Thursday 15 May 2014

Review at The Indie Mine

Survivalist has been reviewed at The Indie Mine, giving it 5/5!  Woohoo!  Some quotes:

"I have to say I love this game. It’s a robust game filled with moral and physical obstacles while giving a grand look on the narrative of humanity and the choices we make."

" I will have to admit that this hit a lot closer to home than I was expecting from a game. I come from a high-risk group of people for diabetes and my family does have a history of the condition. The fact that I got a small glimpse of what I may have to resort to if the collapse of civilization actually occurred, left me in contemplative silence."

"I think that Survivalist is great beyond all expectations and it has become my favorite game among all the titles being offered on XBLIG. It is nearly perfect and it outshines any other title I have played with the survival-horror-sim aspect. If you want a great survival game for a low price, get Survivalist as soon as you can. I guarantee it will keep you busy for hours. While it may not be as eye-opening to others as it was to me, I assure it will give you much food for thought."

Sunday 11 May 2014

Larger Fonts Patch Now Available

So I've released a patch that increases the font size.  This is an increase from 14 points to 18 points, although confusingly that isn't actually the number of pixels it takes up, it's just a setting when I import the font (the pixel height seems to have gone from about 26 to 33).

Anyway when I started this patch I thought it would just be a special mode for people with Standard Def TVs, but when I saw it in action I realised it looked better on HDTVs too.  So I made it the default.  You can change it back in the Settings menu if you prefer the old size though.
I'm interested to hear from you if:

- You are using a standard def TV.  Is it readable now?  I am starting to wonder if I increased it enough...  There are some things I'd struggle to fit in if it went up any further though.

- You prefer the old size.  The advantage of smaller fonts is you can see more stuff on screen.  However if no one prefers the smaller size I might just get rid of it altogether as it's one more thing to support.

Besides the fonts this patch should fix a few bugs that were mentioned in the forums, I won't list them here though as they are quite spoiler-y.

Friday 2 May 2014

Review from TheKodu at Destructoid!

Survivalist has had it's fourth review, from TheKodu, a Destructoid community blogger.  This is a long, in-depth review which was done on a Standard Definition TV, hence his main complaint - the font size is too small!  So it's lucky I've been working on a patch to increase it, which is now in peer review (that's the approval process for XBox Live Indie Games, for those who don't know).

He also lists some other problems, some of which I can address.  For example I should probably add some tutorial hints explaining how to do leg-shots and head-shots.  On the other hand some things are just part of the game, for better or for worse, like the insulin mechanic - I think I've tweaked that enough now.  He gives it 4 out of 6 stars, saying that "the biggest score impact is the text being unreadable it's by no means perfect but it's still damn good".

Best quotes:

"Survivalist is a game that nails it’s goal almost perfectly. It’s a game about survival in a bleak apocalyptic world and it does make every small success seem like a big victory. This is a game that reflects a lot of zombie flick approaches in that it’s not the zombies that are the biggest threat, it’s the humans.  Don’t get me wrong the zombies can be a problem and survivalist is a game where just when you’re beginning to feel like a zombie hunting badass it will take great pleasure in proving how vulnerable you are."

"To add to the world building Skyrim was once described as an “an ocean with the depth of a puddle” due to the characters interactions not changing based on your actions. In Survivalist I’d say this is a lake with the depth of the Mariana trench."