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Quick Slick Deadly

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Adventurous Productions:
Hi everyone,

You may remember my topic about Quick Slick Deadly from a long time ago: http://www.soniccenter.org/forum/index.php?topic=5644.0

Anyway, the game has been released on steam since a few months now and after patching it up a few times, I would like to send here a few steam-keys, because I believe that members of the Sonic Center should try out this game. After all, the competition on this website was actually one of my inspirations for creating Quick Slick Deadly! Here is a link to the steam store page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/399270/

And here are 10 steam-keys:

ITDA8-ZZT6H-3W36A
BEM76-GFDTF-7AJAV
6MNGI-LCVI3-4GJB7
MADG6-JC52X-W29FG
3AYL4-RMICX-BKC9P
XJRL2-BYHVD-8XJFK
TPNKX-37R0K-B9HQF
KYLBN-W94RF-R8CZ5
5V9D9-GTW39-XMN7V
AVXEG-GMTIX-NEBZR

To all those 10 people that will grab these keys: I very much hope you will have fun with the game! :) Please let me know your thoughts about the game via the review section of the Quick Slick Deadly steam store page! Thanks a lot!

Ridiculiousishnessless:
Really enjoying so far! The mouse freeze physic can be annoying when trying to do other stuff (e.g. Press the windows icon when playing a level, it gets stuck), But it's a lot better than I expected!

Adventurous Productions:
Wow, I'm so glad you're liking the game! *:D* About the mouse freeze: Sorry that you've encountered such a problem. I just tried to replicate what you said, but it didn't happen to me. I very much hope it won't take away from your enjoyment! Anyway, once you believe you've seen enough of the game, I'd be endlessly appreciative if you would leave a review on the steam store page of Quick Slick Deadly! :)

TimpZ:
My first complaint with the game is the developer logo. It's completely illegible!

Secondly, the frame rate of this game is completely bonkers. I actually couldn't find a way to find out the true FPS of the game since neither the Steam overlay or Fraps would work with it but based on my own experience it hovers around 20 to 30 FPS which is unacceptable for a PC game. Take a look at the credits and you can clearly see the text jumping while scrolling.

My third complaint is the options menu. There isn't any! I can appreciate the fact that keyboard controls are available and with the right settings they might be somewhat useful but really this game was designed to be used with a mouse and thus the movement speed is more or less a useless option which makes the options menu even more lackluster. The game only supports 1 resolution which is 1280*720 and there isn't any toggle for full screen on the options menu. There is a button command for it which is flashed when you first start the game but it disappears quickly and honestly should be listed in the options since there's tons of room for it.

You can't rebind any of the controls but mostly they're pretty logical so it's not a big deal. However the game does a pretty bad job at menu navigation. What button you need to press at the end of a level in order to continue? Test every one and you might find it's right click or escape but nowhere in the game does it tell you this.

Speaking of "bound controls", let's say you want to record some gameplay footage or put on some music while messing around in a level or at the end of it. Well too bad because you can't! The mouse is locked to the center of the screen whilst in these modes so you need to pause or quit to the menu to regain control even if you tab out. To be honest it's not a big deal but it's certainly very confusing and frustrating when it happens to you and you have no clue what the problem is since it happens on seemingly random menu screens. Another thing that happens when you tab out of the game is that the gameplay music (but not menu music) stops looping and the voiced mission briefings gets muted but doesn't stop playing.

Now to my fourth complaint about the game. The mission breifings. First of all they're way too long and convoluted. Many do have some useful info but considering the gameplay the game offers you can't be bothered to read it all most of the time. Secondly the briefing is voiced by a computer-sounding female which actually sounds pretty neat. However the things she says isn't what the text is saying. What she's saying is a condensed version of the highlighted text, but if you try to listen to her and read at the same time it's just confusing. Thirdly, there is a lot of information that would be very useful to have in the instructions of the game but I'll get back to that later.

Moving on, let's take a look at the gameplay for a bit. When you first start the game only the Fighter is available and you need to complete 5 missions before you unlock the Survivor ship. These missions are mostly just tutorial levels that let you get a handle of your ship and the mechanics which is fine. The very first mission just let's you navigate through some obstacles for 20 seconds. However there is no way to go faster, you can't gain any score and the only thing dying or getting hit does is lowering your score which starts at 0 and can't go below it so you can literally do nothing and successfully beat the mission.

