Can't Bits and Pieces be a game about a Frankenstein figure jumping strategically to avoid monsters?

It can be, but my point is, it shouldn't have to be. I'm not allowed to throw anything out?

I haven't seen your entry dude but if you think remakes needn't be at least thematic then you have no idea what a remake is.

My remake is thematic, it's about jumping and avoiding stuff; this was the theme of the original for me. I did put effort into this, and I thought I was embracing the original in an interesting, if not fully realized, way.

Obviously you guys are drawing the line somewhere in the middle; I draw the line at the intent of the creator, and I thought everyone drew it there, but I was wrong.

And sorry about the tirade. This was mainly separate from Bits and Pieces and should have gone in a separate post. I'd been wanting to get it off my chest for a while, after reading some of the earlier posts in this thread. I don't really know what pigscene is, and I have no idea what the relationship is between Arthur and Derek. All I was really referring to is Arthur and maybe some other guys being aggressive and unwelcoming. Be nice, guys.

I'll shut up now. My Bits and Pieces will go to a Flash portal. Good bye and have fun with the rest of these games.

In Bits and Pieces it's a frankenstein-type (I think) figure being attacked in a graveyard by werewolves, skeletons and swamp things.  

sorry bro. this isn't bits and pieces. this is... not bits and pieces. i'm gonna free up that slot.

Again, it's an interesting contrast - to you, games are stories; to me, they're game mechanics. To you Bits and Pieces is a game about a Frankenstein figure and monsters; to me Bits and Pieces is a game about jumping strategically to avoid objects.

So, as I described a few pages ago, I took the strategic jumping idea and ran with it. Obviously I took a lot of crazy liberties in my interpretation. But that was kind of the point. Bits and Pieces is where I came from; this is the way I as an individual cover Bits and Pieces. Remakes and covers, to me, are most interesting when they bear very little resemblance to the original, instead showing you the unique way someone else experienced it. Sometimes they can go too far and bear no resemblance whatsoever--but they're still remakes, if honestly inspired by the original.

For this reason, in a festival of remakes, it makes no sense to dictate the limits of interpretation. This would be so obvious in most creative contexts that it seems bizarre we even have to discuss it.

Having said all that, I should be clear that I don't consider my Bits and Pieces to be a good game; it's rough and seriously flawed in many ways. I don't expect that anyone would learn anything fascinating about me or the original game from this remake. I would understand if my game were rejected purely for quality. But I find it unfortunate that you would put limits on how unlike the original a remake can be.

In general, the lack of open-mindedness in the "Pigscene" group has surprised me. The exclusivity, the passive aggressiveness, that a couple guys have been filling this thread up with, is something I associate more with pretentious art students than indie game development. I used to feel like everyone I meet in this scene is not just brilliant, but so cool and friendly. Here I feel like I'm in a group of annoying film students.

Not all of you, of course. Mostly, I love you guys.

 

Your Bits and Pieces is pretty cute! I played it for quite a while, but I find it too difficult and frustrating to get very far through...

Sorry about the difficulty. I guess player movement is extremely hair-triggerish. After spending a long time fooling around with the basic locomotion, I decided that these wild, slightly floaty and ultra-responsive leaps make for the most interesting gameplay, supportive of my vision of steering through clouds of enemies. But it's extreme. I might try globally slowing down the game. Do you think that might help?

I'm not seeing a lot of resemblance to the original game though, could you clarify that for me?

As a gamer and developer I'm very abstract and analytical, so for me the remaking process was naturally more about analyzing and expanding on the gameplay mechanics than developing the original's story, setting, or visuals.

Playing the original, the only faint hints of fulfilling gameplay that I encountered were the moments when the player needs to not just blindly jump forward, but actually steer his jumps backward to avoid a crowd of marching enemies.

Strategic jumping in crowds.

I took this concept and expanded it as far as I could. For more complex jumps I made the fov much larger, gave the player crazy powerful jumps with precision controls, and added enemies to fill up the sky instead of just the foot soldiers. The original vision was a platformer bullet hell, where you're jumping through patterned clouds of enemies.

