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[Canned Turkey]

The Ruins of Old Earth is a 2D sidscroller in the vein of metroid and other similar games.
This is the first public release, after a bit of closed testing for major design issues and bugs.

0_0_2d Download

Controls:
WASD/Arrows - Move & look
Z/J - Jump
X/K - Fire current weapon
C/L - Cycle weapon (Only ones you have collected)
Shift/LShift - Hold still (Lets you aim diagonally without having to move)
Enter - Menu confirm
Esc - Exit game

Please keep in mind this is a work in progress, not all content is in the game, and the content that is might not be complete.

Here's a few GIFs:

_________________________________________________

Fishies, water, and algee

First few areas of the game

Mr. Snail's nasty habbit...

Programming/Art/Design - Aiden Rose
Original Sound Track - Andrew Rose
Sound Effects - Sound effects under the creative commons license from freesound.org

Have fun playing!

[Quicksand-S]

That download link isn't "direct". I right-clicked and selected "Save Link As..." the first time, only to find out that it had just downloaded the page.

Anyway, the graphics look great but there's something off about the water color. Maybe it's too unsaturated or something. It seems to make anything it touches not really fit with the overall look of the game.

I'm really not a fan of the combat in this game at all. I dislike the slow rate-of-fire, the crazy screenshake with every shot of such a weak weapon, and the fact that it takes at least four hits to kill even the weakest enemy (which is made worse by that slow rate-of-fire).

It might be a good idea to draw the characters behind the ground. It looks weird when the weapon sticks out the side of the water.

The way enemy respawns work is a little annoying. I feel like the distance should be doubled or maybe even tripled. Jumping out of the water only to find that the eel I just killed has respawned right below me feels wrong.

An eel got stuck on a corner, spinning around in place.

The jetpack controls kind of break jumping. I can no longer do short jumps once I have it? It might be better if I had to hold the button in order to fly at all.

The character's head movement while walking is really energetic (like it could be half the speed it is). Not necessarily a problem, but I found it funny. While checking that, I also noticed that the character keeps playing their walking animation even when up against a wall.

I was very happy to see that I could aim while standing in one place, and Shift is the perfect key for that. I found it easily because it's the same key I use for similar things. Very nice. Aiming diagonal was a pain because of the recoil, though. Maybe holding Shift should also make the character handle recoil better, so you don't have to keep re-aligning yourself with the enemy.

The music has a nice sound to it, but loops far too often for me.

I really like the enemy designs.

I stopped shortly after getting the bouncy-bullets upgrade and realizing that my weapon was still just as slow and weak as before. I like so many aspects of the game, but the combat and jumping annoy me so I don't find it as fun as I'd like to.

[Canned Turkey]

That download link isn't "direct". I right-clicked and selected "Save Link As..." the first time, only to find out that it had just downloaded the page.

Sorry, I meant it was just one click download without adfly or anything.

Anyway, the graphics look great but there's something off about the water color. Maybe it's too unsaturated or something. It seems to make anything it touches not really fit with the overall look of the game.

I'll see if there's anything I can do about that.

I'm really not a fan of the combat in this game at all. I dislike the slow rate-of-fire, the crazy screenshake with every shot of such a weak weapon, and the fact that it takes at least four hits to kill even the weakest enemy (which is made worse by that slow rate-of-fire).

The way enemy respawns work is a little annoying. I feel like the distance should be doubled or maybe even tripled. Jumping out of the water only to find that the eel I just killed has respawned right below me feels wrong.

I stopped shortly after getting the bouncy-bullets upgrade and realizing that my weapon was still just as slow and weak as before. I like so many aspects of the game, but the combat and jumping annoy me so I don't find it as fun as I'd like to.

I think all these might be fixed with just making the player do a lot more damage, i'll see if that helps.

An eel got stuck on a corner, spinning around in place.

Thanks for pointing that out, I've been trying to fix it for a while.

The jetpack controls kind of break jumping. I can no longer do short jumps once I have it? It might be better if I had to hold the button in order to fly at all.

Although I think you're right, this is the first comment I've had that the jetpack feels bad. I'll look into fixing it if someone else thinks it's bad too.

It might be a good idea to draw the characters behind the ground. It looks weird when the weapon sticks out the side of the water.

Okay, i'll see if that looks better. EDIT: With all the little holes in the tiles, it just ends up looking odd, sorry.

