64Digits

Posted by Nathan on Sept. 23, 2013, 1:08 p.m.

Hi, Long time no blog. So I very recently released my first Android (only at the minute) game onto the Google Play Store. I developed the game in LibGDX over the past 7 months with two friends from University. We originally thought we could get this finished and released in a month, but we were pretty wrong with our estimates, but here, after 7 long months, is the finished version!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.me.GDXEngine&hl=en_GB

FlyBy is an exciting, fast paced, arcade style mobile game with a variety of exciting obstacles and challenges to complete! With randomly generated levels and online leader boards powered by Google Play. FlyBy offers many hours of plane flying fun! We hope you will enjoy playing and share our game with your friends!

Features:

- Randomly generated caves and levels for endless game play

- Many different exciting obstacles to avoid and fly through

- Online leader-board powered by Google Play Services

- Collect coins to buy power ups and upgrades in the in game store

- Thrilling challenges to complete

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.me.GDXEngine&hl=en_GB

Comments

Iasper 11 years, 1 month ago

Just installed it, trying it now. Will edit post with feedback soon.

EDIT:

Alright so I gave this a try. My first impression when I saw the menu was the fact it didn't really feel like a menu. There was nothing that like told you those were buttons, it was only after you (accidentally) pressed them you figured how it worked.

Then for the gameplay: graphics are nice and controls intuitive, but my major complaint is the plane. You either go up or down, there's no way to like stay afloat. This makes more precise moving much harder. This is looking nice besides that, a minor remark though would be the prize of the upgrades. It takes too long before you can buy one, which makes the game less rewarding and because of this you stop playing much earlier because you don't feel like you're progressing.

EDIT2:

I've also had some issues with terrain generation. I've had several instances of passages too narrow to fit through, usually because of the swinging ball objects. Since you can't accelerate or anything, you always die which is rather frustrating.

Iasper 11 years, 1 month ago

Updated my first post in case you haven't noticed.

Nathan 11 years, 1 month ago

Lasper, thanks for the great feedback!

Quote:

My first impression when I saw the menu was the fact it didn't really feel like a menu.

Do you have any suggestions on how we could make it feel more like a menu?

Quote:

You either go up or down, there's no way to like stay afloat.

You can do quicker shorter taps to fly in a pretty straight line! Although I can understand the frustration! We were trying to create a game with as simple controls as possible as this was for a touch device. We could not find a way to give more precise control without increasing the complexity of the game, which we were trying to avoid!

Quote:

a minor remark though would be the prize of the upgrades. It takes too long before you can buy one,

We struggled with this a lot during development, and dropped the prices quite dramatically before release. It was one of those things we really couldn't get right until we collected a decent amount of data on the people playing the game, which we are currently doing through Google Analytics. It is very likely the shop prices will be changed based off the data we get back after a few days of people playing.

Quote:

I've also had some issues with terrain generation.

Again this was another difficult aspect to judge during development, and finding a balance between challenging and too easy has been difficult. Balancing the difficulty of the terrain generation will be an on going process.

But thanks for trying the game and providing such detailed feedback, this really will be a big help in helping us improve the game in future updates!