Noyb

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Noyb


  1. Finished!

     

    Though unfortunately, the weird bugs with switching the characters meant that I couldn't get to the ending cutscene. So I played through both of the stories separately, then found a youtube'd ending that didn't have some insane git talking over it. What a shocker! Nice twist, absolutely didn't see that one coming. In fact I assumed that the old, cryogenically frozen future man was Shay. Wronggg!

    I thought that too! Unless there's some previously unintroduced time travel shenanigans, I suspect there's some Moon-like clone worker shenanigans going on.


  2. I'm glad it went over well!

     

    I liked how the sheets of particles partitioned the space and visually interacted with the background. Didn't realize they weren't solid until I accidentally ran through one. I couldn't figure out if there was more to the game than exploring that initial light maze. (Not that a game needs a larger scope, but I had my expectations set to something different by the in-game opening and mentions of dialogue and endings in this thread.)


  3. Cameras have Transforms, so you can transform.Translate and transform.Rotate and Vector3.Lerp/Slerp/SmoothDamp/MoveTowards them like any other moving GameObject.

     

    For day/night you'd need to make a script to contain an internal representation for game time (say 0.0 for noon, 0.5 for midnight, 1.0 for noon again), then increment it every Update based on Time.deltaTime times whatever scaling factor you want and subtracting 1.0 whenever it goes over bounds. Then use that ratio to position light sources (probably by using Quaternions to rotate Vector3.up around the appropriate axis), changing color/intensity of light sources and the ambient light, showing/hiding however you choose to represent stars, etc.


  4. I'm watching with the sound off at work, so maybe it's explained, but why is he jumping around like a moron and specifically avoiding picking up money?

     

    Warning: mechanical spoiler that might make your runs irritating or longer depending on how easily you're tempted to min/max games.

    He's killing time until the ghost appears. When the ghost passes through a big gem, the gem turns into a diamond worth a bit more money if you haven't already picked up any gems before it arrived. It's apparently called Ghostrunning.


  5. Yeah, this felt like a more streamlined remake. Which isn't a bad thing.

     

    Okay, cool. Then I'm all done with that.

    Anyone know if the xinopherydon drops anything useful? I got the treasure chest below it, and I could leave at any time, but the random spells shooting out of my gloves occasionally hit him and he can't do anything to me, so I was thinking of just waiting down there and (eventually) killing him, but if there's no point to it then I might as well just leave right now.

    It drops a claw that permanently doubles your base weapon damage, letting you counteract the enchanted armor's debuff.


  6. How the hell do you enter the desert temple? I think I can see it on the map, but there's nowhere for me to click.

    You need a key.

    It's inside one of the chests in the hole next to the castle.


  7. Liking this a lot more than the original so far. Gets to the action quicker and I've only hit one (optional) spot of obnoxious waiting/grind so far.

    The teapot.

     

    Currently stuck in a few places (BEWARE! later game spoilers):

    The thwomp and spike rooms of the castle, Hell, dev room. And room 3 of the desert temple which I think I know how to solve but am not looking forward to implementing. Also not sure if it's possible/required to beat the dragon on floor 13 in the game within the game.

     


    Yup.. I'm already a mess just from a couple of hours of playing this.

     

    In the cave..

    this is driving me nuts! The monkey wizard keeps jumping over me! How do I go back to dump a load of whoop-ass on that naked dirtbag?!

    Have you crossed the bridge yet?

    The teleport spell sold by the witch might help place you back to where you can hit it. The fireball can help you hit it sooner.

    Or played with the wishing well?

    Dropping chocolate in the well lets you enchant equipment, some of which give you free ranged attacks.


  8. Rabbi Stone is no spring chicken.

    I liked his characterization at the beginning, but he pretty much turns into an action movie hero near the end. (concrete spoilers)

    Fisticuffs in the subway? The whole endgame puzzle where he intentionally gets shot but still has the energy to navigate a conversation tree and throw a guy from his penthouse balcony?

     

    I'd add Increpare's Home.

    Subverts the Sims' systems by putting you in control of an elderly nursing home patient that is increasingly incapable of taking care of their own needs, gradually losing autonomy over their life.


  9. Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit. Some nice character art, but heavily flawed. Constantly struggled with the zoomed-in camera, forcing me to move slowly through new areas lest I fall into unseen instant death spikes, firing blindly at large offscreen enemies using a tiny minimap as a guide. What's worse is that the devs did implement a zoom out button, but it pauses the entire game when used and is mainly just for solving a repeated puzzle. Load times were super long on the XBLA version, particularly annoying when it amped up the backtracking near the end. 

     

    I liked a lot of the character designs and the promise at the start of a game where every enemy is unique, but they quickly broke that promise with slogs through filler enemies and repeated enemy behaviors and death minigames.

     

    Might have redeemed itself through writing, but it's not my sense of humor. :tdown:


  10. Damn fine game. :tup:

     

    If I have a story complaint, it's

    how many of the back-and-forth notes end with Sam talking rather than Lonnie... Shouldn't Lonnie's house have all the notes that end with Sam's writing?

    Lonnie and Sam had the house to themselves that weekend and good reason to reminisce. I figured Lonnie brought those notes with her on her last visit and deliberately left them with Sam. Some documents also made a point that Lonnie wouldn't be able to bring much with her, which likely includes their notes. (which would probably also be risky to bring in the era of Don't Ask Don't Tell)


  11. So what's the verdict on the summer sale cards? Sell them off now or wait for a hypothetical future time when the cards become a dwindling finite supply as users maybe craft more badges?

     

    Edit: Read last page. Hoarding it is.


