You had me at "pew" and "bamf", but I don't think I type fast enough for this as I fell down a hole pretty quickly. Maybe a training mode which prompts words to type would be a good thing?

As JMan mentioned, pretyping commands is about the only way to do it.  The space between "there's a hole" > "realize that" > "type something in order not to die" is a bit thin if you don't already know that the hole is there.  It's certainly a very deliberately paced game, but hey, what text game isn't?

As for the sounds and comic stuff, no one manages to survive the boss' tentacle attack "squeeeeeerrk" sound effect.  The most stoic of audience members will laugh at that.

Might be a little more consistent and less annoying if "jumpleft" has the function of "jumpleftstop" since the default jump stops your character and the "jumpleftstop" is used much too frequently for such a long command. Or maybe "leftjump" can stop after jumping but "jumpleft" makes you move again.

We talked about changing the "JLS" and "JRS" (the fact that they even have an acronym is somewhat indicative of their being too long); it's entirely possible to play the entire game without ever using anything BUT those two as far as jumps go, and it's certainly much "safer".  It's definitely something that might get tweaked, because right now, I've only seen one person ever use the jumpleft/jumpright commands.  They just aren't that useful as it stands, and I totally admit that.

Is your "jumpshoot" based on something CPU-dependent and not a fixed pixel amount? I can't seem to use it to kill any of the turrets, either the first one to the right of the start, or the ones in a vertical configuration after the first climbing section.

The jumpshot uses GMs timer, which is supposedly framerate independent.  The shot is timed to come out at the top of the jump; your inability to hit the turret at the right edge of the stage is intentional, as practice for the boss.  On the other hand, no one who tested the game said that the jumpshot wouldn't hit the turrets in the floating platform section, as those are right at head height.  Thanks for the heads up, I'll try to test the game on an older system when I can, or change the shot to be based on a flat pixel change than on anything possibly external.

Awesome game. Typing of the dead has nothing on this.

Do not operate the flamethrower without proper supervision.

Hey again everyone.

We got the last couple of bugs smashed, and replaced those obnoxious solid blue rectangle floors with sexy gray tiling!  I guess that makes this a done deal, and you can play said done deal here: http://willhostforfood.com/?Action=download&fileid=61068

Again, this was majorly fun to work on.  Thanks to everyone who downloads and plays.

Hello everyone.  You may remember me from my Commonplace Book Compo entry.

If that's the case, I'm sorry.

This game is done now, basically.  It's actually been done for a little bit, but then the extension came, so we took a little bit of time to tweak the difficulty and such.  In any case, it's still done before the deadline!  JMan wants to change up a couple of the sprites, but that can really be done at any point, and does not affect playability at all.

http://willhostforfood.com/?Action=download&fileid=60385

I'm really happy with how this turned out, and it was great fun to work on.  The original plan was to go for three stages and three bosses, and then everything got really crazy with me getting accepted to grad school, planning a move, doing all of the requisite stuff, etc etc.  So we ended up with the title screen-level-boss-credits arrangement you see here.  Still, the concept is there, and it's easily extensible with time.

Caveat:  Read the manual, because trying to play the game without knowing all of the commands will make it extremely difficult.

Thanks for playing, and I hope you enjoy this as much as we enjoyed making it.  I'll have JMan update the thread title with a [Finished], but consider this the entry for now.

Crashes whenever I press a key.  Awesome.  This is just what I wanted after spending all that time updating DirectX for it (also, can't really see why it needs the latest DX).  Grump grump grumble etc.

It needs DirectX 9 because Construct requires DX9 for all of its games.  Even though something like this easily could have been done ages ago, the update is required.  Sorry for the wasted time, though there's absolutely no reason that it should crash with any key press.  No one else has reported that.

@Deadeye:  You're exactly right that the game is bad, and I'm in no way pleased with this.  I set out to make something that I could put on a resume, but I'll obviously be doing no such thing.  Again, I've chalked it up to the learning experience that I should have just written this in raw code; after all, if something goes wrong there, I know that it's my fault and nothing else.

However, I do think that you're mistaken about one thing.  It's not exactly like the game was completely untested.  You can't blame Construct for your election to use untested plugins, but I feel quite justified in blaming it for a bug like this one.  Hard-coding transitions around this bug introduced the instability not present before the change, and it's because a documented feature of Construct did not work.  My options were reduced to "does not work" or "works extremely unstably" because I didn't write it myself.

(Yes, I should have tested it before using it, but who really expects that such a basic function will be broken?  It's not like any game just has one scene.)

Anyway, I'm sorry to anyone who wasted time failing to get this to work.  I liked the concept, and love the art and music, but the programming just isn't there.  Thanks for trying, anyway.

