deadeye's Forum Posts

  • Huzzah!  I can log in now!  Thanks Tom :)

  • You have a really nice start here. I am liking the gameplay overall, but I think there could be a few improvements. It's really hard to stop the player when you're running, and it's very easy to overshoot platforms, which I did over and over again.

    Some of these problems could actually be helped by level design. For instance, I was jumping across the moving platforms and reached this spot, only to miss the ledge and fall through the gap in the platforms. Then I would have to go all the way back up just to try the jump again. And again. It was painful:

    <img src="http://i53.tinypic.com/119tncy.png">

    If you just put a wall there you can keep the player from having to climb all the way back up if they miss. Making things easier for the player like this in the first level would help a lot. Allow the player to make a few mistakes without getting punished to hard, at least until they get used to the controls.

    Another thing that would make playing a lot easier is MORE CHECKPOINTS. In the first level you should have a checkpoint after every difficult section, not after every four difficult sections. For instance, you could use a checkpoint at the top of that platform where I am jumping up. You could use another one immediately after the part where you need to sprint across two big gaps with the gem in the middle. When you reach the first checkpoint, and then have to go down the small spike section, then have to jump across two spike gaps, then have to climb the ladder with the spikes, then have to swim in the fans.... that's way too much to have to do over again when you die. It the checkpoint is WAY too far back.

    So be nicer to your players on the first level. You are an expert at your game, but other people aren't, and a new player might get frustrated and quit playing because they have to do the same things over and over again just for making a simple little mistake.

    I also think that it would be useful to add some camera controls to the game, so that when you're standing on the ground you can press up or down to look up or down. There are a lot of blind jumps, and it would be nice to know if I am about to jump down onto spikes. Also moving the camera out in front of the player when he is running would be a good thing, so you can see what is ahead of you better. He moves so fast that it's hard to react quickly when an obstacle approaches you. And it's not too hard to set up a camera that moves out in front of the player a little bit when he's moving.

    As for the graphics... I really like the platforms and environment stuff. It has a really nice vector-graphics look to it. The player looks nice and is nicely animated, but it (and some of the other sprites) doesn't really match with the background style. It's more like pixel art. You might consider making all the graphics elements match up.

    Also, I would like it if the game started in windowed mode and had an option to go fullscreen if you choose. Having it fullscreen glitches up on dual monitors when I click on another program.

    Overall though it is a very good game so far.

  • Those are some birthin' hips all right. Chalk one up for chunky-thigh female protagonists, I guess.

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  • Steam isn't next... they're behind it all! This is all an elaborate plot to get people to sign up for Steam! IT'S A CONSPIRACY!

  • I am a cynical bastard. There's no denying it, and I think that a lot of people here would probably agree with me . I am just very simply not satisfied with most of what popular culture or the entertainment industry has to offer. As such, my list of "perfect" games is very, very short.

    This game is on that list.

    I really enjoyed Portal 1. When I heard there was a sequel in the works, my cynical nature kicked in. "Why the hell would they need to make a sequel? The first one was perfect, how could you possibly expand on that? This is just an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the first game." Etc. I am very glad to say I couldn't have been more wrong. Not only did it improve on the first game, it DEVASTATED it. If Portal 1 was "great," then Portal 2 moved that bar higher to where Portal 1 is now just merely "good."

    Before I played Portal 2 I heard all the hype about it (but thankfully none of the spoilers). I admit that I did let the hype get to me, which is dangerous (especially for a cynic) because things rarely live up to their hype. But not only did it meet up with expectations from the hype... it was actually better than what I had expected. That's never really happened with any other game I've ever played... except Portal 1 . Portal 2 really is just top quality all the way through.

    I played it for about half an hour or so, but it was basically a boring cutscene that you move around in with some guy talking. And some easy "puzzles" from portal 1.

