12 replies to this topic

[KingPridenia]

My first demo for Adam's Quest Redux is ready to be played. I recommend playing it in 2.50 final. While I'm sure the quest won't have any issues in 2.50.1, I make no guarantee that will be the case. In general, should you play it, it spans the first three levels and first three mini-dungeons. Although I'm looking for as much feedback as possible, please keep in mind this is more of an NES style quest with NES quest philosophy. If you're expecting heavily scripted dungeons and epic scripted bosses, prepare to be disappointed. However, I hope that in spite of using few scripts, the quest is still enjoyable. I'm happy to have made it regardless. I thank everyone that has helped me out up to this point as well as anyone that plays my demo. Hope you enjoy it and can give me feedback.

What is in Demo 1:

Spoiler

-Hero's Cave
-Torch Dungeon (level 1)
-Crescent Moon (level 2)
-Abandoned Armoury
-Northern Ruins (level 3)
-Sand Dune Temple
-Maximum of 8 hearts
-40 screens worth of overworld

In particular, I am mostly concerned about difficulty and balance feedback. In short, I want to know if my enemies are balanced okay, if they're too easy or if you think I need to tone them down. In addition, my goal is to make it such that you shouldn't have to go out of your way to grind much if at all if you're killing everything on sight. Should you play normally and kill everything, you should only have minimal amounts of grinding, if at all. I also would like to know if my secrets are intuitive to figure out, given the clues from NPCs or pay for info characters. My goal here is to hope that they're not too guide dang it (hard to figure out without a guide of some kind) but at the same time not too obvious.

Thank you for reading and thank you in advance if you play the demo,
RedmageAdam

 

EDIT:

 

Known issues:

-West side of dungeon walls have tile errors; I fixed it but since no gamebreaking bugs have been found yet, I'm not going to bother to update the demo just for a mere cosmetic change.

Edited by RedmageAdam, 25 April 2015 - 10:02 PM.

[Eddy]

Sounds good! I'll be sure to play the demo as soon as I can when it goes up

[kurt91]

I'm playing it as I type this post...

 

Everything looks great up until the first dungeon. Some of your walls have tile errors along the topmost rows of bricks, near the corners.

 

Do you have issues on using scripts, or not? If not, I'd recommend using an NPC script to replace the dialog room where you're told to use bombs to get the key. If you would prefer a strictly vanilla design (vanilla, as in no scripts and only default features), you can use sensitive warps and identical screens to get a similar effect. Either method would help because having the dialog room in a high-traffic area can become a potential annoyance depending on how patient your player is.

 

Actually, there's a third method if you want to try something I haven't seen anybody do before. It's used to make fake cutscenes in SMW hacks. Make two sets of combos that fill out the alphabet. One set has each letter take up the left half of the tile, and the other uses the right half. Include periods and commas for basic punctuation. The letters should be done in white, and the rest should be transparent. Now, since you have a black area for text in the room already, rather than using the string editor, manually place your alphabet combos, alternating two layers and left/right alphabet combos to make a seamless font that fills in the space. Since you're using tiles, the text appears instantly and without a sound as well as not interrupting gameplay for an instant! (Let me know if my description didn't make sense, and I can try throwing together a reference for you, if needed.)

 

Difficulty feels nice, but maybe take away a couple fire shooters in the room with one in each corner as well as three Goriyas and a Bomb pickup. You seem to like fire shooters, but they can be difficult to dodge, and when you only have three Hearts, you don't have much room for error.

 

Outside of the first dungeon, you have a large mass of dead trees that stand out. I thought that you were supposed to use the Blue Candle to burn them down and make a shortcut, since they stand out very much against everything else, it's right next to the dungeon, and would demonstrate what to look for to find out what to use the Candle on. They didn't burn down. Either replace them with regular trees or it's probably a bug (which I suspect), and you should fix the trigger for that screen.

 

Okay, second dungeon now, and I'm seeing the same tile error again. I'm guessing that you have a walls-only screen that you copy/paste for building the general dungeon shapes, huh? (Speaking of dungeon shapes, I feel like you lied to me...)

