899 replies to this topic

[newstarshipsmell]

I already got the explosive missiles (from that boss with the disappearing health bar ) so I totally see your point about the pointlessness of tweaking the bombs now.

 

I'm probably going to complain about the keys at some point - constructively, with suggestions, of course. At this point I have nearly 20 so it almost seems like a pointless game mechanic.

 

Anyways, a few more bugs:

 

I don't know if this is global, but in Pisces I've discovered (probably as you would expect, from how the scripting works) that if you run into a door using the Dash Boots, you won't enter it. However, if you stop dashing, sometimes you still can't enter the door when walking into it, and you have to leave the screen and return for the door warp to reactivate or whatever. I fooled around but couldn't really figure out what causes the warp to stop working, from what I was doing.

 

Also, the continue/save point implementation is frustratingly inconsistent across levels. I don't know if that's by design or mistake, but...

In Aquarius, if you quit and either continue or save, when you resume, you begin at the starting point of the game (makes sense, so far.)

In Scorpio, if you quit/continue, you'll resume from the last level entrance you entered by, but if you save, when you resume, you'll start from the first entrance in 00.

Aries seems to be the same/similar, except I've only entered it from one location, so I have no idea if it works the same as Scorpio.

In Cancer and Pisces, however, both continue and save resumes from the last door you entered - in some (maybe all?) cases including inside a cave. (I don't think this happens in the first three levels.)

It's actually kind of nice resuming from the last door rather than the level entrance - I don't know if you did this deliberately to deal with ramping up difficulty level in the later areas, but it seems like it should be uniform, whatever it is, so players know what to expect.

 

Maybe not a bug, but the miniboss(?) guarding the powerup in the cave at Cancer 12 doesn't stay dead when you come back. That same enemy also reappears after you've killed it in Pisces 7C, 7D and 7E. But after wandering into that door in the side of the cliff near the starting point and ending up in some much later area of the game, I realize these might just be stronger, but common, enemies, and not intended to stay dead.

 

Lastly, after I killed the Pisces 79 miniboss, I immediately warped to a completely black room with four fish enemies that spawned inside it. The room seemed to lack gravity, as I was holding down and walked down a couple tiles. I pressed up and walked back up to the top of the screen, and ended up back in room 79, with the miniboss gone and the powerup available.

 

The Sting? If that's what I get for beating the dude in the upper-right corner of the level - no. I didn't have the Dash Boots or the Explosive Missiles when I reached him, and he killed me rather quickly. I then found the Dash Boots (that boss was much more reasonable, though I fought it with just my blaster since my missiles were too slow) and headed over to fight the ball+chain-tail boss to see if he could in fact be beaten, notwithstanding his health bar's disappearing act. I'm going to grab as many powerups from Pisces as I can and head back to try again with the main boss.

 

Dammit, I beat that boss on my second try, with the missiles upgraded. He killed me while he was running around exploding and dying... At least I've mostly mastered the route to him, though the sand digging is still a bit tedious.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 05 January 2015 - 05:06 PM.

[ShadowTiger]

I don't know if this is global, but in Pisces I've discovered (probably as you would expect, from how the scripting works) that if you run into a door using the Dash Boots, you won't enter it. However, if you stop dashing, sometimes you still can't enter the door when walking into it, and you have to leave the screen and return for the door warp to reactivate or whatever. I fooled around but couldn't really figure out what causes the warp to stop working, from what I was doing.

I've had this happen plenty of times. I figure it's because it takes the player off of the integer grid and onto a far floatier one.

Concerning the bombs, it's a particularly acute problem when you're facing the... and I apologize for spoilers,

Spoiler

wall of flesh

when you suddenly have to bomb your way out of it, you look downward to face the floor, and your bomb passes right through the floor to the bottom of the screen. Panicking, the player tries other weapons that might work against the incoming terror, but to no avail, and dies. If the bombs can't lose their gravity, maybe doubling the floor might help. This might be a more useful solution, really, because bombs following the laws of gravity are still useful on occasion. Just not so much for bombing floors.

[MaximumCDawg]

I've had this happen plenty of times. I figure it's because it takes the player off of the integer grid and onto a far floater one

Nope. What's happening is this. The dash animation uses an ffc under the player. This covers up warps and allows the player to dodge some boss attacks. I have been meaning to correct this behavior for a while. In the meantime, just dash somewhere other than the door and it should work fine.

[newstarshipsmell]

The Scorpio Sting acquisition dialog triggers as soon as you move into room 2E, rather than being triggered when you step into the energy field in the middle...

