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[Magnesium Ninja]

Ascension BETA Version 0.4.7

Hey guys and girls! After roughly 6 months of work, Magnesium Ninja Studios is proud to present the very first public demo for our survival horror game, Ascension! Please note that this is not representative of the finished product, nor does it represent any part of the full game.

We started working on Ascension way back in April of 2011, with the goal of creating a genuinely frightening game. Now, six months later and with some actual progress to showcase, I personally think we've succeeded. We'd love to see if you agree.

This beta test serves two main purposes:

1. We want to hear your opinion. Do you like the game? Do you hate it? What's good and what's bad?
2. We want to show you what we've been doing. We've been silent for a long while, and it's time we gave an explanation.

The game is a 2D sidescroller. The beta is set inside an expansive basement, but the full game will feature a much more varied environment. If you're familiar with the horror genre, you'll understand that the game is as scary as you decide to make it. We suggest that for the best experience, you play in the darkness with headphones on.

With that said, we hope you have fun with the game! We'd greatly appreciate it if you gave us your thoughts on the game. Positive comments are great, but what we're really looking for is what we did poorly. We want to make the full game as perfect as we can, and you guys are the best helpers there are.

Screenshots:






Download:

Note: the .zip file must be extracted before playing!
Ascension 0.4.7 (10.59 Mb)


Closing Comments:

After reading that giant wall of text above, we hope we've snared your interest on our project. Ascension is by no means complete; we have a long road ahead of us. If you're interested in following along, you can check out our TWITTER, our WEBSITE and our FACEBOOK for the most up-to-date information.

Thank you so much for taking the time to check out our game; we hope you'll stick around for the long haul!

-Magnesium Ninja Studios

[RichMakeGame!]

hey, i love the atmosphere great work!

2 things which stand out to me as far as things to improve:

1- I didn't understand how to use inventory items at first. Maybe I read it and forgot, but the intuitive way is to be able to click on the inventory icon so I would add that as a way to use things

2- no saving? I don't know how long the demo is and I don't know if I can play it in one go. Saving/checkpoints seems like an important missing feature.

[Magnesium Ninja]

Thanks for the feedback!

1 - We will definitely add numbers to the hotbar so the player always remembers how to use his/her items

2 - The demo is around 30 or so minutes long, potentially longer if you take your time. We didn't add saving to the demo mainly due to a lack of time, but it will definitely be in the full game!

[sevn]

played about 5 minutes. I'm in class right now and dont have much time, so excuse my shortness. Not sure what caused the problem, running win7 with a GTS 250

[Magnesium Ninja]

Woah, that's an odd one. Looks like your surfaces stopped working. Did this happen the moment you started the game, or while you were in that room?

[marsfromvenus]

Just letting you know I am dl'ing from description and I hope to have some constructive feedback soon!

[sevn]

Woah, that's an odd one. Looks like your surfaces stopped working. Did this happen the moment you started the game, or while you were in that room?

The title screen was fine, the starting dialog kept the screen black, but when the level loaded / player appeared..

[SpazDad]

I like it so far.  I agree that not being able to save was frustrating.  Hitting the space bar after pausing (by accident) without any confirmation that you wish to quit was annoying.  I would have liked to be told how to access the info bar sooner in the game.  All in all the game has a look, feel and sound of quality.  I am looking forward to the full version.

[kidchameleon]

Wow this is nice, I look forward to the full release. Perhaps the mouse pointer could be more visible, I spent the first few minutes doing the moonwalk as I didn't realize the mouse was in front of me!

[{del}]

- Do you plan to have some sort of a map ?
It will be really useful, so many doors in this game i can't remember which is which anymore.

- Would be nice if you show how to use flash light / gun earlier in the game, i try pressing all keys to turn on the flashlight/the gun with no avail, until later when the tutorial pops up.

- I want to keep the HUD open instead of auto-hide, [tab] should just toggle it on/off.
I know you don't want to clutter your screen with the HUD, but i need to monitor the panic level.

overall it's amazing work and creepy, keep it up

[Magnesium Ninja]

Thanks for all the responses!

