Put some real nice screenshots on the download page, shots of the halfnaked girl too.
Then people might decide its worth the wait to download.
What makes it so big? the music?

Moving the mouse to the edge of the screen, instead of aiming for the arrow panel would be better. imo

I played another game, not so good this time(played slots 56 times) but spent all my money and all my balls and never got a jackpot and the girl only stood there.
The first time I played, and got all those jackpots, it was fun and entertaining.

Mmmm, thought the concept is very nice, I can't seem to even get a jackpot; you should somehow increase the chance of winning a bit, it'll make it more fun, and I think that counts more, then reallife accuracy


Cheers

Critics and ideas on how to improve:

I would fine tune the grafical assets: the homepage has the basics, but looks a bit too cheap, the skin of the machine in the second level as well. The pic of the model doesn't look very good.

For the homepage:
The light tower could switch off and on its lights in quite artifical rythms as an animated Gif. Quite easy made in Photoshop and Image Ready. You just need a second "version" of the pic, darkend nearly to black,
paste the original lightened tower in several additional layers, then erase each "switched off" lights in the different layers. In Image Ready you can put the layers in a row and test how they look as frames in an animated gif, you can rearrange them etc. and finally save as a gif.

Unless the machine is 3D, it could look more like 3D, the needles could get static shadows, the balls could get sprites as shadows, the wheels could get shadows and a 3d-looking skin.The handle could get a shadow as well. One or another dynamic light, and particles for instance when a wheel gets hit, or when the mouse holds or moves the handle. Adding a second skin with fingerprints to the handle, as index that it is hold. Let the mouse image change into a hand when over the handle, and a grapping when holding/moving the handle.

Unless the original balls of a pachinko machine might be simple white, I would give them a skin, that makes it possible to see how the balls are rotating.

The girl is nice, but a bit more movement would do a lot. If the bmp of the skin is small, then you could add small modifications to the mouth and eyes. Let her clap the eyelids, give a little smile etc.
While she is not dancing give her different waiting poses, the more the better. Standing in different ways, sittting on the chair(is there any?), at the machine, looking behind the last machine, touching the wall, ...

The way the clothes fall off is quite nice as well. But you could add particle effects.

But, when bended, the arms and shoulders are becoming ugly. These are details that are very important to be perfect in a sort of game like this. Tip: Bend the arms and shoulders (and their bones) within the reference frame until the girl gets the "main dance pose", fine tune any vertex of shoulder and arm. Try to animate the relaxed standing pose, it should be easier to achieve a proper look than the other way round.

The animations of the girl are far away from the quality of the animations of your spy girl and from the animations of 3D Kittens.
The dancing looks a bit like dancing on ice. If you choose one foot as her standing foot, it would be easier to animate the rest relating to this fixed part. Her hips and shoulders are doing the most important parts of the dancing, try a sort of minimized dancing. That way, it should be easier tto optimize the "feeling" of her movements.

Loading screen and too small buttons at the screen sides are already mentioned by others.

@Poke Smot and Pheomox

I'll rig the jackpots a little more . Eventually it will need to get harder, though. Otherwise you could keep going forever.

One problem with that is, eventually you'll have loads of balls, and a lessened chance of getting a jackpot. Finally it might run for ages with no jackpot. How do you feel about that, and do you have any suggestions about it? For example, jackpots aren't so hard to get, but if you don't get one for 20 minutes the girl gets bored, leaves, and it's game over.

I'm also thinking about having a different girl for each table, and giving her some personality stats like in Pachinko Sexy Reaction(Warning, Toon Nudity). The idea is nice, but I have to consider the expense, not only in getting my artist to make two more models (if he is even available to make them) ,but also in terms of file size. The biggest single hit on file size for this game is the pachinko girl model and her dresses. Vertex animation is very bulky. I'm looking for more comments on my marketing plan before throwing myself into doing this. Perhaps Myrlyn68, Nardulus, or one of the other published forum members could comment? <EDIT> Actually, that could could be even more expensive, because I'd need to find more voice actresses and have another recording session as well.

The download page is under construction. There will certainly be more pictures, a funny blurb in Japlish, and other pages about Pachinko to explore. I'm going to go around some parlors this week to take some pictures of real parlors and, with management's permission, to get a few pictures of real pachinko parlor girls and maybe a bit of a bio on them. I'll also try to get an interview with an old guy I know who has just closed his parlor after 60 years and see what interesting stories he has about the game (He gave me a couple of his machines when he closed ).


@Pappenheimer

Excellent criticism and ideas. You just gave me another few months work! I won't be implimenting all of your ideas, since I cannot afford any more of an fps hit (particles, dynamic lights -ouch), but some of them I really like.

I was wondering when someone would tell me the animation was crap. I never could rig the model properly. I posted here and on the Lightwave forum, but I never could get bone morph targets to work and in the end I just got it as best I could without spending more days, or even weeks trying to get it right. I find animation the most tedious and frustrating of all areas of game creation. I am willing to pay someone to re-do the animation on the model. I would prefer a Lightwave user, but I am open to offers.

I agree with some of your other scathing crits as well, and I'll work on them.

I think you should polish the help menu a bit
I didn't get into the game at all(maybe thats because I only gave it 2 mins before I went to sleep last night), and the funny then is hearing the lady in the game repeating: "your so good!"

Thanks for your feedback, Wiz. I hope you'll give it another go.

I'm considering Papenheimer's idea of animating the pahinko sign on the webpage. I saved it with minimum colours and some loss so as to keep the file size small. Before I make it bigger by animating it, how does the front page load up for those of you on dail-up?

you need to make the little 'x' buttons in the menu so we can close them...

I downloaded it.

I'll let you know how it runs on my underspec computer.

pentium 3 450mhz, 128 ram
Geforce FX 5500 PCI

BTW Your links on your website don't seem to work. (other than download)

Why do you have naked girls in your game?

Quote:

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I've tried a few things to help those jerks during music changes. I'll keep trying and see if I can improve it some more.

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Just a thought: Isn't the jerk because of loading the music to RAM?
What, if you could make a sort of preload of all the music? Start the music at the beginning of the level, one after another or at once; or, better before the level loading? Maybe, as a sort of opener, maybe, as quiet as possible - only to get it loaded!

The functions bmp_preload and ent_preload have a similar task.