Castle Paradox

[Camdog]

It's in flash, so no download, just click the following link and start playing:

http://www.sapientgames.com/games/farscape

I'd love any and all feedback, from bug and typo reports to criticisms and ideas for making it better. Thanks!

Current list of known bugs:
No audio cue is played when you save/load

[TMC]

A Star Control 2 clone (what a myriad of parallels)! Awesome! You've really done an excellent job; I had a lot of fun. The writing is great, and the 'minigames' continually surprised me with their variety.


*** SPOILERS ***

First some remarks:

Remembering which planets have factories is pretty annoying, and the $ symbols on the galactic view are really hard to see when they're dark. Also, you have to keep track of which systems have had their factories destroyed yourself, so I suggest a second icon on the galaxy screen.

You could hide the "Collect Resources" button unless there are actually resources. As it is, it's a little annoying to have to scan the text to see whether I have any factories on the planet, and how many resources there are.

I found that the difficultly of battles diminishes to nothing as you buy battle upgrades. This is also my biggest complaint against SC2: the battles start out difficult, and at some point suddenly become pushovers because your ship's strength increases horribly fast. In your game however, the battles start out easy to survive (but difficult to kill anything), then suddenly become difficult (if you haven't bothered to buy many battle upgrades) when the harder enemy types appear. In fact, when that happened, I had to fight a battle about 15 times before I survived! (I found it hard to play on this touchpad.) I immediately bought upgrades, and soon couldn't be harmed. It would mean rebalancing everything, but I would have things ramp much more slowly: by starting with more than 1 hp, and by diminishing the strength of each bullet when increasing the number of bullets.

The battle with the Burgbap battlecruiser took forever (I had lvl 0 weapons and spread and lvl 1 firing speed). I was about to commit suicide, figuring that I wasn't actually damaging it, and that it was impossible to kill. Shorten this battle, and make it harder (it was trivial to avoid all the bullets).

The "Last Stand" ending did annoy me a bit in that my choices affected something they couldn't have, but eh.

When I found out I needed 100,000 resources I was a little annoyed, as I had stopped (re)building factories long before, when the need for resources had apparently disappeared. It took me a while to gather that, but not too long.

I think the galaxy could do with more variety. Aside from special planets, the rest are all the same. You could for example, vary flavour text, colours, and add moons and asteroid belts to the solar systems. SC2 had more variety, but I had this complaint against it as well. Nearly every body in our solar system is unique and fascinating, yet everything is fairly dull in these games. On the other hand, it might be a bad idea to encourage inspecting every planet; it'd make the game less fun.

I'm wondering why Earth's solar system doesn't appear in the galaxy if it is supposed to be the nearest to "Alpha Centauri" in hyperspace. Or why the colonists decided to misname all the systems...

It would be nice if the items in the inventory had descriptions, or just names which appear when hovering over them.

I beat the game on Medium with neutral karma at about 26600.

Now the bugs:

Are you not meant to be able to build on any inhabited planet? I believe you can build on the Glarfian's planet and one or two others.

The planet with the text "the readings are fluctuating wildly" doesn't work at all!

Sometimes planets are generated partially off the bottom or top of the screen.

The text for the planet with the structure half-buried in the sand with the energy cannon at the entrance doesn't change even after you've retrieved the artifact or explored all possibilities. Would be nice if it did.

I notice that galactic coordinates are quoted as the top left point of the star sprite on the hyperspace view, instead of the centre of the star, as would be expected.

The sidescroller was bugged; when I hit the wall at a dead end, I flew up to the top of the screen. And jumping doesn't work while walking into a wall. Also, I wish the controls were way less sensitive.

I saw a solar system with a ! icon, but without any planet with anything interesting. Maybe the planet was off the top or bottom of the screen? I never found the 4th text even after exploring the whole galaxy, so I guess it was on that system :(

I suggest showing more confirmation on saving the game.

The sound effects mute every time you save the game (but the menu isn't updated until you reenter). Also sometimes after saving, the buttons in the menu no longer highlight when you hover over them.

Some of the text on buttons overflows, I suggest doing something about that. Also, the "Booby Traps" text overflows the message area of the screen. Also, one of the solar systems was called "Gamma" because the rest of the name overflows. Related, I noticed some random black text at the top of the galaxy view, of which only the top couple pixels is visible.

The Glarfian text tree is repeatable... so I guess it's possible to get the weapon upgrade multiple times. Also, I was disappointed that it's not actually possible to tell them what their text says (though I doubt they'd understand me!)

When lots of things are on-screen in battles, the game slows right down (this is a netbook), and my ship starts flickering between multiple positions rapidly.

The teleporter doesn't do what you're told it does. I like it the way it is better, though.

One time after the message my factories in a system were destroyed, just as I reached a solar system, I was teleported to a position just off the bottom of the galaxy map.

Typos:
During intro: "It was makind's..."
Alarins: "unihabited planets" "it isn't they're fault really" "Isn't the things that are happening now..."
Alpha Centauria 2: "...after the problems ... is sorted out" "They have an old civilization, but that have not yet..."
Glarfian: "still relatively primative" "logical phallacy"
Burgbap: "we pray to 'Koppikorn'. a gaseous being"
"What do you think about the alarin?"
Kalaarni"no sign of faster-than-light propulsion technologu"
"we're sending you the device ummediately"
"I'm sure you use them responsibly"
Suugart: "into the galaxy peacfully"
Uxquat: "generate en extra-dimensional field" "you figuring our how to"
Fiiliifo: "reasearching how to get out"
Other:
"device that we can covert"
"dangerous when it's use becomes widespread"
"once we have they're attention"
"membranes seperating them"
"an anamoly"
_________________
"It is so great it is insanely great."

[Camdog]

Wow, so many suggestions/bugs. Thanks so much for all your help!

[Camdog]

If anyone is interested in this game's progress, you can check out the ongoing discussion here:

http://www.slimesalad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4004