 

Next tip: You know how the Bow and Arrow have to be found separately in order to fire Arrows? You can give the Arrow the graphics of both over each other, make the Bow itself an invisible tile, and have the player start with the Bow so that they only have to find the Arrow. Also, your hint for Level 2 is a bit misleading. I ended up pressing against every wall in the dungeon, convinced that I missed a walk-through wall into an unmarked room, searching for the Boss Key. You've already demonstrated that the game uses Boss Keys, so don't even bother bringing it up in the hint. 

 

Armory has a pretty difficult boss considering you built it as a gauntlet, and if you die at the boss, you have to redo the entire dungeon again. Another "only if you're interested" thing, but if you use an FFC with Secret Flag 16 on it for the first room in a dungeon as well as a halfway point, set Secret Tile 16 to a Tile Warp, and make the first room in the dungeon use remote screen triggers so its secrets activate when the halfway room does, you can make perfectly-centered GB-style Miniboss warps without scripting. Linear dungeons like this one would benefit greatly with such a shortcut.

 

Did you put No Enemy Flags on the stone staircases in the desert so the "Leevers" can't climb up, and more importantly, can't submerge/emerge on them? That is a beautiful attention to detail! I love it!

 

It would be nice to have a warning that Potions don't stack BEFORE I wasted the money I could have saved for a Magic Shield...

 

Okay, I got to the entrance to Dungeon 3 before calling it quits for now. From what I've seen, I'm going to want to start money grinding for that Shield, and probably go back and finish the Armory since I'm assuming that I'm getting the Blue Ring from there.

[Eddy]

I now see that the demo is up. I'll probably try to play it in a few days time or so. I'm looking forward to playing this and seeing what massive improvements you've made from the original

Edited by Eddy, 25 April 2015 - 04:00 AM.

[KingPridenia]

@kurt91: About the tile errors, that's exactly the way it was presented in Koten. To be honest, with the version I had, I actually had to FIX the doors because they would have dark streaks around them and didn't look right at all. I have a LOT of walls to fix. Also, how do you suppose I should address the issue with non-stackable potions? Have someone tell you that they don't? There is a very specific reason why I'm not allowing them to stack, mostly because I want a system where you can only get Blues until you get the Letter, then you can buy Reds and once you have the Letter AND beat level 9, you can buy another tier of potion.

 

Anyway, with level 1, that room with three Goriyas and corner shooters, I justify that because it's a large open room, and let's face it; the original had a room like that in level 2 with three of the blue variant. Also, you don't have to fight them, seeing as the item isn't Enemies > Item, so you would only kill them if you wanted to. As for the room with the guy hinting about bombing walls, I could give him a minor item like 5 Rupees to make him go away. Either way, I know how much people hate unmarked bombable walls, and I wanted to make the guy point it out so I didn't pull another Link's Blade Crusade failure where you end up yelling, "HOW THE HELL WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW TO DO THAT!?".

 

Outside of level 1, that mass of dead trees is just there to serve as a blockade. There IS a secret, but it's a bomb spot along the mountain wall on the right side of the screen close to them. So there really is no bug, possibly just questionable usage of tree types.

 

With level 2, I was originally told that I had "four walk-through walls too many" when I posted my map on the "Post Your Maps" thread. With the guy that told you about the Boss Key, I wanted to have a reminder about going back to that room near the start to get it. What kind of hint could I put in that room instead of "By the way, if you don't have the Boss Key, retrace your steps"? And yeah, Crescent Moon kind of got deformed in the original design. Just out of curiosity, where do you think I should add walk-through walls at? I still want the hint to be there, just in case someone doesn't know about that or is more accustomed to playing quests that strictly use freeform dungeons via NES-styled ones.

 

About the Armory, I was thinking about adding a boss lock near the start so you access a staircase that takes you back to the Armos room in regards to your complaint. Alternatively, how exactly would I set up your suggestion of the half-way point? That seems like something I could implement in the main dungeons but haven't because I don't want to use more scripts than I have to and NES dungeon secrets reset unless it's an Enemy > Secret with enemies that don't return (i.e those Moldorms). Also, the Armory's reward is...

 

Spoiler

NOT the Blue Ring. That's in another mini-dungeon in the sandy mountain area. You actually get the White Sword from the Armory.

 

Based on your feedback, I take it my score from you isn't going to be very good, is it?

