Hey, ditto.

Congratulations on the game!

Oh, ha! That would be fun. Along those lines, I once worked on a project where the parallax scrolling, wind, etc. were all controlled by actual physical objects in the level. They were just little animated objects, but it would be fun if they were somehow interactive, or could be destroyed or something.

Or what if the level were made out of prefabricated areas on pieces of paper, but you could pause the game and rearrange the pieces in relation to each other? For instance you could put a piece with a pushable block on it next to a piece with a pressure activated switch on it, and then use the block with the switch. Or you could put a black hole piece underneath an area to increase the gravity temporarily.

Yay, a progress report! Keep up the good work.

*sigh* Mozilla resizes and blurs them annoyingly.

Yeah, I hate that. It was fine until version 3.0. If anyone finds a workaround, I will be forever in your debt.

Is there a trick to grabbing onto ropes when you're going downwards? I seem to fall alot of the time.

I have trouble with this too. I think the 'grab area' of ropes and ladders is a bit too narrow right now.

Regarding controls- I don't think it's so much a question of re-weighting the physics (though a bit of fine-tuning could help) as it is of the Zelda-style context sensitive controls misfiring sometimes.

I like way the physics are weighted. I think the heavy, fast moving main character fits the way the game is played. He's like a little caffienated ant. As Zaphos and others have mentioned, there are a few situations where he comes up to speed a bit quickly (such as when pulling up from a ledge grab). But I think all this calls for is a few adjustments to the current weighting (mostly horizontal), rather than giving him a total overhaul and making his jump floatier.

I really like this game!

I've been wanting to play this since you posted, and I'm glad I did. The level design in particular impressed me. I love the hazards- jumping fish, saw blades, robots. They're all very clean and simple, and you vary the way you use them effectively, which isn't easy to do well.

I like the way you used the world switching mechanic. It didn't feel like a gimmick at all, it felt like a healthy, well-nourished part of the design. To me the novelty of a mechanic is worth absolutely nothing. How much it contributes to the game, how well implemented it is, and how well it is integrated into the world are everything.

For me, there were a couple hiccups in the difficulty ramp. Level 6 was more difficult for me than 5 or 7, and I found level 9 to be more challenging than level 10. I didn't like level 6 as much as the rest (though it was still good  ), but all the rest of the levels were really fun and varied. 

Add some minimalistic animations here and there (especially for the robot)

I second Nanotie's comment about animation. I think a tiny bit of player animation and maybe a simple two frame sequence for the blue robotic enemies would go a long way. I also felt like some of the in-game events could use more feedback attached to them. I would include in this list getting hit, picking up a gun / jetpack, enemies in bubbles timing out, and using a jetpack. None of these were problematic, but I think making these more tactile would improve the feel of the game.

The game generally explains itself well. I was only slightly confused a couple of times. I wasn't sure if the jetpack is limited capacity and time limited, or only time limited. I also wasn't sure how falling into water works. I thought it didn't lose me an extra robot a couple of times(?), but other times I definitely died falling into it- I was a little unsure of what the rules were. But all around things felt very intuitive, and your little signs were unobtrusive but effective.

This is a really polished game. Thanks for making it. I found it really inspirational.



P.S.- Would you mind if I try using an enemy based on your patrolling sawblades in the game I'm working on? I really like them, and I think they, or a variant, would fit in to what I'm making.

(Ssh, I was trying to sneak them in with simpler shading and no antialiasing.) 
Here are altered versions though, you're right that it wasn't consistent:
   

I like the idea of making the pencil more multipurpose. Your (nicely antialiased) stylus / pen is more flexible.

I've been playing more, and think I may have a bug to report. The shopkeeper shot me through the wall immediately to his right.


Derek, this is a great game, but now that I've played it a lot I have to confess I still have some issues with controlling the player. There are just too many situations where it takes some fiddling to do even simple things, like climbing a rope. Don't get me wrong, I love the game, and will love it even if you never improve the controls .

A few concrete problems I've had:

• Dropping a bomb via the hotkey + down arrow while carrying the Damsel results in setting her down- on top of the lit bomb.
• Pressing down and the rope hotkey from a ledge hang drops an unused rope item on the ground.
• Deploying a rope (up or down) while holding the damsel in a ledge grab drops the damsel off a cliff.
• Chests are opened with up + attack, while jars can't be. (I generally think the up + attack combination seems a little unnecessary. Maybe automatically opening chests by touching them or attacking them would be cleaner.)
• Climbing down from a high place using a rope is difficult without performing a ledge grab first (pressing up while over it in mid-air doesn't always seem to work).
  
