Love your thumbnail. Boxy is queen forever.

It would be nice to have a demo though. Your comment says 2 years ago, and there's still no playable demo. The website and steam both say it's coming for 2020, but without any investment, what's going to make me want to actually get the game?

Same. I'd like to actually play test this. D2 please upload the game files for me to play! T^T

In the meantime, could you roast my game?
https://roastmygame.com/game/under-fire

You can also play it on itch.io if you want to use the browser instead of downloading the game:
https://invadetech.itch.io/under-fire

Holy crap! The controls are insane. If you hold down a movement key, the dot is unresponsive for like 2 seconds then goes flying with speed. Sometimes I could get it to glitch through walls. I found it easier to repeatedly press the movement keys to get the dot going where I want it, which is kind of counter intuitive.

I actually like the mazes though. And I'm thinking I might use a couple of your layouts in newer versions of my own games. It was cool how when you beat the level, the maze walls fell down with physics applied to them.

Overall, 3/10

That was actually really fun. I liked the graphics, I liked the music, I liked the characters and the animations. I just didn't know what was going on half the time. For example I didn't know how much health I had or what things caused damage. I'm pretty sure the acid from the ceiling did damage to my character, but there was no feedback like a knock back, or white blinking or sound effect, etc. I didn't really have any idea what my goals were.

Overall, 7/10 would play again.

That was actually really fun. I liked the graphics, I liked the music, I liked the characters and the animations. I just didn't know what was going on half the time. For example I didn't know how much health I had or what things caused damage. I'm pretty sure the acid from the ceiling did damage to my character, but there was no feedback like a knock back, or white blinking or sound effect, etc. I didn't really have any idea what my goals were.

Overall, 7/10 would play again.

Woah! 2.7 Gigs? There better be a TON of content. Otherwise, it seems to me that your game is going to be very processor intensive with large file sizes. That seems to me like there's game objects that have high poly counts, textures that might be very large, etc. I'll reply to this comment after 6 hour download time from google drive. But if it was for a gaming course, I'm assuming for school, then it seems like you could focus on optimizing file sizes. For example, I made an FPS with Doom style billboard sprites, and the whole game is only 625 KB. It'd be pretty cool if you could roast my game as I'm looking for feed back as well. https://roastmygame.com/game/under-fire

Anyways, I'll be back with a proper report.

Well I played it for about 15 mins.

A couple comments.
*There were invisible walls. It took me a while to figure out that I had to follow the valley. Maybe use some of the rock assets to build somewhat of a wall, or make it a little more obvious where I'm NOT allowed to go.

*Some of the outside assets had weird colliders on them. I could walk through the small trees/shrub things, but I got stuck on some of them. Also, it seems as though some of the assets, like the dead tree stumps had mesh colliders. It would probably get you back some processing power to just throw a simple box collider on them, or a capsule collider if you want to make walking into these things a little smoother. I was able to get kind of stuck on some of the tree stumps as well. It didn't really effect on game play as much because I wasn't running away from a yeti, and it wasn't life threatening being somewhat stuck, but it was annoying and reduces the amount of professionalism to making smooth game play.

*The gun model was nice, but when I aim with right click the camera clips through the back of the gun which allows me to see the bullets in the magazine. Other than clipping through the gun, there's not really a time when you'd need to really render that part of the asset, so you're causing more stress on the processing power of running your game than needed.

*When entering the gun scene in, the game doesn't take over my mouse and I actually have to click for the camera to start following my mouse input. Not a big deal, but again it shaves off professionalism points.

*The yeti was terrifying. I was genuinely scared for my life when the first yeti started running at me. Good job. However, they're too over powered. It took like 6 slow shots to kill it, which by the way I'm pretty sure AK47s are automatic and at the least, semi automatic, so maybe you'd consider using a different gun model or tweak the firing settings. It only takes the Yeti ONE touch to kill me, and they're pretty fast. I ended up dying too much without getting any payoff, because when I died, you just reloaded the scene and all the yetis "respawn". Which means I can only kill about two of them before having to start over. You're going to have to make your game SUPER fun for me to consider putting in enough time to practice WANTING to be able to kill all the yetis.

