#63822 - gauauu - Fri Dec 16, 2005 4:56 pm
Hey all, I have finished a demo level of my game-in-progress, Anguna.
It is a top-view action-adventure game, very zelda-esque in style.
http://www.tolberts.net/anguna.zip
But I'm not just putting this here to say "look at me!"...I want feedback. And not just "looks good", but specifically:
1. What aspects of it are annoying and make you want to give up and stop playing it?
2. How is the feel of combat? Too hard/easy? Are the collision detetion and bounding blocks too crappy?
3. What, other than graphics, could be done better, from a gameplay perspective?
Before commenting, though, please read the readme.txt to see more details.
Thanks!
#63837 - Deanonious - Fri Dec 16, 2005 7:02 pm
Wow... I am the first to respond.
Anyway, I tried out your demo and for the most part you are correct, it is very Zelda-esque in style and overall it was pretty good.
1) There was nothing in the game that specifically made me feel annoyed or made me want to stop playing it.
2) Some of the monsters seemed a bit too easy, others felt just right. I just woke up so I can't think of exact examples.
3) Some of the puzzles seemed a little too easy. Also, the ways doors work was obnoxious. When a door opens it seems to take chunks of the wall with it. This does make it easier to go through the doorway; however, it's very unrealistic.
I hope this helps a little.
Dean
#63930 - expos1994 - Sat Dec 17, 2005 6:31 pm
Hey nice demo.
I like the Zelda style.
I agree about the doors, maybe just make bigger doors?
It needs a twist (which you may already have planned and not yet implemented). Maybe more varied enemies other than ones that just try to run into you would help. Maybe some fireball shooters, boomerang throwers (okay, maybe not that?).
My favorite thing about Zelda is the boomerang. It was a way to be strategic when fighting. The game needs a "B" action. Maybe even an L and R action too. Maybe B deploys some weapon and L and R guide it. Then you could have puzzles where you have to guide it somewhere your guy can't go.
I dunno. I just think it needs a twist to keep things interesting.
Good start though. Technically it works well. Maybe the sword should swing rather than stab.
Good job. Looking forward to seeing more updates.
#63967 - Touchstone - Sun Dec 18, 2005 3:54 am
This was really quite cool. I got these great adventure game vibes from your game. (Which is an amazing thing, I haven't had those since I played Zelda 2 for the first time some 10+ years ago)
What I didn't like was that if the hero bounding box collided with just one tiny pixel with a wall or water thingy the hero came to a complete stop. I would have prefered it if he simply slided into place and kept on walking.
Also I liked it that the doors opened three tiles instead of just the one with the actual door graphics on it. I can't pin point exactly why but it is very charming in a C64 old skool kind of way.
The game seemed to have a bug by the fire breathing dragon though. When I was on the left hand side of the screen I kept getting hit by something invisible which I can only assume was fire balls. When I moved over to the right hand side of the screen the fire balls appeared so i could dodge them. There seemed to be more than one fire ball pattern. I could see the one pattern with two fast fire balls, one going left+up and one going left+down, but the other patterns seemed to not work properly when I was on the left side of the screen.
The music and sound effects was really cool too! Did you do the sounds and music yourself?
Anyways, cool demo!
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#63992 - gauauu - Sun Dec 18, 2005 10:37 am
Thanks for the feedback so far!
A few thoughts/comments:
The doors: thanks for the thoughts. I went back and forth in my mind about this one. Technically, the doors are actually the size of that whole wall chunk that disappears, but when I got frustrated trying to find good door graphics, I thought "hey, what if the wall just opens up"...but I guess based on y'all's reaction that it's too werid. I'll probably try coming up with a better door graphic.
Enemy difficulty: Yeah, these first enemies are definitely too boring and possibly too easy. Thanks for the suggestions....This first level isn't supposed to be too hard; I plan to make them more tricky as the game progresses, but maybe I should also add some easy but different style enemies in this first dungeon?
