Cutting Winds Demo

Hi guys, I'm a first time poster, but I've been playing around with Construct for a couple of months now. I'm an artist primarily, so the coding has been quite a challenge! My game's now has its first two levels in a playable state, so it'd be wonderful to get some feedback at this point.

It's a air-themed platformer, where you can glide and use wind-based attacks to defeat enemies. It's set in an Aztec art inspired world where clay creatures are causing trouble.

<img src="http://lisa-rye.com/DA/ScreenshotsIguanasSmall.jpg">

<img src="http://lisa-rye.com/DA/ScreenshotMeerkatSmall.jpg">

<img src="http://lisa-rye.com/DA/ScreenshotBossSmall.jpg">

Download .exe

http://www.lisa-rye.com/DA/CuttingGale2.exe

Download .cap

http://www.lisa-rye.com/DA/Gale12.cap

The controls are:

Shift � Jump

Z � Hold to glide

X � Attack

C - Talk

There's a few bugs I'm also having trouble with:

-Attack and Death animations not playing correctly (getting stuck on frame 1 etc.)

-Score doesn't carry over between layouts

-When talking to characters, you need to press the button twice the first time.

-General performance issues at some points, possibly I'm using too many sprites or bad coding?

If anyone has any help there, I'd really appreciate it!

Nice start. the game play good so far and the graphics are great. I hope to see more of this game.

-Score doesn't carry over between layouts

use global variables to keep score.

Wow!.This looks like another top quality game from a top quality artist.I love the gfx,wish i had more time to create stunning stuff like this.Keep it up.

I really love the vibrant art, very stylish and immersive in.

If I could make a few suggestions though

• for most games with a gliding mechanic, it is done with the same button as jump. I think it would make things a little less confusing. You could also think about making the talk button something like down or up, its more universally known.

• The world graphics and character sprites really create a nice piece of art in motion, the bland life bars detract from that. You could create a really awesome looking aztec inspired hud that would take it to another level.

• I'm not sure if this would work at all, but you could try to find a way to incorporate the physics behavior. To give your wind the affect of actually blowing things or enemies around.

• one of the HUD icons doesn't scroll on the second level.

Game is looking awesome though

Nice choice of theme; it's refreshingly atypical. Your artwork is fabulous!

Thanks for the feedback so far everyone!

L5j, those are some good design comments too. I've been experimenting with getting glide to work with the same button already, but haven't had much luck getting the script to work. Does anyone know of any other Construct games which use a double jump or glide?

Ah, yes, the HP bars are placeholders, I should have thought to replace them before uploading it. I'm hoping to add more elements that interact with the wind attacks (like the trees moving, grass particles etc) later on, once I've gotten the core game elements working.

Toralord, thanks for your comments also. I already am using global variables for the score though, and it doesn't seem to carry between scenes.

As other people mentioned this is a beautiful and unique looking game you have here. The only thing desired are more frames for your animations. But I guess that'll be improved once you progress.

When I took a look at your cap I soon got a vibe of you overcomplicating things.

• Your animations have frames for both directions, when just one and the auto mirror attribute would do.

• You use Play Animation actions where it's not necessary.

• You have different conditions for different directions when you spawn the attack wind sprite (GustAttack). You don't need that for right/left, since spawned objects will automatically adapt to the angle of the object they're spawned from.

• The many events you use to control your lifebar. That can and should be done with simple math. One event.

That's just what I noticed taking a quick look.

Regarding some of the problems you're having:

-When talking to characters, you need to press the button twice the first time.

That doesn't seem to happen for me.

-Attack and Death animations not playing correctly (getting stuck on frame 1 etc.)

Well, the way your attack events are set up it's bound to not work properly. First of all it's possible to just quickly press the attack key without actually attacking. The animation will briefly play and go back to normal then. Instead you should make it that when you press attack, the animation plays at least 1 time and a wind sprite is spawned.

I think it's your intention that the attack animation should stay on the last frame and keep spawning wind if the player holds the key. So this kind of works already, although you shouldn't use For every x ms there. Instead the first time you spawn it you add to a PV a certain value and keep always subtracting from that value (use timedelta). When its 0 or below, you spawn again one and reset the value.

L5j, those are some good design comments too. I've been experimenting with getting glide to work with the same button already, but haven't had much luck getting the script to work. Does anyone know of any other Construct games which use a double jump or glide?

Why wouldn't glide with the jump key work for you? Simply replacing Z with SHIFT in your events already does seem to do the trick. Am I missing something?

Edit: ah I see, there's an issue with the whirlwinds now. Could be fixed by raising the jump strength for example instead of changing gravity direction.

