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[Arucard]

I also have an Nvidia (GEforce 7300 LE) and usually run the game in fullscreen mode with scaled mode on. Never seen this bug, (nor the surface transparency one) just tested with loading a character too without seeing it. Sorry, no clue. 

[PDF]

and from there on out Ignore simply generates more and more of this message.  This happens regardless of the scaling mode I chose at game start.  I do have an nVidia card, and have been running non-scaled + full screen to avoid the surface transparency issue (though the error occurs whether or not I have it scaled or full screen).

How can Gamemaker even exist when it doesn't work properly on half (or more) of the video cards in existence? Why even go on?

You comment as if the game is still in development; and you talk as if it was not me who ADDED it as an option; as far as I am concerned, the game is easily playable at non scaled at 1366*768 resolution, and others can use F4 to make it full screen, avoiding the problems the scaling may cause (there are also ways to fix this issue for some if not most of the computers, if you are trying to insult GM); as for the save issue, well, you don't inculpate someone you don't know anything about of preaching false facts, do you? Seeing that he has only one post, the logical way to approach would be to encourage him to post by creating a strawman as I am unable to reproduce the problem; sorry if my methodology troubled you.

[Melly]

How do I use items in my inventory?

[CheshireKatt]

Well, I hate to say this, but, as far as I am concerned, this bug should not appear (unless you used different versions of the game, or added a bloom.txt to the folder in which the game can be found); it is either an internal GM bug or something connected to your machine or there is some detail you did not give. I suspect the first one to be the culprit.

Aha.  I went back and checked -- I had been seeing what the various cheats did, and I hadn't deleted bloom.txt.  Deleting that fixed it handily, and my apologies for not noticing that earlier. 

[Arucard]

How do I use items in my inventory?

Just press the corresponding number, the starting items are apparently just there to fill the gaps. So things like pencil, and other odd starting items are useless. The item description will help as well, since certain items are used passively (such as the vampire vial, or hidden blade).

[oryx]

You comment as if the game is still in development; and you talk as if it was not me who ADDED it as an option; as far as I am concerned, the game is easily playable at non scaled at 1366*768 resolution, and others can use F4 to make it full screen, avoiding the problems the scaling may cause (there are also ways to fix this issue for some if not most of the computers, if you are trying to insult GM); as for the save issue, well, you don't inculpate someone you don't know anything about of preaching false facts, do you? Seeing that he has only one post, the logical way to approach would be to encourage him to post by creating a strawman as I am unable to reproduce the problem; sorry if my methodology troubled you.

Uhh.. All I meant was that I was annoyed at the Gamemaker bug and couldn't believe they haven't fixed it.

[PDF]

Uhh.. All I meant was that I was annoyed at the Gamemaker bug and couldn't believe they haven't fixed it.

Heh, think about it, there will always be problems for someone whatever development system I use; I chose to go with Game Maker to reduce the development time. I don't think I even spent 40 hours working on this project, and the game is one of the most complicated games (the way I see it, the most complicated; but I am the developer and shouldn't be trusted in such sayings) in the contest despite the time constraints; and this was possible only because of your awesome sprites. I'm not the kind of person who gets to have hours of free time each day; I've had to spend every spare minute I have to finish the game, to perfect it. Even so, a  light roguelike is not the kind of game people really like; it seems I should have made a platformer to make a game everyone would like. Actually, I was going to make a short shooter-platformer before I realized there wasn't going to be as many roguelikes as there first appeared to be.

Hell, its engine was completely finished, and some of the content was added. I may occasionally finish and release it sometime later. Here are some screens:

By the way, I would still like some feedback; you can report the bugs you find, but please at least give some impressions and suggestions; I won't be able to update the compo build, and there is a huge chance I will remove the current bugs in the next release (if there is ever going to be) anyways.

