[4E4] #6: Operation Dog Tag

Oh, hey. That would make the game a bit more fun. I got tired of walking through the entire level, what with the high hitpoints of the zombies and all [smile]. I enjoyed the second level with the jeeps, so I'll try Necro again with the tanks.

Also, did I mention that the destroyed building texture is awesome?

Thanks guys, I'm glad you liked at least part of the game:)

Yes we included a handful of Easter Eggs for players to find. Looking back we should have made the tank a bit more obvious as the Necro level would be really tough and long to walk thru the whole thing. Oops:)

Isn't a tank overkill for those poor defenseless zombies? :(

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Original post by Anonymous Poster didnt it say something to the effect of "look for the tank" in the mission objectives? i though it did, maybe i just thought "hey there is a tank I wonder if I can do stuff with it?" Then I got in and was like, "cool". Running down zombies is fun it makes the level easier. making ninjas go flying in the air off the car/dunebuggy is cool too. Their ar some funny easter eggs in the game to, see if you can read the guys shirt and some of the signs. i think there is something silly in the ninja level to but im not sure i only heard/saw it once, so listen closely. i guess ill have to play again to see if i missed anything. haven't played the other level yet, you can do them in any order. overall its a cool game ran fine on my 3 year old machine which is cool cause shit craps out easy on it. thanks for makin it dude

Thanks for the comments, we appreciate them! Although, it would be nice if you were logged in :)

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Original post by nes8bit Isn't a tank overkill for those poor defenseless zombies? :(

Yes! But I think it's kinda fun ;-)

are there any cheat codes? Something along the lines of "make zombies not require 100 rounds to kill"?

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Original post by AnonymousPosterChild are there any cheat codes? Something along the lines of "make zombies not require 100 rounds to kill"?

If you right click, you have a grenade launcher... Also, if you find the rocket launcher, and you can use both bullets, and grenades, and press "r" to fire rockets. You can find ammo powerups for each placed around the levels. They should help with dispatching enemies.

There's the tank as well.

Good luck! [smile]

I would also recommend remapping the rockets to a third mouse button if you have one. That was how it originally played, but then I thought some people may not have a third mouse button and the default was changed.

All keys can be remapped in the options, as well as the mouse sensitivity and a reverse mouse setting for those of you that play FPS's like it was a flight sim:)

Another thing I forgot to mention, the game's progress is saved by the player name you use when starting a server. If you beat a level and quit you can come back later, type in the same name for your player and continue with the beaten levels. The game only saves completed levels though and not progress mid level.

Also, to start a new game you can either delete the savefile in the games directory with your players name, OR just use a new name for your player.

By the way, the default R didn't work to fire my rockets (and yes, I had some [grin]).

Really? Hmm, did you have the rocket launcher? The default weapon can't fire rockets, you have to find the rocket launcher (there are a few in each level, sometimes they are hidden). If you had the launcher and it still didnt work try remapping the key in the options screen. You just have to click on the action in the list you want to remap, then hit the key you want to remap it to. You can bring up this screen in-game by hitting escape.

Oh, oh. I might have picked up rockets, but not the launcher.

I was pleasantly suprised to get this running on my GF2MX based Duron750 system. I selected 640x480 and it was pretty fluid, and I didn't notice any jaggies which left me wondering how that is the case?
It slowed down quite a bit when close to an enemy but was still playable even when 8 pirates were hopping after me.
The polish was the main thing that impressed me - the well-done manual for instance, and an intro 'movie'. However I've no idea how it'll score- I don't know how much more the coding is than 'drop some animations into a 3D world in Ogre', and I don't know how much the judging cares about amount of coding done for the entry. But I'd expect this to make top-10.

Only complaint - no sound or music on my system, which has never had sound problems before. Perhaps it's an OpenAL issue?

Wow man, actually I'm surprised you were able to run it ok on those specs. We tested on a 1.1 Athlon with a GF2MX and it was ok, but I figured anything lower would chug. Nice!

We have noticed sound issues with OpenAL on some older cards and in Win98. That's really too bad cause the music and sound was a good portion of our entry... o well.

The coding was actually a hell of a lot more than just dropping animations in, (not to mention having 2 programmers trying to learn how to model and animate in just a few months is a project in itself). We basically had to do an overhaul of many parts of Torque to get it to do what we wanted. Especially with the buggy and tank handling and the turret cam on the tank. We basically spent the first 2-3 months working in the engine and creating the scripts we would need, then spent the last month and a half creating the levels and finishing up the content.

To anyone interested in ramping up their coding skills I would definitely recommend grabbing an engine like Torque where you can get the source-code and get your hands dirty. It took awhile to get used to, especially how to make new objects and not break the client/server console object model they have. And I'm sure there are many other choices besides Torque for this too, I'm just recommending what I know.