Okay, I'm back from Thanksgiving stuff, and made some of the changes that people have requested.  There are now two versions of the game: a sixteen meg one with slightly-lossy compressed music, and the original 60 meg behemoth.  Use whichever one tickles your fancy.

I'm really unhappy with the way that this turned out, and had been informed that Construct was not quite the insane wall of bugs that it ended up being.  By the time I realized, it was too late, but I'll just chalk it up to a learning experience.  There's always a tomorrow, in any case.

Title inspired by Full Life Consequences? Cheesy

Played up until the part in the first level with the second green turret enemy. It unpredictably crashes when I fall in a pit. Then it started crashing when I restarted the program. (On Vista if that makes a difference.)

Medusa heads were annoying as hell at first, mostly due to the unforgiving inertia when you get hit, though their patterns are able to be learned.

It's odd that you don't display the player's current health.

The walking animation is buggy, sometimes not animated at all, sometimes looking like ice skating. This is hilarious, though, and I'm not sure I'd want to see it changed.

You *really* need to compress those sound files in Audacity or something. No reason this game should take up 60 megabytes.

Yeah, the crashes started showing up during the frame transitions.  I think it's basically the same thing that happened in IWBTG; whenever you die or otherwise change event sets, Construct and MMF2 both just start freaking out.  This game was initially stable, but there's a gigantic bug in Construct in which the "next layout" function does not actually work at all.  I only discovered this when I started trying to put the stages together, and having to hard-code the transitions introduced a large element of instability.  See the post above about Construct, heh.

The player's current health can't be restored, so I figured that it wasn't too important to display it.  It wouldn't be at all hard to do, so I can definitely put it on the list.

The walk animation should never be skating (though that is amusing), but yeah, that extended foot in frame four is just bad, bad, bad.  Since I can't change the bounding box to encompass just his torso and the area directly below it (again, thanks Construct), if that foot gets caught on a platform, it's over.

Lesson learned:  Even if it takes three times as long, do serious projects from scratch in your own language.  Then if you have a problem with something, you can just change it.  Construct is in beta, yes, but MMF2 is definitely not, and there are some very similar huge bugs or issues in both.  Admittedly, I did not have time to write this in a "real language" given the deadline being when it is and this month being wacky in general.

Thanks for playing in any case.

Okay, well, after a grueling day of Construct being an utter piece, the game is done!

It controls as follows:
Shift to jump
Z to attack
Arrow keys to move

Motorcycle controls:
Shift to switch planes
Up to jump

I'm sorry that this is later than anticipated (though still by no means late); at the end of the testing phase, Construct decided to start crashing every time I edited a sprite, and in said crashes, undoing random amounts of work.  There are some minor hit detection issues in the first stage which are being ironed out; these stem from the utterly inexplicable inability to change a sprite's bounding box in Construct.  Rather than rewriting the entire engine on the last day in which I can work on this, and possibly missing the deadline, I decided it best to submit now and patch later.

Thanks to everyone who plays, and please let me know what you think either here or at the email address attached to this account.  Any and all feedback is welcome.

This is my first compo entry, and in fact, first post here at all, so bear with me.

For this competition, I went with entry 105 from the Commonplace Book:  Vampire visits man in ancestral abode—is his own father.  Vampires and video games really just say "Castlevania" to me, and that's the route that I set out on initially.

What we ended up with is not your childhood Castlevania at all.

Our protagonist's father passed away before the events of the story.  Upon returning home after a visit to the ancestral gravesite (as this is Lovecraft we're dealing with, we can't avoid using "ancestral" repeatedly), he finds his father standing outside his window, clearly not as dead as he should be.  What follows can really only be described as "zany".  If you're offended by Lovecraft not being taken seriously, this is probably not the game for you.

Some screenshots:


Pompadours rule.


The Akira bike, and the Turbo Tunnel.

The game is currently "finished", with massive sarcasm quotes.  (They aren't really so massive.)  What this means is "I am waiting on one last song, and to hear back from a thread about a potentially critical bug in my choice of IDE."  The bug has a workaround, I just need to know if it is a necessary one.  The full game will be uploaded tomorrow; seeing is this is being posted at 8:11 without me having gone to bed yet, "tomorrow" is a very fluid term.

Edit:  The game is now finished, and can be found here:

Uncompressed Audio:  http://willhostforfood.com/access.php?fileid=43097

Compressed Audio:  http://willhostforfood.com/?Action=download&fileid=43096

Dramatis Personae:
Programming and concept by me.
Art by Jacob "UltraJMan" Ritz
Music by Alvin Grissom II.

Thank you for playing.