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[pulsemeat]

Alright, finally finished my first compo entry at the last minute!

The game is a bit of a mash-up between Zelda: Four Swords and Princess Maker. You spend some of your time in the dungeon, killing monsters and getting gold, and the rest of your time in town training and building stats. You can play with up to 4 players on a single computer, and I've also included support for controllers.



Latest version:
http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/games/110259-dungeons-of-fayte

There's a lot of content in the game, with four dungeons, 12 classes, and over 40 character endings, so it should have some replay value. Lots of unique events all over the place to enjoy as well.

The game is meant for co-op, but there is some difficulty scaling, so you shouldn't have any problems playing single-player.

Of course, this is for the Assemblee competition, so I made liberal use of other people's awesome assets. Here are the additional credits:

Content Design: Tanya Short

Art from: Oddball, Oryx, and Geese

Sound: Atuun, Jorge Boscan, Shaktool, Stian Stark

Music: Craig Stern, JRHill, Patrick Alexander, Synnah, Wyvern, Stevobread, and Shackles

Special Thanks: Dariusk for fixing the blurriness, and Dom2D for his awesome box art.

UPDATE: Fixed an issue an town where you could get stuck on each other while exiting buildings, and also fixed the healing pool text. And I also buffed casters a bit, they were kind of weak before.

UPDATE #2: A small number of people have had problems with an Unexpected Error when the game boots up, so I posted a version of the game that uses a dll to play mp3s instead. This version loads much faster and I've also included a quit warning.

UPDATE #3: The new version has an .exe that fixes the blurriness, as well as the old, extra blurry version just in case.

UPDATE #4: Updated with two new classes, the Storm Mage and Summoner, a bunch of new events, and other tweaks and fixes.

UPDATE #5: Added the Hall of Legends, including a big nasty challenge and unlockables. Also fixed a few bugs, and made the Buccaneer a lot more useful. Special thanks to Geeze for some extra art!

[Lon]

WOW!  Screen shots look good.  Sounds amazing, looking forward to playing it!  Co-op too!  Sweet!

[oryx]

Crazy, this is insanely fleshed out. Looking forward to trying it more. Is it balanced ok for 1 player?

How do you pick a new class/career?
I hit escape on a dialog box by accident and it quit the game (doh!)Are you sure you want to quit Y/N would be nice.
Also makes me wish some of the graphics were polished up a bit more

[Lon]

Fun stuff.  Well done.  Had a blast playing it with my bro, lots of clever and entertaining events.  The game is challenging,  .  Have yet to beat the final boss (or a dungeon for that matter), looking forward to winning one of these days. 

I did find a bug/glitch though.  When my bro and I were trying to figure out the 'training' I was at the select menu for choosing training or work (or what ever those options are). I decided to cancel out while my bro was standing right next the entrance/exit of the training area and we both ended up stuck, unmovable on the same square.  We had to exit and start over.

The other bug we ran into is when sometimes some kind of action is taking place on screen and a dialog pops up (like the fountain of life one) and sometimes the text doesn't appear in its proper spot of the dialog popup, the game is still quite playable.

Nice job pulsemeat, my bros and I are having a blast playing your game, and cracking up over the entertaining events.

[zpxlng]

This is amazing! I love it! I wish I'd made it.

I love the old PC game flavour it has -- I don't mean the graphics; I mean the way it's kind of mysterious and obscure, and figuring out how to play it is part of playing it. (Of course, the low-res graphics contribute to that feeling of mysteriousness.) (Mystery?) (Mysteriousness.)

I've only played it by myself so far, so I can't comment on the co-op. But, yeah, this game is wonderful. Short but deep -- meant to be played over and over, slowly but surely exploring every part of the world. Ah! I love this feeling!

Well done; I'm so impressed by this.

[pulsemeat]

Thanks for the kind words, guys!

I'll see what I can do about the town bug, that's a pretty guaranteed way to break the game. I think the fountain of life is the only place where the text can get screwed up like that. I'll look at that too.

You buy new classes at the shop, btw.