 

Also, firing it while moving on the ground causes you to stop moving briefly, though you can fire it while jumping sideways without halting your horizontal speed. Seems kind of weird/inconsistent. Do all the Zodiac weapons cause you to do this?

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 06 January 2015 - 08:33 AM.

[MaximumCDawg]

Yep, they act like swords.  That particular quirk doesn't bother me too much, since there are venerable games (Castlevania, Zelda II) that have the same mechanic.  It was only the flying levels where the stutter step is a huge problem.

[newstarshipsmell]

Fair enough.

 

Pisces 36: The platform with the door seems to have leftwards conveyor belts applied to it for no apparent reason.

Pisces 09: The platform to the left of the coral has a leftwards conveyor as well.

 

Pisces 04: I can't move from the right hook to the right onto the block, in the upper left corner. When I ascend with the Grappler I bounce around at the top of the line just beside the block, rather than rising all the way up into the row below the hook. Is this a bug with the Grappler or are you not intended to access this part until you have the Double Jump? ETA: Having practiced more with the Grappler elsewhere, I think maybe I could go back and try again, but wonder if the conveyor from the moving water is what's stopping me from climbing up on top of the block? I dunno.

 

Pisces 45: You can dash through the door and into the wall on the left side of 46. ETA: I don't see any other doors on the room border anywhere else I've been so far... but you know, that would be a great way to deviously hide a room - leave it open on the edge, and in the adjoining room that the player can reach, put a bombable wall/hidden door on the edge, that links to a frustratingly empty room. So they simply have to dash past it to reach the actual secret. Of course, you could also use the Dash Boots 2 without bombing the wall to reach it.

 

Gemini 58: If you fall into the hole on the left side, you land in a solid tile on the top row in 59... Move the 2x2 bubble down/left one row/column, and put little bubbles in the upperleft/lowerright corners where it is, and that'd fix it.

 

Aries 2E: The door leads to a room 80 that's empty, with 4 bees, similar to the room I ended up in after defeating the Pisces 79 miniboss. No gravity - and walking off the left or right side of the room returns me to Aries 2E, but scrolls the screen left/right and sticks me inside a wall in 2D or 2F. Fun times!

 

Aries 0F: Another door like Aries 2E.

 

Explosive missiles don't detonate against tiles on the topmost row or the leftmost column of rooms.

 

The Grappler impact graphic animation will briefly appear in the previous spot you struck with it on the subsequent strike.

 

I used the Grappler in 0E in the upperleft corner, shot it diagonally up/left and it seemed to hook offscreen onto the rightmost hook on the ceiling in the next room, 0D - it pulled me to the edge of the screen and scrolled, but upon scrolling into 0D, the Grappler was attached to a point off the left side of 0D in room 0C - the same relative point it hooked onto offscreen in 0E. So it pulled me across the entire room while not actually attached to a hook. Too slow to screenshot it, but It looked sort of like this:

 

Leo 55: The top of the electric beam is shifted to the right:

 

LOL, I uncapped the FPS to skip through all the dialog, and it started popping a couple of soldiers in the same spots on every screen:

They were gone after I died/continued.

 

I saved/resumed the game from the door at Leo 65 and entered the shop at Leo 39. While inside the shop I quit/continued, and it resumed here:

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 06 January 2015 - 07:24 PM.

[MaximumCDawg]

...and promptly died, huh?  I don't think you're ready for that boss yet.

 

I am paying attention to these bug reports, it's just that I'm deep into coding the final boss at the moment, so I havn't had a chance to get to them.  Keep em coming!

[newstarshipsmell]

Haha, no. It was obviously a bug, so I quit/continued without even attempting to fight it. I just lingered long enough to screenshot it.

 

Leo 05: I completely bypassed the boss by dash jumping across the room without touching the lowest floor anywhere. Not sure if that bugs things up later, and/or if the boss is still there if/when I go back later, since the door locked behind me in Leo 07. I'm not going to progress further because I want to backtrack and kill that boss at Leo 62 that has a nifty-looking prize (who promptly killed me the first time.)

 

Leo 62: It's possible to shoot the switch on the left side from the right by firing just over the top of the grey block in between. Not sure if that block is supposed to prevent you from triggering it from the right, or fool you into thinking so. ETA: Ah, I see, it's not sequence-breaking if the former, so it doesn't really matter. And you have to go around the other way to get to the one door anyways, and all it gets you is a sidearm energy upgrade I think.

 

Gemini 12: The door also leads to another empty/no gravity cave.

