next »

[Lode]

The game is indeed amazingly improved thanks to Thardus!

I've uploaded the most recent version. Not all graphics are done yet. In level 6, the new floor and wall graphics appear! The slime monster is new, all other monsters still use the old graphics.

I've also created a webpage for the game now:

http://lodev.org/wizardtower/

So what's new?

-New graphics by Thardus!
-Animating player character, smoother scrolling screen and monsters, more other animating things.
-More floor and wall themes than before.
-An Options screen with various tweaks!
-You can't accidently step on things that make you die anymore, except if you enable the Hardcore Mode!
-Some levels have been edited a bit, usually to make them easier.
-The stats have a total score value now (it used to be just times and move amounts)

What's still to come?
-A Chip's Challenge custom level author has given permission to port some of his levels to this game!
-More new graphics.
-Support for complete custom level sets instead of just a single custom level
-...

I thought you did a good job with the puzzles.  Rather than making the player read a ton of dialogue explaining how everything worked, you used the "show-don't-tell" method to teach players what to do with their environment, which I think is great.  The puzzles weren't too difficult, but were still interesting.  I also enjoyed the little messages.

Thanks! The game has come a long way, in the beginning it started with a set of 10 "Tutorial" levels and people had suggested to do the "show-don't-tell" approach instead, so thanks!

The game was slightly laggy, which made certain sections challenging in a bad way.  In "Forest Ice" for example, it was pretty frustrating getting through the area with the mice due to the lag.  I don't mind difficult levels, but when the difficulty comes from lag it is annoying.

That's a shame, I try to make it as responsive as possible. Maybe try messing with the new "Scrolling Screen" and "Scrolling Monster" settings in the options window?

Also, your move speed is limited and locked to tiles (on purpose, it's that type of puzzle game), if you tap the keys faster than your character can move, this might be perceived as lag but it's just the character finishing the previous move.

I wasn't sure how the sword and shield worked.  When you have the shield, can you just walk into enemies?  When you have the sword, do you kill enemies an unlimited number of times from just walking into them?

Indeed. This game uses the arrow keys only, the sword requires no key to swing it or anything. If you have either the sword, or the shield, you don't die from monsters anymore but "interact" with them in a different way:

-shield: monsters won't walk onto you anymore (you're a wall to them), and you can't walk onto monsters either. This means monsters will block you and can cause you to get stuck!
-sword: monsters will still walk onto you, and you can pass through monsters. In both cases, the monster will immediately die (instead of you).
-both shield and sword: monsters won't walk onto you, but, you can walk onto monsters and kill them, so they can't block your way.

I should add more shield and sword levels, there are so many potential puzzles with it, you can control the movements of monsters with the shield and no current level uses that feature yet!

The coin SFX is rather grating when heard multiple times in a row; you might consider doing something less high pitched (lightly tossing a few coins in your hand for example), or pitch shifting the coin SFX.

Good suggestion, I agree! I created the sound the way you described with a mic. I'm not a professional so let me know if it's a bad sound
 

[increpare]

I might be able to whip up some background music, too

Or a theme song? :D  (Going to jump in here and say that supershigi makes good music, who I would personally totally trust to be able to make something that would sound stunning for this sort of game).

Tried it out there again very quickly, it's coming along well, though the higher detail stuff makes me squint a bit/want to zoom in.

(pushing sound effect would be nice).

There's something about walking around on the grass that feels a bit floaty/not quite right to my fingers.  Could be that the character is moving smoothy (linearly) from one tile to the next, maybe some acceleration/deceleration when moving between tiles might help emphasize the tileyness of it (or maybe not).  Not sure.  What do other people think?

[Starflier]

Played through to Floor 25, couldn't find a ladder. COULD walk off the edge of the level into some serious "Nothing out here" blacky stuff.

The game is a hoot though. I like that the puzzles give some leeway, most Sokoban games don't let you screw up at all, this one gives you a couple pushes to realize that you're doing something wrong. Some kind of undo button would be nice anyway, There's a couple floors that required several steps, and I had to restart because I accidentally pushed a rock the wrong way.

The purple things in "Three Rooms" got me thinking: When/if you implement background music, it would be neat to take into consideration the fact that everything has a rhythm already, in the way they move, and try to make the music work with those rhythms.

"Inside a Star Filled Sky" did this by giving each enemy its own piece of music, that together with the other enemies on screen made a constantly changing sound scape.

Even if each enemy had a string of notes and played one with each step, that would be interesting.

[HiVE]

Neat game. Grid-based puzzles are always a good thing!

Feedback... went a bit overboard on this so take or leave at will...

