Getting someone to do a let's play of your homebrew game?

Have any of you guys finding someone to do a lets play of your homebrew game?

I'm trying to get find an experienced gamer to do a blind playthrough and make a
LP video of it so I can see how a someone completely new to the game reacts and plays, and how
intuitive the controls are.

Unfortunately the let's play forums I've been to are hostile towards any type of
"interest checks" or requests to LP a game so there is no way to enlist help on those
forums.

Emailing/PMing my favorite LPers has not worked either.

Any ideas as to how I could find someone to do this.

-Sedwave
Hiatus Ward Alpha: http://www.nesworld.com/homebrew/hiatwrd0.zip

Not to be mean, but it'd help if the game was much much much more polished...I start it up and I can only notice glitches everywhere...it's a pretty big turn off IMO.

A lot depends on what emulator you run it on too. Many emulators will have a lot more glitching due to the tight timing. Only an actual NES or Nintendulator seems to run it well.

I ran it in NESTopia, puNES (Mast accurate emulator), FCEUX...and got the same junk in all 3. I highly doubt it runs on a console well, honestly. But a lot has probably changed, so I hope the best for it?

Not to discourage you. But I have some critque.

First of all the core gameplay: I realise this is a very early version and probably not even close to release. But your level layouts enemy design and graphics just seem kinda focusless. The player doesn't really seem to be guided into any direction. The graphics seem to be kinda muddy, and it's hard to differentiate different places. I think both of these issues can be fixed though, and considering it is an early version I don't think I can draw any conclusions quite yet.

Second of all as Threegen mentioned, there seem to be a lot of glitches. I haven't tried it on a real nes (yet?). But everything is flickering, jumpy and when I press select 3/4 of the screen goes black for some reason. You should really work on the stability of the game before you proceed much futher, otherwise you'll be building on a muddy foundation.

The above points gave me the impression that you worked really hard on the cool raster effects and things like your dying animation. But you kinda rushed over the most important things, the foundation. I don't want to discourage you though, you've probably done more programming on this game than a lot of people on this forum can say. However I think it'd be wise to maybe make a design document, outline exactly what you want to do, and also fix the bugs currently in your game. If you manage to do those things, I think the community will gain a great game.

Looks like a very promising game, but as the other said, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Personally I'd go for smaller and better animated sprites. Or if you want to keep them this huge, go ahead, but at least make the levels and collision detection so that the heroine's head is not constantly hitting against the ceiling.

I've had a similar problem getting people to try my Atari 2600 co-op shooter. ROM is available. Pictures present. Very few indie gamers willing to fire up Stella and play. I really believe the hook is a YouTube video. I'd make bullet points out of the feedback you've gotten here and at Nintendoage and see what can be done. AFTER THAT I'd make the "let's Play" video yourself.

The graphics garbage at the screen and text box changes should be certainly fixed up before promoting the game. It makes way much worse overall impression that it should do, having all the potential.

Speaking of getting a let's player to the game, there is another thing to consider. They are mostly doing games that they have a personal connection with - played them being kids, or didn't play but wanted to, etc. This is actually required, as you have to be familiar with a game to make a good video of it. So you would need a special kind of let's player, who like to play new games, previously unseen by him, unprepared.

Ah, this game! Good to see you kept working on it.

I believe that the reason people won't do a "let's play" is because it doesn't feel like a complete game yet. Glitches are still abundant, as well as collision issues. Screen transitions are very messy, you should use fading or at least blank the screen properly between areas. So yeah, it definitely needs polish.

As for the ROM behaving differently in different emulators, I really don't see a reason for this. The effects you're using don't seem to require that much accuracy, besides proper behavior of MMC3 IRQs. Scroll changes during HBlank can be somewhat tricky, but HBlank is long enough to accommodate any possible jittering. Unless you're doing something really extreme, it SHOULD work on most emulators. The fact that it appears to work on hardware isn't determinant... if it's flimsy in emulators (when it has no reason to) it might still fail on hardware under certain circumstances.

The feel I get from this game is very close to the one I get when I play Hong Kong demakes from Genesis and SNES games. Large, flickery sprites with sub-optimal physics and glitches all around. But your game has more potential than those pirate games, and if you put more effort into polishing it I believe you can make it look like an actual game.