The character's head movement while walking is really energetic (like it could be half the speed it is). Not necessarily a problem, but I found it funny. While checking that, I also noticed that the character keeps playing their walking animation even when up against a wall.

Both those are intentionally left, I didn't want to re-do the walking animation just to slow down the head a bit, and I thought letting the player walk into walls added to the feel of the little character doing what you tell him to.

I was very happy to see that I could aim while standing in one place, and Shift is the perfect key for that. I found it easily because it's the same key I use for similar things. Very nice. Aiming diagonal was a pain because of the recoil, though. Maybe holding Shift should also make the character handle recoil better, so you don't have to keep re-aligning yourself with the enemy.

Yeah, i'll fix that.

The music has a nice sound to it, but loops far too often for me.
I really like the enemy designs.

Thank you for your comments and critique, the music looping a lot is just to reduce file size, I hope it's not too annoying.

[Canned Turkey]

The Ruins of Old Earth 0_0_2b

Fixes:
Player damage output balanced a lot
Holding shift negates weapon knock-back
Eel spinning bug should be fixed

Download

Controls:
WASD/Arrows - Move & look
Z/J - Jump
X/K - Fire current weapon
C/L - Cycle weapon (Only ones you have collected)
Shift/LShift - Hold still (Lets you aim diagonally without having to move)
Enter - Menu confirm
Esc - Exit game

[newstarshipsmell]

Bug:
Load Game doesn't work? When I select it, after previously playing/saving game progress, I get the error message:

ERROR in
action number 1
of End Step Event
for object o_player:

Sound does not exist.

Bug:
Weapon cycling doesn't seem to work. Once I get the second weapon (bouncing bullets) pressing either C or L switches back to the first weapon, but pressing them again does nothing, i.e. you're stuck with the first weapon once you switch back to it.

Suggestion:
Get rid of the recoil altogether, unless it's going to serve more than an aesthetic purpose. Previous complaint about it was good, correcting that was good, but it seems weird just holding the aim button will eliminate recoil. If you keep it, keep in mind that it could easily be used to sequence break. Since shooting midair pushes you back a little, all someone would have to do to reach a ledge that's slightly beyond their current jumping distance is map a key to quickly aim+fire in the opposite direction; pressing it at the correct point(s) in the jump would presumably allow the player to make a jump they shouldn't be able to.

[Canned Turkey]

Bug:
Load Game doesn't work? When I select it, after previously playing/saving game progress, I get the error message:

ERROR in
action number 1
of End Step Event
for object o_player:

Sound does not exist.

I'll fix that, thanks for letting me know.

Bug:
Weapon cycling doesn't seem to work. Once I get the second weapon (bouncing bullets) pressing either C or L switches back to the first weapon, but pressing them again does nothing, i.e. you're stuck with the first weapon once you switch back to it.

I'll fix that as well.

Suggestion:
Get rid of the recoil altogether, unless it's going to serve more than an aesthetic purpose. Previous complaint about it was good, correcting that was good, but it seems weird just holding the aim button will eliminate recoil. If you keep it, keep in mind that it could easily be used to sequence break. Since shooting midair pushes you back a little, all someone would have to do to reach a ledge that's slightly beyond their current jumping distance is map a key to quickly aim+fire in the opposite direction; pressing it at the correct point(s) in the jump would presumably allow the player to make a jump they shouldn't be able to.

The recoil is really just there to add a take away to firing. If there are no downsides to firing, there's no reason not to just hold down the button the whole game. You're right about the sequence break, but I've been working around that.

[Canned Turkey]

The Ruins of Old Earth 0_0_2c

Fixes:
Fixed game breaking audio loading bug
Fixed not being able to switch back to unlocked weapon

Download

Controls:
WASD/Arrows - Move & look
Z/J - Jump
X/K - Fire current weapon
C/L - Cycle weapon (Only ones you have collected)
Shift/LShift - Hold still (Lets you aim diagonally without having to move)
Enter - Menu confirm
Esc - Exit game

[tjcbs]

I like it so far!

Please, if you can, get rid of the scrolling jerk/juddering. That is like visual nails on a chalkboard, it would help the game a lot to make it console smooth.

Also, I think the other criticisms of the fire are good. I think everything related to the weapon fire needs to be reduced by 50%: the screen shake, the recoil, the fire sound and especially the impact sound.

Keep it up!

