186 replies to this topic

[trudatman]

....If you ever find a use for the dungeon tiles I made for your quest, they are....Here....

still no plan for dungeons in this game (only the boss fights are in dungeons, but they don't even appear to be), so I likely wouldn't use them in the game, but they could go in the set, sure. I see that some of the door images have lines thicker than one pixel, something I have decided to avoid entirely (except in the logo), so they would need to be converted for that, but I can't imagine that would be hard. I've never imported tiles before, but wouldn't they need to be .png or .bmp and not .jpg? JPEGs are lossy, I'm pretty sure. no worries. won't be a set any time too soon.

Edited by trudatman, 18 June 2012 - 06:51 PM.

[trudatman]

somebody type something about this thing and inspire me to work on it again.

[SofaKing]

All I've got is that it looks extremely cool, and, most importantly, unique and unlike anything else out there, which we need more of. I'll definitely play this.

Also that the 2600 kicks ass.

Edited by FerentzRocks, 02 August 2012 - 11:25 PM.

[trudatman]

thanks, John!

I think I am going to put some work in, again, for the first time in a while. I don't really have any ideas for the middle parts. I have some ideas for near the end and I have a general idea of how I want the game to progress, but I don't have tile ideas. the trees and rocks are played out, but I keep using them. what else do I include? flowers, maybe. there will be a shovel. it will make slow-walking holes. it will lead to an item. problem is that the shovel is going to be the second sword. you will upgrade quickly to the third, but I don't have a way to prevent somebody from getting the shovel and saving, taking it around and beating enemies to death with it. oh, well, not a big deal, I guess. so, I guess my plan for today is to stick up some enemy sprites and add some flowers and see where things go. motivation... go!

Edited by trudatman, 15 August 2012 - 08:10 PM.

[Sheik]

As for tiles: Maybe some desert stuff with cacti and skulls? Other than that I still pretty much dig the graphical style. I don't even know much to say other than it looks pretty cool.
You could also have toasted bread with a face as an enemy. Maybe peanuts.

[trudatman]

yeah, cacti. word. sand, too, I guess. pretty sure I want to keep an element of realism in this thing, so floating toast is out, but thank you for replying. got flowers in, added blood to the snake teeth, changed a few other simple things... keeping it moving. I'm not sure how I want to handle water. I have swimming and diving sprites, but no real plan for delineating the water edges since I've changed the palette that had many blues. I intended to have waves, but now I think I'll have mostly still water. I might just be a thin blue line and then you are in until you reach another to get out. hmm...

Edited by trudatman, 03 October 2013 - 07:17 PM.

[Sheik]

Why don't make the water a regular pattern of two horizontal white pixels on black ground that wave from left to right? Something like the GB Zelda games.

[trudatman]

I worked on the cacti and sand. pretty happy with them. I'm figuring that the leftmost section of the map will feature these desert tiles. thanks for chiming in! I would love to have more to read in here when I check back, folks...

Edited by trudatman, 15 August 2012 - 08:10 PM.

[trudatman]

I worked on the final boss last night. it is awesome to me, but it is going to offend people, I'm pretty sure. I'm excited to test it, but it isn't currently connected to the rest of the map and I'd need to give some items to the player along the way. I may spend today setting the basic path up. this game will get completed, assuming I continue to live. I'm eager to have people try it. not sure when (if) another demo will exist, so please try the current one in the mean time and reply with comments, questions, suggestions and the likes.

[trudatman]

I got another demo ready after a productive night with this thing.

[removed August, 2012, demo]

Edited by trudatman, 30 June 2013 - 03:46 PM.

[trudatman]

so... the "Gannon" that I suspect will offend many is theoretically reachable, but, as of yet, untested. I haven't put serious effort into beating the honeycomb room with eight moldorms and one of each patra, so the final boss is the only part that is currently untested.

if you have troubles with any other part, please let me know. be sure to say which build you used, too. I have only tested the latest demo in 1.90, so if the digdogger entering from the sides doesn't work in the playing application that you used, clue me in.

assuming average skills, the demo should take between ten and forty minutes to finish. please try it and leave me some feedback. thanks for your time. be well and stay smiling.

[Giggidy]

I played as much of the demo that I care to. The verdict? It sucks.

The biggest problem is the graphics. And no, I don't mean "Waaaaaaah they're not photorealistic so they automatically suxxors", I mean the graphics induce basic design problems.

