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[3dpursuit]

heART- The Indie Exploration Art Love Adventure3 Months ago today I began my largest project yet. I decided that I wanted to create a platform exploration game that focused on keeping the player in love with the game and to feel like they were in the game by using detailed aesthetics, and perfect music. Today, I've released a Tech Demo. This shows the first 4 areas in the game, and alot of what's going to be in the game. I'd love for suggestions. I've made the entire game, but music credit goes to Patrick Moriarty. You can visit the website: http://heartindie.co.nr

Screenshots:









Here's the download link: http://www.2shared.com/file/bdPrk8Mc/heARTv2.html

Here's the second (Beta) Link:
http://www.mediafire.com/?4lv09hw20218lus

To download go to the bottom right and click "Save file to PC: Click Here" I hate 2shared, but no other sites would load, and I don't know why.

Please leave your feedback below. If you'd like to, please leave what you think out of 10, this game is. so 1/10 is the lowest, 10/10 is highest. Thanks.

   

[ness io kain]

I don't have time to try this at the moment, but I feel the need to comment on it just because nobody else has yet.
Your visuals look gorgeous!

[aznmonk]

i think its lovely. get it? haha.  i look forward to playing it!

[fraxcell]

Cool little game. Didn't quite get through the demo, but here are some thoughts:
-Could use an option to play at a x2 resolution, or at least actually increasing the resolution when you switch to fullscreen mode. Right now it's a little small, and your character is hard to keep track of.
-The player movement is a little fast. Especially when moving into a new screen, I would often times move so fast I would stumble into some hazard (like spikes) that I couldn't predict.

Besides that, I love the graphics and the story is very touching. I can't wait to see more 

[Kicks]

I agree that the movement is too fast and the graphics are too small. Switching so rapidly from screen to screen really brings me out of the immersion. So many of the jumps were between screens it became annoying. Controlling the character has to feel good and be fun in itself for these types of games to appeal to me.
I think you need to concentrate on one area and make sure exploring it by itself is fun. Then extend that. I really didn't feel much motivation or immersion. I didn't get to know the characters at all so I didn't care much about them. The player character didn't have much going for him, so I couldn't relate or want to be him. I feel like the areas don't really inspire or evoke. They're just random and dig-dug looking.
I think the art for the environments is awesome so you have all the right tools to reach your goal, but really concentrate on making each screen a painting. Make sure each room has it's own unique drama through the art and mechanics. Use that drama to make us fall in love with the world.

[J. R. Hill]

It took me longer to find the real download link than it did to play the game.
Didn't find any bugs, although it might be nice to have a quick key description on the intro screen so we know what button to hit to progress through it.

[namre]

Hi 3dpursuit,

I played through the game and here are some of my thoughts:
- The music helps greatly in immersing the player into the world
- Visuals are pretty. I felt desperation and sadness from the theme and the colors used throughout the different stages.
- Window is too small and it strained my eye so much. I wish I could play it on full screen or at a much bigger window, at least.
- I found that controlling the player is too fast for my taste. I suggest slowing it a bit. This proves annoying especially when jumping, sometimes you move too fast that precision jumping from one ledge to another is very difficult.
- There are some areas where the ceiling is too low that it's hard to jump on enemies.
- When in water, pressing the jump button makes me zoom upward so fast. Because of this, as soon as you get out of the water you are catapulted to such great heights. Movement through water must be slower.
- Switching through screens is indeed too fast. Most of the time after switching through a screen I imemdiately fall down a cliff or on a spike. How about slowing screen switching or better yet, stop movement input altogether, only when players press a movement button will they move again.

There you have it, some of the things I noticed about your game. It's really lovely but could use more polish. Goodluck with your game!

Also, I suggest that you place your feedback guide here on this thread so that playtesters have a guideline on what to comment about.

[Razz]

wow, this is ... wow. I'm not FLOORED or anything, but this is exactly the kind of thing I'd make. are you sure you aren't my evil twin or something?
 

anyway it's a good game, but holy cow does he swim fast. seriously, I press the button for half a second and I'm catapulted to the top of the screen, lol.

[ness io kain]

So I was ready to play this, but the download has been blocked or something. They appear to have labeled it as a virus... You may want to fix that.

[s0]

I have to agree with what other people here have said about character movment. It's too fast and imprecise. Possibly related to that, the jumping seemed a bit capricious too. I spent much more time than I wanted just madly bouncing around. Also, the main character is rather small, even in relation to the rest of the graphics and the fact that he's half-hidden behind grass/dirt most of the time doesn't help. That combined with the movement speed makes it a bit of a strain on the eyes to keep track of where you are.