  12. You might want to ping Leon with your problem. Knows a lot about the inner minutiae of Twine.

     

    General Useful Twine resources:

    Anna Anthropy's tutorial: http://www.auntiepixelante.com/twine/

    Porpentine's Resource Page: http://aliendovecote.com/?page_id=4047

    Twine Cheat Sheet: http://gamesaslit.textories.com/syllabus/twine-cheat-sheet/

    Twine Documentation http://www.gimcrackd.com/etc/doc/

    Leon Arnott's Macros: http://l.j-factor.com/twine/

    Making Custom JavaScript Macros: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3


  13. Good start! I like the music. Sound integration could be a little smoother (your triggers restart a piece even when it's already playing, and I expected the alarm to still be blaring when I woke up).

     

    I also couldn't figure out how to open the door. E did nothing, although the WebPlayer didn't grab my mouse so I might not have been aiming where I intended.

     

    I don't really understand the concern about pausing. Like, you might think it's ideal for a player to play through the game in one sitting, but there's a whole host of external things like phone calls that can interrupt a player. Which would be more immersion breaking: an interrupted player that is able to pause and return where she left off, or an interrupted player that steps away and returns to an entirely different scene or the end of the game and must repeat what she's already played to get back to the same spot? This is just a hypothetical, because nothing in your current mellow exploration design seems to reflect your stated goal of having the player swept away by events; a stationary player is basically paused anyway.

     

    I also don't see how a single, long dream needs to have the environmental constraints you describe? It's a dream, some places might have jarring transitions, ground might collapse to reveal another island structure beneath the first one, maybe walking inside a building changes what's outside while you're not looking or triggers a 30 Flights of Loving-style jump cut, etc. I don't think there's a right answer to this question: I'd say go with whatever you feel comfortable making and decide just how much internal consistency you want an abstract dream to have.


  14. "Isn't this what video games are about? Doritos, Mountain Dew, late nights and trash talk?" -- IGN.com

     

    "Like the cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane ([Tony Hawk's] motion picture counterpart), every single shot is set to deep focus and delivers." -- IGN.com


  15. The big missing features for smaller games are the profiler (making it easy to see how to make your game operate more efficiently), shaders (access to the displayed pixels for neat visual effects), real time shadows, and render-to-texture (for mirrors and such). But you still get most of Unity's feature set, and they just recently opened up building to Android and iOS for free, which is exciting!

     

    I've heard good things about this tutorial sequence, which teaches C# alongside Unity: http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/

     

    It also depends what you want to do. Unity is built for 3d games, although there are external libraries (some free, some paid) to dig around to make the 2d stuff a little easier. If you just want to get going with 2d game design, I'd recommend Flixel (AS3 is very easy to pick up with a Java background), Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion.


  16. So I played through the XBLA remake of NiGHTS into Dreams after vivid, decades-old memories of being completely befuddled as a child by an in-store demo kiosk of the original Saturn version.

     

    Such a weird game design to wrap your head around. Every level begins with the player character walking a few steps then getting attacked and robbed, making me think I was doing something terribly wrong. The 3d platforming parts that feel so familiar end up being mostly unimportant, while the 2.5d flying sections overwhelm with invisible rails and important game elements out of reach on another plane. Took me until now to figure out that it's a time trial racing game at heart: you need to collect 20 balls over one or more laps, bring them to the spherical robot thingie, then return to the start of the track. And when you finally complete a level, it throws you into a boss fight that emphasizes combat mechanics you might not even know about from the main levels, which you need to replay from the start if you fail at the boss.

     

    Such a steep learning curve, requiring a ton of memorization to excel at any one level, but once I was able to get into the groove I eventually grew to like its charm. 


  17. Proteus is lovely and built on this concept, musically scoring the exploration of a nature-filled island in real time according to what landmarks are around you, how the various fauna react to your presence.

     

    Recently found icefishing v, first person puzzle game about dynamic glitch music. Lets you switch up glitch effects on the fly, music changes as you shoot out rays into the environment that bounce around making tones.

     

    Braid changed up the background music dynamically to reflect your time shenanigans.

     

    Andi McClure's Sweet Nothings is a collection of interesting music/noise generators, some of which found their way into the exploration game Responsibilities.


    The Step Sequencer Kart is full of minigames that take place on a grid that doubles as a music sequencer, generating music based on the discrete positions of various in-game tiles and sprites like Lumines.


  18. Autobiographical games:

    Anna Anthropy's dys4ia and Aegis Wing

    Mainichi

    Conversations With My Mother

    All the Pleading Emoticons

    Depression Quest

    There Ought to be a Word

    scarfmemory

    My First Kiss EXP

    Nineteen

    Kim's Story

    December 2012

     

    History/politics games:

    Games about the Italian Election

    Richard Hofmeier's Secret Agent 47% and the other Play the Year 2012 games

    Avant-Garde

    Most of Molleindustria's work

    Double Tap

    Gametrekking

    Fate of the World

     

    Real time newsgames:

    Game-O-Matic - academic attempt to procedurally generate newsgames based on simple relationships provided by the user

    Games By Angelina - a few attempts to create newsgames by parsing articles for key words and images to shoehorn into a generic platformer engine

     

    UI:

    18 Cadence - fictional to my knowledge, but a fascinating interface for exploring/collating history


  19. Pursued did the whole "figure out where you are after being plopped down into Google street view" thing back in February of this year.

     

    I had a very similar experience with both, but GeoGuessr is a lot cleaner. Clicking on a map is so much more intuitive than typing the name of a city (which may be mispelled, have regional variations) and gives good, analog feedback on how close your guess was. I also appreciate how much less stressful it is to play without a constantly ticking timer. The random starting locations also give it more longevity than Pursued's set of premade dev and user levels.