The floaty jumping was pretty maddening, and the progression of difficulty was frustrating. But, I enjoyed myself while I played, and even though it wasn't engrossing per se I liked it. (also, I liked the sound effects and music)

fireslash 2010-12-21 01:20

The difficulty was a teetering slope. If it was too easy, you could just stomp them as they came out and it was about as fun as watching paint dry. If you peek under options you can adjust the difficulty up or down to your liking, but I find a good game is one that you have to work on a bit to really master. This is why the end game scoring is there, with records, so you can watch your progress as a hat stomping machine.

As for the collisions, I suspect what you're seeing is that the collision boxes can be up to 8px behind the sprite due to a little mistake I made in the order of updating. If you generally bop them straight on the turret though, you'll be fine.

Also you CAN combo stomp, its just a bit tricky. You can't combo stomp the same tank, as it goes invulnerable for a second. You can however combo stomp a nearby tank if you keep moving from the first stomp. Also note the amount of bounce you get from stomping is directly related to the height you stomped from, so there's some strategy involved :)

wizbane 2010-12-23 21:59

The controls seem a little too fast in the x direction, and without any acceleration. Music is pretty solid.

jagttt 2010-12-24 02:59

Cool game! I'm sure you also like Super Crate Box very much.

jolle 2010-12-25 19:01

Will try it later on a computer I have XNA on.

endurion 2010-12-26 08:16

Neat game.
However it feels quite marred from the control. The robot is way too fast horizontally to position it nicely. Also, there's quite a lot tanks coming up.
I like the gimmick of stacking hats.

badlydrawnrod 2010-12-26 12:38

Reminiscent of Super Crate Box by Vlambeer. Writing was a bit small, even in full screen, but it does have that "one more go" quality.

myx 2010-12-26 13:27

A pretty decent game, but I feel the overall experience would have been better if the X-speed wasn't quite so high. Or possibly if some acceleration was used. I flew all over the map which made it very difficult to hit the small enemies.

jolle 2011-01-03 19:54

Extra approval because of hats. I was even thinking of making a game about finding hats. Which I didn't, which was good, since you did it.

The intro text was hard to read, very dense while being fairly small.

The game was actually much harder than it sounded like, but also pretty fun.

fireslash 2011-01-04 00:42

Thanks for all the comments. I'll clean up the controls a bit after voting ends for anyone interested. The game speed IS a bit high, looking back, so I might take an SC approach to letting players adjust that as they see fit. I guess I was just working so fast the game speed felt normal to the pace I was working at. SuperCrateBox was part of the inspiration I used; a great game that I suggest anyone play, especially if you liked this. The font is an 8px pixel font, I had no trouble reading it on 1920x1200 but I didn't test the font loader in any other environments so maybe theres a bug somewhere.