 

Also, the red moth enemies in Gemini - they just fly around for a few seconds and then disappear. Are they supposed to do that?

 

Is this just 500 credits, or is it the wallet upgrade?

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 07 January 2015 - 01:21 AM.

[MaximumCDawg]

It's a wallet upgrade.  

 

I'm happy to report that your mystery arch-villain is now functional, at least in one of his 9 phases.  The rest should go slightly faster since I have some of the general functions and behavior working correctly now.  Still, it took me three days of solid work to get this far, so it's going to be quite a chore to get him fully functional.

[newstarshipsmell]

Once I've obtained 260+ HP, the counter on the lifemeter screws up for 260-269 HP, and displays them as 160-169. Actual HP and meter itself seem to work correctly, just the counter is subtracting 100 for some reason. Haven't noticed it for any other ranges of numbers.

Taurus 13: The door warps me inside the cave stuck in the wall in the upper-left corner. Requires a quit/continue to recover.

Taurus 02: There's a tile missing in the upper-right corner.

Taurus 03: You can see the back end of the flames moving up/down behind the missile counter. This graphical flaw is also frequently apparent in the corridors, where you can see the background behind the credits/keys/missiles totals.

Speaking of corridors, I've noticed oftentimes while flying through them that a fair number of the background tiles suddenly change while scrolling - and there are a number of tiles building larger graphics that cut off on one side/corner. Since the corridors close upon completion, I'd have to go back through the entire game from the beginning to try and spot them all, and anyways I'd either have to somehow automate repeated triggering of F12 to capture them or figure out how to capture my monitor output as video to go back and look for them/point them out to you. Is it worthwhile to do that or are you not too concerned about it?

Taurus 04: The green bubbles almost always fall off the screen immediately. Presumably these are the item-restoring bubbles? Please consider modifying the lower half so it only has a tile-wide access downwards - maybe with tiles a row higher on one/both sides of it, so they land on the floor. Or just move them to a floored room nearby, like 15 or 25.

Also, I noticed two different kinds of bubbles in 06. Presumably one disables your A item and the other your B? Since you can assign any weapon/item, it seems kind of redundant to have bubbles that only disable one or the other. Is it possible to just have one that disables both?

You might also add (assuming that you haven't already - and I just haven't reached/read it yet) a terminal room with doctor's notes about the bubbles - maybe talking about them disrupting robotic controls or something, and describing what disrupts them and what apparently restores them (i.e. the green bubbles?) Since this uses different sprites for them than a typical Zelda quest, it might be less frustrating for the player to be left wondering how to restore their items upon loosing them, though my suggestion above about preventing the green ones from falling out of the room immediately would probably also resolve that problem. I honestly didn't spot them the first few times I went through that room and didn't even remember they were there, so I simply quit/continued when I got struck by the other ones below them.

Taurus 44: You can walk right into 45 on the bottom and walk into a solid tile. (Should I be posting "bugs" like this one? Or is it not that big a deal so long as the player doesn't become stuck?)

Taurus 45: It's really hard to backtrack from 45 into 35 - the first step in 35 is just too high to double-jump up to, and I was only able to make it back out without quitting/continuing by persistently attempting to exploit the jump-from-bottom-row bug; I did like 4 or 5 jumps in a row and finally managed to jump up onto the step. Maybe drop it a tile lower? I bombed all over in 44 and 45 and couldn't find any other way out...

Taurus 27: Door leads to empty room again.

Taurus 15: Upon defeating the boss his explosion turned into a bunch of large numbers...

Taurus 59: Another miniboss whose lifemeter drops to zero before it runs out of HP.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 07 January 2015 - 10:14 PM.

[MaximumCDawg]

Post all the issues you have; you are obviously being very thorough, and this thread is becoming a gold mine for bug fixes. Work on the end boss is my focus at the moment, but I'll make all the corrections you post here.

Game play odditites might or might not get fixed, but walking into a wall certainly should not happen.

[newstarshipsmell]

Cancer 15: Another doorway to emptiness. Should I bother posting these as well, or have you just not gotten to filling out all the doors/caves yet?

Cancer 52: Missing a couple tiles in the upper-right corner.

LOL, my very first experience with Libra was getting damaged by the ice stalactites to the right of the entrance, jumping over the door to bomb for hidden passages, and knocked back into Cancer.