Personally, I consider the "Let's Play..."-category of videos an abomination, as whenever I want to show a friend a playthrough of a favorite game of mine, the top Youtube search results lead to a video where all funky music is replaced with some blabbering dude who seems to love the sound of his his own voice far too much.

I tried your game on my powerpak, and like others have mentioned it's far too glitchy to be enjoyable at this stage. The screen is constantly shaking,, and the character portraits - while having quite nice graphics - are flickering way too much.

Got to the boss battle, where the AI felt quite good compared to the rather dull enemies. After that I was stuck, as the defeated boss told me the new item I received from her is usable with SELECT, which only activates the monochrome bit (debug?) setting. Going back to the beginning showed her still greeting me for my new mission as if the boss encounter never happened, so seems some game event never really got triggered.

Two deadly sins of level design IMO that the game employs are:
1) Confusing parallax. The parallax scrolling might be technically cool but really distracts gameplay. Whenever you want to use a parallax backdrop in a game you need to make it subtle and distinct from the level you interact with. The easiest way is to have it use different and darker colors. I know this is a bit tricky with the NES's limited color palette, but you can always employ dithering here. At the moment, the backdrop uses not only the same color sets as the BG, but even the same tiles in some places.

2) Maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Far too much level with too little variations in appearance, causing you to feel lost and wonder whether you're progressing or just going around in circles. Hope this will change as more graphics are added in a later version.

Game definitely has potential though, and with some polishing it could very well turn out to be one of the better homebrews seen on the NES.

Not necessarily darker, but it needs to have less contrast. If you look at the distance under daylight, you'll notice that the saturation and the contrast of objects decrease as the distance increases, to the point where everything starts becoming blue. During the night the effects is similar, but things get darker pretty quick.


To draw images with less saturation on the NES you can try using only the lighter or the darker end of the palettes, never making use of the full brightness spectrum. A lot of NES games have backgrounds like that.

Look at a mock-up(?) from a post I found a while ago in some other forum. Notice the low saturation and contrast of the background. I find that image quite well done actually, it appears to have many more colors than it actually has, and the separation between background and foreground is perfectly obvious.

This game is glitchy as hell. The title screen being so glitchy leaves a terrible impression. You need to find better ways to make the game not show areas that are being drawn on. For example, try disabling rendering while the screen contents are being redrawn, then have the next NMI enable rendering again.

I'm also not a big fan of the jumping sprite, she is leaning too far forward.

This - and there is too few animations steps in my opinion.

I think there is some impressive technical work in here, and I'd like to see you keep working on it, but honestly I can see why you're having trouble finding someone who wants to Let's Play this game. Some of these points have been made by others, but here's what I'd suggest after playing it for a bit:

1. I had a lot of difficulty telling what was solid and what was not. It seems many ramps can be jumped through from below, and some you will fall through from above. I would suggest reserving the silver colour exclusively for solid tiles so that the player can have a good idea of what is supposed to be solid.

2. It's easy to trigger a speech section twice, and without any way to speed up or skip the text, it is very tedious to watch a second time.

3. The levels are sprawling and confusing. Exits take you to very unexpected places. Because the exits are essentially just teleports, and all places look the same, this is very hard to follow. There is no reward for the player for exploring, you're simply going the right way or the wrong way, it seems.

4. There's a ton of jitter and flicker and other graphical glitches, on emulators or PowerPak. Motion is choppy in general. It's a huge eyesore, and if you can't get it more stable you might consider that you're sacrificing too much for the rendering effects.

5. The enemies are uninteresting, and pose an annoyance rather than a threat. One problem I think is that the enemy sprites are so large, there is not much place for manoeuvring. It might help to have enemies with timed periodic behaviours, giving the player something to predict and react to. The ninjas right now just seem to move about chaotically, there is nothing fun about fighting them.

I did not manage to get to the boss.

I tried it out. It's Arcade Strider with a kunoichi in it; looks very cool and the idea shows promise.

However, you need to fix all the glitching. Just because Capcom never fixed it in NES Strider doesn't mean you don't have to.

Also, the levels should make some sense. Large sloping metatiles are great for parapets and rooftops, but underneath those roofs should not be a jigsaw puzzle of angles.

Good luck with the project!