I have no idea what anything is, and thus I don't really know what to expect from an action until I've already tried it. This is *horrific* game design. Some examples:

- There are many apparently clear areas that are unwalkable, but I have no way to know until I bump into the invisible walls because it looks exactly the same as the walkable parts.

- The items. The only things where I could immediately figure out what they did were the discs (only because you didn't, or rather, couldn't modify the subscreen so I could tell they were rupees), the stick (because it was automatically assigned to the A button) and the bombs (which I suspect were only clear because you couldn't think of anything that behaved that way aside from a bomb).

- The health bar. It's just a solid line. I usually praise simplicity in game design but this is a brilliant example of a game element that's too simple. How much health do I have? Is it 2/3rds of what I started out with, 1/2, or 3/4ths? How much did that attack reduce my health by? I honestly have no clue. This is why good health bars either have a background (so you can compare the size to the background instead of relying on memory) or are separated into discrete chunks (like, you know, HEARTS) so you can clearly see "Okay, I had 4, now I have 3."

- The enemies. I have no idea how powerful, how dangerous, or what sort of behaviors an enemy has just by looking at it. I have to learn the hard way (by dying) or by watching it for a while and trying to think up what ZC enemies they actually are underneath your awful paintjob. NOTHING takes you out of the game more than trying to puzzle out "Well, that cloud of yellow stuff is slithering around the screen, so it must be a moldorm" and "That's the dodongo sound effect, so that's a dodongo" or "That thing has spinning stuff around it so it must be a Patra." This method isn't really reliable because I died, TWICE, to a super-hard bug thing (Cracktorock?) that was absolutely identical in appearance to the pushover bug things I had encountered earlier.


I could say that these issues, as bad as they are, are just covering up a great game but they really aren't. The music is mangled (admittedly more likely the MIDI maker's fault than yous), having to dodge screens filled with enemies without any weapons is bullshit, the graphic style (other than its extreme minimalism) is completely boring and uninspired, and the gameplay itself is nothing more than the enemy spam linear dungeon crawl we've all seen a billion times before.


Toss the whole thing out and start over. This mess is unfixable as-is.

[trudatman]

thanks for the review and your time. I'm glad you didn't dance around the issues. while I do not agree that it sucks and I will not be scrapping it, I am taking your criticisms to ponder on and influence further production. I may add some grass bits at the base of the big trees. I would hope that would alleviate the infuriating "I can't figure out why I can't walk there" stuff. I really wanted to avoid having to do that, as I want the trees to be ridiculously poorly drawn, but I am considering the change. if anybody actually likes the big trees and their walkability SNAFU, chime in at any time.

now, when you indicated that you want the subscreen to tell you that the stones are really the money item... why would you need to know that? the counter keeps track of them and they are clearly drawn in the counter as the "discs." I'm not sure what you would have me do with them. they will not be used to buy stuff, so they are just rocks in a bag. you throw one and it comes off the tally. maybe I don't understand what you mean regarding the stones.

the heath bar is designed to be unclear. you don't start with much health. when you get hurt, you just know that you are hurt. in real life, do you know that you are at 60% energy? nope. you know it hurts. the intent here is to have a sense of panic when your health runs low. when you acquire greater stamina in the later parts of the game, it will feel rewarding, because your bar will grow, but I don't want you to know exactly how much heath you have at any given point. if you must know, you can pause and measure, but I am actively discouraging that. it is intentionally wack. I didn't want to use heart containers and obvious health tickers. I am not sorry about this aspect, at all.

the concept kind of carries over to the enemies. I don't want them to be obviously one type or another. I want the player to earn an understanding of them. the singular mutant octorock should be obvious in his frantic movements and the difference between what he flings compared to the dung the other beetles spit. is it bad design when other quests alter the enemies? these are basic enemies and the only ones that look and act the exact same, so far, are the regular octorocks, blue/red, fast/slow. [this turned out to not be the truth, as even those enemies have slight variation] does the not knowing if it'll take one hit or two ruin the game? not to me. I like the challenge. did the bees not look like bees? the moldorms and patras are supposed to be obviously bees. maybe I see them as what they should be because I know what I meant to have them look like. could other folks chime in on this? are they tough to identify as bees?