Our biggest complaints about the engine were issues with physics and collision and the OpenAL implementation. There just wasnt enough time to rewrite either of these and still get a game out with just 2 of us coding. Our next goal now that the contest is over is a complete overhaul of the audio subsystem and implementing the newer OpenAL 1.1 specs.

Anyway, Thanks for the comments and hopefully you'll get the chance to play it with sounds eventually.

Just out of curiousity, what OS and soundcard are you running on?

And I'd like to mention a special thanks to Klora Jardi for the hard work on our manual. It makes the rest of our game look like programmer art:)

[Edited by - Selsesstissan on November 8, 2005 9:59:41 AM]

Oh it wasn't meant to sound derogatory - just wasn't sure what the engine did already.

My system has Win2K, DX9.0c and I don't know what the soundcard is. It is a separate card, not onboard sound, but it is about 5 years old. However like I said I've not come across other games that didn't like it since sound cards are pretty simple compared to GPUs!

I would say that out of the few entries that I have played, Operation Dog Tag has been my favorite. It actually had a substantial amount of gameplay, and had some nice little polishes, like the well done user manual. At some points it almost felt like serious sam, especially when mowing down a group of pirates.

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Original post by d000hg I was pleasantly suprised to get this running on my GF2MX based Duron750 system. I selected 640x480 and it was pretty fluid, and I didn't notice any jaggies which left me wondering how that is the case?

Wow cool! That's definitely the lowest specs we've heard about our game running on!

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Original post by d000hg However I've no idea how it'll score- I don't know how much more the coding is than 'drop some animations into a 3D world in Ogre', and I don't know how much the judging cares about amount of coding done for the entry. But I'd expect this to make top-10.

Oh if only it were that easy[smile]... We actually ended up doing alot more engine programming on this project than we had anticipated, most of it fixing Torque bugs, and adding features we needed the engine to have, like the camera code for the tank. I'd definitely recommend Torque for making games, but only to someone who has a strong background in programming and basic understanding of 3d math.

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Original post by d000hg Only complaint - no sound or music on my system, which has never had sound problems before. Perhaps it's an OpenAL issue?

Yep, I think it's OpenAL. We've had some people report issues with certain sound cards. It's too bad, because we put alot of work and money(around $700 US) into the sounds in the game. Which sound card / driver do you have so we can check into it?

Anyway, thanks for playing, and thanks for the comments!

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Original post by d000hg Oh it wasn't meant to sound derogatory - just wasn't sure what the engine did already. My system has Win2K, DX9.0c and I don't know what the soundcard is. It is a separate card, not onboard sound, but it is about 5 years old. However like I said I've not come across other games that didn't like it since sound cards are pretty simple compared to GPUs!

Oh, sorry I misunderstood the comment. The engine does handle a ton of stuff out of the box, but in a generic way. And there were many bugs to fix.

The card wouldnt happen to be a Aureal vortex or vortex2 chip would it? I know there are issues with those chips for OpenAL. Other than that I'm not sure. Although to be honest, I've encountered many times that when a game crashes to desktop its actually an issue with the sound driver implementation.

It could also have to do with an existing OpenAL driver installed on your system that isnt compatible with the version we used... who knows. If I ever figure it out I'll let you know.

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Original post by Moe I would say that out of the few entries that I have played, Operation Dog Tag has been my favorite. It actually had a substantial amount of gameplay, and had some nice little polishes, like the well done user manual. At some points it almost felt like serious sam, especially when mowing down a group of pirates.

Hey thanks Moe! We were striving to get the feel of mowing down tons of enemies. I actually would have put even more in but it would have been too much for the min specs of the contest with our current models.

Has anyone tried playing multiplayer yet?

I've not been able to find what exactly my card is in the past -the drivers probably ahven't ever been updated because without a decent internet connection I can't let it go and look for one.
I'll try again to find the chipset - if I can find newer drivers that fix it then it's not your problem (although why OpenAL should have a problem I don't know)!
Does the game produce any kind of error log so we could see what exactly is failing - as long as I don't have to go through a 90Mb download again I could run a debug/special .exe that has some output...

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Original post by d000hg I've not been able to find what exactly my card is in the past -the drivers probably ahven't ever been updated because without a decent internet connection I can't let it go and look for one. I'll try again to find the chipset - if I can find newer drivers that fix it then it's not your problem (although why OpenAL should have a problem I don't know)! Does the game produce any kind of error log so we could see what exactly is failing - as long as I don't have to go through a 90Mb download again I could run a debug/special .exe that has some output...

We did have Logging but I disabled it for the contest version. Although even the logs we did have wouldnt be helpful for openAL debugging, thats one of the big TODO's on our upcoming overhaul:) It seems in the current version of Torque there isnt much error checking in the audio framework going on, so I'm in the process of adding that.

