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TIGSource ForumsCommunityJams & EventsCompetitionsOld CompetitionsCommonplace BookAfterlife Consequences [Finished]
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Catharsis
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« on: November 25, 2008, 06:15:41 AM »

This is my first compo entry, and in fact, first post here at all, so bear with me.

For this competition, I went with entry 105 from the Commonplace Book:  Vampire visits man in ancestral abodeā€”is his own father.  Vampires and video games really just say "Castlevania" to me, and that's the route that I set out on initially.

What we ended up with is not your childhood Castlevania at all.

Our protagonist's father passed away before the events of the story.  Upon returning home after a visit to the ancestral gravesite (as this is Lovecraft we're dealing with, we can't avoid using "ancestral" repeatedly), he finds his father standing outside his window, clearly not as dead as he should be.  What follows can really only be described as "zany".  If you're offended by Lovecraft not being taken seriously, this is probably not the game for you.

Some screenshots:


Pompadours rule.


The Akira bike, and the Turbo Tunnel.

The game is currently "finished", with massive sarcasm quotes.  (They aren't really so massive.)  What this means is "I am waiting on one last song, and to hear back from a thread about a potentially critical bug in my choice of IDE."  The bug has a workaround, I just need to know if it is a necessary one.  The full game will be uploaded tomorrow; seeing is this is being posted at 8:11 without me having gone to bed yet, "tomorrow" is a very fluid term.

Edit:  The game is now finished, and can be found here:

Uncompressed Audio:  http://willhostforfood.com/access.php?fileid=43097

Compressed Audio:  http://willhostforfood.com/?Action=download&fileid=43096

Dramatis Personae:
Programming and concept by me.
Art by Jacob "UltraJMan" Ritz
Music by Alvin Grissom II.

Thank you for playing.
« Last Edit: November 30, 2008, 02:53:15 AM by Catharsis » Logged
UltraJMan
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« Reply #1 on: November 25, 2008, 06:22:21 AM »

Working on this has been a pleasure, and I hope everyone... enjoys? Yeah, we'll go with that... enjoys the spritework, and before anyone asks, I have no clue what I was on when I tried animating some of these, the results were hilarious and just stuck.
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« Reply #2 on: November 25, 2008, 07:38:41 AM »

This sounds pretty cool. Since I cannot view any of your screenshots or play your game at the moment, I will use my imagination to envision and calculate how good this game will be.

(Akira + pompadours + Castlevania)/uses of the word 'ancestral' = daiper

[error. ending program now...]

See? Imagination is your friend.

PS: @ UltraJMan: Are you the UltraJman? Like, the guy who does all those playthroughs on Youtube? Undecided
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UltraJMan
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« Reply #3 on: November 25, 2008, 02:25:20 PM »

...yes, yes I am, please do not eat me good sir!

Anyways, have fun imaginating the game... is imaginating even a word?
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Catharsis
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« Reply #4 on: November 26, 2008, 04:10:58 AM »

Okay, well, after a grueling day of Construct being an utter piece, the game is done!

It controls as follows:
Shift to jump
Z to attack
Arrow keys to move

Motorcycle controls:
Shift to switch planes
Up to jump

I'm sorry that this is later than anticipated (though still by no means late); at the end of the testing phase, Construct decided to start crashing every time I edited a sprite, and in said crashes, undoing random amounts of work.  There are some minor hit detection issues in the first stage which are being ironed out; these stem from the utterly inexplicable inability to change a sprite's bounding box in Construct.  Rather than rewriting the entire engine on the last day in which I can work on this, and possibly missing the deadline, I decided it best to submit now and patch later.

Thanks to everyone who plays, and please let me know what you think either here or at the email address attached to this account.  Any and all feedback is welcome.
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« Reply #5 on: November 26, 2008, 04:19:17 AM »

Construct is a buggy mess and I admire you for doing something like this with it Gentleman
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UltraJMan
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« Reply #6 on: November 26, 2008, 04:43:36 AM »

Construct is a buggy mess and I admire you for doing something like this with it Gentleman

We both came to the conclusion that neither of us are going to use Construct on a platformer again. It's honestly not too bad despite being a bit of a mess
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« Reply #7 on: November 26, 2008, 04:52:12 AM »

Title inspired by Full Life Consequences? :D

Played up until the part in the first level with the second green turret enemy. It unpredictably crashes when I fall in a pit. Then it started crashing when I restarted the program. (On Vista if that makes a difference.)

Medusa heads were annoying as hell at first, mostly due to the unforgiving inertia when you get hit, though their patterns are able to be learned.

It's odd that you don't display the player's current health.

The walking animation is buggy, sometimes not animated at all, sometimes looking like ice skating. This is hilarious, though, and I'm not sure I'd want to see it changed.

You *really* need to compress those sound files in Audacity or something. No reason this game should take up 60 megabytes.
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« Reply #8 on: November 26, 2008, 07:12:00 AM »

Title inspired by Full Life Consequences? :D

Oh, I assure you it goes far beyond the title...
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UltraJMan
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« Reply #9 on: November 26, 2008, 02:53:45 PM »

Title inspired by Full Life Consequences? :D

Played up until the part in the first level with the second green turret enemy. It unpredictably crashes when I fall in a pit. Then it started crashing when I restarted the program. (On Vista if that makes a difference.)

Medusa heads were annoying as hell at first, mostly due to the unforgiving inertia when you get hit, though their patterns are able to be learned.

It's odd that you don't display the player's current health.

The walking animation is buggy, sometimes not animated at all, sometimes looking like ice skating. This is hilarious, though, and I'm not sure I'd want to see it changed.

You *really* need to compress those sound files in Audacity or something. No reason this game should take up 60 megabytes.