More Items: yeah, there are more on the way (not sure about a boomerang, it's a little too over-the-top zelda ripoff, but definitely wanting to add similar things). I like the idea of the L&R guidance system. Maybe I'll work something like that into it -- although I was originally going to use L&R to swap B-button items, so you could cycle through quickly without having to pull up the subscreen. I'll have to think about it.
Bugginess: thanks for noticing, I'll look into those! One of my other friends also noticed bugs with the dragon guy and his fireballs, so I think I definitely need to work on him. (as far as the fireball patterns, there actually aren't any. it sends 3 fireballs out, each in a semi-random method partially based on where you are standing. although sometimes 2 of the fireballs end up with the same path, so it just looks like there aren't 3 of them.)
Great feedback so far, I really appreciate it! Anyone else?
#63993 - gauauu - Sun Dec 18, 2005 10:42 am
Oh, and the sound effects & music...
the music was a creative commons piece (from...shoot, I don't have the name on this computer. I actually need to give him credit for it, but don't have the name handy. It's on my other computer), that I did a lot of tweaking too to make it fit for a loop in a game.
The sound effects were mostly real world sounds with a lot of effects added (the "ooh" when hit was me saying "ooh", the enemy hit was a snare drum, the door closing was a door closing (With lots of echo)). The item pick up noise was just a little jingle I wrote with a midi sequencer.
#63995 - Quirky - Sun Dec 18, 2005 12:01 pm
There's a small bug with the messages: if a larger one is shown before a short one, the short one has the rest of the larger one still showing. e.g. after collecting the food it says "health restored". then you get the key "got key", but the effect is "got keystored".
#64083 - DayDream - Mon Dec 19, 2005 7:32 am
#64084 - gauauu - Mon Dec 19, 2005 8:04 am
Wow! That stuff looks great! I'll PM you with some questions.....
#64281 - KashinKoji - Tue Dec 20, 2005 11:21 pm
Hey I played through the demo level and I thought it was pretty cool.
I think with better graphics the game would be a lot better, more frames on the hero would make a huge difference. The bg tiles (esp the water and the door) could use some animation or just a nice well defined non square shape. The bg collision can also "snag" If the edge of the hero hits the edge of a bg, you have to manually move around it.
I like the way the hero stabs, but the monsters are too easy, and move too fluidly and predictably. A little mix up to the movement and attack would be good. I like the larger monster that charges like a bull.. once you start stabbing it, though, there is no reason to stop until its dead. If it was drawn out (by a period of invulnerability after the monster is hit) it would make the battle more interesting.
There are no real puzzles yet, just walking through until you kill everything and find the key, but some kind of puzzles while the monsters apply pressure, would be just what the game play needs.
Music and title screen were very cool.
Good luck!
#64295 - DayDream - Wed Dec 21, 2005 1:19 am
KashinKoji... I did some new gfx... still work in progress.. but it's getting there... :)
http://www.spriteattack.com/angunan
#64387 - Palamon - Wed Dec 21, 2005 10:10 pm
Like said before, the hero needs some more movement frames, or a faster animation. Right now, he seems to glide across the floor like he was walking on ice or flyng or something.
I enjoyed the bg music.
The dragon (direct zelda ripoff) was neat, although defeating him consisted of me being cheesy and hiding on the left side until after he spit fire, stabing once, then retreating.
#64517 - naleksiev - Fri Dec 23, 2005 6:13 am
I like it. It's pretty cool.
I just saw something, I thing some issue - I can walk through walls.
It happend after I found the yellow key (I didn't found the lock). So in the left side of the puzzle I found a verry small tunnel. On the other side of the tunnel there was a wall. I decide that this is a hidden way (sort cut), but I can cross the most left wall on the same height, and I just exit from the screen.
It can be a simple map issue but I hope that I helped you with the testing :)
But the game is deffenetly becomming great
And I realy want to see this game with the sprites of DayDream.
