Not real speed of course, struggling to beat GifCam

Have you tried licecap already? I feel like is the best tool for creating fast gifs. Good quality, low size.

created by Logan

Acheron got picked among the hottest games of 2016 in Gamejolt to participate in The Jolties award!

Check the game out and cast you vote!

The door perspective on the door frame silhouettes seems a bit odd to me, makes the floor pop up a bit.

It seems like it's more the light casting onto the ground that feels weird to me. Either way, the floor feels weird with that door at the bottom.

Those color palettes are awesome! How hard was it to implement that transition feature?

I kind of agree with both of you guys on the doors -- the way the light from outside spills into the room is still not right to me. I have done some additional iteration on it but haven't found anything I like yet.  Will keep trying.

What about this?



I'm not sure how you feel about gradients in your game, since you seem to be using flat colors in everything. But i would argue that if you resort to use gradients only on lighting elements, it will not detract from your aesthetic.

And i believe the key thing about the light i did is that it irradiates from the top of the door, not the bottom where it meets to floor. So you can try some options with flat color and see what you like best.

The water in the bottom is some shader trickery?

A gif is better than a thousand words

I'll just explain the gif a little here. I have a blendtree with 8 animations, one for each direction the character will face in the game.
Then i show two of the animations in the blendtree that are exactly the same and have the same length. All this animation does is rotate the sprite 360 degrees.
Then i play one of these animations and you can see the sprite rotating and taking 10 seconds to do the complete turn. But then i show the second animation, wich should take 10 seconds to rotate as well and it takes only 3.
I have no idea what is happening that one of the animations is playing super fast .


edit:
alright, took me hours to figure out how stupid i am. In the blend tree i changed the animation speed field as if it was the blend threshold

Probably a prototype of what you described would be a good way to feel it.
From the description you gave, i can see the potential and i believe you're in the right path. But it seems to me that with this setup players will never click on silence, and the game will be a button mash on the Smart reply. I can see that you intend to convey the difficulty of giving the answer, but i'm not sure if through carpal tunnel syndrome is the way to accomplish that.

It would be interesting to see how you organize your tilesheet and how is your setup for placing them on the map.

Imho, you already solved your problems with this:



If even that little edge is overlapping important stuff, then you can tackle this issue from the perspective of the objects and not the walls. Like placing the object not exactly at the center of the tile, but a little to the top of it. In the end i really see no problem with the first image.

I find it completely unnecessary to have walls covering 3/4 of the other tiles, specially since it's such an issue.

And also there's the "Zelda Perspective", which fucks up any conceived perspective rules you're struggling with, and still pulls it off. Which means that you don't have to be so adamant about maintaining proper perspective. You just have to be consistent with the decisions that you make.

"That person after asked you to be friends"

That's where it ends for me, cause i won't accept friend invitations from people i don't know.

Played a little bit of the build on itch.io and wanna give some feedback.
Sometimes is hard to tell if a background element is a platform or not. For example at the very beginning of the game, if you go left, there are four orange blocks that looks exactly the same. Two of them are platforms and two are not.
In the first stage there is a moment where the waterfall sfx is too loud, it overlaps the music and everything.
I got to that part right after the burning village scene, where there's a wolf and tree bats. When you finish them off, a gap on the floor opens so you can descend. In this part of the level you can wall jump the wall on the right, and the game glitched when i went beyond the height of the screen. The camera panned up, as if there were more level up above, but the character was missing and i couldn't do anything, so i had to restart the game.
Which leads me to the last thing, that there's no checkpoint, only a "start new game". So i didn't replay it because i'm leaving to work soon.

Other than these things, the game was very nice, sometimes the level art is a bit too noisy, making things hard to see, but overall is pretty good. The feeling and the music really create an atmosphere. I'll keep playing when i have the chance.