[alphasmart]

I found this very interesting.  Conceptually, it's very sound.  The idea of 5 anything-goes equipment slots is interesting and works well as prescribed.  I have a few comments, however:

• there's a lack of variety with enemies.  Could be more interesting.
  The boss didn't announce himself very well.  I thought he was just another enemy, since I was completely mowing them down by that point, so it was a bit of a shock to see the window return to the normal size (I had it on 2x zoom because I can't work in squint-o-vision) and read the ending.  Perhaps supersize the boss or have a long corridor leading up to him or something.
  
• Allow press and hold for walking, and allow diagonals if you allow numpad navigation.  Both are sorely missed features.
• The arrow moves SOO slowly...
• What the heck do the classes do?  Some are a bit obscure and there's no descriptions for them.  In fact, it seems the differences are entirely superficial.
• Where do "learnt" things go?  I know you want to hide some information for the sake of exploration, but they get a bit lost and there's little apparent importance for them.
• Vampiric vial was far too overpowered.  I think that combined with a perk that healed me per hit meant that I barely noticed enemies, seldom had to heal and even when I lost some health in a fight there were plenty of healing items around.  I never needed to use the shops.  On that note...
  
• Where's the shopkeepers?  Given the lack of continuous movement (holding the arrow key) I found the shops entirely tedious to navigate.  Why are they so large?

What I see is a great functional prototype.  It all works the way it should for the most part, but just seems pretty bare at the moment.  Needs content!  The music is well-picked, and the graphics suit the cause (though all equipment being in a chest feels like a bit of a cop-out...), but there just isn't enough flesh and variety to make it feel compelling.  I actually enjoyed exploring the camps and hunts since the scenery was more interesting than in the dungeons, but there was limited appeal.  Also, why are there several shops and dungeons on the island, when the game ends when you kill the boss at only one dungeon?

I fear I sound overly harsh, but I hope that you could take some of these criticisms on board.  It is to some extent unfortunate that so many people chose to do the roguelike using the same sprites, but it's good that there is so much variety between each of them.

[PDF]

Thanks for the comments!

• Allow press and hold for walking, and allow diagonals if you allow numpad navigation.  Both are sorely missed features.

What do you mean? Both are in the game, and I am sure both a working well.

• there's a lack of variety with enemies.  Could be more interesting.
  The boss didn't announce himself very well.  I thought he was just another enemy, since I was completely mowing them down by that point, so it was a bit of a shock to see the window return to the normal size (I had it on 2x zoom because I can't work in squint-o-vision) and read the ending.  Perhaps supersize the boss or have a long corridor leading up to him or something.
  

I've adressed this point earlier; there is no "boss", there is no reason for him to be that powerful. He wouldn't have needed an army were he that powerful. But it's nice to see that people just want to assume there is a boss. There was going to be a boss, actually, but was cut due to the time constraints of the competition.

• The arrow moves SOO slowly...
• What the heck do the classes do?  Some are a bit obscure and there's no descriptions for them.  In fact, it seems the differences are entirely superficial.
• Where do "learnt" things go?  I know you want to hide some information for the sake of exploration, but they get a bit lost and there's little apparent importance for them.

I actually thought it was a good decision to make the arrow move faster. Why do you think a faster arrow would look better? You wouldn't see it then and say "ah, its implemented poorly".

Classes don't do exactly much; they have passive bonuses against some enemies (for example, cultists against dwarves, scribes against golems and so on) but they are minor bonuses. They were originally mostly for cosmetic; I think that is more important than anything.

The "learnt" things don't go anywhere, I thought you wouldn't need to remember the things you have learned in such a short game. Of course, I assume you realize you can't get the same scroll twice.

I think your other complaints are associated with the points I made earlier, so I won't write for each of them. The games, in my opinion, should make you begin as a weakling, and end as a demigod who can still die easily (yes, even when you are too powerful there are ways you can horribly die, even against the "boss").

[Oddball]

Liked: Easy to get into. I was dungeoneering in no time. The abilities for levelling up were a nice touch.