Visually, the original had two level palettes, the gray rocky dismal one and the green grassy happy one. I went with the same two paradigms, starting happy and green, and getting progressively darker and less colorful and more ominous as the game goes on. (The original goes the other way, from grey to green, then it loops back to level 1.)

Story/setting, well, I tried to maintain a creepiness in the atmosphere. Instead of the scary purple and green monsters, I made creepy little mysterious things.

Also I riffed on the game title. The game is all about the bits and pieces that make up our bodies and our souls. Those of humans and those of the hive.
As the bird consciousness puts it, "Your bits are neurons and muscles; my bits are bird brains and feathers."

Really enjoyed this, quite a fun set of mechanics, really charming little game.

One really really minor thing, I understood pressing Escape was supposed to take you back to the main menu. I know you explain how to quit out if you do press escape but I think it would be nice if that was consistent across all the final games. Will be annoying if each game does it their own way.

Thanks man, I'm glad you enjoyed it. There's a lot more I wanted to do, but I guess that's always the case.

Have most games actually been implementing Escape this way, quit to front screen? I think I remember there being some inconclusive discussion about this before. The problem is that people complained about accidentally losing progress, plus it seems awkward (and un-NES-like) not to have a pause key. If I were to follow the proscribed scheme, I would be tempted to add an option to the front screen - "restart last level played." Whatever the consensus is, I'll adhere Bits 'N Pieces to it.

[Bits and Pieces - Final v1.0!]

Presenting

Bits and Pieces - Final v1.0!

Unofficially subtitled "I have no hands only a head."

Download here.

A slightly inferior web-based version is also available here. There's no preloader, only a blank white box for you to stare at while it loads.

Parts of this game are painfully unpolished; on top of this I'm sure I'll get great feedback, so I will continue to fix the game up as time allows. But time will not be allowing much for the next few weeks, unfortunately. Some day, I'll make a post-compo version with more levels and more polish; as is, there's not enough content to support all the powerups and gameplay types.

You might find the beginning rather boring and/or frustrating. If you stick with it, it should get more interesting later on. Likewise, if there's anyone who played one of my work in progress builds and thought it was horrible, I encourage you to give this a shot as it has changed a whole lot.

Everything in the game is by me. Programmed in AS3 with some Flixel. Thanks to Zaratustra for the A52 font.


2010 version:
 


1991 version:
 

How have the rest of you implemented Pause? Early in this thread, someone suggested using Esc to pause, with the second Esc quitting the game, or X or C to unpause. This is pretty awkward. A dedicated pause/unpause key (like Start on the NES) would feel a lot better.

Still working on Bits and Pieces, still planning on finishing this weekend. Basically I just need to do some art, and some more music...

and some more levels....   

Bits 'N Pieces update -

I'm officially over my 2-week deadline now. I'd planned to finish up this past weekend, but that goal proved unattainable. However, the game is shaping up pretty well.

By this weekend I'll make sure I'm done.

Nice work Melly! Time Warp Tickers is charming.

The controls weren't immediately intuitive to me, and I had to restart the game and re-read the instructions before I figured out how to slow time and how to do the super kick. Also, at first I didn't realize I was kicking the eyeballs - I thought I was somehow spawning fireballs, but couldn't for the life of me figure out how to replicate that elsewhere.

But once figured out, it has an odd coherence and it's really fun to play through.

 

Dedant works fine on my XP computer too - it's a Thinkpad with some kind of discrete Nvidia card.

Charming game, oranda! Thanks. 

Thanks, SirNiko - really useful comments. 

Hmm... the thing is, this kind of runs contrary to the defining aspect of bullet hell gameplay, which is making very small and precise movements to avoid the densely packed bullets. In this game, all of your actions are frenetic and swift - rising, falling and air-moving - which makes it kind of hard to react to things. Not that I think this is necessarily bad, but that the comparison you draw isn't particularly apt.

Agreed - it's not a very apt comparison. I played around with a variety of different movement and jump speeds, and these large, fast jumps seemed most interesting to me. Player and enemies moving slower in general, which looks more like bullet hell, really doesn't feel like jumping around - it's more like the water levels in Mario, I guess, which are always kinda unexciting. I liked this frenetic yahoo atmosphere more.

One thing I might play around with is either a parachute or a time-slowdown device that the player can activate from time to time. Strategic slowdown is good. That part at the end of level 3 where you're falling through a cloud is not fun partly because it's too fast.