*The gun model was reacting to lighting outside, even though the sky was completely white, and none of the objects outside were casting shadows. That's a little in-congruent and shaves off more professionalism points. Inside the cave, the gun reacted to the lighting which was fine, except the gun and arms cast shadows. But there's no body shadows, so the "illusion" of being a character is broken when I see floating shadows on the wall.

*The voice acting deserves an oscar.

As far as optimization goes, there are TONS of little tricks to do that add up to giving you back chunks of frame rate. For example, I know you're using other people's assets, but this video shows the difference between correctly modeling objects without changing the look or feel of the object and it's impact on how the player perceives it.

Blender 3D - How to make - Modelling Game Assets - Medium Tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlueIzyQ4hs

He takes the EXACT same model, does some light trimming and goes from 218 Verts to 56 Verts. If you have 5 of those objects in the scene, that's the difference between the graphics card attempting to keep track of 1090 Verts as opposed to 280 Verts.

And then there's things like this video by Thomas Brush:

How To Make A 2D Game (Unity Basics)!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqd1u_dfrkc

Where at about 3:50 in the video he starts explaining how he disables most of the level and has scripts to actively enable and disable sections of the level so that he can squeeze in more assets running at the same time.

Then there's things like object pooling mentioned in this video:

OBJECT POOLING in Unity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdSmKaJvCoA

I know I'm using Unity, and you're using Unreal, but the core concepts can still carry over platforms and even programming languages.

For example, the billboard effect I'm using in Under Fire is actually a shader. So the shader takes care of making the object "appear" to face the camera at all times. However it's not affecting the transform of the object itself which means it has less of a processor impact. Shaders can be used for GORGEOUS effects and even some more practical things like making a fish mesh "look like" it's swimming with an animation such as in this video:

Unity Shader Graph - Vertex Animation Tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQxubpLxEqU

That guy Gabriel has some really sexy and easy visual effects tutorials and even some videos for Unreal Engine.

He even has some performance tips for using VFX also:

Unity 2018 - Game VFX - 10 Performance Improvements Tips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqWvJK1uFn8

And then there are people that make tests just for fun because they're too woke, like this guy:

Coding Adventure: Boids
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtqltqcQhw

In this video you can see how the fish swimming shader can have a really nice impact on the visuals of the game and a smaller footprint on the processor.

Just released a new game! Check it out and roast it!
https://roastmygame.com/game/retro-rage

I can't play this cause there's no download...

Yeah, not much to game play. Actually I think the game is playing you. It's the one guessing.

It's not really a game. sman is right, you should make it so you guess the computer's number. ALTHOUGH, it'd would be pretty easy to take this and make a dice game out of it. For example, when you click a button, it would pick a random number between 1 and 6 and there could be a Die graphic that visually displays the chosen number. Before you press the button to pick the random die number, you could place a bet using a variable to store how much money you start off with and then placing that money on either a number with higher returns or on Odds or Evens with a 150% return.

So if you bet 50 coins and you picked the number 4 and click the button, if the number chosen is not 4 then you loose 50 coins. If the number is 4 then you get 100 coins.

If you bet 50 coins and you pick Odds, click the button and the number chosen is 1, 3, or 5, then you get 75 coins. If the number is 2, 4, or 6 then you loose 50 coins.

Otherwise, some easy changes would be to go into the Project settings and set the default icon for the exe of your game.

I know it's been 4 months since you uploaded this, but I'd like to see a second game! :D

There's no download link. :/

I wanted to play test this

I can't download this! :c

I wanted to try the free version.

Can't download it as there's no download link. The website link has the game for $1. Frostbite looks like a walking simulator, as there doesn't seem to be anything other than the ability to walk from the trailer. That was your first game made which was started Oct 14, 2019. Then there's a $10 mermaid game, except I don't see that project coming out in October if Frostbite hasn't finished, and you just started Dustwalker. From the video of Dustwalker that boogie did, there seems to be limited animations as the character doesn't have a walk.

