Hello Richard, I've spent quite a bit of time with AGM over the passed two days, and I think I am ready to make an initial report about my findings and end user experience. I'm well aware as I write this that you had a fixed budget, little time, and this is a proof of concept so I'll try and tailor my thoughts with that in mind.
1. As a proof of concept I think AGM is a briliant concept. I especially like the concept of being able to drop building blocks, game objects, on a grid and set properties and reactions This makes designing games very fast and takes allot of grunt work out of really designing a game from scratch. However, I have noticed there really is no way to have the game randomly place or generate a building block which is bad for replay value and makes the games more or less all the same. I think future releases should be able to allow the developer to place a building block randomly between x1-x2 and y1-y2. A simple treasure hunting game would require some kind of random generation. If you were hunting for gold coins I'd like to skatter them around the game playing area randomly rather than having all the coins appear in the same place game after game. 2. One major accessibility feature AGM lacks is a good way to find out what direction I am facing. I saw a sort of fix for this in the manual, but it still isn't all that helpful at times. What I'd like to see is in the reaction sounds for the player be able to set a wav sound file for north, south, east, and west and when you press a key like f have it say north, ssouth, east, west, etc.. 3. One area I really did not like about AGM was the games I create can't give me much feedback on current ammo, health, distance to enemies, etc. This is all vital information I need for bigger and more complex ideas. 4. This is probably very miner, but I'm not happy with the arrow key setup for AGM. The control key to exit is fine and space is fine, but I really wish up and down arrow were used rather then left and right. Using left and right feels weird to me, and here is why. When I think of menus I think of a column of items in descending order rather than across. When I open a pull down menu in most Windows applications such as file, edit, tools, etc up and down arrow cycles through the menu options and enter selects them. This is a universal standard for menus for Mac, Linux, Windows, etc. 5. One thing I noticed in AGM cycling through the menu choices is slow if you have to use the arrows to jump to them. Hot keys or accelerator keys would help allot. For example, while in the main menu pressing n should create a new game, l for load game, s for save game, and so on. This would be very very nice, and speed up production allot. 6. When you create building blocks each of them have numbers 1, 2, 3, 4,, etc based on the order they are dropped. Unfortunately, this doesn't allow the designer the ability to figure out how many building blocks he/she has created of that type. For example, if you put six aponents on the grid they should be labeled aponent 1 through 6. Then, if you put two triggers on the grid they should be triggerr 1 and trigger 2. Rather Than, the way things are labeled now like player 1, aponent 2, trigger 3, aponent 4, etc... That is kind of confusing. 7. I realise that AGM is suppose to be a very simple idea, but I find it difficult to write anything serious without being able to alter the games AI for the game characters. Perhaps this desire comes from me being a developer, and in my games I have total control of that aspect. In any case I'd like to be able to change the enemies behaviors weather that enemy will try to attack, flee, switch to a different weapon, bla. The AI is far to static and predictable for my taistes. 8. Finally, AGM leaves much to be desired if I want to put menus into my games. Sure I can put message blocks in a row, attach portals etc, but that entire way of going about it is like a big kluge. I could probably write a menu in C++, C#, or Visual Basic three times faster than doing all the work in AGM to make menus. Perhaps there needs to be a menu building block, and more thought out ways of making menus. Hth. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