I'll also play with patterns, for sure.

Jumping is quite imprecise, which I don't feel fits well with the idea of avoiding massive hordes of randomly located enemies. But it is somehow enjoyable.

I'm glad you found it somehow enjoyable; somehow enjoyable's what I'm going for. How exactly does it feel imprecise? Is it just overall too fast to get your wits straight? Or do you feel like you don't have clear enough control over the jump height? As far as steering through the air, that should be 100% precise, though very possibly too fast.

Thanks for the comments, guys.

Anybody like or hate the sprites? This is one of my first times doing pixel anims.

Bunch of minor updates since last time. One new enemy, and a looot of particle-based effects now, game just got a wee bit gory...

This is cool - the art is great, of course! In general gameplay feels sluggish and not very responsive; if movement were a little zippier, and perhaps if the projectile went a little further, it would be more exciting.

I think your boss fight isn't far from being fun - you could probably jazz it up by adding some more randomness to his attacks, and moving the guy himself so you're not always shooting at the one spot.

Latest work-in-progress of Bits N Pieces.

Playable in browser HERE.

There are 4 unpolished levels in there. Last level is almost identical to first level, but harder. These two levels represent the absolute bare minimum core, central, raw, fundamental, bottom-level, foundational, elemental gameplay that hopefully make this game into something identifiable. My hope is that the basic jumping-through-clouds-of-enemy-bullethell gameplay is interesting enough all by itself.

Is this boring or seemingly uninspired? I hope not. It seems interesting to me, but I could be wrong. All feedback is much appreciated.

Sorry guys if Hamburger is not 'leet enough to satisfy some members of the audience here. I consider it an honor to share a project with some of you guys, and all I can promise is I'm doing my best to bring some unique Hamburger flavor to Bits 'n Pieces--it will be its own beast, I hope, even if that beast is somewhat bedraggled and lacks the majesty and polish and artistic coherence of some of the other games. As a developer I'm working on these things.

I'll post a progress build of Bits 'n Pieces / platform hell this evening. My personal 2 weeks will expire at the end of this week; I aim to finish by the end of the weekend.

New Ninja Assault build. I spent wayyyyy too much time making that ninja move.

I like yer graphics.

After landing a jump, there's an annoying delay before avatar can move again; you're probably already aware of this.

My game has spiky balls and spiky ceilings and levels in it now.

A possible story: "Once every 52 years, all of the undead spirits imprisoned in the village cemetery are released!

 - or once every 19 years!

Heh, thanks. That looks like a good game.

Hmm... Frankenstein monsters can't normally jump that high or run that fast...

Thanks for the comments L. I did play with the larger more mario-esque movement style suggested by a Frankenstein or a grave robber (whatever the original sprite vaguely suggests), but for now I'm trying to focus on this crazier thing with more movement, bigger jumps, and clouds of enemies that you have to weave through in the air. The goal is platformer + bullet hell = platformer hell. So rather than developing the 'story' of the original game, I'm hoping more to evolve the basic gameplay.

A variety of levels come to mind pretty readily - platformer tropes taken to a larger scale, mostly -
- one where you're falling for the entire level, making the game sorta like an upside down bullet hell;
- one with a low spiky ceiling, where jumping will kill you and the only way to survive is to bounce continually along between the heads of the little imps;
- ascending a giant cliff by chaining jumps off birds' heads;
- I also want to add levels (maybe every second level) that require you to defeat all the creatures by jumping on their heads before you can progress.

Suggestion: Bits and Pieces's title juxtaposed with the actual game content makes me wonder if finding 'spare parts' for your creature could be a necessary game mechanic... Maybe represent health in the form of the character's four limbs, with each falling off after you take a knock? (Shades of Monty Python's Black Knight here...)

That's a great idea. I too was thinking about using bits 'n pieces to represent a damage state, which was the original idea behind making the guy smaller when he gets damaged - I was gonna make a little emitter to show pixels getting knocked off of him when he's hit. Your idea's better though.

I'm super busy and harried at the moment, so if there's a musician in the room who'd be interested in riffing on the Bits N Pieces theme song, I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks guys.