My game is free: https://roastmygame.com/game/under-fire
There's an option to buy the downloadable game for $2 if someone feels like supporting my work on https://invadetech.itch.io/under-fire. My game has a clear start and end, and has more functionality from what I can see in the boogie video. However you're expecting people to buy your concept that is missing a lot of work or even just in the theoretical stage, such as the mermaid game.

I get that the video was made 6 days ago, but I was able to make my Under Fire game in 3 days.

I also have a prototype 3rd person game in the works that I just might upload the demo for because you've inspired me to show you what you could be capable of.

You also seem to have been into programming since 2006 when you were 12. I understand that robotics programming and video game programming are completely different. Trust me I know. I also do web design and have developed websites for clients in the past and that's completely different programming as well. BUT you said that you switched majors to CompSci. C# is used by many programs and is the basis for the windows operating system. So you should be somewhat decent at C# to begin with right? At least familiar with functions, variables and classes right? With that being said, I'm not sure why Dustwalker doesn't have things like solid controls programmed in. Frost bite from the trailer doesn't have anything other than walking programmed in. Why would I pay $5 to attempt to test that out?

I'm really not trying to attack you or your work. In fact if anything, it's inspiring me to do better myself and help motivate others to get their dreams closer to reality. I think the point I'm making is that without a free demo, and a video showing that there's not really any actual game play, it seems like a stretch to think that people are going to fund your projects upfront.

This is actually a really cool concept. I actually had fun playing this. I didn't play too much because the game definitely makes it hard to see what's going on. I get that there's monsters in the dark and it's horror, but I can't kill the monsters if I can't really see them.

There needs to be more polish as well. For example, the text in the tutorial stage is hard to read when it goes under the game objects. I'd recommend either putting it in the UI, or off to the side of the wall where the player or tables and chairs aren't going to be covering it up. Also, I understand that you need to "interact" with computers to open doors, but the computer is a rigid body so it and the table it's on go bouncing across the room. They should be immovable.

The monsters being really hard to see took the fun out of the game play.

Overall I played like to the first door, but I love the idea and I would love to see more progress on this.

Not bad for pong. I actually really like the idea that you can turn on line mode to see where the ball is going.

I'm not sure why it's 6MB though. The graphics seem pretty simplistic.

My game has a lot of graphics in it, yet it's only 625KB. So there's probably some file housekeeping that you can improve on.

I would love to see this game evolve into a Brick Break game.

The graphics are nice.

There's really no game at this point. Even though the "game" was posted 36 days ago, I'd expect a little bit more. Especially if you're expecting people to pay you anything to keep the development going.

And how is the game 29MB if there's nothing in the game?

My game has lots of graphics and is literally only 625KB. That's not even 1MB.
https://roastmygame.com/game/under-fire

Ok, my roast got an error when I went to post it:

" Whoops! There were some problems with your input.
The body may not be greater than 5000 characters."

So I'm going to post my roast in multiple replies.

This was actually a really great Idea. The controls are very solid, and the camera flows very nicely.

1. Did you have fun?
Yes, I had fun playing the levels. The mask concept was really fun as well.

2. Was the game too hard? (though the game is meant to be difficult)
Yes. The difficulty of your game made it loos fun value. You have a really great core concept with nice controls. Dying as much as I did started to ruin that. I know it's just a prototype, but I wasn't given any real feelings of accomplishment after clearing areas. It took me a while to realize that I could turn the mask on and off. So instead of saying to press R2 to put the mask on, it would be better to tell people to press R2 to "toggle" the mask on and off. Also in that room have toggle-able game objects, so that when I put the mask on it is instantly explained through visuals why I should put the mask on, and that putting the mask on has an actual effect. Dying about 6 or 7 seven times before I figured out that I could take the mask off and it would make the spikes disappear took away the curiosity that I had simply because I didn't understand your gimmick. I think that was in part due to the spikes on the blue platform were red. My brain registered the blue platform as being new but not the spikes as they matched the previous spikes. Also I didn't have any understanding of the mask ability BEFORE I got to that room, which causes me as the player not to understand that I need to be paying attention to the layout of the level.