 

EDIT: I fixed the dungeon walls being screwed up. I still can't believe I never caught the error. I still feel like crap because I submitted a demo with all these mistakes and that my credibility is GONE.

Edited by RedmageAdam, 25 April 2015 - 09:05 AM.

[Lejes]

I ran into similar issues in level 2 as kurt. The hint led me to checking every wall for the bow, when it turned out it was being sold in the overworld. Also agree about that tree blockade. It would save the player from walking several screens out of the way and demonstrate the candle's incredible power. You could maybe shift it to one tree if exploding an entire copse seems too ridiculous. I blazed through both of the mini dungeons, so I'm not really seeing the need for a midpoint. It's difficult to see how to implement one with NES Dungeon anyway, that DMap type is very restrictive. Level 3's miniboss stole the show there. I am not a fan of Zelda 1 bosses (except Aquamentus obviously).

 

Another thing I noticed while playing is that the door combos seem odd. They're harder to walk into than a certain other Koten quest I've been playing. Maybe it's the solidity mask? I finished the demo in about 1:50 and got 7 of the 8 hearts. I didn't notice any problems with cash. I bought pretty much everything available and ended with over 400 rupees.

[KingPridenia]

Another thing I noticed while playing is that the door combos seem odd. They're harder to walk into than a certain other Koten quest I've been playing. Maybe it's the solidity mask? I finished the demo in about 1:50 and got 7 of the 8 hearts. I didn't notice any problems with cash. I bought pretty much everything available and ended with over 400 rupees.

 

I think the difficulty going through doors is due to me having Freeform Dungeons unchecked. With it checked, when you go through a walk-through wall, Link ends up walking on top of the doorway unless you take those tiles and put them on layer 3 or 4 so you go under it instead of on top of it, but when you or an enemy jumps, they don't have their sprite cut off. I discovered this when I was playing around with AQII and level 5 where I had a 3x3 freeform room and had to do that so I wasn't on top of the doorways.

 

Just out of curiosity, do you think I should nerf the Rupee drops a bit or perhaps consider raising prices some? With that thing of dead trees, you think I should go with that plan and make the candle burn them for a small shortcut in lieu of having a bombable secret worth a small amount of money? I could probably do without the Rupee secret anyway, seeing as you had way more than enough cash on you.

[Lejes]

The tree shortcut sounds like a good idea. I'm not sure you have to do anything to the rupee drops. I almost never buy anything that's not an equipment item.

[Nightmare]

How long is it Adam?  I need a detente after New Quest Level 11.

 

-James

[kurt91]

Another thing I noticed while playing is that the door combos seem odd. They're harder to walk into than a certain other Koten quest I've been playing.

Oh hey, I noticed that too. I thought that it was just my PC controller, since I have it set to use a Control Stick rather than Control Pad. I just switched to keyboard, and had a bit of an easier time.

 

Just out of curiosity, do you think I should nerf the Rupee drops a bit or perhaps consider raising prices some?

I personally didn't have any issues with money, but if you were to want to tweak it a bit, I would probably think that raising prices is the better option. That way, if you don't want to swap the Bow/Arrow into a single item and still make the player have to buy the Bow, you can keep the price the same as it is now and try and prevent mandatory money grinding.

 

Alternatively, how exactly would I set up your suggestion of the half-way point? That seems like something I could implement in the main dungeons but haven't because I don't want to use more scripts than I have to and NES dungeon secrets reset unless it's an Enemy > Secret with enemies that don't return (i.e those Moldorms).

Isn't there an option to treat individual screens as Interior type rather than NES dungeon? Actually, why are you using NES dungeon at all? Not a complaint, just curious if there's a feature that they use that Interior doesn't have. Everyone I've talked to seems to use Interior for more freedom of design. Anyways, if you can't set the individual screens to Interior, you have enough Kill Everything rooms that it shouldn't be much of a hassle to set one of them to Enemies Never Return and Enemy->Secret. (Also, I bet you that scrolling side warps to a special Interior map with the individual warp rooms would work, you'd just need one additional map.)

 

What kind of hint could I put in that room instead of "By the way, if you don't have the Boss Key, retrace your steps"?