In addition to that I'd like to suggest only using two keys (apart from the arrow keys) for this. One attacks, the other one jumps and glides. Talking would be done by pressing up arrow. I'd love to have X and C as action keys, as opposed to X and Z btw. It's a keyboard layout thing. Imagine trying to control your character on a keyboard where the Z and Y keys are switched (as they are on many european keyboards, see wiki).

I'd also like to suggest disallowing bunny hopping and making use of jump sustain for variable jump height.

-Score doesn't carry over between layouts

When you run the game in debug mode you can see that the score is actually carried over. Yet the text shows 0. What also striked me as weird is that I do get points for killing enemies, as one can see in the debugger, but again it's not shown in the text.

Ultimately I noticed that your ITEMS event sheet was doing it's own thing, yet changing the ScoreText text object over again. Therefore it appears faulty. I think you were testing something out with that event sheet? Just exclude it and it will work properly.

And again I have to say very promising project. Looking forward to future updates! Hope my comments help a bit.

Wow, thanks for giving such detailed feedback, PixelRebirth! That will help so much! Hopefully next time I upload a new version of the game, I'll have those things fixed and more.

super anime

<img src="http://smiles.kolobok.us/personal/paint3.gif">

The graphics are absolutely fantastic and you're a very talented artist.

Here's a couple of things I've observed:

• When the player is faced with too many action inputs (e.g jumping, shooting, gliding and chat) everything gets too complicated in my opinion. In my project my rule is to have a maximum of two action inputs on the keyboard with an alternative input on space key. The reason space key is so good it's because it's a separate motion compared to your more dexterous digits -- I find my brain having an easier time of distinguishing those key presses. A last tip regarding the controls is to make use of contextual controls, for example have the player glide if you hold in jump, that feels MUCH more natural.

• The responsiveness of your game feels very... unresponsive:) Another soft rule I have to combat this in my game is to always change the players pose when he's interacting with a new object. I feel the only thing in the way of making this a fucking fabulous game is the way it feels moving about with the player. I've spent many weeks just working on the main player and how he feels going through many iterations.

• Don't use chat in the beginning of the game as fluff, my immediate response is to ignore them that point onwards because they're saying non-useful stuff and then you're fubared when you want to use them to actually progress the player later in the game. If you do fluff let them just trigger simple speach bubbles instead OR embed useful info in the fluff text, you know?

• Something Blizzard found out while developing DIablo 3 and really stuck to me (paraphrasing): "We spent all our energy in designing great looking monsters to only have them die 2 seconds later, that's when we switched to the philosophy 'design the monsters to die'". I don't know how applicable you think this is but basically, the feeling of 'killing' a monster is much more 'tactile' to a player than the feeling of seeing it live you know? So, your monsters look AWESOME, now make them DIE awesomely aswell.

Anyway, it's GREAT to see something of this quality graphics wise made in Scirra, keep it up!! Sorry if the next is near unreadable, in a hurry and gotta run.!!

Just two graphical nitpicks:

The platforms that allow you to jump up through them should have an indication that they're behind the playing field.

The trees in the background of the second level have shadows that face the sun, rather than away.

... that's all for now.

Looking good, wow!

Art crits:

-- The bright saturated colours in the background + the bright saturated colours of the player character means she doesn't stand out much. Especially without some kind of outline. While the unified look is nice there's the issue of everything blending together visually.

-- The direction arrows in the tutorial levels could look so much nicer! Are they placeholders right now? I was thinking more that the word was integrated into the cloud, rather than the the arrows being clouds with words written on there. (other than that I love the style of the sun and clouds though. More than everything else, haha)

--

Gameplay crits:

The player character feels very slow and floaty? Probably because her fall speed is quite slow. It made the boss fight annoying rather than difficult. It'd be nice to get an option to drop faster (down arrow?). She doesn't feel swift and agile which I suspect is what you want with the "cutting wind" theme.

This will be a nice game

I'll just say this :

If you stay on the platform before the boss, it will detect you and come underneath, and then you can kill it very easily by shooting downward...

Wouldn't it be better maybe to make him destroy that platform or something?

Beautiful.

I did feel that the sun and the boss' attack graphics' squaryness clash with the overall smooth lines of the games.

If you want to introduce it as a theme, I would suggest you take damage from anything that looks squary, so that means the sun wouldn't look that way.

It looks nice, but it clashes, and as such I spent most of that level looking at the sun and expecting something to happen with it.

Wonderful graphics and animation, though it could really use some in-betweens.

About gameplay, although it's standard platforming it really works and I liked the theme and flow. Hover and jump key could have been the same though, but even if it's not it still works.

Pretty good for a start,

I suggest more animating with more frames to give a less choppy, WIP feel.