Cancer 10: Can you put a swordable, appearing block on the left wall in Cancer 10? Maybe have it triggered by the miniboss's death? That room is super-tricky to ascend from, even with the high jump, double jump and dash; if you go down there before getting the double jump (like I did) I think the only way out is to quit. But I backtracked from Libra after maxing out my credits crunching ice cubes (to go back to Taurus and buy the 2nd recharger) and discovered that quitting/saving/resuming returned me to the Libra entrance to Cancer, instead of the Aquarius entrance. So... you have to backtrack through that entire section of Cancer and then once you reach the miniboss's room it almost proves impossible to ascend, without spamming the jump and exploiting its bugginess.

Libra 79: Not sure this can be fixed, and not that big a deal. If you put a cave door on ice, with the cave interior door approach from the left, and the exterior exit point on the same side (the left) then exiting the cave will require the last direction pressed to be right. Which will be immediately applied to the slide, regardless of whether or not the directional controls are released during the room transition - meaning you'll slide back into the cave, unless you immediately begin holding left while exiting, which is kinda silly. (Holding up or down does nothing besides reface you, and you still slide back in.) Is it possible to fine tune the ice sliding so it doesn't do that? If not, I'd suggest either a) not putting doors on ice, replacing the platforms underneath any with snow or something, or b) removing the slide attribute from the tile you warp onto when exiting the cave. That'll handle strangely/non-uniformly when approaching it, but will at least prevent the character from being forced to repeatedly enter/exit the cave several times until they react to and correct it.

Corridors: The main weapon powered up to level 3 fires a big shot in the middle with a pair of smaller shots on the side, but the smaller shots seem to be purely cosmetic, as they don't appear to deal damage:

Only the enemy on the left is taking damage (from the central shot) while the enemy on the right is taking no damage from the side shots passing directly through it.
Also note the background showing through the credits/keys/missiles windows and obscuring the counts.

Libra 33: LOL. That's devious as hell. Congrats for stumping me for over an hour and making me intimately familiarize myself with every other dead end in Libra which I'd already thoroughly bombed.

Libra 31: The door warps you inside the cave next to the terminal, instead of the inside door.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 08 January 2015 - 06:29 AM.

[MaximumCDawg]

In Libra already, huh?  It looks like you're having very little trouble following the clues about where to go next.  That's awesome to see, since some people earlier had complained that it was too easy to get lost.

 

The main weapon in Corridors is a single shot no matter how many bullets you see, that's true.   However, the damage range is getting wider each time you upgrade.  I may not have got it lined up precisely, but it's there, and you'll notice it much more as you continue to upgrade.  

 

I've got the final bosses' mode-selection system working fine now.  Aquarius mode works and it's awesome.  Aries mode is... not functional, but it looks promising once it gets working.  Turns out it's a bit of a challenge to sprite your boss using only DrawTile functions when you need to change the size and position of the sprite relative to the tiles, and keep track of where the hit zones are as the sprite changes shape.  

[newstarshipsmell]

Yeah, aside from when I got stuck in Cancer - which was my own fault, since I forgot to go re-check that one door after triggering another switch - I hadn't gotten stumped until Libra. Hilariously, I mapped out all the rooms I could reach except the first few I'd explored into the western building, which was where I needed to return - I found my way in there when I first started exploring, before I bothered to start mapping, and was promptly hit by one of the warp mages, cursed, and decided I would explore in other directions before coming back to face that aggravation again. Then, since the bombwall to it doesn't stay bombed, I forgot about it.

 

So I explored the rest of the level, and then figured out how to get to the remote explosives after wandering around for another hour - which I assumed would blow open the star blocks, and was what I needed to somehow proceed. More hilariously, after crossing the spikes, I failed to note that I'd needed to dash, and assumed that when I couldn't move through the spike tile it was because I'd tried to move at first while the freeze was in progress - so when I tried to exit that area, I thought it was somehow only passable in one direction, and posted that it was bugged and forced a quit/save/resume. After figuring it out I edited my post, heh heh.

 

Since I assumed (before finding the switch) that there must be another entrance to the eastern side where the Ice Beam is supposedly located, I backtracked and headed to a spot in Aries with them, only to discover they apparently just deal regular explosive damage, but with a remote detonation. Does that actually come in handy at some point, like somewhere you can't shoot a missile but have to drop the bomb and time the explosion?

 

Finally, I remembered I'd gotten hit by a warp mage earlier and never been through that section again, so I went all the way back to Libra and found that area again, and made my way down to the switch.