That in and of itself wouldn't be too bad if the only goal was to learn how to handle the craft. However when you unlock the second craft IT'S first mission is exactly the same and as far as I can tell their speed and handling are identical. This means that there is literally zero point in having that first mission again for the second craft.

When it comes to actually handling the craft, the mechanics are in my opinion very bad. Like I said before the WASD keys are very hard to use to the point of unusable considering the overall difficulty of the game so really you're going to use the mouse for all the movement. However the ship has a maximum speed limit and if your mouse speed exceeds that, a faint shadow of your ship will indicate where your mouse is and the ship will go toward that point at maximum speed. This gives the game an inherent input lag that only makes navigating hard and unintuitive. Other games that has a similar mechanic usually use mouse acceleration to smooth out the movements to make it more natural whilst also having a slower overall speed.

Now it might not seem all that bad at first glance but consider the situation here: you have 2 enemies shooting straight from the left, another enemy moving fast in a cross pattern with fast shots aimed towards you in addition to a big boulder blocking your path and a small boulder that's almost invisible against the background. There's also a boost ring which is a sort of power up that you'd like to collect.

So basically you want to look at 5 or 6 different places that aren't your ship and steer with a method of control that basically requires you to look at the faint shadow of your ship in order to move accurately in a game that moves this fast. You feel crippled rather than challenged and whenever you do something right it feels more like luck that you happened to move your mouse to the position you wanted rather than skill.

The second mission introduces the boost mechanic. Basically you can collect "boost rings" in order to fill your boost gauge and then scroll the game faster to get a better level time. You can also combo them together in order to get more boost per ring. The first ring gives "1" something, the second gives 2, then 3 and so on. Once you reach 10 it starts over at 1 even if the combo didn't end and if it did end you also get 1.

The fifth mission for the survivor ship requires you to finish the level in "Ghost mode". In order to do that you need to gain boost level 3 and then boost to the finish. So you try it a couple times and can't seem to reach level 3. How do I keep the combo going? How long between rings can I wait? Is there a visual cue I'm missing? Do the numbers represent the combo counter or something else?

So you go to the in-depth guide PDF linked on the steam page and read about Boost and you learn that each ring gives 2% individually, the 2nd in a combo gives 4%, the next 8%. "After this, every boost ring that is reached within two seconds from the last fills the boost bar by 8%".

So in total there are 21 rings in the level. With some basic maths we find that the maximum combo we can get is 10 + 10 + 1 which gives
2*(2+4+8*8)+2= 142%

Wait hold on that doesn't look right! How much % is a level anyway? If you ignore the actual numbers and just assume a 21 ring combo you still only get
2+4+8*19=158%

That still looks wrong unless a boost level is 50% for some reason. So I don't get this mission because the game numbers your combo from 1 to 10 back to 1 and I have no clue if that resets the combo or not because it would be pretty reasonable to assume that if the number go from 10 to 1 that means the combo was reset, but the "in-depth guide" only mentions it being 2 seconds between picking up a ring as a combo breaker so I have no clue what's going on. Furthermore what is the whole deal with the percentages anyway because the numbers don't add up in any way I can make sense of.

Now you stop giving a crap about making sense of all this and try to just get all the rings in a single combo to beat the stage, which is hard because there is no indicator for when 2 seconds have gone by and you can't look at the timer because the controls are shit and getting killed ruins it so after some 20 attempts you finally get level 3 and beat the stage.

Or so you thought but you didn't. What the hell why not? I reached level three so I should be in ghost mode right? Nope, in the mission text you read 30 minutes ago and forgot about it says you're only in ghost mode if you're boosting while in level 3.

Anyway moving on, the 6th mission for Fighter requires you to reach "Rank: C". Ranks are determined by the score you have at the end of the level. Time doesn't give you extra score so "Highest score" and "Fastest time" are completely independent of each other so you can take your time with these which is thankful considering every single hit gives you a score penalty.