@Sevn: yeah, definitely looks like your computer isn't handling surfaces correctly. Odd issue, I'm not familiar with how to fix the issue but perhaps I should look into it!

@SpazDad: Glad that you enjoyed it! We'll be vastly improving the pause screen in the full game, so that won't be an issue.

@Kidchameleon: We'll consider changing the cursor; we have an idea or two in mind.

@{del}: We will have a map in the full game, yeah. You can't use the flashlight until you get the batteries (when the tutorial shows), but we'll consider introducing the gun sooner. The HUD will eventually be part of the pause screen as well!

[Liosan]

I enjoyed this, has a polished feel and manages to be quite scary. I really liked the subbasement Plot seems nice too (at least the bits and pieces I managed to collect).

I agree that the HUD needs to be toggled. I don't want it in the pause screen, why would I? It's supposed to be a HUD. I almost died twice because I didn't notice my health was falling. As a side note, I assume there will be some visual feedback that an item was used? At least flash the item in the inventory

It took me a while to figure out that I don't have to point my mouse on something to use it by pressing 'E'; don't know why. Maybe I got suggested with experiences from previous games.

The dialogue system was a bit irritating - I had to wait a full 1 second after pressing 'E' for the rest of the text to appear. It was smooth while moving by itself, but the delay after pressing 'E' felt as if the game was lagging.

The game crashed when I exited, leaving my taskbar full of black unrendered blotches. Windows 7 x64. Not much of an issue; maybe it's because I accidentally started a new game while exiting the game through alt-f4.

Other than that, no bugs or issues, and the things above are minor stuff, really. I'm impressed you managed to make a side-scroller actually scary

Liosan

[davidp]

Man this game gave a creeps few times, especially when that zombie screaming thingy appeared. But I didn't complete the demo coz' I got lost. Really cool atmosphere and all that. Can't wait for more

[Magnesium Ninja]

Glad you enjoyed it  

A number of people have been getting lost, and I think that a more diverse environment in the full game is going to help bring that number down a bit.

[GZ]

I played this game twice, once a few weeks back, and just now about 33% through to refresh my memory. Here is what I thought:

- The game is extremely dark in the visual sense. I think you could get away with increasing the circle of light around the main character a little, or by switching up the pacing so that there are a comparable amount of lighted and unlighted areas. The graphics in the game are quite nice and it's a shame that more than half the time is spent in extremely poor lighting. Understandably you need the darkness to create tension in many cases, but it feels a bit too much to me. I also believe the map is hard to traverse because of this, it's hard to create a mental map of the area because you are seeing black the majority of the time.

- I second the notion about the mouse cursor needing to be a bit more visible.

- It takes a long time for dialog to skip as mentioned by another poster. You should fix this soon because it's fairly annoying.

- In the boiler room, I had this happen:

http://gzstorm.com/gmhelp/Ascension0.png

The enemy kept running into the wall until I exited the room. However, I played this game twice, and my first time playing I ran straight through this room and never even saw this enemy. Which made the dialog after odd, because the main character remarks something about how he saw something that looked almost human. In my first time playing, I never saw this enemy, although it's possible that because it's very dark that I just never saw him when running through.

- You need some way of showing panic and health at all times, or allowing the player to toggle it in a less obtrusive way. As it is right now, you either have no HUD, or a very large HUD. Perhaps a third mode you can toggle through with TAB is something to consider, a much smaller HUD which only shows health and panic.

- Great job on the character animations. I also noticed the player sprite acts differently based on panic levels.

- The game does a competent job of creating a scary atmosphere. It can be very hard to do this, so good work.

- Fundamentally the game seems solid already. I look forward to future updates of the game.

[Magnesium Ninja]

Super late response, my apologies

Thanks for the great feedback! I'm happy for the reaffirmations of the past complaints, they help us in knowing what to view as simple complaining and what to view as legitimate issues with the game.

Glad you enjoyed!

[verticalvertex]

Great animations. Reminds me of clocktower. A bit anyway.