 

There's also a Life Tank near the entrance that you can reach by jumpspamming up to it, and a ledge on the far side you might be able to dash+doublejump across to and go up from, but I'm maxed out on tanks and accidentally grabbed that tank the first time I got up there (despite trying to avoid landing on it) and my dumb ass fell back down before I tried jumping across. So I quit/retried to save the tank and didn't try to get back up there. Anyways, it looks like you'd have to impale yourself on the far side and then line your wallclimbing jump up before recovering, and I'm seriously doubting that's an intended path. So I'll just go check out the door I opened with the switch I finally reached last night.

 

The Sidearm upgrade was frustrating to earn. Is the player expected/supposed to beat that corridor upon first reaching it, or is the relentless onslaught supposed to discourage the player from retrying it and come back later with more health/energy/ship upgrades? I had to expend a Life Tank just to reach the corridor boss (and I'm hoarding those tanks against the expectation I'm going to need all of them later on...) which thankfully, I was able to beat on only the second attempt (fighting the boss, I mean - I died many more times than that prior to reaching him, when I finally decided to resort to using a tank.) That's why I mentioned the main weapon hitbox width not increasing with the sprite; it would've made it far easier to deal with the beam-shooting enemies that fire downwards, since that's a pretty common shmup trope: using wider shots to line up just off-center with a firing enemy like those to take them out. If you cannot or will not tweak that, sobeit, but it's still kind of aggravating, even if it's only cosmetic.

 

The upgrade itself, I'm guessing you intended the player to come back after jacking up the energy aspect of the weapon, or force them to do so quickly after acquiring it. I had mine balanced perfectly up until that point. I only picked the Speed upgrade at the three-selection rooms a couple times in the beginning, and relied upon single treasures to boost it from there on out, and made sure I always followed up a Power upgrade with an Energy upgrade as soon as possible, so the energy bar remains near full or only drains slowly while repeatedly firing it. After getting the second Sidearm, the thing rapidly depletes my entire bar, which might be less annoying and gameplay-impacting until you can collect more Sidearm Energy upgrades, except that, you know, it affects the dash. I didn't even experiment with it much to see if the shots did substantially more damage or if the sudden increase in energy drain's sole tradeoff was firing faster and continuously - I just quit/retried and figured I'd stock up on more Sidearm Energy upgrades before coming back to get the weapon upgrade (and maybe not have to use a tank to finish the level.)

 

Also, is it even possible to reach the left side of Gemini 09 without the infinite jumps/antigravity powerups? It looks like you ought to be able to dash/jump, clear the middle pillar, and double-jump up to the far side, but every time I try, I fail. I spent like half an hour practicing it last night to no avail, and it was incredibly frustrating since missing the jump forces you to backtrack through sixteen rooms before you can re-attempt it. (And if you can make this jump, I'd suggest removing the two tiles/tops of the crystal pillars at Gemini 1E:14+15, to spare the player repeatedly attempting/practicing that jump from dealing with the tight space and extra up/down room transitions imposed while trying to hop up into 0E.)

 

Lastly, this is mostly cosmetic, but I noted the Aquarius Bubble always fires in the same (clockwise, I think) direction, so it's more effective against close enemies a row above you on one side, and a row below on the other. The Scorpio Sting only waves down when facing left/right, and to the right (I think?) when facing up/down. If you could modify both weapons (and any other Zodiac weapons that are left/right-handed like that) so that it alternates which side/direction it veers each time you fire, that would make it look better.

Edited by newstarshipsmell, 08 January 2015 - 12:50 PM.

[MaximumCDawg]

Good gameplay suggestions.  I will take them all into account.  I am sensitive to shots with a path being hard to hit enemies with, as I never did get past the first boss in Fester's Quest... if you never played that, go try it out and you'll quickly see why that's relevant.

 

Remote Bombs - They have no real utility at the moment other than being, well, remote.  I will probably jack up the damage down the road to make them more useful.

 

Sidearm 2 - This allows rapid fire, which you noticed, and it also increases all categories of the gun by about 5.  I will be doing some revamp to the Sidearm down the road, so stay tuned.  There should be more visual changes as it upgrades, and it should be able to get strong enough to work as a reliable secondary weapon in Corridors.  This is far-down-the-road stuff, so stay tuned.

 

Corridors - Libra is hard?  You ain't seen NOTHING yet, my friend.  You may want to hoard life tanks, but I designed the game to both be generous with tanks but also require their use.  There's no shame in this.  I think, in my playthrough last month, I usually had 3-4 tanks but no more, and occasionally would have to eat them all to beat Corridors.  Things only get worse from here.  In general, the difficulty of the game hops up once you get to Leo the first time... then again once you get to Taurus... and by the time you're in Capricorn, it is intended to be punch-you-in-the-head challenging.