3. Are there any levels that stood out to you? (good or bad)
The most interesting level that stood out to me was the level with the green rectangles that you had to make appear at the right moment. It seemed clever to me.

4. Any other thoughts that you think are important?
Yes. There are two videos that Egoraptor did 8 years ago that have some really interesting breakdown of two classic games.

Sequelitis - Castlevania 1 vs. Castlevania 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aip2aIt0ROM

This video makes me think of how great a core concept your game has. BUT, I can tell that you use the difficulty of the chunky level design to prolong game play so that I have to play longer to get the same small payoff each time. To me this felt very frustrating and had me questioning why I continued to play. I think Egoraptor makes a very good point when he talks about the snacks and the desert. Your game concept is a high class desert. BUT when I get difficult level design that literally works against the smooth controls of the player, you're taking that high class desert and turning it into a cheap snack food that, yeah sure because it's difficult the game becomes addictive by nature even if you don't really want to play it.

That's not to say that you have to dumb your game down and make it less difficult. But you have to take into account your level timing. What I mean by that is that when you introduce new concepts without letting the player understand how things work, you're setting them up to fail on purpose as the driving force behind your game play. Basically you're punishing your player over and over and over without giving them any reward other than oh great a new room that's even harder. :c

If you look at movies, anytime there is a stressful moment or a sad moment or really any moment that takes an emotional toll on the viewer, the well thought out movies will always incorporate comedy in the scene right after. This allows the viewer to de-stress and get back to enjoying the movie. If the movie is too stressful or depressing without any relief, it feels like a bad movie. Since your game is still a prototype and there isn't any real rewards for the player to complete each room, you don't have that de-stress element. Again, adding difficulty to make the game longer and get more playtime out of it at the cost of frustrating your players cheapens the whole experience in my opinion. So instead of that, prepare the player to be able to to deal with the difficult situations and grow accustom to them little by little.

What I mean by that is explained in the second Egoraptor video:

Sequelitis - Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM

The most important concept that I got out of this video is learning how to teach the player how to play your game without directly telling them through boring text or generic engineering layout style instructions. Back when megaman first came out, the game system at the time didn't have the ability to display too much information due to it's hardware constraints. So the developers of megaman had to teach you how the level works part by part before increasing the difficulty by throwing everything at you all at once. At exactly 5 minutes in, Egoraptor makes a crucial point that you were shown what the spikey guys do, and THEN shown what the platforms do, and THEN they put you in a situation where you KNOW ahead of time how to deal with the situation. And the FIRST death isn't as bad when you're like, oh ok, now I know what to do, and if I screw up again, now it's MY fault, not the game's fault.

So the ways that I believe you can incorporate this is to make easier levels in between all your hard levels to even out training of your player's skill level. Your game right now assumes that the players playing are hardcore platformer enthusiasts that are going to know how to play your game and are looking for a hard or challenging play experience. The problem is that your prototype doesn't have traction in the market place, so people aren't going to come looking for it hoping to quench their Legendary Platforming Skills thirst, because nobody knows about it yet. I honestly didn't even want to click on the really lame thumbnail because I thought this game was going to be horrible. But this... This is a gem in the rough.

That being said, when you first get the mask, and it tells you to put the mask on, I think it is a crucial moment where if you have the blue platform in the same room without your character needing to leave, then the player will see that the blue platform directly correlates to them putting the mask on. THEN, in the next room... yes the NEXT room, not the previous room, you can have something inform the player that they are capable of taking the mask off as well. That way they see that the mask has TWO functions. Putting it on changes the environment as much as taking it off. When I didn't know that I could take the mask off, I thought that now that I was wearing the mask I needed to figure out the levels as they were presented to me. You color coded the platforms, but not the spikes, and it caused my brain to malfunction. Also, the room PREVIOUS to the mask room had a shit load of spikes in it. I barely just learned how the mask works, and I don't even fully understand it, and now you're expecting me to go back through the difficult jumping areas but now I have to expertly execute platforming mechanics while my neural pathways are still trying to cope with creating new problems.