Disliked: The line of sight is a little inconsistent. Sometimes I could see enemies on the other sides of walls and sometimes I couldn't.

Conclusion: Good, fun, accessible rogue-like, but suffers from being like white noise in the sea of similar rogue-likes also entered into this contest.

[PDF]

Post Mortem:

Oh, I just realized I had not posted anything after the end of the competition. Other Observations is not dead; I will be updating it pretty soon, almost completely changed save the graphics, which I hope to replace soon. Of course, I was disappointed by the results as I had always considered Other Observations to be the most complete games that entered, although certainly not one of the best.

The game was criticized for the absence of many things that were in it by the players, despite the enormous amount of helper text and repeated notifications. Of course, there was a lack of descriptions regarding class selection screens, but there is a great amount of roguelikes that don't give any details regarding any of the classes (Nethack). It was a design choice apparently wasn't liked much. Would it have been better to have no classes at all? It is impossible to say.

Issues with resolution haunted the game; the problem with blurry scaling of GM made it pretty impossible for me to add more than two different resolutions without doing much iterative work. I was sad when it turned out people actually didn't mind that much (Dungeons of Fayte). I vowed never to make a game with low native resolution ever again. I didn't know many people were unfamiliar with the F4 key making GM games full screen.

People expected the main villain of the game to be a boss, and not the powerful normal enemy he was. Again, it was a poor design decision. It was fixed, with the villain becoming the killing machine people wanted him to be, but alas, the deadline had passed.

The line of sight, people said, was inconsistent. It was not, as I told them a number of times. Basically, there were two combined sight checks:
-The player should be able to sense what is going on in the four tiles around him, since every tile is approximately 1 meters long, and we can sense things 4 meters away from us, even if there is a wall blocking our sight. I did not want to add a "Search" button that people would need to spam.
-The player should be able to see every tile in his line of sight, though not every wall since it would be too dark to discern. The view should provide the necessary limit of sight.
There was nothing wrong about this system. Indeed, the decision might have looked strange; but I fail to see why.

It was a recurring saying in the posts that the game suffered from being 'just one of the roguelikes in the contest'. The problem was that there weren't any real turn-based roguelikes that got completed other than Other Observations, or I just wasn't able to see any. Certainly, there weren't many of them. It is true however that the graphics of oryx were used in a large number of games, so surely there was a aesthetical resemblance that changed the way the players looked at the entries.

The amount of content, I thought, was much more than needed; indeed, it was nearly impossible that one would see all the items and all the enemies. I made sure one wouldn't get bored because of lack of new things to use.

The game was difficult, although certainly much easier than its influences. That might have made it hard for people who are not into roguelikes to enjoy the game, although I'm not sure of that.

An updated version of Other Observations which will be hopefully better than the current version will be released soon, along with the source.

[Arucard]

Ok, I'm not sure if he forgot, or is waiting to release the source or something, but the update is actually out now and available from PDF's blog
(again I have to hope I'm not stepping on his toes here, but I want people to check out the new version )

+Some story has been fleshed out a bit without interfering with gameplay
+Spells have been added (they act sort of like a scroll from traditional RLs)
+Spiffy new splash screen! 
+LoS (line of sight) seems improved too

Also, I found a couple bugs in my short play;
-the 'Amplify' spell had a description for 'lifesteal' but gave me amplify when picked up
-when I died the screen unscaled and froze the level onscreen, though I was apparently at the title (the music changed and pushing a button took me to the class selection)

My thoughts:
One thing I wonder is if you would consider removing the text for sensing a trap if you have the levitation upgrade. Since you can't get hit by it, just seems unnecessary. Also, 2-3 more background musics would be good, what's there is atmospheric and fits well, but very repetitive.

The splash screen really is an improvement, simple, but still nicer than pure black background. I never had an issue with the LoS before, but it seems very nice now. Finally, congrats on the writeup from Gamejolt! I think you really deserve more recognition for this, it's pretty damn good.