[Canned Turkey]

Please, if you can, get rid of the scrolling jerk/juddering. That is like visual nails on a chalkboard, it would help the game a lot to make it console smooth.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

[Quicksand-S]

Please, if you can, get rid of the scrolling jerk/juddering. That is like visual nails on a chalkboard, it would help the game a lot to make it console smooth.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

I'll just chime in here to say that I haven't encountered any jerky/juddering issues with the scrolling, so it may be caused by something else (ex. The computer defragmenting your drive or something while the game was running? I don't know).


I really dislike the screen-shake and I may have figured out what bugs me most about it. I think it's that not only do the sprites shake, but the fake "TV screen" shakes and rotates as well, which irritates my head. I'm thinking maybe some things (maybe the hearts as well) need to stay still in order for the shaking to be easier to take.

[newstarshipsmell]

Please, if you can, get rid of the scrolling jerk/juddering. That is like visual nails on a chalkboard, it would help the game a lot to make it console smooth.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

I'll just chime in here to say that I haven't encountered any jerky/juddering issues with the scrolling, so it may be caused by something else (ex. The computer defragmenting your drive or something while the game was running? I don't know).

Strange. I think I know what the first poster is talking about. But I cannot produce a screenshot of it.

Frequently while playing I see a visual glitch where there's a line or bar (horizontal row) of pixels that jitter left/right by one pixel, causing some ugly distortion in the image. It tends to glide up and down as you move around, and stops jittering when you stop moving. It seems to be somewhere around 8-12 pixels high when it happens.

I'm playing with a gamepad+Joy2Key, and PrtScn mapped to one of my flipper buttons, and despite taking multiple screen-captures while the glitch is apparent onscreen, whenever I paste them into MSPaint there is no visual glitch present in the pasted screenshot. Make of that what you will.

Also, question: Is it possible to get the powerups left of the ship, above the cannon enemy, or across the lava yet? I feel dumb asking, but wondering if I've overlooked something I'm supposed to get? It's kind of obvious you can't go past the blue door yet, but the other areas I'm left clueless whether or not I'm supposed to be able to explore them yet.

ETA: Suggestion:
If you continue holding left/right while dying, when you respawn at the save point you'll be immobile, and have to release the key/button and depress it again to resume moving. I gather this may be to prevent you from moving into something that harms you when you restart/respawn, but really, it's kind of annoying and dislike every other similar game. It would feel more natural if you simply began moving again (if still holding the control(s) down) upon respawning. A second long (or so) pause upon dying (prior to shifting the screen back to the resume point, possibly with some other onscreen indicator of death and/or sound effect) would probably be sufficient to cue the player into releasing the directional controls if that's the intended effect of immobilizing them.

[tjcbs]

I don't understand what you mean by this.

When the screen is scrolling, 90% of the time it will be perfectly smooth. 10% of the time, the scrolling is will get out of sync, and become very rough and jerky.

I'll just chime in here to say that I haven't encountered any jerky/juddering issues with the scrolling, so it may be caused by something else (ex. The computer defragmenting your drive or something while the game was running? I don't know).

Nope. I can almost guarantee you it is present on your computer too. Many people are able to mentally filter out this kind of thing, and don't notice these kinds of problems unless they are severe. For me they are always very obvious.

[Quicksand-S]

Frequently while playing I see a visual glitch where there's a line or bar (horizontal row) of pixels that jitter left/right by one pixel, causing some ugly distortion in the image. It tends to glide up and down as you move around, and stops jittering when you stop moving. It seems to be somewhere around 8-12 pixels high when it happens.

I'm playing with a gamepad+Joy2Key, and PrtScn mapped to one of my flipper buttons, and despite taking multiple screen-captures while the glitch is apparent onscreen, whenever I paste them into MSPaint there is no visual glitch present in the pasted screenshot. Make of that what you will.

That just sounds like screen-tearing which could likely be fixed by forcing vertical sync in your the options for your graphics driver (or by Canned Turkey giving you the option to enable it in-game). The reason it doesn't show up in screenshots is that it isn't "real". It's just an artifact of the monitor not getting the screen image from the graphics card in time.

I can almost guarantee you it is present on your computer too. Many people are able to mentally filter out this kind of thing, and don't notice these kinds of problems unless they are severe. For me they are always very obvious.

I think I just experienced it near the water. It was just sort of a stutter that started on shore and got worse as I entered the water. I didn't see it anywhere else yet. Sinking in water is especially jerky, but maybe for a different reason. I think in that case it's just some weird physics issue rather than dropped frames or anything like that.