It's ok to go back through those previous levels, but AFTER I feel confident knowing how my new found power works. For example, after I get the mask and in the same room find out that it changes the environment, do a Metroid thing, where naturally continuing in the level causes the level to loop back onto itself. That way you can ease the player into the NEXT couple levels.

So after the mask, block off the path to get back to the previous area. Such as have the falling ceiling stay there so that I can't go back to the left. Then in the next level to the RIGHT the game teaches me that I can take the mask off which has it's own consequences. THEN in the next level after that slowly start building up the fact that I have to use the mask and controlling the character at the same time to continue. Then the next level, instead of going RIGHT, you make the level go UP. Give me some more easy examples of how my new found power works, so that I can get used to using it and have time to develop my skills. Then the level after going UP goes LEFT. Keep developing my skills slowly with slightly increasing difficulty. I go LEFT a couple more times and then the level stops going left and DROPS DOWN instead. When my character drops down, I find out that I'm now back in the MASK level, but I've dropped on top of the fallen ceiling allowing me to go back LEFT to the level right before the mask. But NOW I'm ready to handle the difficulty of using the new power and instead of being frustrated I can easily use my new power while enjoying the wit of being able to see the old levels from the new perspective. THAT would be extremely satisfying while providing me with a sense of hope that I can actually pull this platformer off.

I made a grid of the level design just in case my paragraph was hard to understand:
the [M] is the mask room
-----------------------------------
.............................[v.][<][<][<]
[>][>][>][>][>][M][>][>][^]
-----------------------------------

Anyways, the moral is that your game concept is awesome. However the game is lacking story line, power-ups, or a hot princess to save, because there's no rewards built in. Since you have nothing but the mechanics to play with in the prototype, you're resorting to the difficulty to add more game time to your game so people don't fly through it and get bored. But this punishes your player for playing your game. If you pad in the easy levels in between the harder ones, you help your player build the skills necessary so you don't have to sacrifice the difficulty AND at the same time, you're adding more play time to the game by giving the player more levels to beat. If you can refine that aspect of making the game super fun without punishing the player, then when you go to add the story line, power-ups, and sexy princesses, the quality FEEL of your game will skyrocket while being able to appeal to people who are just beginning platformers as well as the platforming experts.

I hope I didn't come off as too harsh or critical. This is as constructive as I can be. I hope you see the amount of effort that I put into typing this and understand that it directly correlates to how much potential I see in your game.

I would absolutely LOVE to see updated versions of this game!
Keep up the good work.

The simplistic color scheme is great. I love the greens.

First big flaw, you made a game in first person point of view, but you didn't lock the mouse and hide it. So I can see my mouse, and it doesn't stay in the game. So I can only rotate to the left and right so far.

It could use some music. It got kind of boring when I got to the 4th maze. Also, there's a clipping glitch. If the camera gets too close to the wall I can see through the wall. I found that out when I accidentally saw the goal through a wall and just back traced it to beat the level.

I'd love to test this out, but there's no download link. You can always upload works in progress to have other people help figure out what you should do next with your game.

Thanks for the Roast! :D

I'm going to have to look into the mouse controls. I haven't had spazzing issues, but I have a mouse that has different DPI settings and I'm super used to it being at the highest setting. I had a friend test it out and she also said it was too fast for her even when I dropped the mouse DPI down.

The objective thing... yeah. Haha this game was a proof of concept for myself. I'm kinda tired of all my half finished projects and I found this game: https://lagged.com/en/g/bullet-fire. Then I saw that people are actually playing this game: https://lagged.com/watch/311. And I'm sitting at my computer screen like, WTF, I can make that. This project also allowed me to work on the fact that I'm a dreamer mixed with perfectionist, and that means that when I get grand schemes of games and projects that I want to do, I assign too many upgraded "cool" features and tweaks to make the best game I can. But then it just ends up in me piling on too much work for myself and I never finish because I'm not proud of my work. That being said, I had to cut out certain aspects that I wanted to fix, and attempt to just make a simple clone of the Bullet Fire game. Because in the end I knew that at the very least, I can always use it as a base for making newer better sequels.