• (see picture) To descend a ladder that runs through a platform, it's necessary to press down, then up (or up, then down) in rapid succession. Pressing only down results in leaping down through the platform without grabbing the ladder, which has hurt me a number of times.

Sorry, I'm not trying to be negative! Like I said I love this game to pieces, and it's already really fun and high quality despite any control issues. But I think the main character has the potential to be really agile and fun to play as, whereas right now I don't trust the little bugger, and I tend to play as if he's going to attempt suicide every two seconds. I think tightening up the controls and making them more intuitive would do a lot for the game's ability to woo non-hardcore players, as well.

Oh, neat!

I love the rat man's tail wiggle as he lands. I like where you're going with the approach to tile reuse, too. I've never done anything with tiny versatile tiles like this, and I'm totally intrigued.

P.S.- for resizing, you can do this:

Code:

[img width=32][/img]

Where width is your image's width times whatever zoom factor you want.

I wanna drive a limo into a pool.

Okay, I call shotgun. Also, I think the pool should be full of jello.

Terry, why is the man in the upper left hand corner wearing no pants?

Guess what?!? My uncle and aunt in Australia sent me a tin of instant, just-add-water Australian fauna. See, they come in little concentrated slabs, and when you add water they come to life. There's an echidna, and a cassowary, and a numbat...

I don't want to rehydrate the koala yet, though, because I don't have a eucalyptus tree in my yard.

I use an LCD as my primary monitor. That said I prefer CRT's in most situations.

Newer flat panel displays have pretty decent viewing angle, and the colors don't shift nearly as much as they used to. Response time has also improved a lot, so ghosting (image retention or trails from moving images) isn't as bad as it once was. Flat panels are still flaky, but I generally trust them now.

But CRT's have none of these problems. The biggest selling point for me however, is the way flat panel displays can't switch resolutions properly. As someone who loves older games, it really irks me when I play something at a low resolution and It gets all mangled and blurry looking! I still reconnect my CRT sometimes so I can play older games.

One real advantage of flat panel screens is that the black point tends to be better than with CRT's.

A game that simulates the difficulty of drinking coffee, similar to QWOP

Aagh! Make it now! With a realistic scalding liquid burn simulation.

Also I still really like the bird flight similation idea. There's something very alluring about that.

I love the internal organ idea, too.

Here's one I had a while ago-
you play as a sort of an abstract spider. You can't move directly, but you can spit out little springy webs which attach to you at one end, and the environment at the other. The webs contract as they harden, so you can manipulate objects with them or hoist yourself around.

Who did the earlier round of smiley additions? I would love to see this joystick added. It's a work of genius.


Also these:

I also humbly ask that the writing hand and concentrating / thinking smilies I did earlier be taken into consideration, if they seem like they would be useful.  

Some great approaches to music and ambient sound have been described in this thread.

Glaiel, I really like your tracking + fading idea. It's really simple, and seems like it could be really effective.

I wonder if it would be fun to extend this idea so the entire game is musically continuous. Menus and different areas in the game could all use a different subset of tracks, but everything would occur within the same 'song'. It would probably work best for something semi-ambient.

2008

• I finished my first game!
• I went back to college, and am doing much better now.
• I became a marginally less incompetent programmer.
• I found out that TIGS had been right under my nose for ages, and promptly joined.
• I played a million awesome independent games
• My best friend moved out of town.
• My cat got his neck broken by the neighbor's dog. I still cry about that.
• I entered in the IGF student category.

2009

• I'd like to do a a bit of rapid prototyping.
• I will continue to work on my bad game development habits (especially obsessing over the wrong details and not organizing projects well).

Hugs to all the Commonplace book contest winners, which includes every entrant as far as I'm concerned.

Also hugs to Santa for keeping on in the face of the ghastly consumer makeover we've given his holiday. 

Wow.

All these new people are awesome.

This is the first competition I saw from beginning to end on TIGSource, and I have to say it was a lot of fun seeing everyone's entries grow from little germs of inspiration into great, ponderous Lovecraftian monstrosities!

Great work all around!

Congratulations, Xerus! Nice game.