Who said anything about changing the hint? Just remove the mention of the Boss Key and make it simply a tip on how to get the Arrow specifically. The dungeon itself is fine, albeit having to backtrack quite a bit to get the Boss Key back at the beginning.

 

Also, how do you suppose I should address the issue with non-stackable potions?

Hmm... If you don't want it to be flat-out telling the player, I suppose you could change the Potion Shop text to include something along the lines of: "Remember, this is a full serving, so don't be greedy", or "Keep in mind, store policy is one serving per customer!" Something like that, perhaps?

 

I wanted to make the guy point it out so I didn't pull another Link's Blade Crusade failure where you end up yelling, "HOW THE HELL WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW TO DO THAT!?".

The tileset that I put together for my quest doesn't have bombable wall graphics available for inside of caves, so I used a floor decoration, and placed a bit of rubble in front of the spots to mark them instead. If you'd like to help make sure that the player doesn't have that problem, you could use a similar method and mark areas with walk-through walls, whether it be placing hints in front of the wall, or layering a subtle detail over it.

 

About the Armory, I was thinking about adding a boss lock near the start so you access a staircase that takes you back to the Armos room in regards to your complaint.

Why not just add a one-way warp after the Armos room that leads back to the entrance, and flipping the boss and dungeon reward rooms so that you enter from the room below where you get the first key? That way, if you die, you can just run through two or three rooms and get right back at it for another go.

[KingPridenia]

How long is it Adam?  I need a detente after New Quest Level 11.

 

-James

 

My demo? I would guess approximately 1 1/2 to 3 hours going into it blind, why? For another time frame, I beat the original version of Adam's Quest (the 1.92 version) with 100% completion in 4:41:53, but that's knowing the game in advance and probably half an hour or more could be shaved off had I not gone for 100% and stopped to explain everything.

 

EDIT: It has levels 1-3 and three mini-dungeons. Basically, the intended order is the first mini-dungeon because you have to, levels 1 & 2, second mini-dungeon, level 3, third mini-dungeon.

Edited by RedmageAdam, 25 April 2015 - 07:27 PM.

[Nightmare]

My demo? I would guess approximately 1 1/2 to 3 hours going into it blind, why? For another time frame, I beat the original version of Adam's Quest (the 1.92 version) with 100% completion in 4:41:53, but that's knowing the game in advance and probably half an hour or more could be shaved off had I not gone for 100% and stopped to explain everything.

 

EDIT: It has levels 1-3 and three mini-dungeons. Basically, the intended order is the first mini-dungeon because you have to, levels 1 & 2, second mini-dungeon, level 3, third mini-dungeon.

 

I'm looking for candidates for a Let's Play for June that's a bit step down from what I've been doing (Nostalrul, Demo Original, Demo SP, and New Quest Level 11 are like a murderer's row), and you have watched my LP's before, so I'm not opposed to doing yours.

 

If you don't want me to do it and consider someone else's let me know.

 

-James

[KingPridenia]

@kurt91 and @Lejes: I have changed that bunch of dead trees to be a shortcut you can activate with the Blue Candle and removed the 20 Rupee bombable wall secret.

 

@kurt91 specifically: I took your advice with the Abandoned Armory and made it so that the room after the Boss Key is a portal that goes back to the start. In the room you get the first key, the northern wall is now a Boss Lock door and I put just one room with Blue Stalfos and traps before you go in to fight Manhandla. Also, upon walking out of the White Sword room, you now instantly leave the dungeon. Should be useful in the finalized version to avert possible frustration.

 

Minor bug, but while I figured out how to get screen state carryovers to work for the secret above, when I use spacebar map, the layered tiles of the trees still show up, even though they're replaced by mountain tiles while physically on the screen.

 

EDIT: I have decided to release another demo, version 1.1. It features the following:

• Tile errors with dungeon walls being fixed
• Slight change to enemy flying sword sprites
• Abandoned Armory has been made less frustrating (thanks to kurt91 for suggestion)
• The dead trees just west of level 1 can now be burnt down for a shortcut
• A bomb secret for 20 Rupees on the screen above has been removed
• Portal tiles changed
• Potion Lady now tells you blue potions can't be stacked (thanks to kurt91 for suggestion)

Edited by RedmageAdam, 26 April 2015 - 12:30 PM.