Mana Games

[Passing by guest]

- Breakpoint, setpoint and matchpoint labels should appear in the screen when its the case.
- The graphics could be a little better. I'm not talking about 3D (for now!), but you could use some better sprites. It wouldnt be expensive to hire a 2D artist to create a couple of better sprites than the ones presented in the game.
- The player could actually WALK when moving sideways before the service, not sliding the way it does.
- You could add a new dimension to the game: managing the player's personal life - which would have effects in the players skills. You gotta know a game called New Star Soccer 3, they do it in a simple but very enriching and entertaining way.
- Media and relationships with other players would be a good add too.
- The music and sound suck hard - pardon me, but i just had to say it , they really need a little attention.
- More statistics.
- Aging, retirement and arrival of new players.

The rest is great.

[Passing by Guest]

It's me again.

I forgot to mention that you could get the screen to show the player when he is at the edges of the court. I just hate not being able to see him when i have to respond to a service gone that way.

Ciao.

[manutoo]

Hello,

A little estimation.
there are about 600 sprite frames for the 2 players in the game.
A good and fast artist could have a rate of 1 frame / 30 min. Such artist wouldn't work for less then $200 / day (at 8 hours / day)... A bit of maths, and that gives : 37.5 days of work = $7500.
As it seems you're the one that wants the game for free (same IP address & almost same time than your other message), I guess you could pay the 2D artist for me. So I'm waiting for your check...

I agree that the musics aren't the best ones around (even if they're not so bad), but about the sounds, you're the 1st one complaining about them. Anytime someone mentioned them, it was for compliment them, so maybe you should check your ears...

About the other things, I'll think about them.


Regards,

[Passing By Guest]

Dude, this cost is just unrealistic.

You don't have to pay an artist to redo all the sprites, that's a waste of time and money.

You can start from the sprites you have and pay some talented guy to work just in the edges of the sprites, where it's uglier (no offense), and insert a couple of new ones. It wouldn't be 1/10 as expensive as you have put in here.

Another solution is just to put an output video processing in the sprites, the same ways Zsnes and Snes9x do to beautify the old sprites from snes.

ZSnes is open source, so you can just rip the algorithm from there.


After playing a couple of matches in medium difficulty, i realized that the computer makes a lot less mistakes than in real life, even real life Federer isn't as good as those guys. And the same goes to us, human players. Unforced errors and mainly forced errors should be more common.

That's my opinion.

And about the other post, errr, you know, that was my little brother

[manutoo]

Hello,

at 1st, you said "create a couple of better sprites", it sounded like creating new sprites..!

If it's only retouching, then it'd be cheaper, sure. But there's an important technical issue that prevents this : the possibility to modifiy the color.
In another way, it'd be possible to automatically beautify the sprite, but still coz of the same issue, it'll be very long to do the code, and it'd be tricky to bypass some glitches...


About the unforced errors.
It's a gameplay choice; as these kind of errors is random, and doesn't depend of the player skills (the human playing Tennis Elbow), it'd be quite frustrating to implement them in a realistic way.
Maybe in the future, I'll do a system where the positioning is more important, and a misplacement would lead more easily to a direct fault...


Regards,

[Guest]

But you'll make unforces errors editable for the computers right?

[manutoo]

probably yes, but not sure.

I'm still far to do the new AI so I still didn't take any decision about the direct faults of the computer...