A game I made - Does truth sound bitter?

[QXD-me]

Hi, I've finally managed to finish something after spending far more time procrastinating than working. I used graphics and music from the TIGSource asemblee compotition but programmed/designed by myself. I took the name from a poem, although I forget which one.

I started out with a bigger game in mind but kept scaling it back, so it's fairly minimalistic. It somehow ended up playing a bit like a 2D version of The Path, which wasn't my intention, but I don't really mind. Also, lots of things are editable via the text files in the resource folder, should you be so inclined.


Here are two screenshots and a download link. Enjoy. (I'll try and put a linux build up as well once I figure out how to do it. Mac? I don't know. If anyone can tell me how to do these it would be appreciated)




http://www.mediafire.com/?zum33m0sv67u4v4

[Michaël Samyn]

I get a "System Error" dialog on startup saying that "zlib1.dll is missing".

Edit:I found it here.

[QXD-me]

Sorry, someone pointed this out to me on the TIGsource forums, I just forgot to update the link here. It should include it now if anyone else was wanting to try it.

[Michaël Samyn]

Here's just a few thoughts I had while playing it.

The environment is shown top-down, yet the character is seen from the side. This makes it difficult for me to imagine I'm looking at a world. It feels more schematic.

Why do you require that we press the space bar to see text. Why not simply overlay the text on the screen, for instance triggered by the position of the avatar? Or at least allow the player to move further after triggering the text.
I do like finding the little "packages", though.
Have you considered voice acting? If you would record yourself saying the text, it might be quite strong, emotionally. And less tedious than reading.

Have you considered other ways of controlling the avatar? Point and click perhaps? Or some kind of tilting of the environment maybe? The cursor keys feel very rigid because you can only go up, down, left and right.

I like walking over the bridges.

A bit more atmosphere would be nice. Some parts might be darker than others, e.g.

I'm curious, what are some of the things you cut?

Haha. The end was funny. Took me by surprise.

[QXD-me]

Thanks for trying it   

The main reason for the inconsistencies in viewpoints is that I didn't make the art myself and was just trying to mix'n'match art from various sources as best I could. If I'd tried to make them myself, I would probably never have finished. I suppose I could have searched wider for resources though.

I guess the main reason for requiring space/enter to be pressed was that I wanted items to be able to be picked up on non-walkable squares (this would have required far more work with just the walking because the "event" and the "image" would be on different squares). I could probably have used the walkable ones more often than I did though.
And the main reason why you can't continue walking while reading is that I never considered it. The only potential problem would be if you walked over another event, but that's manageable I suppose.

Voice acting? I'm not sure it would be that good because I'm not very confident with speaking in any capacity plus I mumble greatly. Although I might try it to see if it sounds good, I hadn't really considered it.

As for controls, it is rigid mostly to simplify things for me, as this was my first project. To add in diagonals would have necessitated more animation and mouse movement would have needed some form of pathfinding (probably not a very sophisticated one though). I didn't really want to do too much as it was more of a learning experience and I just wanted to have something that was finished (and relatively playable). I'm not sure what you mean by tilting, but it sounds more complicated than I was willing to go for.

All bridges, or just the one?  Incidentally that was probably my favourite bit of writing I did for this.

Very true. I was actually thinking that it would be good to have different darkness levels in different areas as I was getting close to finishing the mapping, but due to the way I hacked my tile rendering code into the main loop it seemed like it would be a daunting task. I think I'll probably try and look for an easy way to do that though. I was also planning to add some sound effects, including waterfall sounds, but I kinda forgot / the waterfall wasn't as impressive as I'd hoped.

Originally I was thinking of doing more of a puzzle-ish game. Only simple puzzles, but the main character would have been a wizard, cast a few spells. There would probably also have been some enemies in there. Essentially all I kept was the cave setting and the writings (although they would probably have had a different tone if I'd kept the original setting).

As for the ending, I'm surprised that you found it funny, I actually find it to be more morose or depressing, although I wouldn't interpret in the context of being within a videogame (even though technically it is). It wasn't really supposed to be reflexive or satirical or anything. But to each his own.


Anyway, thank you very much for the feedback and I'll start looking at trying out some of your suggestions tomorrow evening (assuming I don't just fall asleep).

p.s. Just out of interest, did you find the "less obvious" event? I'd be surprised if you did unless you read the event.txt file, but still...

[Albin Bernhardsson]

The collision is a bit off. It looks weird to bump into the wall at such a distance.

I feel like the level is unnecessarily big. Either make it more varied, by adding more environment objects to it or make it smaller. I was, quite honestly, rather bored while playing.

It has potential, but currently with a few quite obvious flaws.

[Michaël Samyn]

I feel like the level is unnecessarily big.

I agree.

Though I did like being able to just wander without being stopped by a puzzle or an enemy. It's so rare. As a result I spent more time with this than I did with many other, much more ambitious games.
Proving how easily pleased I am.

[QXD-me]

The reason for the collision detection is that movement is square by square, i.e. if you tap right, you move one square to the right. As you've pointed out, this makes for some wierd collision detection, but the only other option was to write customised collision detection for every single possible tile, which would probably have required a rediculous amount of coding. It would perhaps have been better if the edges were at the edges of the edge pieces (if that makes sense), something I'll bear in mind if I ever design my own tileset.

I don't think it's quite as simple as it being too big, it just has a poor size:immersion ratio. I think if it were more immersive it would be perfectly fine the way it is. I think this is largely because the corridors all look very samey (variations in lighting would have helped there) and the fact that the music wasn't entirely tone-appropriate, although it was far better than the other potential candidates I listened to. Also, a lack of other sounds may have detracted. I actually wanted it to be quite empty, it's just that the walking around inbetween events wasn't supposed to be quite as tedious, but more mood setting. The mood setting being sabotaged by the aformentioned problems.

But still, I think my only future plan for this will be to try recording voice-overs (which I probably won't release unless I surprise myself with my voicing talents), since most other potential improvements would require re-writing too much of the game's code and I think that no matter what I do, it will always remain fairly rudamentry, one might even say crude.

Next time I plan to do graphics/music myself (or get friends to help under my supervision) so hopefully it should all go together better. Additionally, I now have a much better idea of how to plan the program than I did before I started, which should help in the future. Incidentally, my next planned game will have no in-game text (or perhaps very little).

The comments/criticisms are much appreciated, thanks for giving it a go. 

(On the off-chance that someone was waitng for a linix build, it's not comming any time soon, linux is too much of a pain for me to get it to work in, even though the code should be perfectly cross-platform)

Though I did like being able to just wander without being stopped by a puzzle or an enemy. It's so rare. As a result I spent more time with this than I did with many other, much more ambitious games.
Proving how easily pleased I am.

I'm going to add this to the positive list for the game