the music: yeah it isn't great. it is a remnant from the quest file I used when I started the production of this quest. basically, it is what it is while it is what it is. hopefully John Stacy will be inspired to add some value to this aspect. in the mean time, I will not be worrying about the MIDIs. it took me a decade to deal with the music in HowHigh appropriately. Wolfo saved the day (or many, many days) on that one. here's hoping I get similar assistance for my current demos (this one and HowHigh2, AKA Pastel Zelda). here's to improved tunes.

as for the linearity, yeah, it is linear. it is a simple spiral outward with small fields of space and a few slight off-map cut-throughs. it isn't meant to be anything epic. the idea is to have it be about an hour worth of simple gaming that is playable by anybody (knowing how Zelda enemies work is just a bonus).

if the graphics are too confusing and the items are too hard to figure out, then I may need to change them. if anybody is old enough to remember the first Zelda as a new game, without a Nintendo Power magazine collection, the game was hard to figure out. if trial and error make you mad, this quest may make you mad. if you screw everything up the first time, it is a short quest that you can just start over. I disagree about most of the poor design comments, but I do agree that too many of the tiles and sprites are tough to decipher.

thanks for giving me this exercise. I am always hoping for critical reviews such as the one in the post above, so please don't let my defending and explaining stance deter further comments. if anybody has anything to add, please do not hesitate.

Edited by trudatman, 15 August 2012 - 08:20 PM.

[Giggidy]

now, when you indicated that you want the subscreen to tell you that the stones are really the money item... why would you need to know that? the counter keeps track of them and they are clearly drawn in the counter as the "discs." I'm not sure what you would have me do with them. they will not be used to buy stuff, so they are just rocks in a bag. you throw one and it comes off the tally. maybe I don't understand what you mean regarding the stones.

Lemme explain: The subscreen is what told me that disks (rocks? really? they're perfectly circular) were rupees, because the rock counter was in the place where the rupee counter always is in pre-2.5 quests. I didn't really need to know that they were money (I only needed to know that they were ammo for the bow bag), the point is the rocks being ammo/money was one of the only things about this quest that wasn't cryptic and obscure.

(Also, why do you need a bag to hold rocks in before you can throw them? You can carry around as many rocks as you want before you find the bag, so apparently holding them isn't a problem.)

the heath bar is designed to be unclear. you don't start with much health. when you get hurt, you just know that you are hurt. in real life, do you know that you are at 60% energy? nope. you know it hurts. the intent here is to have a sense of panic when your health runs low. when you acquire greater stamina in the later parts of the game, it will feel rewarding, because your bar will grow, but I don't want you to know exactly how much heath you have at any given point. if you must know, you can pause and measure, but I am actively discouraging that. it is intentionally wack. I didn't want to use heart containers and obvious health tickers. I am not sorry about this aspect, at all.

Ahh, I see. That's a valid design goal, but your game is still very poorly suited for it. Unfortunately there's not much you can do to fix this in 1.9, you'd need scripting to adapt the health system to work properly this way.

the concept kind of carries over to the enemies. I don't want them to be obviously one type or another. I want the player to earn an understanding of them. the singular mutant octorock should be obvious in his frantic movements and the difference between what he flings compared to the dung the other beetles spit. is it bad design when other quests alter the enemies? these are basic enemies and the only ones that look and act the exact same, so far, are the regular octorocks, blue/red, fast/slow. does the not knowing if it'll take on hit or two ruin the game? not to me. I like the challenge. did the bees not look like bees? the moldorms and patras are supposed to be obviously bees. maybe I see them as what they should be because I know what I meant to have them look like. could other folks chime in on this? are they tough to identify as bees?

Again, your idea can work in a game, but ZC is not the engine to attempt this sort of thing with, especially not 1.9.

[trudatman]

you can't get stones before the bag. if you managed to do that, please explain how you did it. circle versus oval, pointless distinction, I guess. "Sticks And Stones." ...your first two weapons. I guess I think those items are obvious.

so I "need" scripting for proper execution of my health meter design goal? um, why? it seems to have baffled you enough without it, just as I intended. I feel like you are trying to find ways to dismiss the whole quest outright. I'm not mad or anything, I just think you are letting the frustration(s) translate incorrectly into failure(s) in the aspects that don't directly relate to the "I can't tell what this item is" issues.

I hope you will expound on your last point. what does 1.90 have to do with having multiple enemies look similar or the same? I just do not understand the point, so if you could get a bit verbose, maybe I can follow what your point is at the end there a bit better.