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[Theta]

I found the application event log using Event Viewer.  Here is the message that pertained to this game:

1

And, under the tab "Details":

2

[increpare]

When you have completed the monkey puzzle he offers you three choices. "Yes" gives you a new puzzle, "No" exits the game (this is badly labeled) and "I need to go speak to mortimer" takes you back to the first bit. I suspect you picked "no" and weren't expecting it to exit, if that's not what happened then let me know.

Well i got visual studio popping up and asking me if i wanted to debug...

And turning: in what way excruciating? Slow,

Yep, very slow.  This is a reasonably good PC, fwiw.

[adam a]

@Theta, thanks for posting those. I will see if I can find anything that might help.

@increpare, Ok, that sounds bad. Can you describe what you did to get it to crash? Also, the turning thing sounds odd, it shouldn't matter about the speed of your computer. Hmmm, is anything else slow, like the movement of the tortoises, and is it just the first stage?

Thanks both of you for bearing with me, it seems the game is not quite ready for mass consumption. 

[increpare]

it takes about 4 seconds to turn 180 degrees; is that slow to you? i dunno, maybe it's not, but trying to chase the tortoises was horrible.

not sure how to get it to duplicate the crash...

[adam a]

Ok, the slow turning bug I think is just 'poor design'. It's the same speed on my computer. As for the crash, if it comes up again then try and note down the steps you went through to get it. But I wouldn't worry overly.

[adam a]

@Theta: I tried the game on a fresh XP install and came up with the XP equivalent of the error you had (I think). After some trial and error I got the game to work after installing the MS Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 redistributables. See the first post, I have updated it with links to those packages.

Hopefully this will solve your problem (hopefully). I was pretty bemused as the game doesn't use any Visual Studio whatever-it-is that it seems to now need. It was written on Linux for chrissakes.

Anyway, let me know if that helps.

[Theta]

Okay, I downloaded the MS Visual Studio 2008, and I was able to run the game.  I though the gorilla puzzle was fun, though it would be better if everything moved a little faster (the gorilla and the guy).  Finding the tortoises was fun too (although it got a little tedious).  It was funny to see them all spinning around your head.

I got all of the turtles, but Mortimer didn't say anything different (other than the fact that I got fifty).  Is something supposed to change once you complete this?

Also, it would be nice if talking to the animals was initiated by <SPACE>, rather than just being near them.  It sometimes got frustrating to have to talk to Mortimer several times because he had you pinned against a tree (and you couldn't easily move away to escape the dialogue).

I liked the graphical style (kind of reminded me of Katamari), and the guitar background music was absolutely beautiful.  I like actual recorded background music in games (chiptunes and tracked pieces are great too, but I don't think they have the same character as a "live" recording).

[adam a]

Thanks, yeah I think the music is one of the nicest elements in the game too. As with everything it was kind of last minute but it worked out really well. Composed and played by Steve (rubzo here I think).

As for the tortoise challenge, nothing happens when you get them all. It was never actually intended to be in the game at all but it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to collect the tortoises so I just made a simple mini game with no real point.

The game originally was intended to be puzzle based, the gorilla puzzles are just a kind of stub of what should be there. The idea was to have a similar kind of mechanic but with multiple animals in each puzzle, so you have to coordinate their movements to solve the puzzle and get the internet. In the gorilla puzzle he can break boxes but the idea was to have tortoises which could go through water but not boxes, parrots which could fly, stuff like that to make it more complex. I need to take some time off from programming but I hope to go back to the game and get it to a stage which I'm a bit more proud of.

As for Katamari, it's a fantastic game and I think it definitely inspired our game, the idea of having no real menu and navigating by talking to characters was a definite rip off for instance.

[Theta]

The game originally was intended to be puzzle based, the gorilla puzzles are just a kind of stub of what should be there. The idea was to have a similar kind of mechanic but with multiple animals in each puzzle, so you have to coordinate their movements to solve the puzzle and get the internet. In the gorilla puzzle he can break boxes but the idea was to have tortoises which could go through water but not boxes, parrots which could fly, stuff like that to make it more complex. I need to take some time off from programming but I hope to go back to the game and get it to a stage which I'm a bit more proud of.

That sounds like an awesome puzzle idea - the 'stub' with the gorilla is already pretty fun, so I would hope you continue to develop this after the competition is all finished.

[jimmykane]

I'm known as jimmykane on here, not rubzo, sorry to be confusing, adam a.

I think adam a has pretty much said what our intentions with the game were. The majority (that is, art assets, music, puzzles, levels, sounds) of the final demo was produced in the last week, and we didn't have time to produce the kinds of puzzles we wanted, hence the hastily knocked together random puzzle generator to use in this demo of the first puzzle that would be in a longer game...

Theta: glad you enjoyed the music.

[Greender]

I loved the visual style of this game, nice work.

[edmundito]

Hey, nice game!

As a techie guy I'm really curious... what did you use to make this game? Did you write your own engine or did you grab something from the web that has harnessed sdl, lua and all that good stuff?

[adam a]

No we wrote our own engine with C++ and OpenGL, SDL and using Luabind for Lua integration. All that good stuff Yeah it has a few problems but it was quite a rewarding way to do it I think, certainly improved my C++. If you are really interested all the source is up on google code although documentation is still on the todo list, so it's a bit messy at the moment. I am slowly going through and fixing and tidying, as well as working on the game too.