Congratulations Bootlicker!
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The judging is complete, and the results are in; with an overwhelming majority,
HMS Diptera has propelled
Bootlicker to BOTB status! The other entrants didn't quite make the new standards; but a few came
very close.
Here's what the Judges had to say about each entry:
HMS Diptera
"...Creatures are great, the best lighting, very good sound and music. Felt like being on a space ship. Not a bad story line. " -
BOTB Judge
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"Though some of the things like the enemies seemed a bit arbitrary I thought it was a good, solid, well-tuned game. I liked how you revisit sections and see them in a different state. While not difficult, and pretty straight-foreward I appreciated not having to backtrack needlessly or being forced into box stacking and jumping puzzles. The audio was very good as well." -
BOTB Judge
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"I thought this one had some nice custom loading screens, got a good laugh at the "silly" jokes. Nice HUDS, and room signage so that one did not get lost, going around in circles. I love the sound effects in the game, gave you that eerie feeling that you really did not want to look around the next corner. I am not an overall fan of zombie / horror games, but this one gave me that spooky feeling." -
BOTB Judge
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"Could have done with some pre-planning on the storyline, seems thrown together as it went along (think we can all be guilty of that sometimes) with no real reasons for much of what is going on. Still its a well put together game with real potential if worked on a bit more." -
BOTB Judge
Squadron AIU - Dark Storm
"It has a simple [i]Quake-ish feel/style, nothing really grabs me but it's complete, has custom screens and media, and a very good frame rate."[/i] -
BOTB Judge
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"Very wide open feel, seemed like the best enemy AI, great graphics, good sound.
The biggest downside I found was the fact that it often auto picked up items like notes and then proceeded to display them blocking my view often at the wrong time." -
BOTB Judge
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"Most finished feeling of all the submissions. Great installer, great game options dialog, good AI (dodging opponents), wide open feel, tons of custom graphics, selectable levels, music good, sound effects excellent, lighting is good and consistent across machines and video cards as was also true of the sound. Text was readable even the small font when talking to fellow soldiers. Good frame rates, no freezes or lags.
I felt it was a very good showcase of FPSC features." -
BOTB Judge
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"Overall, it was a complete game, it was nice to have different "story lines" to play. I liked all the signage, and the sound seemed to suit the feeling of the game.
Few "bugs" I noticed :
- The game crashed when trying to load a saved game.
- Picking up the documents every time you happened to pass by them, getting in your view.
- In the Russian Science - the odd placement of the Persian rug in a Sci-Fi Computer Room - to me this was out of place.
- In Russian Science - in the 2nd level, you walk down a hallway and there is a puddle of water underneath the pipe. If you look in the water, the reflection is that of a chandelier and a brown wall. (?) this led me to look at Bond's Metro theater pack we purchased, and the 5x5 water was taken from this. It is the same reflection from the metro pack. This may have been an oversight by Deathcow, but to me, a good designer should be looking at these finer details.
- All the catwalks have no supporting beams. What's holding them up?
All in all, I thought this game was really good, just needed a little more work in the finer details." -
BOTB Judge
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"This game does have that 'finished' feel to it, I can overlook some of the errors in it, as individuals creating games sometimes we don't know how to do everything, such as overlooking a cube map for reflection. Some of the simple design errors like missing supports or scripts constantly running when no longer required etc, are pretty much basic things that shouldn't be missed. I'm on the fence with this one as it appears to have been built from the top down and while it all looks/plays great and is fairly well optimized, it doesn't have that [i]something innovative I like to see."[/i] -
BOTB Judge
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"It feels like a finished, stable game which is a pretty big achievement for FPSC!
I really liked the launcher system but at least on the first levels I couldn't get the level to load if I tried using less texture reduction.
I thought the level design was great in terms of high-concept. Execution; not so much.