Hah! Nice to come back here and these guys look like actual dogs now

Hello people!
I'm releasing my first game today. It is a whole polished product, but gameplay wise it's a prototype of what could become a bigger game someday. So i would really like to know how you guys feel like about this concept.
At the beggining of the development process, Acheron was supposed to be a two month project. In a way we began development with the mindset of being in a very long game jam. Two months passed very quickly and we realized there was more to this game than what previously developed, so we agreed to put another two months into the development, so we could publish a cool game.

The game is available to download for free on http://titolivio.itch.io/acheron.

Hope you enjoy it! Any feedback will be kept and considered when we make this a larger game.

Just released a little trailer. We're finishing the game this week!

What about Mars One? Is that a thing still? It's moving forward?

I don't think having a button to reset puzzles is necessarily bad. In the end, it essentially solves the same problem. The only issue I have with it is that it makes it extremely clear which rooms are "puzzle rooms" and which aren't (unless I'm totally misunderstanding your example, which may be the case because I haven't played Oceanhorn). I'd like the player to feel that every room has the potential to have puzzles, or parts of a puzzle, in it and it's up to them to figure it out.

One good example of this button sort of solution is the pocket watch in Wild Arms 1. In that game, one character (a magic-user) had a pocket watch that would make the player "go back in time" to when they first entered the room, which reset everything in the room. It's a nice solution because player always has it, so it avoids any issues with having "puzzle rooms" vs "non-puzzle rooms" because you can use it any time you want.

Your example about Wild Arms is something that i believe to be a better solution than Oceanhorn's. Mechanically is the same, but it has a narrative explanation for existence. In Oceanhorn it's a button on the floor you press by standing on it, then every moved block and whatnot goes back to the starting position. But overall i still recommend the game.

Holy crap, that's a lot of different characters you're designing and they all few unique. I'll keep a look out on your game.

Just to spark a little discussion on the idea of puzzles expanding to other rooms. I look forward to reading peoples input on this:

"Zelda-likes" are my favorite "genre" of games. The mechanics of puzzles, exploration and item/upgrades discovery are, imho, the closest we got the perfection of an adventure game. They fit incredibly well to the aesthetic of adventure. Because of that i tend to spend times every once in a while fantasizing about creating a game like this.
One of the things i kept in my mind as a certainty for a while is that i would design a game in which the camera follows the character openly through the whole world, instead of having it divided by screens like 2D zeldas. In my mind this was simply an evolution of the "world divided by screens", because back in the day they had technical limitations that forced them to make it like that, right? But now we don't have these limitations anymore.
But after playing some 2D Zeldas sequentially (Minish Cap, Oracle of Seasons and Phantom Hourglass) i realized that the scrolling screens had a very important mechanical purpose. Since the screen resets every time the player leaves and get back, it allowed the designers to create puzzles that the player could fail on, as the player can easily reset the puzzle's state by leaving and going back. I noticed this after playing Phantom Hourglass that had dungeons without scrolling screens, the screen change after each level of a dungeon, but each level is a single screen on its whole and the level's state persisted through this change, iirc. In PH the puzzles were very different and were carefully crafted in order to not allow a situation in which the player could get trapped into a failed puzzle. The challenge in this game relied much more on how to use Link's items in different situations and fights. On another note there's a "zelda-like" game called Oceanhorn that is designed very similarly to Phantom Hourglass. In this game the puzzle rooms have a button to reset the puzzle's state, but it felt like a very cheap solution to the "failed puzzle problem".
My point here is that there's no good or bad between these two design decisions ("persistent screens" or "resetting screens"), but i would like to know if you had any thoughts on this when you decided to have the possibility of a puzzle expanding through multiple screens, or even after making the decision if you stumbled on this challenge by accident. It's always nice to hear a developers thought process on these stuff.

I'm digging this thread.

This looks cool. Are you still working on it?

Yes! I'll post it when it get's released.
We decided to work a little longer than the original two months, and development has been much slower than it were, but it's constantly improving. I believe in a month we'll have it done.