[newstarshipsmell]

That just sounds like screen-tearing which could likely be fixed by forcing vertical sync in your the options for your graphics driver (or by Canned Turkey giving you the option to enable it in-game). The reason it doesn't show up in screenshots is that it isn't "real". It's just an artifact of the monitor not getting the screen image from the graphics card in time.

I've set my graphics card accordingly: http://i.imgur.com/3Gqfr0K.jpg

It is still tearing. Any ideas? I have a DEL 1708FPBLK monitor and ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series card.

[Canned Turkey]

Sorry I haven't addressed any of this issues, my power went out.

ETA: Suggestion:
If you continue holding left/right while dying, when you respawn at the save point you'll be immobile, and have to release the key/button and depress it again to resume moving. I gather this may be to prevent you from moving into something that harms you when you restart/respawn, but really, it's kind of annoying and dislike every other similar game. It would feel more natural if you simply began moving again (if still holding the control(s) down) upon respawning. A second long (or so) pause upon dying (prior to shifting the screen back to the resume point, possibly with some other onscreen indicator of death and/or sound effect) would probably be sufficient to cue the player into releasing the directional controls if that's the intended effect of immobilizing them.

No, immobilizing the player was not my intention, it must just be an issue with the way controls are inputted, but that wont be a problem after I add a death animation.

Also, question: Is it possible to get the powerups left of the ship, above the cannon enemy, or across the lava yet? I feel dumb asking, but wondering if I've overlooked something I'm supposed to get? It's kind of obvious you can't go past the blue door yet, but the other areas I'm left clueless whether or not I'm supposed to be able to explore them yet.

Yeah, those areas are for later after a second jetpack upgrade, but you shouldn't be able to access them yet.

Frequently while playing I see a visual glitch where there's a line or bar (horizontal row) of pixels that jitter left/right by one pixel, causing some ugly distortion in the image. It tends to glide up and down as you move around, and stops jittering when you stop moving. It seems to be somewhere around 8-12 pixels high when it happens.

That might be caused by forced vsync on your monitor.

That just sounds like screen-tearing which could likely be fixed by forcing vertical sync in your the options for your graphics driver (or by Canned Turkey giving you the option to enable it in-game). The reason it doesn't show up in screenshots is that it isn't "real". It's just an artifact of the monitor not getting the screen image from the graphics card in time.

I think I just experienced it near the water. It was just sort of a stutter that started on shore and got worse as I entered the water. I didn't see it anywhere else yet. Sinking in water is especially jerky, but maybe for a different reason. I think in that case it's just some weird physics issue rather than dropped frames or anything like that.

Yeah, vsync is by default off, and there isn't a way to turn it on.
The water will be fixed eventually, the slight lag is caused by the large instance count of all the solid objects surrounding it. When the level design is final, i'll make all the little solid objects one large one.

[Canned Turkey]

I've set my graphics card accordingly:


It is still tearing. Any ideas? I have a DEL 1708FPBLK monitor and ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series card.

Try moving the "wait for vertical refresh" bar all the way to performance.

[newstarshipsmell]

Try moving the "wait for vertical refresh" bar all the way to performance.

I tried it on all four settings, and it glitches the graphics no matter which one I select. I'm hitting Apply and closing the driver program after changing it. Those settings should take effect without rebooting, right?

[aamatniekss]

What you talk about sounds like screen tearing, I get that sometimes too. But it happens when the Vsync is OFF. It happens when frame rate is higher than your displays maximum frequency. so you need to turn Vsync ON. For example I noticed your game runs at 120fps, and my displays max frequency is 60hz. That's double the frames my display can show, so it's causing that screen tearing because of all the extra frames. Turning Vsync on to limit the game to 60fps would fix the issue. So basically right now I believe that pretty much anyone who hasn't got a 120fps monitor and vsync ON, should be getting some screen tearing issues.. Maybe you can make your game run at 60 fps, not 120fps? It's the more popular option, anyways.

[tjcbs]

Is the game rendered w/ opengl or d3d? The ATI vsync setting does nothing w/ d3d.

And the fact that the fps is a constant 120 without vysnc means that the game is trying to calculate the timing itself, which never, ever works, it is inevitably jerky.

[Canned Turkey]

Whoa, it shouldn't be running 120fps. I'll look into that, sorry.