Now I've never balanced a game personally so take my opinion here with a grain of salt but when you kill the most common enemies in the game you only get 10-50 points. Some are worth more to the point where they're breaking the levels they're in but what happens for most levels requiring a rank you're struggling to combo 10-point enemies while avoiding near invisible tiny space rocks that take off 250 points if you touch them. Compare that to 100 points off for a death. Also the game doesn't give you a reasonable amount of invincibility frames after being hurt so what usually happens is that a single crash into anything that doesn't disappear will remove all of your points unless you're lucky enough to die before that in which case you do get some frames of invincibility. And mistakes are quite easy in this game, just take a look at the section right at the end of Fighter 6. There's one section that's sort of hard at the start but you learn to avoid it but the rest of the level is just waiting for that one bit and a single mistake means a reset.

Speaking of resets; there's no reset button. Every time you want to do a new attempt, you need to exit the stage, select the correct mission, wait half a second until the "play" button can be pressed, then wait for the second or two it takes to load the level (which is insane btw for a game of this sort!). For a game that revolves around hard gameplay and maximising scores it's very strange there's not a "retry" button.

Anyway that level took me like half an hour to complete but the 7th Fighter mission one I got on my third try. How you ask? By making sure I didn't die after the first row of enemies kill themselves then you just hit the OP enemies that give 100 points each and kill the last two in a combo. Again the strategy becomes to just wait around for the very end part of the level for the challenging part and that's not very fun at all even if you were loving the game and tried to get high scores.

The start of this level is shamelessly reused from the end of the level before. In fact in the 18 missions I've completed so far the only areas I've seen are the asteroids, that ship-arm-light thing and a small part of the inside of the ship. I suspect all 3 ships have the same long continuous level that are split apart between missions with the start point just being slightly further into the level with each mission but it certainly gets repetitive after like 6 or so missions in a row of the same area.


After only a few moments with the last character I had had enough. Let's take another look at the instructions. "You can also drag this box around enemy attacks to return their damage back at each corresponding enemy that initiated the attack". So basically I wait for 30 seconds then try to use the star box to kill the 3 enemies at the end. But it doesn't work. I tried several times. Maybe I'm doing it wrong and should consult the "in-depth guide" but I don't care. I followed the instructions and tried dragging the box which disappears in like half a second around the enemy attacks and it didn't work. I tried dragging it in front of the attacks and it didn't work. I tried dragging it onto the enemies themselves and it didn't work. I'm not waiting around for 30 seconds doing almost nothing in order to have another attempt at understanding the basic attack you couldn't explain how to do in four rows of text.

So that's basically all I have to say about the game. I'm sure I could continue all day if I had the patience to play it all the way through but I think I've tried harder than most would and all it does is making me frustrated over the poor execution of almost every aspect of the game. I don't really mind the graphics personally, they're ok for what the game is, but there's no thought put behind the things that really matter.

The meters are quite literally big boxes made with no love. Every piece of the Heads Up Display is out of the way so it's hard to look at them while playing the more intense sections. The ship shoots from weird offcenter places making it hard to aim. Foreground objects often don't stand out from the background. It's very hard to keep a combo going because there's no indicator for when it's ending. The same areas are reused over and over. The list just goes on!

The menu music is pretty good and the game music is... ok, but those aren't original works they're just taken from some website with free music.

I wouldn't buy this game.

Adventurous Productions:
WOW! Thank you so much, TimpZ, for such a thorough feedback! Between the people who have given this game a negative review, you are the first person to go through the trouble of writing down your thoughts so much in-depth. I really appreciate it a lot!

The credits in this game is a video and the choppiness has nothing to do with the frame-rate of the game. The choppiness of the video does not occur in the video editor, but after it has been exported as a video. I don't know why this happens and I have tried several different settings, but the final video still becomes choppy. It also only happens with this video (for example, the trailers are not choppy). As far as the in-game frame-rate is concerned, I personally haven't had a problem with it, but you should know that this game has been made with the game-authoring-tool "Multimedia Fusion 2" and games created with this tool, unfortunately, don't run as well optimized as games created from the ground up or with more sophisticated game engines. In fact, several of the issues that you have mentioned boil down to the limitations of creating a game with Multimedia Fusion 2.

