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[thedaemon]

I'm anxiously awaiting a playable release.

[sandcrab]

Ok, I pronounce this done.

Link Link!

I really hung onto it for the past couple days!  I had a drawing I was working on to go with it, but I wasn't really finding the time to finish it so I decided I'd just go without.  Hope you enjoy it!  I had a lot of fun making it, and a big thank you to everyone on the forum who helped me out. :D

[thedaemon]

Awesome! Got to the 2 frost giants but took a break cause I couldn't defeat them yet. Nice game, love just about everything about it. The grabbing of the rope is annoying though, it's very hard to grab the rope. The wolves rock, nice variation of enemies. It works well. Glad you got this done!! Cheers! I wanted to state the "startup" sequences for various npcs was great, and the mood is nice. The music also gives it that great feel.

[droqen]

Ohmygod

This is downloading so slowly I want to be a tiny barbarian why is the internet here so terrible

edit :: Lovely.

The ropes are fine o: Just hold up/down while approaching one, and you'll grab on easily.

KIND OF SPOILER I GUESS :: Fun last boss, although I eventually decided the easiest way to beat them was to pretty much bypass the solo giant pattern completely. Is this okay?

[randomshade]

Really dig it. I'll post some more substantial feedback after I get through it.

[Valyou]

Awesome, it's here!
I've played it a bit, got sorta stuck on room 6, but room 7 was the tougherest.

[sandcrab]

KIND OF SPOILER I GUESS :: Fun last boss, although I eventually decided the easiest way to beat them was to pretty much bypass the solo giant pattern completely. Is this okay?

There's no wrong way to slay a giant!

[randomshade]

Played to room 11 and kept getting my ass handed to me so called it quits for now. Here's my 11 room feedback 

Overall: Really like it! Great aesthetic and the premise of the game is up my alley. It was a fun play.

Issues:
- Music/sound doesn't pause/silence when you minimize the window.
- Enemies don't seem to reset when you die, which I think is the right idea, except when you die on room 11 without killing the wolves; in this case you start at the end of room 10, warp to room 11, and then get mauled by said wolves before you can do anything about it...
- Grabbing onto ropes is way too iffy/imprecise. I didn't seem to have a problem until I actually needed to be a bit dexterous and the result was falling into lots of pits/enemies below.
- The Frost Daughter's projectiles are homing, which is cool, except when you are on ropes and basically have no way to avoid them other falling or trying to make all the jumps super fast, which due to the rope grabbing finickiness, results in falling anyway (for me!)

Suggestions:
-Might be neat to be able to deflect incoming arrows with your attack.
-It would be convenient to be able to jump down through platforms that you can jump up through.

I'm going to pass this around to some friends; really glad to finally play it!

[thedaemon]

Ok, there is an invisible enemy at the boss battle (2 guys) that is on the right side of the screen. After you kill the guys , nothing happens. And the invisible wall kills me if I try to walk right.

[sandcrab]

That is a new one on me, I can't repeat it.  You're supposed to be able to walk to the right after you beat them.  Did it happen multiple times?  Can you walk through the "invisible enemy" during your invulnerability period?

[thedaemon]

No you can't walk through, it keeps pushing you left.It also happens when the 2 monsters are falling down. If you are in the middle/right side of the screen, after the first one falls if you run too far right the 2nd falling one will "hit" you without making contact when it first falls out of the sky. If need be I can figure out a way to film it and post on youtube, if you can't get it to repeat.

[farcodev]

I just tested your game and really liked it, it remember my old 8bits years.
Thank you and great work ! 

[droqen]

Oh man, was I the first person to beat the game (aside from sandcrab of course and maybe some super secret playtesters) ?!

I wrote my last message while I was at school (also I played the whole game in class with headphones on) so I had to be a bit brief. Let me remedy that.

1. Ropes. Although it was entirely unnecessary to do so, I felt the overwhelming desire to hold up while jumping off of a rope. It'd be nice to have a short timer to allow me to jump off while holding one of these arrows, without clinging immediately to the rope again.

2. Enemy revival reminded me of Star Guard, which isn't a bad thing! The enemies varied interestingly, and never really became boring. The method by which wolves summoned more wolves was cool, too.

3. Combo attacks were kind of unreliable. I wasn't sure why they didn't happen sometimes. I'd tried pressing the attack button at different rates, with and without enemies before me, and I still couldn't really figure out why sometimes I just repeated the base attack? Do you think you could shed some light on that for me? :3

4. The level design was good (I enjoyed it, anyway. I liked the archers lingering at the edges of spike pits, daring you to make a carefully-timed and carefully-placed leaping attack), and while restarting at the beginning of the room with full health was probably a good decision, it felt odd that arriving at a room for the first time retained your health from the previous level -- if I entered at one or two health out of six, I sometimes felt like not even trying since I knew dying quickly would really exert no penalty. Then again, it'd be fun to try to play through the whole game without dying once.

5. The boss was fun (: The daughter's attack was also interesting, although there was one breakable block that I just couldn't get her to hit and I really wanted to see if something was in it. Ah, well.