- The early outside areas are a bit slow, as some players have mentioned. The long walk to the sword and back on Floor 3, for example. Floor 7 is where it feels like it starts to pick up, and there's hardly any 'dead' space.

- The controls are a little frustrating, given the real-time tasks you throw at the player early on, dodging monsters etc. It feels far too easy to hold the direction key for a fraction too long and end up walking into an enemy, or even a static hazard like water. At the same time, the player often pauses for a second before starting to move onto the next tile, which is jarring, since it feels like walking into an invisible solid. The patrolling blob near the key on Floor 5 in particular.

- The character animation (though much improved!) still feels a little jumpy, in that it's difficult to visually anticipate the timing of cross-tile movement when it happens as large jumps rather than smooth motion. 4 frames isn't really enough here.

- Also, it's possible to 'start' moving towards a wall/solid when up against it, which locks the player until the 'move' (which doesn't go anywhere) is complete.

- Floor 8 gets a bit long - when you pass the buttons, diamond gate, water trap, and then get killed by a mouse... frustrating. Checkpoint system? You seem to have corected this for some other levels already, which is good, but particularly early stages are sensitive to this.

- Graphical suggestions:

• Decrease the outline/contrast on things like flowers which can be walked over
• Increase the outline/contrast on anything which can't - these really need to stand out as separate
  
• Similarly when you get into the Tower, the floor and block textures are very similar in tone, makes it difficult to see what's what instantly
• Consider stitching tiles together when they cover a large area - for instance, when there are lots of trees, the inside region they contain could appear as a canopy of leaves, instead of individual block trees.
• The inbuilt textbox for 'level complete' and options clashes quite a bit with the rest of the game. Is it possible to grab the data from these functions and draw them yourself on something better-looking?
• It would be nice if buttons and blocks were colour-coded to show what button lowers what blocks - the beginning of Floor 8 is ambiguous between the two buttons and two rows of blocks, not that it makes a difference here, but it would be more intuitive... or, in later Floors, it might well matter.
• The green tentacle trap would be nicer animated.
• Ditto for the diamond dispenser. It doesn't look or feel good when things just appear without any feedback - you could try fading in the newly-created diamond, or having it appear from the dispenser position.
• The tiles on e.g. Floor 9 which seem to serve only as a decoration (e.g. table of drinks, large beaker thing, grass patch, etc) look out-of-place and odd since there's so little decoration everywhere else. They stand out in the way that an interactive object should. This is related to the separation comment above - make your non-interactive things melt into the background, and make the interactive ones stand out hard. When you're introducing new switches, buttons and blocks nearly every floor, you can't get away with having such visually distinctive decorations which don't actually do anything.
• The water blocks look like glass - it wasn't immediately clear that they were elemental blocks at all.

- Floor 10 could do with a brief explanation note; it's safe to go without one for minor variations, but for introducing a whole new set of blocks, you need some exposition. The show-don't-tell is generally good, but occasionally needs a little support when you introduce multiple new targets at once.

- Similarly Floor 11 isn't clear on how elemental blocks transform tiles. e.g. why does adding fire to fire-water make it a solid block? Why does pushing wood onto fire-water not burn the wood?

- When you first push a block onto ice, it seems to 'jump' ahead 1 position, ie. it skips its first frame of motion on the ice.

- The spike-patch blocks in Floor 9 which disappear when you walk on them... there were some similar blocks near the water trap in Floor 8, but they didn't disappear. Is this right? If so, why? If the Floor 8 blocks were just decoration, they looked too much like an object to be that similar to these tiles, which now do do something. In fact, compare them to the similar pattern on the green area in front of the ladder. Those tiles look almost identical to the disappearing ones but do nothing.

- Similarly again, Floor 10 introduces water which looks identical to previous water, but can't be walked into. If it's different, it needs to look different.

Overall, every floor seems to introduce some new and exciting mechanic, like the player-only blocks or the eye monster... the pacing is just right - it keeps things interesting without being overwhelming. BUT the communication is poor - often it's unclear (until you walk on something) what's solid and what isn't, or why things react the way they do sometimes. Visually, the background and the objects need to stand out much more, and some later floors could do with a bit more of the deliberate explanation that the early floors had too much of. Finally, the feel of the control/movement and general polish isn't quite there yet, but these things are easily fixed. The core is solid. Very nice game!

(Also, please make sure your title-header post always contains a link to the latest version! Saves us the time of playing it through then deleting half the post, losing progress and starting again. Good sign that we did though. )

Finally, if you're looking for sound effects, http://freesound.org is brilliant.