The flying off the ground issue was one of those things that I was like, yeahhhh whatever, I gotta get this done. I'm not a big fan of using forces to move objects like a player around the level for that reason. But hearing it lets me know that it's more of a noticeable problem than I convinced myself of.

The gun shots also bothered me as well and I wanted to add bullet holes. In fact I wanted clip sizes, firing speed, and reloading. But those I had to cut out because now I'm piling on three new tasks. In fact I started the project with 5 different crosshairs and set them up to have their color change at run time and was planning on building some cash reward system into the game to unlock the crosshairs and their paint jobs. But I had to force myself to stop because this horrendous pattern of pile shit loads of work onto polishing off the project BEFORE I even had a working base game.

I'm glad you found the secret area. I didn't know what to put in it, so I kind of transformed it into a museum. The girl in the secret area is actually https://www.instagram.com/invader_min/. She has her own company called Galaxy Invaders and I've already developed two mobile games for her, a Brick Break that reveals gallery images every level you beat, and a flappy bird clone called Tappy Ship where you tap a space ship instead of a bird. In Tappy Ship, every two points you get unlocks a new image in the gallery and every 10 points unlocks a new playable space ship up to 10 additional ships not counting the one you start with. Hence the "Invade Tech Software" ..... see the theme? She's just invading everything.... anyway, so I felt like she's deeply rooted in the history of the company and how she's attempting to branch off her modeling to incorporate a video game company as well.

Good to know that mouse sensitivity is def a priority for the sequel. An options menu with settings like that would be great.

As for the enemies taking a long time to shoot, I was spending too much time on tweaking that aspect and wanted to implement a difficulty setting to adjust things like enemy fire rate. But honestly the entire enemy logic script needs to be adjusted as I created a quick one from scratch that works off detecting OnEnterTrigger events, waiting to fire, then firing. This was difficult to adjust later to level objects causing severe blind spots in the enemies hence why some of them can shoot you behind cover. For the second game the first priority I made when I uploaded this was to upgrade the enemy AI. Using a TriggerEnter to activate a search for the player using Raycasts and if the enemy can actually "see" the player then attack.

I definitely considered using fireballs and moving projectiles, but I had to move forward with the original idea of cloning the inspiration game so that I could get a somewhat finished project out. Then like you said, make a sequel on top of the "good base structure" with control and player experience as the most important fixes. So I was thinking of having a Boss in the second game that shot moving projectiles like that to keep things fresh.

This game was a huge proof of concept challenge for myself and I'm loving the feedback. It's honestly giving me so much motivation to press forward and actually make some great games.

Just released a new game! Check it out and roast it!
https://roastmygame.com/game/retro-rage

There is no explanation of the controls. I figured out that you can walk around and click items like the key to pick them up, but I don't know how to use the key once I have it. Pressing Esc doesn't bring up a menu for me to check what the buttons are.

So I guess once the item is in my inventory, my character uses it when he needs to when I click the right item. So you should let your players know

The crib does not have a collider on it, so I can walk right through it.
The first jump scare totally got me. It scared me more than it should have.
The axe is way to small and seems to be clipping through the floor.
The bathroom sink is REALLY tall.
The bathroom doesn't have a door.
I ran into an awkward glitch. I found the code in the bedroom and I tried to use it on the bedroom door number pad thing. Nothing changed so I left the code on the pad, and went back into the bedroom to see if I could figure something out. When I clicked the door again it closed. Then I tried to open the door back up to go out of the bedroom, but it was locked from the other side because I changed the code lock before I closed the door. Then since Esc doesn't bring up a menu, I had to Ctrl+Alt+Delete open up Task Manager and close the game down that way.

This is where I ended my experience, because I got distracted and ended up getting involved in other projects eating up my time.

My favorite part though is the very nice music/ambiance. You picked a track that really helps set the tone of the level.

Just released a new game! Check it out and roast it!
https://roastmygame.com/game/retro-rage