In Multimedia Fusion 2, you can't make your game have multiple resolutions. That's why I created this game with a resolution of 1280 x 720 instead of something more high-res, like 1920 x 1080, to make more people able to play it.

As far as clicking the right button to continue at the end of the level is concerned, at first, it was possible to do it by pressing any of the keys used for controlling the game. But I decided to change it, because it was possible to accidentally keep pressing a button when you get to the end of a mission and thus, skipping the result screen. I thought to myself, if I limit the buttons for skipping the result screen to just ESC and right-click, it will be easy to figure out; especially considering that ESC is a default key in any application to abort things. I didn't think it was necessary to specifically state to the player to press one of these buttons. The first time you get to the result screen and left-click without anything happening, you will naturally try out other buttons (ESC being the most natural choice) and once you figure it out, you know it for the rest of the game.

If you wish to return to windows in the middle of a mission, you should pause the game first. This way, the mouse won't get stuck. You can pause the game by pressing any key other than the keys used for controlling the game. Instead of pressing CTRL+ESC or ALT+TAB, just press the windows key while playing. This way, you pause the game and get to windows at the same time.

Reading the instructions and tips at the start of every mission is the most essential aspect of playing this game! Most of the problems that people have with the game boils down to not paying attention to the texts. For this matter, I ask anyone interested in playing Quick Slick Deadly to please, always read all texts very carefully! About the voice reading the texts: At first, there was actually no voice. I later added the voice through a patch. In fact, the text-high-lights weren't always golden either. They were just a slightly brighter green; so that they wouldn't stick out too strongly, but still catch some attention. But then, I observed people playing the game on youtube and realized, no one ever pays any attention to the texts! They just immediately click on play, and then, they wonder why they don't understand how the game works. The most irritating thing was that they even never came to the conclusion to read any of the texts at their consecutive tries. There was a video of a person playing the second mission literally for 10 minutes (a mission that is 20 seconds long) and just tried over and over and over again and not once did he hesitate to immediately press play in the mission briefing. So, the result was, he didn't even know what the goal of the mission was, and yet, he was wondering all the time why the mission is impossible to finish. Anyway, my first attempt was to make the text-high-lights in the tutorial missions golden, so that they would pop in the eye and "cry for attention". That didn't help at all. Then, I added the voice. But in the tutorial missions, I, on purpose, did not let the voice read all the texts and just read the high-lights. The reason for this was that I feared that if the voice-message was too long, people would just press play before the voice would be finished reading. After all, you should be able to get through all 5 tutorial missions of each class by only paying attention the the high-lighted texts. I thought to myself, even though the not high-lighted areas are also informative, it remains for people who actually pay attention while playing. That was fine by me. Your argument that listening to the voice and reading at the same time is confusing is valid, but the voice gets done talking pretty quickly and, again, the information given by the voice is condensed only in the tutorial missions.

Originally, the goal in the first mission was to get through the level without hitting any asteroids. To my surprise, people found it annoying to be able to fail the very first mission. So that's why I just removed the mission objective and now, it's just a level where you get to get a feeling for the ships movement, without any particular aim. Of course, you can also finish the mission without ever pressing anything, but I don't think it's wrong to expect from a player to play a game with care and the desire to learn it. If the player has no desire in learning the game, then she/he shouldn't play it in the first place. I also disagree that there should be a way to accelerate the mission. It's only 20 seconds long and you only play it a single time, since there is no objective. Boosting is explained in the mission thereafter. There is no need to teach the player right in the first mission how to boost, just to be able to bypass a 20-seconds-long mission even faster. In your next paragraph, you mention that the first mission with the survivor is the same as the one with the fighter. That's true and the same applies for the second mission. However, I'm sure you realized that as soon as you unlock the survivor, the first three missions are already unlocked. So, when you first start with the survivor, you can immediately start with the third mission. Same goes for the trickster. In other words, you only ever need to do the first two missions with the fighter.

Getting comfortable with the controls needs some practice. If, while playing, you often see the faint shadow of your ship, please try moving the mouse a bit slower and with more control. If things get too hectic, please remember that you can pause the game at any time by pressing pretty much any key.

