[Cut-Down Info about it's current state and plans:]

Hi,
So I just started college and was kinda bored. I didn't have anything to do one weekend so my girlfriend said "Hey, you should spend the weekend making a game. I have a lot of work to do and by Monday I'll want something to play." So I did. And that's what this is.


So the majority of this little thing was made in that weekend. Graphics, engine, basic gameplay, etc. but most of the items and content came afterwards. Since it turned out to be one of my most complete-looking projects, I figured I'd post it somewhere to get some feedback, and where better than the feedback forum!


Right now it just consists of a few getting-started levels and one or two very simple puzzles. I hope to later fill it with push-block puzzles galore, but I'm not very good at that yet.

I'm really bad at making levels, especially puzzles, so there is only a few right now...but I hope to get my friend to do some when he gets a chance. Though if others wanted to, I wouldn't mind that either

Cut-Down Info about it's current state and plans:

• Each door in the atrium (first room) will be 'unlocked' through the age-old mechanic of needing a tool to get through the door like a bomb or an arrow or something.
• The ghost guy will always follow you through the level, but will only hurt you when you are < half health, so find a potion quick!
• Bosses will probably end up acting a lot like the ghost in that they won't conform to the map grid, and will be much larger than 1 tile
• There isn't any armor yet
• Yes, falling down a hole forces you to go back to the atrium, not a bug
• The only playable level-tree is the bottom left door. The bottom right door is just a debug/testing room.
• Swiping is a fun attack technique that doesn't put you in as much risk of getting hurt. You do it by pressing the arrow keys in a clockwise motion like this:
  

_{There is also a level editor, you can use it by running the jar with -e, though since most of this game was made in the first weekend, the levels are hard coded so you can't actually play any levels you make}


Also, if anyone happens to be a gaming student at RIT New York pop me a message

Download: Executable Jar
Controls and such are in the README

Any comments about anything are welcome
[/list]

I don't really care for dungeon crawlers much myself, but this one actually looks appealing. Very original.
The art, the characters, and the gameplay all look awesome. I would play it (if I had an ios device )

My only complaint is that the vampire just looks....weird. I don't really know what it is, its not his character abilities or anything it just doesn't look like he really fits in for some reason...but I'm baffled as to why.

As for your question, aesthetically it might be nice to add in the double-tab to reveal stats, but in terms of gameplay its just an annoying step between you and otherwise freely available information. Especially in such a direct command game like this where the player can just kinda jump around to anywhere at any moment, it would make more sense to leave all the stats open from the beginning to help the player plan his next move.
I don't really know what I'm talking about, but it seems like you're adding in another step just for the sake of looks which I'm never very fond of...

[Edit:]

This is pretty fun, for the first few seconds I thought it was kinda clunky and I kinda felt too restricted, but I got over that quickly and I found it to be rather exciting. I was well entertained for quite a while, very nice job! Not a thing I encountered ever really made me not want to keep playing.

Edit: whoops, I didn't notice there was an even more recent version >_< sorry. Fixed most of this though.


Good:
-The fuel bars blink with text, which is interesting. It gets my attention enough to tell me something has changed, though is not too distracting.
-The trick system doesn't feel as strict as I expected it to be. At first I thought I had to be facing forward perfectly on landing in order to not get hurt, but it is pleasingly loose in that respect.
-The tricks are slow enough where you fear doing one because you might not making it all the way around in time to land, making it quite a challenge. (I didn't realize at that time you could let go of X and spin back >_<)
-Not always caring that you can't land a trick and kinda just trading in shield for boost anyway
-I really like how limited the number of graphics are. Its really just you, the land, then the trees and meteors. I don't really know why I like this but it feels simple and clean. Fits well with the techy style. (That was 0.5.2 but it still stands, though I kinda preferred the simple, white ship)
-Trees falling over and creating more of a problem by being bigger and more in the way.
-Being able to see meteors coming to avoid them
-Seeing meteors coming and still not being able to predict anything since they knock trees over in your way.
-The pop-up text makes everything feel a lot more active.
-The whole background and terrain is really awesome in my opinion. Even though when I focus on the mountains I begin to see errors, but I still didn't care. The checkered grass and the smooth mountains look really nice together.
-It being possible to miss the refuel points. (And not being able to go back for them)
-The HUD zooming out as you boost. Though I think this effect would be made a little better if the HUD went back to the angled text that it was like in the 0.5.1 build
-The entire GUI is a lot better in the latest version. I didn't like how things were 3D in the menu but 2D in the HUD in 0.5.2, but the menu is very well done in the latest version.
-Those pixely shield collision graphics are amazing.

