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.
