a7titude is a game of skill which ensembles several tricky puzzles which have to be solved to get to the next stage to get more and more points to reach the highscore.
The game has been done for the Conitec 100 lines contest (june 2008) which involves programming limitations like only 100 semicolons as delimiters for lines and only a sourcecode filesize of max. 10 kB. a7titude fulfills these requirements and is still a cool game.
Ensembling the very well received but not used A7 logo design, a7titude is also a hommage to the A7 game engine community.
Filled with rockin' tunes from the very well know electronic artist Binaerpilot from Norway, an easy to understand but hard to master gameplay, you are asked if vou've git the right a7titude. The a7titude to make games, to play games, to have fun or chill with style while listening to a fine selection of electronica music.
Some key features:
Addicting gameplay
Easy to learn but hard to master gameplay: play all stages for global highscore or unlock stages to play single trials
Two stages with 14 puzzles each. The first stage is easy, the second not
Nice to look-at, abstract visuals with an electric flavor
# A$$-kickin' tunes from Binaerpilot perfectly matching the game and its graphics
source code will be freely available: 100 lines and < 10 kB source code size
Uses the A7 game engine (obviously ;P ). Levels, cutscenes and lightning has been done in Cinema4D
the video and the graphics looks cool, but it has mayor letdowns:
- Awkward mouse steering - I thought you knew that direct changing of position is never(!) good. It is jerky and allows to cheat.
- SLOW GRAPHICS - Are you using shaders 3.0 for this game? I dont know, but even in 640x480 its slow and jerky like Half Life 2 in full HD and 1600x1200 (on both my laptop and desktop!)
- "Back to menu" key (Q) doesn't work at all. Yeah. I havo to exit and restart the game when I finish a stage.
besides from that, the style and the design is fresh and innovative. The overall idea is really good too, but those 3 points above make it _unplayable_.. I expected better from you, HeelX
"Sometimes JCL reminds me of Notch, but more competent" ~ Kiyaku
it plays fairly well on my radeon 9600, yes, the fps count drops heavily when the wohle level is in the view, but that lasts for only 2 secs.
i am not sure if i like the mouse-only gameplay. it does not feel like a real game, more like a joystick calibration test - with your mouse. maybe i'm just too bad, but it wears out pretty soon.
it's so completely clickless - you get ne feedback of what you re doing... just waving your hand... makes me aggressive.
i love the menu style!
Re: a7titude - an experimental game with style
[Re: broozar]
#212053 06/19/0822:1906/19/0822:19
i'd always take a X3100 as a reference GPU for mini games, your gf6200 plays in the same league. so yes, there have more than one speed improvement to be done. but it's really not an issue as soon as you got only one tile in view.
I also can't play it on my system with fun. For this kind of games the game never should be the reason the player looses - and with a7titude the first thing came up in mind when touching a rotating beast is: fu** slow sh** game!!!!
The idea is not new, though the realisation is well done - I like the camera flight and the color combination - but in the end it can't keep me playing...
Re: a7titude - an experimental game with style
[Re: ]
#212132 06/20/0815:1106/20/0815:11
CPU: P4 3GHz RAM: 1,5 GB RAM OS: Vista Business 32bit GC: NVidia Geforce 7600 GT
It plays here very well (even on my notebook), so, well. I'm sorry that it is slow as hell on your side.
As I promised earlier, I'll take care of the FPS in the expansion which will meanly has to do with LOD and compressed textures (currently I use uncompressed textures). The game is already codewise optimized as you can see in the code.
I dunno why you think the input behaviour is akward. Maybe you get stuttering due to low FPS, but that would be somehow expectable. As you can see in the code, I translate the mouse position on the screen into 3D space, meaning, that if you accelerate the mouse to the right, the player also accelerates to the right and vice versa. I also tried going the way with mouse_force but this wasnt satisfying.
So, I think it is a subjective thing. All girls I know which played it, like it. I mean, that was also the issue with RUDI: I decided to add a control scheme which is key-bounded (for the fast paced puzzles in a7titude this wouldn't work). It works very well, but most people complained that they need more control. Now, you have the ultimate control through your mouse. Maybe you set the mouse speed in the windows settings to low? Make it higher and the mouse moves faster.
I got some requests concerning the question if this game wouldnt be something for being turned into a game with wii-mote control and/or Nintendo DS touchpad control, because its intuitive and pointing based.
Nevertheless I am happy that some bad comments exist, too. Now I see that I can't definetly satisfy every player. No one can do this. Some are annoyed by the soundtrack (though it is really cool.. maybe it is an generation or age thing), some praise the gameplay and hate the visuals (or vice versa), some dont like the simple control mode, most people like it. So, thanks for bringing me to this conclusion
By the way, did anyone looked at the source? I appreciate that we talk about the game but the code itself is from my point of view the contest submission and not the megabytes of unnecessary graphics
Bye bye - Christian
Re: a7titude - an experimental game with style
[Re: HeelX]
#212134 06/20/0815:2106/20/0815:21