Bad:
-Didn't realize that there were even tricks at first. Blew through the tutorial too fast (may be my own fault) and went to play. Ran out of boost and just kept going. Strangely though, I was still kept entertained, so this is both bad and good. (Note, that was when playing with 0.5.2's tutorial)
-I like how the new menu makes the fuel, boost, and shield readily available for the eye, but now the other three indicators are completely off radar. I can't even remember what those were for and I just played 30seconds ago. I almost prefer the old layout better, especially the angled numbers and such, they fit nicely in terms of the sorta sharp theme.
-Not being able to jump without boost. I've not even managed to get adequate air off of just speeding off a hill to get any tricks in without any boost yet.
-Tricks just feel kinda off in terms of gameplay, I would find them a lot more fun if they were quicker even though being quicker would kinda contradict with something I said in the good section. But they don't really fit in the theme once you think about it, you're a jet speeding across a terrain as fast as possible avoiding meteors, but doing tricks is rather slow and arduous. Maybe you could try splitting it, so that every time you press the arrow key (with x) you do one trick. And every trick consists of doing maybe 5 quick spins before slowing down to face forward, that way it will still feel fast while keeping the risk of not having enough time to do the trick.
-It'd probably be a hassle to fix, but landing on top of a meteor seems to hurt you regardless of whether it should. I don't know if this should even be fixed but I thought it might make it flow a bit smoother if you could land on a meteor without worry and just keep speeding through. Though at the same time I also like the fact that you can't because it forces you into panic sometimes when you know there's this great big rock in the way of your landing.
-It took me a really long time to figure out that you could let go of X to stop a trick and save yourself. Would have been really handy to know. Also, it would probably be better if you just had it so that it spun back if you let go of the arrow since letting go of X kinda breaks the flow of the game.
-The newest meteor crashing graphic is kinda distracting, though I got used to it kinda quickly
-I had no idea there was a pause button for the longest time.
-The tutorial still needs to say that letting go of X will right you.
-The newest ship graphic doesn't really fit with everything else. The landscape is kinda plain with one-color skins (which I like) but the new ship is really detailed and colorful, which is kinda strange.

Random Recommendations
-It might be a good idea to make it so that the fuel resuppliers get further and further from each other as you progress so that you are forced to maintain a high speed. It would be incredibly difficult to get very far, and also to balance it out so that it is even possible (with all the things slowing you down), so maybe that'd be like a hard mode? also with that barrage of small asteroids that Inanimate suggested, that'd be cool.

Bugs:
I played this on the 0.5.1 version for a few minutes and didn't encounter anything, but within seconds on 0.5.2 I got some strange ones. Though they didn't happen very frequently at all.
Edit: Derpity derp, could probably ignore all these as they are all in 0.5.2, I don't know if they are in the latest.

-I went really fast off a hill and started doing tricks and ended up past the left map boundaries and fell off. I was also quite a ways up high so that might have something to do with it.
-I noticed some trees that were upright and straight floating above a landed meteor that looked almost as though they were placed there. I can't be certain they didn't just fly up there on impact, but there were two of them making it hard to believe they actually landed straight up like that.
-I ran out of shield and triggered the damaged fire particle effects, but then hit a shield boost during the midst of it and got healed however the particles still lasted.
-I Hit something right before going up a slope and lost all momentum. Started going backwards and soon after fell through the floor and out of the map. Couldn't do it again though.

(bugs in the latest version)
-The terrain occasionally overlaps the GUI in the corners. Like the lowest corners of the fuel bars would intersect with the ground and be behind it.
-Music off button in the menu doesn't do anything


This is a lot more text than I intended when I started writing, and while I'm writing this line I still don't even feel half way through...
Effin' heck yeah, that was a lot longer than I intended >_<

Also, what exactly does "Bt" stand for under the boost bar? BoosT?