I'm sorry you had so much problems with the missions that required boosting, but, unfortunately, you understood the way boosting works completely wrong. Before explaining the problems you mentioned, I would like to copy here the complete information about boosting, in three different ways. The first is the way the voice in the game explains it. The second is the mission briefing that can be read in the game. The third is the information from the in-depth guide:

1. Voice:

"Fly through boost rings to receive boost energy. As soon as you have any amount of boost energy, you can perform a boost (shift or middle-click). By rapidly flying through the rings, you create a ring chain.

For every ring chain of 10, the boost level increases by 1, which means increasing in boost speed."

2. Mission Briefing:

"Fly through boost rings to receive boost energy. You can track how much boost energy you have via the green bar at the bottom left corner of the screen (boost bar). As soon as you have any amount of boost energy, you can perform a boost via the boost button (shift/mouse3). Boosting increases the scroll speed of the screen.

The way that the boost button works is that upon pressing it (if you have any amount of boost energy), boost mode becomes activated and it is not required to hold the button. While boost mode is active, pressing the button again will deactivate the boost. If you run out of boost energy or become destroyed, boost mode will be deactivated automatically.

Each boost ring grants a small amount of boost energy, but this amount can be increased by rapidly flying through the rings, reaching each next boost ring no later than within 2 seconds. This is called a ring chain.

For every ring chain of 10 (rapidly flying through 10 rings), the boost level increases by 1. The boost level is displayed at the right of the boost bar. Increasing in boost level means increasing in boost speed."

3. In-depth Guide:

"It is possible to change the scroll speed of the screen during play time by performing a boost. This can be done by either pressing the middle mouse button or the SHIFT key. Boost mode can be activated and deactivated by pressing the mentioned buttons. For boosting, there is a boost bar in the head-up display, which is empty at the start of each level. To fill the boost bar, the player must fly through boost rings (rings of energy, which are quite plentifully located in each level).

Each boost ring fills 2% of the boost bar. If the player flies through a boost ring and then flies through another one within two seconds, the second boost ring will fill the boost bar by 4%. If then a third boost ring is passed within the next two seconds, the third boost ring will fill the boost bar by 8%. This is called a ring chain of three. After this, every boost ring that is reached within two seconds from the last fills the boost bar by 8%. If the player hesitates and the chain brakes, the value of the next boost ring will fall back to 2%.

Boosting consumes 5% of the boost bar per second. If you manage to fully fill the boost bar, it will blink for 5 seconds. During this time you can boost as much as you like. After that, no matter how much you have used the boost ability, the boost bar falls back to 80%.

The standard scroll speed of the screen is 5 blocks per second (b/s) [What blocks are is explained at a different section of the guide.]. During a boost, this will go up to 8 b/s. For every ring chain of ten, the boost speed increases by 1 b/s. This allows skilled players to make the boost ability increasingly more powerful, only limited by the total number of boost rings available in a level. A number next to the boost bar (the boost level) indicates how fast your boost is at any time. Boost level 1 equals 8 b/s, boost level 2 equals 9 b/s and so on."

Now, I will try to explain what you understood wrongly and how I expected the player to understand it without referring to the in-depth guide.

The numbers appearing when collecting a ring is not the amount of energy you get from it, but your chain counter. That's why it goes from 1 to 2 to 3 and so on until 10 and then back to 1. Whenever you make a ring-chain of 10, you go up one level in boost-strength. You're boost-level is written at the right of the boost-gauge. To be fair, it is nowhere explained what the numbers appearing on screen when collecting a ring are, but I thought that's something the player can figure out on her/his own, since there is already so much text in the game. But aside from this, the other aspects mentioned in this paragraph could have been derived from the voice and the mission briefing from the following sections:

Voice: "By rapidly flying through the rings, you create a ring chain. For every ring chain of 10, the boost level increases by 1, which means increasing in boost speed."

Mission Briefing: "...reaching each next boost ring no later than within 2 seconds. This is called a ring chain. For every ring chain of 10 (rapidly flying through 10 rings), the boost level increases by 1. The boost level is displayed at the right of the boost bar. Increasing in boost level means increasing in boost speed."