Originally I planned to fix the walk animation, until he made the first cutscene. After that it ended up staying seeing as how ridiculous the game already was.
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Catharsis
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« Reply #10 on: November 26, 2008, 04:27:32 PM »

Quote
Title inspired by Full Life Consequences? Cheesy

Played up until the part in the first level with the second green turret enemy. It unpredictably crashes when I fall in a pit. Then it started crashing when I restarted the program. (On Vista if that makes a difference.)

Medusa heads were annoying as hell at first, mostly due to the unforgiving inertia when you get hit, though their patterns are able to be learned.

It's odd that you don't display the player's current health.

The walking animation is buggy, sometimes not animated at all, sometimes looking like ice skating. This is hilarious, though, and I'm not sure I'd want to see it changed.

You *really* need to compress those sound files in Audacity or something. No reason this game should take up 60 megabytes.

Yeah, the crashes started showing up during the frame transitions.  I think it's basically the same thing that happened in IWBTG; whenever you die or otherwise change event sets, Construct and MMF2 both just start freaking out.  This game was initially stable, but there's a gigantic bug in Construct in which the "next layout" function does not actually work at all.  I only discovered this when I started trying to put the stages together, and having to hard-code the transitions introduced a large element of instability.  See the post above about Construct, heh.

The player's current health can't be restored, so I figured that it wasn't too important to display it.  It wouldn't be at all hard to do, so I can definitely put it on the list.

The walk animation should never be skating (though that is amusing), but yeah, that extended foot in frame four is just bad, bad, bad.  Since I can't change the bounding box to encompass just his torso and the area directly below it (again, thanks Construct), if that foot gets caught on a platform, it's over.

Lesson learned:  Even if it takes three times as long, do serious projects from scratch in your own language.  Then if you have a problem with something, you can just change it.  Construct is in beta, yes, but MMF2 is definitely not, and there are some very similar huge bugs or issues in both.  Admittedly, I did not have time to write this in a "real language" given the deadline being when it is and this month being wacky in general.

Thanks for playing in any case.
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« Reply #11 on: November 26, 2008, 09:52:53 PM »

The lesson I learned: Study some other walk animations before attempting your own.
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« Reply #12 on: November 30, 2008, 02:56:18 AM »

Okay, I'm back from Thanksgiving stuff, and made some of the changes that people have requested.  There are now two versions of the game: a sixteen meg one with slightly-lossy compressed music, and the original 60 meg behemoth.  Use whichever one tickles your fancy.

I'm really unhappy with the way that this turned out, and had been informed that Construct was not quite the insane wall of bugs that it ended up being.  By the time I realized, it was too late, but I'll just chalk it up to a learning experience.  There's always a tomorrow, in any case.
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« Reply #13 on: December 01, 2008, 01:39:31 PM »

Crashes whenever I press a key.  Awesome.  This is just what I wanted after spending all that time updating DirectX for it (also, can't really see why it needs the latest DX).  Grump grump grumble etc.
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deadeye
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« Reply #14 on: December 03, 2008, 01:57:47 AM »

Okay I gotta say, this game is pretty bad, although rather amusing.  I have no idea what you guys were thinking.  I hope I'm not offending, it seems from what you've said yourselves that you already know this.

As for the problems you guys were having with Construct... I can see were you might have run into a couple of bugs, but for the most part this game is just poorly designed.  Things like GM, MMF, and Construct are made to be more noob-friendly than straight code, but even so it helps to have some idea what you're doing. 

A word of advice: make your game with something you're familiar with and save yourself some hassle.  Do the learning new tools thing when you're not on a deadline.  You can't rightly say Construct is a piece of junk just because you made a crappy game.  Take some time to learn what you're doing before you write it off.  Hell, you could even - gasp - do some beta testing Shocked.

And yeah Construct is in beta, but it's nowhere near an "insane wall of bugs."  I mean, come on... I managed to make a playable game within the deadline and it wasn't the painful experience that you're making it out to be.  Sure, some folks had crash issues with the audio, but the audio plugin was just released a couple months ago and isn't complete yet.  Even so I can't blame Construct for that.  It's my fault people had trouble playing my game, because I chose to use an untested, undocumented product to make it.
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« Reply #15 on: December 03, 2008, 04:13:13 AM »

Crashes whenever I press a key.  Awesome.  This is just what I wanted after spending all that time updating DirectX for it (also, can't really see why it needs the latest DX).  Grump grump grumble etc.

It needs DirectX 9 because Construct requires DX9 for all of its games.  Even though something like this easily could have been done ages ago, the update is required.  Sorry for the wasted time, though there's absolutely no reason that it should crash with any key press.  No one else has reported that.

@Deadeye:  You're exactly right that the game is bad, and I'm in no way pleased with this.  I set out to make something that I could put on a resume, but I'll obviously be doing no such thing.  Again, I've chalked it up to the learning experience that I should have just written this in raw code; after all, if something goes wrong there, I know that it's my fault and nothing else.

However, I do think that you're mistaken about one thing.  It's not exactly like the game was completely untested.  You can't blame Construct for your election to use untested plugins, but I feel quite justified in blaming it for a bug like this one.  Hard-coding transitions around this bug introduced the instability not present before the change, and it's because a documented feature of Construct did not work.  My options were reduced to "does not work" or "works extremely unstably" because I didn't write it myself.

(Yes, I should have tested it before using it, but who really expects that such a basic function will be broken?  It's not like any game just has one scene.)

Anyway, I'm sorry to anyone who wasted time failing to get this to work.  I liked the concept, and love the art and music, but the programming just isn't there.  Thanks for trying, anyway.
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