Great game, some suggestions Thread - Zombie Grinder

Really enjoying this game and it reminds me of so many old school games and a few newer ones that I use to play all mashed into one. You guys really did a great job, but some gameplay aspects really put me off at times -

1. Screen gets extremely cluttered and very hard to track your position most of the time.

• Maybe have a transparency slider in the settings to allow the player to make teammates and their explosions/bullets have a transparency level between 10-100%. This way only the player and enemies stick out most and you can easily track your position while still seeing your teammates. I constantly find myself getting lost in the chaos of explosions and teammates running around on smaller maps.
• Add options to hide hud elements or rework their positions to be out of the way of the battle arena. The name boxes above character, text boxes above characters, score panel, wave.
• Maybe bring the camera out of a bit more, maybe a FOV slider?

2. An option for an auto-fire or a toggleable one.

• Smashing my space bar hundreds of times each round is just putting an unnecessary beating on my keyboard. If you are worried about pistol abuse, just put a rate of fire limiter on it.

3. Screen shaking is rather annoying and headache inducing at times.

• Please add an option to disable this.
• Maybe stick to screen shaking for the very large explosions. It's rather annoying having your screen shake every pistol shot.

4. Text log (Join messages, leave message, etc)

• Automatically hide a message after X seconds. I don't think it's necessary to have the chat log on screen at all times and just further clogs the screen.

5. The machine guns and sentries are extremely loud. I can't even hear explosions over the top of them.

I just got the game today so I might have a few more suggestions as I continue playing. I hope you can take this as constructive feedback and I want to clarify, I'm in no way trying to be negative about your game. Thanks for reading and good luck with your gem of a game!

Edited by: caixa

1. Screen gets extremely cluttered and very hard to track your position most of the time.

Yup, I know that feel, not sure if transparency is the best way to go for it though. Probably need to make your character more obvious in some why.

• Add options to hide hud elements or rework their positions to be out of the way of the battle arena. The name boxes above character, text boxes above characters, score panel, wave.

You can always boost the resolution, the hud is drawn at the resolution used, not at the games resolution, so should free up a whole bunch of screenspace. Going to be redesigning the anyhow, the current hud dosen't work correctly with higher player counts, I'll keep it in mind.

• Maybe bring the camera out of a bit more, maybe a FOV slider?

Setting widescreen increases your field of view to an extent, I'm not wiling to increase the FOV any more than that however, it totally unbalances PVP games if your opponents can see you before you can see them.

2. An option for an auto-fire or a toggleable one.

• Smashing my space bar hundreds of times each round is just putting an unnecessary beating on my keyboard. If you are worried about pistol abuse, just put a rate of fire limiter on it.

I think this is more symptomatic of the weapon prices in game, I need to rework them really, using the pistol was originally meant to be a pain-in-the-hand last resort, its not meant to be your primary weapon as a lot of people appear to use it for.

3. Screen shaking is rather annoying and headache inducing at times.

• Please add an option to disable this.
• Maybe stick to screen shaking for the very large explosions. It's rather annoying having your screen shake every pistol shot.

Its intentionally meant to be slightly disorientated, its the only way I could think of of simulating some form of recoil to mess up your aim between shots. I'll think about adding a toggle though.

4. Text log (Join messages, leave message, etc)

• Automatically hide a message after X seconds. I don't think it's necessary to have the chat log on screen at all times and just further clogs the screen.

That's actually originally how it was, can't remember why I changed it.

5. The machine guns and sentries are extremely loud. I can't even hear explosions over the top of them.

A lot of people tell me this, I just never notice it, guess I have a wierd sound setup. But yeh, most sound effects are pretty bad lol, we have nobody on team making them so we are just trying to do as best we can from free-sound archives, I'll modify the sound file and lower the baked in volume though.

eh messed up

So after playing a while...

• Performance on Ubuntu 12.04 wasn't great in my experience. Constant lag spikes and it seemed to get worse as time progressed during a game. Usually restarting the game would fix it for a little while, but after some time the issue returns. I'm now playing on Windows 7 SP1 and it runs great, but I do get a weird lag spike when picking up gems, other than that it runs perfect, performance wise.

• The screen shaking if beyond awful and almost to the point of being unbearable. Try playing a game where 2-3 people are using explosive ammo, and one of them is using a uzi. It's literally screen shaking the entire wave. During light games it's bearable, but this is just too much when a majority are using explosive ammo and you're advancing to the higher waves. Once you get to the higher waves and explosive ammo is constantly going off + explosion sprites/effects going off + screen being cluttered from large waves it's a disaster.

• The inventory is annoying to navigate with a keyboard once you acquire pages of items. If you don't want to introduce mouse support, maybe at least an auto-combine gem button so we don't have to have 10+ key presses to craft 2 gems together.

• There is a unlimited sentry glitch that allows a player to place multiple sentries at once. It has something to do with picking up the sentry while switching weapons from the pistol slot.

• Don't let users stack ammo items if they don't work together. For instance uzi + fire ammo + explosive ammo.

• The grinding at higher levels is ridiculous, too much work and it takes away from the enjoyment.

• Gem drops and coin drops have turned a lot of games into who can grab the most gems and coins with the actual game being an afterthought. I constantly see people just ignoring the waves and running into them to collect all the coins and gems being dropped from others killing them.

Last update was very good and added a bit of depth.

Holy cow! I just remembered about this game and somehow remembered my credentials and I see you finally added a toggle for the screen shaking!

What ever happen with Steam greenlight?

Edited by: caixa