So, the numbers appearing when collecting a ring are meant to help you know if your combo is going. If the numbers keep increasing, you're combo is continuing. If you reach combo 10, you will have increased in boost-level. If the counter drops down to 1 before reaching 10, that means you've lost the combo. It's true, there is no indicator to show you how much of the 2 seconds time you have for a chain has passed, but I thought I could expect the player to develop a feeling for 2 seconds time-pass. After all, there are also other sorts of combos possible in the game and if I was going to make a number appear for each of them every time, that would have been more confusing than helpful. But, in any case, it is stated in the mission briefing that you have 2 seconds for chaining rings.

Again, sorry for all the confusion from the in-depth guide. The part of the guide that contained the information you wanted was the last paragraph in the boost section. But the information that caused confusion for you is from the second paragraph, which explains to what extent collecting rings fills your boost-gauge. But the energy in your boost-gauge has nothing to do with your boost level. The boost-level is written at the right side of the gauge. The amount of energy in the gauge is an indicator for how much energy you can spend for boosting, while the boost-level indicates how fast your boosting is going to be. The higher your boost level, the faster you go.

Moving on, the information that your time doesn't influence your score is wrong. When you reach the sixth mission, it is not yet explained in any of the mission briefings how your time bonus is calculated. It will be explained at a later mission. The reason for this is simply that the more important information had to come first and time bonus calculation was not one of the more important aspects of the game. There is the legitimate complaint that how is the player supposed to know that time influences score if it isn't explained. But I had thought of it this way: When you reach the result screen, you see three bonuses listed: Health bonus, time bonus and power bonus. When you play the sixth mission for the first time, you don't know how any of this is calculated yet, but the fact that you can see these aspects on the result screen should give you the idea that, no matter how the time bonus is calculated, if "time bonus" is mentioned on the result screen, then it is natural to think that if I finish the mission within a faster time, I will probably get some extra points. This is the way it works in most games anyway. Most games don't go in-depth in how the score is calculated. All they give you is a result screen and it is your job to make the correct assumptions based on the information on the result screen. In Quick Slick Deadly, there is actually explanations for everything. It's just that some explanations come later, because all the explanations could not have been cramped into the first five missions.

Your problem with the game balancing comes back to the fact that when playing the sixth mission, there is still a lot of information about the score calculation that you do not yet know. All of it will follow later. This, admittedly, makes the sixth mission difficult. But once the player figures out that the completion time influences the score, it makes the game much easier. Consider that all the sixth mission requires is a rank C, but your rank can go up all the way to A. This means that a rank C is actually not much.

Yes, I would have loved to introduce a quick reset button for the game. But because of reasons related to Multimedia Fusion 2, it was important to completely restart the game whenever you want to restart a mission. So, whenever you abort a mission, it appears that you get back to the mission selection screen; but what actually happens is that the game completely restarts and then skips forward to the mission selection screen. This is actually made this way for the exact reason to enable the player to restart missions as fast as possible. Still, it's, of course, not as ideal as a reset button that immediately restarts the mission. But I still think that restarting a mission in this game is still a lot faster than many other games that focus on competition.

The strategy you have used for the seventh mission does not work in all missions. Also, again, consider that you are only required to obtain a rank C. If you would like to reach a higher rank, then you definitely can't just rely on the final part of a mission.

About the repeating areas: I would like to give some explanation for why it is done this way, but I will leave that for another post. But I just would like to say for now that even though the areas repeat, every single mission introduces one new enemy or environmental element. Also, it all will make sense once you get to the final mission.

Sorry for becoming frustrated with the trickster class. I don't think your doing anything wrong as far as dragging the box is concerned. But I can imagine that you drag the box a bit too late. There is this light-beam at the end of this mission that destroys the three enemies. You need to destroy all three of them with the "Star Box"-attack before they are destroyed by the light-beam. What might have happened is that the light-beam might have destroyed the enemies almost at the same time you dragged the box, but nevertheless, it was the light-beam that destroyed them and not you. I admit, this is very very tricky. I will remove the light-beam in a later patch.

Once again, I just would like to thank you sincerely for all the time you invested in playing the game and writing down feedback! Most people really don't bother, so, what you've done really means a lot to me! Please don't feel attacked by anything I've written in this post. I just have tried to explain everything. I understand if you hate the game, but just maybe, this information here might give you an incentive to give the game another try.

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