#64901 - calimero06 - Wed Dec 28, 2005 9:48 am
I think your engine game is pretty good. From the gfx point of view it lacks the professionnal style of today games but if you use the gfx DayDream is making I think it will be perfect.
To enhance the playability you may add an inventory/status screen to show graphically the items and the state of the player.
#64928 - gauauu - Wed Dec 28, 2005 5:17 pm
Weird...I typed a big comment about this a day or two ago, but I must have forgotten to hit submit.
I updated the readme to give credit to the music composer. His name is Magic Fred. I just randomly found his website one day while digging for music files with a license allowing me to edit and use -- he uses a creative commons license which lets me edit and reuse his song.
naleksiev, as far as the "walking through walls" issue....as far as I know, there are 3 places you can walk through a wall on the left. 2 of them are purposeful secret passages. Any others are bugs (oops, that's what I get for copy/pasting levels)
Daydream and I are working togeter on the project now, so the graphics will be greatly improved, along with the addition of some cool intro and story graphics.
The first step will be remaking this demo level with the new graphics (since I'm having to rework a significant chunk of code to do things "the right way" (on-the-fly sprite tile swapping for character animations, 16 color sprites and dynamic palette loading, mutiple-layer backgrounds for "foreground" objects, etc))
Thanks for all the positive encouragement and feedback from everyone! I'll update the demo when it is re-finished, and let you all know. (maybe a few weeks?)
#93657 - gauauu - Thu Jul 20, 2006 2:17 pm
Ok, with the help of DayDream, I've totally redone the look and feel in the game. Right now, still only the first level is completely playable, but it's a pretty big overhaul.
I've also added some items: a life potion, a bow and arrow, attack and health powerups (they are all pretty well hidden)
The general level layout is similar to before, but some of the secrets are rather well hidden....remember, secret items or passages could open when you kill all enemies in a room, or some walls you can just walk through.
The second level is nearly complete, but I need to work on the overworld to tie everything together.
Nathan
#93658 - gauauu - Thu Jul 20, 2006 2:19 pm
#93662 - naleksiev - Thu Jul 20, 2006 2:58 pm
Hey, I tried the first version a long time ago and I'm very impressed from the progress in version 2. The gameplay was interesting before but now it's much more fun. I played for 15 minutes but I'm on work and need to go back to the duties.
GREAT GAME!!!
#93663 - clone dad - Thu Jul 20, 2006 3:23 pm
well, first let me say that i can't run the game yet, because all the emulators return white screens, and my nopass isn't here yet....
but if it's sort of like the old top view zelda games, you could have enemies health bars show up when they are in view, and fade away once you kill that ememy. Know what i mean?
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#93665 - gauauu - Thu Jul 20, 2006 3:38 pm
You just get white screens when running anguna in your emulators? That's odd. I do most of my day-to-day testing in vba 1.7.2, as well as on a flash cart.... what emulators are you using?
#93670 - clone dad - Thu Jul 20, 2006 4:14 pm
My stupidity. I was thinking, for some uknown reason, that this was a NDS project. My mistake. Tried it out on visualboy and it worked.
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I don't know anything.
#93711 - tepples - Thu Jul 20, 2006 9:16 pm
| clone dad wrote: |
| I was thinking, for some uknown reason, that this was a NDS project. My mistake. |
DS projects would have been posted in what has become the DS Announcements and Comments forum.
_________________
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-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#93884 - gauauu - Fri Jul 21, 2006 8:34 pm
![[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]](http://www.spriteattack.com/angunan/title_1b.png){kind=link}
![[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]](http://www.spriteattack.com/angunan/test1.png){kind=link}
![[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]](http://www.tolberts.net/anguna.png){kind=link}
![[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]](http://www.tolberts.net/anguna/anguna2.png){kind=link}
![[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]](http://www.tolberts.net/anguna/anguna3.png){kind=link}
![[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]](http://www.tolberts.net/anguna/portraits.png){kind=link}