New version out. Features a NEW NAME, sound effects, 5 new levels, some fixes to the old levels, a reordering of some of the levels, a brand-spanking new Hipparchean physics engine :D, and
slightly slower-paced gameplay (in response to those with sloth-like reflexes
)
Portile V0.3 (466KB, for Windows*)
(*the makefile should compile under macs as well, so long as you have allegro installed)
It's been a while since I've done anything with this. I'd like to say first that I appreciate the comments, and that I did want to reply to them sooner, but I thought it would be better to actually try to implement the various suggestions first.
I thought the reflections looked cool, but they were confusing and my reaction was to just find the 'main' room and look at that.
I think you should get the hang of it eventually. I've thought about making them more background, but...I guess I just didn't want to. But I did consider it in light of the comment above, really!
They might add a lot more if you made use of them as more than just a graphical oddity. For example, [...]
It certainly would, you're entirely right. It's something I don't want to try in this project, though. It doesn't particularly fit in with what I had in mind for this game. But it might lead to some interesting scenarios.
Often I would not even really understand how I moved, I'd win a level and say ... wait, what just happened?
I have added a slight pause at the moment of level completion, which should aid your retrocontemplation. (yeah, I lied about testing these particular suggestions. I thought about them, and thought about testing them, but didn't).
Perhaps slowing it down and adding a pixel of 'motion blur' would help?
That would definitely be an indea. I hadn't really thought of it before, but now I think that maybe doing something a la Passage-style downsampling/whatever blending would work really well. Bugger. Wish I had thought of that before.
Or perhaps letting the character's pixel move smoothly
That's how I usually deal with tile-based motion, and there would be no problems if I did that. Alas, I didn't :/
I guess there are just too many years of using WASD to move for that reflex to go away on demand.
I can't help you with that dude. I'd like to, but I think that's a problem you're going to have to work through yourself
i got really far, (some of the timing based puzzles were really tricky) but i eventually got to a point where thhere wasnt a 'die' key, and i got blocked, inside a one space, and coudln't get out of.
Ah nooooes that was the second-from-last level. BIG SORRIES ANNABELLE. Thank you so much for playing the game through. And yes, I hadn't noticed that little trap. In test versions there was a suicide button, but I figured it'd be nicer if people didn't need one in practice...
i do think that they could be toned slightly to bring focus to the center one.
Hmm. Okay. That's two votes for it. Okay, I'll give it another try then.
My input is that the keypress detection is awkward. [...]
Ah, thank you very much for pointing this out, and your detailed commentary. I did a lot of work testing out various options on this. The problem with detecting key-presses in-between frames is that then the controls can seem even more sensitive. I don't know if slowing down the frame rate exacerbated the effect or not. But I'm not getting as annoyed by it. I also toned down the earlier levels where this effect might have actively contributed to people's deaths. Hopefully it's not as big a problem. As I said above, if I interpolated movement between frames, the problem would vanish entirely. Or if I just made the game turn based (which I'm resisting).
Also, I wasn't too pushed to put in a save system. Once you know how to solve the levels, you can do most of them in less than 10 seconds (many in much less), so it really isn't, I think, necessary at this point.
Anyway. As long as this minor update took, I'm unlikely to go back to this project for a little while (Except, maybe, to add an extra level or two as the mood takes me).