Well, there is some good feedback here. I'm a little discouraged and overwhelmed, but I'll get over it.

So pretty much I think I found a few people that can help me out on NintendoAge. What I'm really looking for is not advertisement, but rather a video playthrough of all the bosses and levels (2 people so far I know of have found all 6 bosses) to learn what works and what doesn't in terms of the level design and play mechanics, weapons, and bosses throughout the game.

Many of the things mentioned I know how to fix and will just take time to solve.

However the mid screen scrolling glitching I have done quite a bit of experimenting with it and have not had much luck removing it in a way that still works on the powerpak. I will make another post with my IRQ routine and see if any of you guys have some ideas.


@Bananamos did you manages to get back the beginning without the wall jump? If so how did you manage to do it?

I really don't know, because like I mentioned I was mostly wandering around aimlessly without being able to distinguish one area from the other...

Is there a new binary with the recent fixes? I'd like to get good enough for a YouTube video. Unfortunately, I get stuck at the guy who gives you a clue to find a projectile.

I'd also watch out for putting bright colored tiles in back of the exit and entrance icons. Since the exit/entrance icons flicker strong colors basically block them out.

I got a few fixes, but nothing major. About that guy. You need to beat Madamyne first. The room to the left of him. zigzag climb to the top right corner and use the exit there. Continue upward and right and you will eventually find the boss.

Doesn't asking for advice, and practicing before recording the video kind of defeat the point of a blind playthrough?

Yeah. Sorry. I wasn't thinking in terms of a strictly blind playthrough. There are points in Streemerz I just cannot get past. Likewise for Super Bat Puncher. This game I get stuck waay before the others. It'd be a pretty short let's play without a little advice

Here's a little feedback about gameplay:
The razor line is much better than the gun, since you can't hit low enemies with the gun, but you can hit them with the razor line.
Also, not being able to drop down from platforms with A+Down seems strange.

Thanks, The weapons all have pros and cons.
I also generally use the razor line unless an enemy is far away, or not easily approachable: e.g. for the madman of the subway boss, or the banshee. The rolly balls make Miura easier.

As far as dropping down, I considered it, but decided to go with using a+down as a way to stay in one spot and aim in any direction. If I were to switch to drop down, I think it would only be for the platforms you can travel upwards through. (similar to how Bionic Commando has 2 platform types)

Your game looks like one of the better ones currently in development, so I highly encourage you to keep on working hard

But... I've seen your message on Nintendo Age & here and would like to suggest you few basic rules when you want to get feedback (either on in progress productions or also proper releases). Certainly this will take little longer than what you rushed out, but at the end it will raise more attention towards the people you want to attract.

a) Screenshot! (if you do not have space, there are free picture hosters) -> you are entirely missing them
b) Video! -> Well, you did that, but you said on your own it was one month old. no one will be able to see the progress work of one month with an old video
c) Text/Description should be better repositioned and brought straight to the point. What is it? What is it about? What do you want? Always talk about yourself in the third person... there are so many "I's" you know... (at least in the very beginning!)
Something like: Hiatus War by srndwave is a Metroidvania type game with six bosses and about 50 levels. The game is about 40-50% done and I'd like to ask everyone here for some feedback. Download the game here... If you want to beta-test, please get in touch with me via ..."

other thoughts:
* considering you want to attract beta-testers, how should they get in touch with you if that person does not have a na or nesdev account?
* do not rely on "let's play" authors, as long as your game is yet not finished. they will feel like you want to waste their time. there is also no point in playing a game which is not yet fully developed. just imagine they will accept your request, you think you'll get a second chance once the game is done? everyone will see a lets play of your "old garbage" and the final product remains unrecognized.
* try to get the word out onto the various homebrew pages and retro-gaming pages, sure it's lots of work, but it will work out at the end. especially for such pages, it's important to have material to work with (screenshots/video).
* if your game is supposed to be that "massive" (I'd call 50 levels massive) it will for sure get attention, but people need to get a place for updates, consider a small blog for your game.

hope this doesn't sound too rude, but there is so much potential behind your game - you should really put some energy into public relation / marketing too

regards
kojote

The only things I'd add, the game might be better off as scroller like Shatterhand and not a sprawler. And the hands should probably be clenched since they kind of invite avgn-style jokes.