That said though, I  enjoyed the atmosphere, music and graphics style, I think if you manage to iron out the issues, you could turn this into something really good. 

Oh and one last thing: You're in desperate need of a better file host. How about Dropbox? 

[nikki]

yeah , any host that allows hotlinking would be great,

this pc here didn't came past your first message and crashed, but that's this pc i think...

[3dpursuit]

I would've used dropbox, but I got a virus that wiped my computer a few days ago (I saved my game file) and it deleted dropbox, and i never took the time to re install it. Anyways. I've gotten alot of great suggestions from you guys and from others. With Fullscreen, I was thinking of amping it up so instead of it making a black boarder it did 1 of 2 things.

1) It switched the resolution to 320x240 (games window size) and it SCALED it up
2)It simply strectched the game out, creating a more pixelly look (no resolution    blurriness) but its not in the right portportions.

Also, here's what I'm adding to the game due to a huge list of suggestions from the YoYoGames Forum. One major thing(s) that will be added/changed
!You can die, health and leveling up system(s)
!There will be exact save spots
!Enemies and spikes give you exp, not hearts
!New enemies and hearts will not reset when you leave the room and come back
!Leveling up allows for "abilities"
!I will be re creating all the rooms. so everything is in good placement so when you leave a screen, its not... jumpy to a random place, it actually looks good. I may want to amp up the screensize... thougths?


here's a quote of what I posted at the YYGF...

Ill work on the little things first. Firstly, I'll add lives. Enemies give you (2 exp) per kill. Enemies take away (1 hp) per hit same with spikes. Bombs take away (4 hp) out ofyour total (10 hp) Sound good? hearts will still be randomly generated, as thats the point of the game, but nothing will "come back"

When your exp is at an interval of 10, your hp will go to 20 again and you will level up. Leveling up allows you to learn abilities such as (double jump, high jump, dash (shoots player at high speed in the direction he's facing killing enemies and destroyig breakable walls)
after all this is will re create all the rooms to make them longer. And I'll work on save spots.

[darshell]

There's a way to scale the screen up without it getting blurry in gm by doubling the port size of each room

[ness io kain]

There's a way to scale the screen up without it getting blurry in gm by doubling the port size of each room

Actually, you have to make it 2x(actual width)-1, otherwise it's slightly skewed. I don't know why.
Even then, it isn't perfect. I know there are better ways to do it, but I haven't tried any of them because they all require the registered version of the program... And I still haven't purchased it because of poor financial situations. So I can't really say how well those work... But I think Derek Yu has a tutorial somewhere around here, and he seems to have gotten something to work well for Spelunky. So if you can find that, I would assume it's worth trying.

[3dpursuit]

Alright. :D Ill stick with just making the resolution 320x240 until i figure it out.

EDIT: I've decided it would be easier/better if instead of making it legit fullscreen, it jusdt doubles the size of the game window and then puts the black border around. I'm making it so it doubles, then subtracts one, so its perfect scaling. Good Idea?

[fraxcell]

I think that would be good, although if you want perfect scaling, there's a great example here, by ChevyRay.

[ness io kain]

Actually, that may be the example I was talking about; I might have been remembering the author incorrectly.


By the way, don't forget to rehost your file at some point so people like me can actually play the game.

[3dpursuit]

I actually found an easier way. Just resize the screen using window_set_size() to 639 by 479. Works perfectly.

New Screenshots of the new interface and deaths.





EDIT: So I've made the HUD Dissapear to an alpha of 0.2 since someone said it was hard to see since the player was always being blocked by the hud. So when the players is behind the hud the hud fades to a very very almost invisible alpha, then fades back to 0.8 when you leave it. Screenshots below.

NORMAL:

FADED:


The next step in the game is to replace the double tap to save with save points throughout the maps.

Random Screenshot:


EDIT:
Save Spots

[3dpursuit]

Here's some progress news. Along with the save points I'm getting teleporting working. How itll work is you'll hold down space and a list of areas that you've saved at will come up on the screen. Still holding space, you press up and down till you find the area you want and release space, then you will teleport to the most recent save point from each area. Right now I'm still getting the menu and everything going but the teleporting works, but you hold down space and press 1,2,3,4 for each area and no area names are shown. I'm working to get my wanted method.

[QOG]

Looks quite nice, but doesn't run on my computer (displays loading bar and never actually runs).