[Lon]

Yeah, the only game-breaking (but easily avoided) bug we found was the one where you cancel out of the 'work selection' popup and get stuck on your teammate who was standing right at the entrance/exit of the work area(s).

We finally beat the final boss!   However we have yet to beat a dungeon,  .  It was lots of fun.  Beat it 2-player co-op with my bro (Shackles).  We were both Barbarians.  I really liked my ending.  I lived on to be known as the best brawler in the kingdom, it was said that I even killed the Bone Lord with my bare fists.    I really like dominating dragons/demons/boneLords/darkLords/armies with my bare fists.  Magician can kill things with magic, archer with arrows, warrior with swords, assassin with blades but a monk/brawler/fighter can kill dragons with his bare hands!

[sergiocornaga]

This game is awesome. I hope to play it with 4 people at some point, and finally beat the Bone Lord.

Which classes feature ranged weapons?

[pulsemeat]

Alright, fixed the bugs you guys mentioned. Thanks a bunch!

The Archer and Longbowman have ranged attacks, and the Adept, Necromancer, and Buccaneer all have ranged specials.

[Mikademus]

Good, fun. Nice old-school feel to it. I like the way the story is progressed by messages. Somewhat difficult to control the direction you attack.

---> Add a volume control or mute option!!! My ears are bleeding! <---

 (All my sound goes to the stereo, but the system-wide sound control is disabled by the USB gadget)

[pulsemeat]

Hmmm... I should probably have mentioned that the mouse is definitely the least polished control scheme here. I only included it so four people could play at once without having to have controllers, and it's fun enough if you've got four people, but if you're playing alone, definitely pick another scheme.

Sadly, I'm not sure I can add volume control this late. Damn my feeble skills!

[mesotes]

totaly loved it! though i couldnt play it with some other players right now, so i lost all the way

[Eyvindur]

That was ridiculously fun!  I played it through once with 2 players and once as a single player and it seems pretty well balanced either way.  I still can't defeat the bone lord, but I love that my effort was rewarded with a personalized ending sequence despite my ineptitude.  I was a big fan of questing in Princess Maker 2 so I love that you've designed Dungeons of Fayte around the best aspects of that game, and made it multiplayer to boot!  Good job!

Oh yeah, one suggestion: why not let the character attack diagonally?

[pulsemeat]

The main reason I didn't do diagonal attacks was because the sprites didn't support them. But I think it ended up ok, because with the attacks all based around the cardinal directions, you head for the diagonal angles for safety when you want to dodge.

[Arucard]

Just another positive comment for ya! 
I have only played alone so far, but am really happy to see co-op RPGs again. I mean offline co-op, so I'm looking forward to trying this with a friend. I also like the way that being in town breaks up the action between each stage, getting you ramped up to go crawling again. Will you continue working on this post-compo? I had a suggestion to make the jobs into little minigame type affairs, rather than just the questions/options.

[pulsemeat]

I may continue working on this or turn it into something else, but either way I'd be interested in hearing your ideas. The only thing regarding minigames is that they'd have to be REALLY short, because I want to make sure the other players don't get bored. But I imagine there'd still be a way to make it work.

[rayteoactive]

hmmm... the visual is pretty blurish when I play this... any idea why? I hope I'm not the only one with this issue

[pulsemeat]

The big problem is that I'm using 8x8 sprites and zooming in, and Game Maker 7 doesn't seem to do that very well. The only solution I can imagine would be to blow up the sprites in Photoshop so I don't have to zoom, but that's kind of unfeasible at this point.

Changing the screen resolution to something small did bad things and generally irritates people, and that's why I usually prefer to resort to the zoom feature. I'd love to know if anyone knows a better way to do this, or if there are some options that can be changed to avoid the bluriness.

[Dragonmaw]

Can't boot. Gives unexpected error on both builds.

[pulsemeat]

OK then, if the unexpected error is still happening, it must be due to the mp3's, since Game Maker doesn't play nicely with that file format. I'll have to see if there's a dll that can help with the problem.