Can someone recommend a good 3d library for java (or c++ but I'd prefer java) that doesn't use opengl?

I want to write a 3d project at school but the IT department got clever in the war against computer lab gamers and blocked opengl from initiating
I think they also blocked direct3d but I haven't managed to test that yet

Really good music
Wacky super powers I think of having from time to time
Weird little tidbits of information, like how spiders move their legs by pumping fluids into them O.O
Those times when I zone out with some object in my hand and notice that it actually reacts in a rather strange manner (not high)

Yeah, I agree with Famil that it definitely needs more instruction, and I think the available terrain/bouncy tools need to be a little more noticeable. Also, the restart button took me a minute to figure out that you have to actually click the arrows and that you cant just click the center
Something you might want to add would be the ability to reset the ball and not the whole field so that you can test your terrain and revise it as needed.

Just some simple suggestions, but nice work

Holy crap this is one of the most beautiful things I've ever encountered

I used to try to use this as often as possible on computer science tests/assignments

Code:

char zard;

Ive had this same exact element sorta gameplay stuck in my head for years and now i might actually get to play it
looking forward to seeing it done!

What Ive done:
Wrote a glimpse of a simple room generator to hold the tribes, as seen above
Added an inventory
Made the gui look kidna better
Rewrote a couple unbelievably crappy things to make it faster

So really the entire basis of the project is finised, ie the shell of a server that runs fully off plugins
All thats left is for me to add is the starting plugin to make it a game, but soem of it is kinda already there

Hopefully I can get a pre-alpha thing out soon to test for speed issues with more than 5 clients

incredibly addicting :D

Added line-of-sight to the lighting + a gradient
And I got kinda carried away while scratching out my servers domain
Big box on the right is the incoming chat window, and the small one is the outgoing

You cant really see it here but the big black box is actually 1 big map  + 8 smaller ones surrounding it to preview the next map your about to move when you approach the edges

Kinda just re-realized that I still need to spice up the gui, since it looks lonely and empty and bald and bad... could use some advice there since Im under the impression that thats about the best java guis can get, but I really hope not >_<

Also worth noting, the generator + AI are now fully run off a plugin system, so the server is now basically the shell console thing I was planning, albeit a bit less fancy, but creations never live up to the mind bogglingly beautiful things that you originally concoct in your dreams

This really just leaves optimization and decent content
Hopefully that gets done relatively quickly between schoolwork >_>

What an original name

And whats this about 2 touch surfaces? Ive heard all the other stuff but thats the first Id heard of that
also how would you fit 2 screens of a psp2 onto a single android screen?

I'm curious as to how you'll handle multiplayer gameplay-wise. Will it be real-time, or semi-real time or...something different o_o


The generate-as-you-go part sounds delightful, though - it'd be interesting to generate parts of the world based on where you've been and such, like coming upon a razed village, and then, seeing that you've been there, generating a group of survivors in exodus for you to come across, and then coming upon a camp of the soldiers who razed the place, and finally the horde army they belong to...or something simpler, I dunno. In any case it sounds rad, and mod support is always a wonderful thing.

Not really sure what you mean by semi-real time, but excluding lag it should be real time >_<

As for generation events, I do plan on adding a couple of small events, maybe short chains but nothing too complex/long
although the "generators" can also just read from a file too, when the server calls a plugin for a map at [x,y], the generators from the plugins take full control on the output, so the developer can generate a fully new map of whatever type, a map that had been generated from a previous server run being read from a file, or a map that the developer may have written in a level editor, like a town or something!

Personally, I find the ASCII graphics rather charming.

This actually looks like something I was working on, only a lot better executed. Now I won't feel so bad about not using that idea.

I am kinda fond of them, they make the objects open to speculation plus its a lot easier on me
However it also makes it difficult to find text that fits the part you are trying to portray without stretching the idea too far and getting obnoxious
Ill probably end up with a ascii/drawn hybrid like you see in the pic >_>

I really liked the little part in your first demo where the blocks followed you around, I know it seems annoying and in the way but theres something about it that seems fascinating >_<
Maybe the pure white look had something to do with it, I really dont know, so feel free to ignore me

Anyway I like everything youve done so far, and for charity no less! Looking forward to seeing the result :D