Yes, after a ton of months worth of work, the Oil Blue is now ready to download.
You can view all the media, try the demo and buy the game right here! Don’t forget that by buying this game before August 31st, you’ll receive a free copy of greenTech+! The game is also available on GamersGate (sans greenTech+).
I’d like to thank the following beta testers: Owen Harrelson, Andrew Minton, Aaron C. Richardson, Eric Sones, Angus Ward, Billy King, Joseph O’Donnell, Petter West, Nicholas Kraak and JKR for their support in reshaping this game and making it a better title overall. I’d also like to thank Jonathan Geer for the wonderful music and Sara Gross for the fantastic art. I cannot thank you all enough.
Enjoy the game!
17 Comments
Maybe now I won’t be so severely deprived of sleep.
Nice!…. Good night.
Wth am I supposed to do in the first repair? It seems like the bolt is supposed to kind of bounce to the right when it hits a ledge from the right, but it just gets struck and falls every time.
Simply decompress the metal bar using one of the arrow keys, then pop it back up after the bolt passes over it.
[...] The Oil Blue, Vertigo Games’s third commercial game, has been released. The game takes place in the future when there is a severe shortage of oil. All land oil [...]
hooray!
now go catch up on sleep!
Congrats! Enjoy the break before whatever project you’re diving into next!
This is awesome, bought it and started playing, I’m completely addicted. This has to be your best game yet, I hope you have a lot of success with this one
Hi Vertigo Games !
Shellblast is one of my favorite game cause it delivers a great experience through gameplay, visual and sounds.
I just tried The Oil Blue and I love it for the same reasons.
Congratulations !
Yay, I figured out what to do in that repair. As much as I like the actual game (will buy in a few days), the tutorials are truly horrendous. (move mouse over this button, and click it to press the button! now, move mouse over the other button and click it two times! pressure level is now this much, see, isn’t that great! now, press a few more buttons, only a few more, promise, and then we’ll tell you why you are pressing these buttons in the first place! now that you have pressed lots of buttons, proceed to read these walls of text and try to remember what buttons you have pressed previously, since in these walls of text are hidden answers to some of the burning questions you may have previously had, such as why should you care if the pressure level is three and what reason do you have to not exit this game before these tutorials are even over! hey, read all of these walls of text that try their best to hide any useful facts in walls of text, then press only a few more buttons and you may get a nice reward! you like games, right? how about letting you play the actual game?) This will put off many potential players. Btw, on a completely unreleated note, does the full version have sog:r-style online updating? The windows close button doesn’t do anything, might come across as unprofessional.
Hey anon,
Sorry that you didn’t feel the tutorials were much help- I think the majority of users have told me that the tutorials were actually quite good at holding their hand and getting them through the game. But players can always skip them if they’d like via the Skip tab on the left in the beginning of tutorials.
The windows close button is just one of those things that was out of my hands as GM doesn’t really support it very well, though I should have made it clearer that the escape key is the one you need. The full version does not have an auto update feature like SOG, due to the way I’m distributing it this time around.
Anyways, thanks for the critique! And thanks everyone for the comments.
The problem with the tutorials isn’t as much that they’re confusing, but that they’re immensely boring. For the first ~1/2h or so the player is forced to learn the intricate details of every single mechanic in an game they don’t even know what’s it about, with no idea of the wonderful complete picture, multitasking. Thus, before seeing a single minute of actual gameplay, players leave bored, confused as to why would anybody make such an boring game (wtf? pressing buttons? thats all? srsly?) and possibly insulted by the over-explaining tutorial.
What the tutorial should do is throw the player immediately in control of a couple of machines, have a bunch of question mark buttons floating over different parts of machines and give the player infinite time to figure out the simple mechanics themselves. When the player decides to continue, the unbelievably cool transition to above sea level occurs for the first time and the game will force the player to sell a few of the barrells of oil he just made before the game let him continue. No talk about ranks and such since they’re irrelevant at the time and self-explanatory when they become relevant. To keep things further moving, only after the tutorial the first island comes with broken machines and a quick info box explaining them.
Also, even though for some bizzarre reason there are no functions to check the close button’s state, and there’s the whole closebutton=escape mess GM8 has an event to check if the button is pressed. A simple event. It’s Game Maker logic at it’s finest.
tl;dr: the tutorial must be fixed for the sake of sales, close button can easily be made functional
I did do the closebutton=escape key code. It didn’t work. So I wrote it in code. Still didn’t work. What can I tell ya.
“the button” referring to the close button, should have made that clearer. Pick a controller object. There is a close button pressed event. Put a game end d&d block into the close button event. It drives me crazy how so many developers fail to do that for one reason or another
Just to make it clear,
there is an event for checking the close button, you can put any code in it [/italic]
No offense, communication just isn’t my strong suit.
Oh, how about that. There it is!
Well I will definitely support this in all my future games, and patch this in if the game needs a patch down the line. :p
Thanks Anon!
Ah, don’t say that, Anon. It reflects on the lousy beta testing we did :p