If you do find out the chipset and let us know that would help a ton. What I can do if you're willing to help us out is add logging info to a new .exe build and send you the link to get it. It would just be the exe so would only be a few megs. I dont think I'll have time to mess with it much until the end of this week/beginning of next tho.

Anyway, thanks man!

You know you guys should have won this contest. As soon as I saw screenshots I actually listed Dog Tag on top as far as direct competition with my project. So at the risk of sounding like a complete ass I'm going to tell you what I believe went wrong.

First I'd like to say that I really respect the fact that you guys were on time and met your milestones with no problem. You guys had been so far ahead that you were able to implement multiplayer. Your assets were decent, your engine was excellent, but for some reason your game was lacking. The reason I'm posting this is because I know your game could have been placed so much higher with some extremely minor adjustments.

The Theory
There is one thing about any sort of form of entertainment and that is, you must capture your audience in 5 minutes or less. Really they should be interested in about 2 minutes or you've probably lost your audience forever. Once you have their short term attention, you have to keep their long term attention. I'm telling you...people have such short attention spans its not even funny.

People on this site are far more generous than most crowds I've seen. I'm sure most of them played through just to see what the competition is like. However, I guarantee you that most people that don't know you and that don't have any sort of feel for development would have totally shut your game off in the first 5 minutes.

So lets just say you have 4 minutes and 45 seconds after loading time. Your intro was too long. On top of that, I didn't feel that the intro connected me with the story at all. Even if it did connect the game, it didn't feel like that. It was something you should have caught in focus group testing. If you did have a focus group, then your focus group was either the wrong people or you didn't listen to them.

Now lets say theoretically they immediately clicked through the intro. So now you have 4 minutes 45 seconds to catch their interest in game play. Well first of all the whole "connect to server" idea was really confusing and nearly intimidating to me at first. If I was a noob end user I would have had to look at the game manual at that point. You don't want that to happen because you've already broken suspension of disbelief. In other words...if your intro kicked ass and they got hyped to play the game, then their groove would have been ruined by a complicated interface. They should be able to get in the game with like 3 simple clicks without reading...

Other things I have to complain about is the fact that your rockin' rocker music was far too loud and distracting for menu music. The music should compliment the game, not overshadow it. If you wanted to go with that music then you would have needed a much more exciting and active menu screen. In other words no music would have been much more professional in this case.

Gameplay
Ok ok...so lets say they figured it out quickly and now they have 4 minutes flat. Consider 45 seconds for navigating the menu + optimistic loading times.

Consider this scenerio: You have 4 minutes to capture your audience in level 1. The environment is really cool looking! Lets investigate... Can't find any enemies...you already lost a minute just walking up to the first enemy. Then your first enemy takes forever to kill...now you lost 1.5 minutes. Now they have to walk around a lot more just to find the next few enemies. Thats 2 minutes...and already I'm losing interest because the enemies are so hard to kill. And it repeats... By now you need a miracle to gain interest and retain it.

I hope you can see where I'm going. These are things that your focus group should have caught. You should have observed the frustration in them not being able to kill the enemies easily. Someone mentioned a rocket launcher...you should have noted the fact that the players probably didn't use the rocket launcher.

Did you know you can literally run from start to finish without firing at anything? Thats exactly what I did. I finally shut it off because I got bored.


Proper Game Flow
Imagine this...

###### Frustrating ######

-----Game Flow--->

###### Boring ######

Game flow is what your player "feels". Now game flow goes up and down. So it gets hard and it gets easy. You should strive to keep it right in the middle. Its almost impossible to keep it in the middle for everyone. So really the game flow pattern fluctuates. You want the majority of your target market to stay in the middle somewhere. So in other words good game flow goes in between frustrating and boring. Once your game is too easy then it becomes boring. Once your game gets too hard then it becomes frustrating.

In dog tag, the game got furstrating right when it took 1000000 bullets to kill a zombie. So immediately I hit the ceiling. Then the game got really easy once I realized I can run away and not get hit. Then it got boring and hit the floor. See how this could have been avoided in polish?

Finally...
In short this is what you messed up on:
* Intro - Too long and not entertaining at all
* Menu - Complicated server/menu system
* Music - Out-of-place
* Game flow went from too boring to too frustrating too quickly. In other words it takes forever to kill a zombie (frustrating) and yet you can run away from them really quickly (boring)


I was gunning for you guys. I really wished you guys would have wiped the floor with the competition. You guys had something going, but probably slipped in the polish phase. Maybe you didn't hit a milestone, but I honestly think dog tag could have been 100x better than it is right now just from utilizing quality control a little more.

Anyway I'm being blunt while trying to be tactful at the same time. Thats pretty hard to do especially when you aren't sure of criticism is welcome. So I hope you guys don't take this in a negative way. I'm only posting this because I know you guys have potential. I know you guys could have done so much better. So hopefully you can use this information to build a much better game in the future.