~

No more numbers. I really liked the game! I might even play it again and seek those diamonds; I think my final score was 8007 or something, but I wouldn't count on my own memory on this matter being too accurate.

Shit, 8007 is a number, isn't it? And here I was saying 'no more numbers'.

Oh, one last thing: the silence and wind in the beginning was a lovely touch -- although I do think the wind sound could do with a little more variety. It was really easy to tell that it was a loop and it didn't really sound convincing after hearing it loop predictably a few times over in a short period of time.

[/criticism]

[deathtotheweird]

I'm playing it now, through Anna Anthropy's blog. I really liked it, but the final boss took all the joy out of the game for me.

It's not that it's too hard, it's just too cheap. There seems to be no efficient way to dodge their combined attacks, and when you finally take one down the other one has this homing jump attack that seems impossible to avoid. So I gave up. Left a bad taste in my mouth, especially when I enjoyed the rest of the game.

And I have to echo the criticism with the rope jumping. Although I had no troubles with it, I felt it could have been handled a lot better. See Spelunky for an example of awesome rope handling/jumping.

[ortoslon]

@allen: there is a reliable way to dodge their combined shots, i'll show it in my video playthrough soon [EDIT: after Feb 8, for technical reasons]

[sandcrab]

Minor updates for chain-missing antics!  Please tell me if this makes a difference:

+ You can now jump off a chain while holding up.
+ Collision check for chains is no longer 1 pixel wide (Whoops!)

And as an added bonus

+ Wolves reset to starting location on player death/room entry/exit

@Droqen, for combos, the trick is to press while the sword is fully "swung."  The timing is precise, but it doesn't keep track of how many presses you made, so you can mash the button and still get it.  The first one (baseball bat style swing) requires a very fast press, but the second (overhead smash) is a little slower.

Star Guard's similarity on reviving enemies is coincidental (love that game!), but it is thanks to Star Guard's mercy that most rooms don't reset when you die.  

No you can't walk through, it keeps pushing you left.It also happens when the 2 monsters are falling down. If you are in the middle/right side of the screen, after the first one falls if you run too far right the 2nd falling one will "hit" you without making contact when it first falls out of the sky. If need be I can figure out a way to film it and post on youtube, if you can't get it to repeat.

I still can't get this one to happen, so I'd really appreciate that.  Probably a lot easier than explaining the criteria in excruciating detail.  Has anyone else had this happen?

[sandcrab]

If anyone is still having trouble with the end boss, there's good news!  Somebody sent me this scan from an old artifact called a "magazine."  It turns out that people have been playing games like this for a long time, and even in those old days they found ways to get help when they needed it.  Spoiler warning, obviously!

http://www.starquail.com/TinyBarbarian/NP_scan.png

*Also totally not intended to offend anyone!  I just wanted a fun way to answer the question, but I also love hard games and hard bosses, so while I do take the input that the boss is hard seriously (noted for next time), it's not something I'm willing to change.  The designer's dilemma, right?

[randomshade]

Minor updates for chain-missing antics!  Please tell me if this makes a difference:

+ You can now jump off a chain while holding up.
+ Collision check for chains is no longer 1 pixel wide (Whoops!)

And as an added bonus

+ Wolves reset to starting location on player death/room entry/exit

Awesome, awesome, awesome! Thanks, will check out the latest and greatest tonight 

[dumbmanex]

This is damn cool.  My only few complaints are...

-Sometimes when landing on the ground after a jump, I'd auto jump immediatly if the jump button was still being held down.  I don't know what triggers it, seems to happen randomly.

-Getting the second attack to activate was touchy, seemed like the last few frames of the animation is when you need to press again.

-I wish it were a full sized game, Tiny Barbarian tearing ass across the land in all sorts of adventures.

Awesome.  Also, for anyone who hasn't read The Frost Giant's Daughter, the story ends just as abrubtly as the game, haha, poor guy.

[deathtotheweird]

The new rope/chain controls are much better. Makes room 11 actually incredibly easy now.

Finally beat the dang boss. It took me less tries to beat the boss in this game than the Star Guard boss but I still found Star Guard's boss much more enjoyable. The boss in this game just feels too cheap, rather than difficult. EDIT: and as Chris (below) reminded me, I forgot to mention that the boss fight when compared to the rest of the game, is like a huge spike in difficulty. There's basically no challenge the entire game (except perhaps room 11, but since you fixed the controls- not so much) and then you walk into a rather difficult boss fight, it feels weird. And to mention Star Guard again, it's boss doesn't seem that difficult in comparison, due to the game slowly creeping up in difficulty as you get to the later levels.

-I wish it were a full sized game, Tiny Barbarian tearing ass across the land in all sorts of adventures.

Nahh. As much as I like longer games sometimes, bite-sized morsels like Tiny Barbarian are great and super refreshing. Sometimes I wish people would make more shorter games like this instead of throwing in filler content in their games.

I should also mention how great the music was. Very catchy, and the boss theme was fantastic too.  hats off to the musician.