    There are a couple reasons that you play the first Portal 1 puzzles over again at the start of the game... the first is that those puzzles are already pretty much the perfect way to introduce the idea of portals to people, so for new players that didn't play Portal 1 it's easy to get acquainted. The second reason is all atmosphere for those that did play Portal 1... you get to see a familiar environment from the first game, and how dramatically it has changed since last time you were there. That direct comparison with the old and the new is a pretty powerful tool. It is familiar, yet something is obviously wrong. It was a pretty smart move in my opinion, as it sets up the player with an uneasy feeling right off the bat.

    Unless you just find it boring, I guess. Can't help you there, though.

    At any rate, new puzzles pop up almost immediately after that. And later on the game diverges rather wildly from the puzzle-room setting, even more so than the first game.

    As far as the "some guy talking" thing goes... well, if that really bothers or bores you then I guess you probably shouldn't bother trying to play through the rest of the game because you will have "some guy" or another talking at you all throughout. Portal 2 is VERY heavy on story. If you take the time to pay attention to the atmosphere and the story though I think you will be pleasantly surprised. It is surprisingly deep and engaging for a game such as this.

    And remember, this is all coming from a cynical bastard who is never satisfied with anything.

  • That, and they want to stop Silverlight from dying out. Seriously, who actually uses Silverlight?

    Netflix does, unfortunately . And Netflix is HUGE.

  • Very promising game you have here .

    By the way, megaupload and mediafire and sites like those are terrible. Get yourself a dropbox account. It's what most people here on the forums use, and for good reason... it's really handy. check it out: www.dropbox.com

  • Oh, wow hey... it's karshinkoff again. I leave for just a little while and I miss all this.

    You got banned. That means don't come back. Ever. I'm going to do it again, and this time will you please stay gone?

    Oh and I'll be sure to keep an eye out for you at the next indie game awards.

  • Also, transitions have been known to be a bit buggy in the past. I am not entirely sure if they have ever been improved, I personally haven't used them in years. It's relatively easy to make your own transitions anyway, especially if it is something as simple as fade to or from black. Just put a black Tiled Background on the top layer and change it's opacity.

  • Jayjay is correct. This info is on the wiki here:

    http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/c ... ransitions

    Granted, that particular section isn't very in-depth, but it does state that you need to add transitions in the layout properties before you can use them.

    Moved thread to Help/Tech

  • Animations? Wait what?

    I am assuming he is baking his animation frames out into separate model files and swapping them dynamically at runtime. I've thought of doing this myself but the process would be rather time consuming.

  • I agree it would be better, I didn't really like the pad on the PSP. And it broke all the time. I had to replace it with a few different , and once I actually had to replace the little controller unit inside.

    Anyway I meant the little touch-sensitive pads on this thing:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12445142

    Those apparently behave like analogue sticks but they have no moving parts to break, which is why I thought it was a little odd that they have actual sticks on the Vita.

  • It takes place in London, but the money is shown in dollars....

    ...ok

    Looks kind of neat though, like a campy cult classic monster movie from the eighties or something.

  • I'm wondering what the hell they were thinking making it 3G. I mean, why not 4G? Why would you release a 3G device now? It's hardly cutting edge. Would have been impressive two years ago maybe.

    And on top of that, they're using AT&T. I laughed out loud when I heard that... and what made it even funnier was that the crowd had a mix of boos and laughs when they announced the AT&T service.

    I also think it's odd that they went with actual analogue sticks instead of thumb-sized touchpads. I mean that phone that plays Playstation games has those... why would you invent a solid state virtual machine only to revert to a physical machine in your next generation of hardware? I know there are a lot of people who would prefer the analogue sticks, but still it seems odd, like a technological step backward. And yeah I know that phone is actually made by Ericsson but whatever.

    Anyway I'm not much of a handheld gamer either. I had a PSP for about two years and I hardly played the thing. It was even jailbroken, with Nintendo and Sega emulators and a hundred games on it, and I still wound up playing those same emulator games on my PC while the PSP sat there gathering dust. I guess I just really don't get handheld gaming in general. When I'm at home I have consoles and computers to play on. When I'm outside, well, I'm busy being outside.

  • Am I the only one who has noticed that the controler looks like a handheld system it's self?

    No...? Just about everyone thinks this