Echos - Suggestions

[signblank]

Hi there. I want to say thanks for the fantastic game. I play it to waste time between customers. I never thought I'd be playing Asteroids and liking it, great! Now I'm addicted and getting to level 10 on normal now, I'm sure I'll get better. While I think the game is superb and a very enjoyable game I've played in quite some time, I do have a couple of suggestions.

A single collision taking 2-3 weapon levels away destroys the current mission and forces a suicide/abort/retry. Even if I only lose 5-10 HP, the weapon level loss is often unrecoverable. I'd like to see a maximum of 1 weapon level loss per half second to negate it.

A non essential addition might be to somehow make the weapon and health power ups more visible by say vertical and horizontal crosshairs which may glow or something for a third of a second when the power up appears. A think this should happen only when the power up is useful to you.

Anyway thankyou so much again, great job on this game.

[edit] Also I've noticed the player profiles still get lost but that doesn't bother me too much. [/edit]

[fog]

Hi signblank and welcome.

I'm always open to feedback and suggestions so thanks for that.

A single collision taking 2-3 weapon levels away destroys the current mission and forces a suicide/abort/retry. Even if I only lose 5-10 HP, the weapon level loss is often unrecoverable. I'd like to see a maximum of 1 weapon level loss per half second to negate it.

I can't honestly say I've ever found that a problem but you're not the first person to mention it so it's obviously something I would at least need to look at.  The idea would certainly need some tweaking though as IMO it would make the game too easy for those that play on hard difficulty and like the challenge.  I know some people wanted it even harder so I guess you can't please everyone

A non essential addition might be to somehow make the weapon and health power ups more visible by say vertical and horizontal crosshairs which may glow or something for a third of a second when the power up appears. A think this should happen only when the power up is useful to you.

 
We did change the powerups from what they were originally to make them easier to see but I appreciate with so much stuff on screen it's still ot particularly easy.  Again it's something I'll address in the future.

[edit] Also I've noticed the player profiles still get lost but that doesn't bother me too much. [/edit]

Yeah that's also a problem a few people have reported but I've looked into it and can't recreate it myself.  The only thing I could probably do would be to rewrite the whole file loading and saving routines but even then there's no guarantee it would fix things as I can't see a problem at the moment.


In truth it's unlikely Echoes in it's current form will get updated again.  I am however looking into using XNA to see about getting something on  the XBox360 and should I do a new version for that then there would also be an updated PC version too.