Scripting was a mixed bag with good things like the communication system, bad things like annoying popups and plain ugly things like poor AI and cheap enemy placement. In a lot of ways this feels like it was made in v1 FPSC except for things like particles and the excellent frame-rate. The weapons were very out of tune for this game and combat was really annoying and frustrating." -
BOTB Judge
OPS- Escape
imageflock.com/img/1314837211.jpg[/img]
"I was on the fence over this one. I really wanted to vote yes; but there were a few issues. He didn't have any instructions with this game; no reason for what you were doing. The presentation itself was lacking a bit as well. The AI was nothing special either. Having said that though; the soundtrack and action was pretty good actually. The level reminded me of one of those old action arcade games. I couldn't play the second level at all; it gets hung up on about 3/4's of the load bar, and won't go any further." -
BOTB Judge
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"I felt this one had a tad too many enemies to try and fight. Overall it was too dark, could not change the ambiance. Kept getting stuck in a few spots." -
BOTB Judge
Thanatophobia
"...I know he can rush out a game that's better than most worked on for months but as I say a current BOTB holder should do better." -
BOTB Judge
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"I have to agree while it has promise the game is just not there yet." -
BOTB Judge
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"I can't run it on any of our systems. We run Vista, XP and Windows 7. It gets to a certain point in the loading and then has an error." -
BOTB Judge
Dusk
" I thought this game was well put together, had very nice atmosphere, brought a fresh play style to FPSC and was packed up nicely overall." -
BOTB Judge
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"I also like the over all feel of the game. Music, Graphics, Opening screens, loader, all great.
Cons -
1) It might be my sound card on Vista but the music and sound effects over whelmed the character's voice. I could not follow things and often tried doors many time to make out it was saying locked or blocked.
2) The picture of the wall with the blood writing was very hard to read. At least for these eyes and I have a 22" flatscreen. Clues must be clear to be seen. Will try it out on my other system.
3) No settings/options screen to increase resolution." -
BOTB Judge
"Really wanted to like this one as it was a different approach to building a game with FPSC. For that and the story line it got major points. Graphics where very decent.
Tech issues did it in for me. Also ran it on my XP machine - Even with a better video card I still could not read some of the clues, lighting went from good to poor. The music, sounds and voices still had problems. These may all be problems limited to my systems but when other submissions stayed consistent across hardware and I could fully play them." -
BOTB Judge
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"I liked the fact that the game had a different style of design than the normal "shoot em up". I enjoyed looking for the clues and trying to solve your way through to the next level.
Cons -
- I felt the ambiance was too dark. Some areas were very difficult to see . You had to "hope" you stumbled upon something.
- The sound triggers were off on the doors. You heard the door shut before it actually did.
- The triggers for the clues were set to repeat. So if you "picked up the key to room 103" You could still go back to that spot and the trigger would reappear again and again.
- When objects were picked up, you could use them as weapons. Model pack issues? Scripting issues?
- Spelling and grammar errors on loading screens (This might just be my picky-ness, due to my office background)." -
BOTB Judge
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"I did like the different approach to this and give kudos for at least being original. I too got irritated by the repeating 'picked up a key' scripts constantly running (it would have made more sense to stop such a script running after it was used, for a number of reasons). I found the lack of a graphical reference when hovering over something interactive to be annoying since it was mostly 'click and see what happens', for example I picked up a key when clicking any place around the TV set and you find yourself wandering around clicking on everything, seems the select areas could be tighter and an obvious pick up could be used. This however does not detract from the fact that he a least is attempting to do something outside the box." -
BOTB Judge
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"As far as using the objects as weapons, there's really no way around that with stock FPSC. I rather liked you could punch stuff when your holding something. What I didn't like were that they left shotgun holes on everything (failure to use noscorch=1 in gunspec).
So far this has been the most interesting one I've played and easiest on the eyes. I agree with everyone that it's sort of ruined by the fact you run around clicking F all the time." -
BOTB Judge
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I'd like to personally thank ALL
BOTB Judges. Their insight and commentary will hopefully help our Developers to improve their skills, and move forward in their quest to become the
Best of the Best! I encourage you all to work on your entries, and resubmit for next season.
Bootlicker's video will be added to the
NEW YouTube FPSC-BOTB Channel.
See you this Winter, for
FPSCreator's BOTB - Winter 2011 Season!
-Keith