- The blue horse still sometimes falls through the floor. Out of maybe 10 times I started the game, it fell once.

Joseph Karl Ratzinger! What is wrong with that freaking horse?! I've tried so many different things to fix it! He never falls through on my computer. I have no idea whats wrong he isn't any different than any other entity in the game. He used to fall through everytime on my friends computer but I fixed it on his and I thought he was done falling through forever but I guess not.

- The conversation text with the blue horse is unreadable. It's black text on near black background. I had to turn gamma way up to even see it was there.

Really? It is perfectly readable on my computer and all the computers I have tried the game on. Do you have your default brightness down really low?

- It's HARD, maybe too hard. It was easier to run past enemies than trying to fight them. Especially later when there's half a dozen enemies on one screen.

Yeah, I'm thinking about increasing the frequency of health drops a bit. Each enemy has 1/6 of a chance to drop one, maybe I should make it 1/4. But I don't want to make too easy. Its a short level so I want it to still be pretty hard, but not impossibly hard.

- Maybe a ranged attack or a block skill would make things a bit easier. I found it difficult to fight 3-4 enemies (well ok, even 1-2 were challenging).

Good point, I'm not going to add it in this game though. It will change the whole balance. Maybe whenever I make the full game.

- Those black knight horses have a too high reach with their weapon, in my opinion. You get hit even though it looks like you're far enough away (2-3 centimeters in front of its weapon's ... uh ... swoosh ).

I'll have to ajust the hit boxes a little.

- The "Can Games" screen in the beginning and some arrows have a higher resolution than the rest of the game, which makes it look inconsistent. The rest of the graphics are a good match but these two instances stand out.

I thought they looked fine.

- Alt+Tab doesn't work, the game cannot be restored after pressing Alt+Tab.

Yeah, I'll have to look into that one.

Thought of being able to make the horse duck down? Could add a bit of depth to the attack system (ducking to attack certain enemies and avoiding others' attacks).

Yeah I do think it feels like you should be able to duck. This is something I will probably add in the full length game also.


Thanks for the feedback guys!  Any others is greatly appreciated.

The important thing is not changing the avatar in your profile, but the avatar in your heart.

[A]

Not A Beaker. The muppet Beaker.

That's what I thought too. Who is that guy anyway? He looks like Beaker.

People from the olden days are so stupid. They don't even know how to make cars right.

Thanks man, fixed my links too.

I did it! Finally I was able to make it work on all graphics cards! After hours of trying different things. The new version is here! If you were getting the weird stretching problem before it should work fine now.


Download

I also fixed some other glitches:
   -Crashing problem on the boss
   -Game running too fast
   -Player falling through floor when knocked over at some places
   -Blue horse at the begining falling through
   -Title screen shows controls

Thanks everyone who helped out. Please download and tell me what you think.

Well whenever the graphics mess up, most enemies fall through the floor. Since the collision is based on the image dimensions, everything is messed up when the graphics don't work.

By the way deadeye, don't you think its time to upgrade from that old 4400mx? I mean, I think that's the same graphics card abraham lincoln had when he wrote the gettysburg address.

the only requirement a game needs is people.

Wrong. Poeple just get in the way of playing video games and watching tv. Thats why I prefer robotic companions...


...actually thats not why, but I do prefer them.

Thanks man. Luckily the judging computer has a decent graphics card and will probably not get the error. I am still really bummed out about this, though, the game went together so nicely but now I am running into this crap and a lot of people can't even play my game. Oh well, I'll fix it somehow...

Anyway do you mind telling me your gfx card? I'm trying to narrow down the minimum required to play.

Also, has anyone ran into the glitch where the blue horse at the begining falls through the floor? And, has anyone beaten it yet?

Hmm, this method might work but it will require too much code rewriting, and I have to submit in 3 hours.
 
Well, thanks Zaphos, and everyone for your help. I am not going to be able to fix this before the deadline. As long as you don't have a graphics card from the stone age it should work fine. I think I will just write a game engine in opengl and port the game over.

I found the error. Apparently only newer cards support using textures that have dimensions that are not powers of two. So with older cards the textures are automatically scaled to the nearest power of two. I'm currently trying to find a way around this and its not going too well.

Wow. This is really annoying. I hate computers. But thanks though, I have an old mx4400, I'll put it in and see what happens. Does any one have any clue at all what the problem could be?

Download Bravehorse

Alright this is the final version of the game for the contest. I was able to fix the speed error but I could not do anything about the graphics problem. I have no clue what is happening. I tried the game on a few other computers and one of them had the error. I wasn't able to figure anything out but I will continue to look into it. For anyone that had the error, do you mind telling me what graphics card you have? Also maybe updating video drivers might solve the problem.

Thanks everyone for trying it out and giving some feedback!

Wow, I haven't seen anything like this graphics glitch before. For those of you with the graphics glitch, make sure you have the march 2008 release. I am going to try a few things and see if I can figure out whats going on. Kind of hard though when I can't replicate the glitch.

It was too  fast. Way too fast, uncontrollably fast.
I mean fast like when you have the game-time going as fast as your cpu can go.

I had a frame limiter programmed in, but that seemed to make problems on some computers so I just have the frame limit set as the monitor refresh rate at the moment. I thought that would solve the problem, but I'll have to look into it more today. The controller with the strange layout is because I set them to the defaults of my controller wich has button 10 in the start position. In the future I will make the keys customizable for both the keyboard and gamepad. On XNA, I haven't used it yet, but I want to try to start using it before too long.



@Zaphos:
  Thanks for the list! I will definitely try to fix these things whenever I make the full length game. I don't think I'll be able to make any changes before I submit it today though, especially because I have a whole set of new problems to deal with.

Thanks again for your input everyone, it is very helpful! I will try to get up a new (and hopefully fixed) version of the game up in a couple hours.

[Bravehorse]

Bravehorse
--------------------------------------



Bravehorse is a sidescroller fighter that we made for the GameDev.net 4 Elements 6 contest. It is written in C++ using DirectX. The total development time was 2 weeks. We are planning to take this engine and make a longer full length game with more levels.

I am really happy with what we were able to accomplish in a short amount of time. We aren't going to submit the game until tomorrow so if you have any suggestions or find any bugs please let us know!

We would also like feedback on the overall feel of the game, the engine, fighting, music, graphics, or anything else that can help us improve the game. Or if you just want to do some general bashing of the game that is fine too .

Controls:
Keyboard:
 z-Jump
 x-Attack
Gamepad:
 1-Attack
 2-Jump
 10-Start

Requirements: Windows, DirectX (if you get missing .dll errors try downloading the latest version of DirectX)

Download

I don't like video game movies anyway.

Nice Darthlupi, that is looking really nice!

Pretty cool, not much to comment on. You should try using punctuation marks.

Thanks for the feedback guys, it has to be done in 10 days so itle be out soon.

It looks like a sequel to Altered beast

Someone else said the same thing, I've never played altered beast though.