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[saluk]

It runs a bit better. Definitely an improvement, but still bad enough to really hurt playability. I was able to lower the quality without it crashing, which helped a bit more too. It's getting there!

[HanClinto]

Looks great, plays great, can't wait to see what more you come up with!  Looks like you've got a nice cutscene mechanic going here with that special room. 

Out of curiosity, are you using any libs for your Flash work?

Love the background. :-D

--clint

[Sar]

Curiously, on my Macbook Pro under Opera, controls seem to 'stick'; I hit 'left' and the guy just keeps dashing left continuously, meaning he lands on spikes almost immediately. I hit 'right' and he runs into a wall and stops and accepts new input, but hitting left again goes for the spikes again. Hitting space at any point has him continuously jumping (curiously, even after he's died).

Most of this doesn't happen in Firefox, so I guess it would be easy to write off as a browser bug (and I know Opera on Mac isn't exactly the best browser ever) but it's the first time I've seen issues with flash at all.

I guess you already know about the inertia + tight jumps = incredibly unbelievably hard not to die? ;-)

[jotapeh]

It runs a bit better. Definitely an improvement, but still bad enough to really hurt playability. I was able to lower the quality without it crashing, which helped a bit more too. It's getting there!

Nuts. Well at least it doesn't crash you. I don't think changing flash quality will help, everything is being done with BitmapData which is unaffected by the quality setting.

I have one or two small extra optimizations to be made, but that will require some serious thinking from me. I do want this to run smoothly on as many machines as possible, so if I can come up with a solution, I will.

Looks great, plays great, can't wait to see what more you come up with!  Looks like you've got a nice cutscene mechanic going here with that special room.  

Out of curiosity, are you using any libs for your Flash work?

Love the background. :-D

--clint

Thanks! I really appreciate the encouraging words! The only library I am using is TweenLite, and that is only for the camera motion and volume when the cutscene event occurs. The rest - Physics, Graphics, Sound, Input managers - are all written by me from scratch. Mind you I've taken a run at this more than a few times so  it's kind of ingrained in my brain at this point  

Curiously, on my Macbook Pro under Opera, controls seem to 'stick'; I hit 'left' and the guy just keeps dashing left continuously, meaning he lands on spikes almost immediately. I hit 'right' and he runs into a wall and stops and accepts new input, but hitting left again goes for the spikes again. Hitting space at any point has him continuously jumping (curiously, even after he's died).

Most of this doesn't happen in Firefox, so I guess it would be easy to write off as a browser bug (and I know Opera on Mac isn't exactly the best browser ever) but it's the first time I've seen issues with flash at all.

Strange.. Actually, I develop this primarily on my Macbook Pro. I don't use Opera, though. The behaviour you're describing implies that Flash in Opera does not register KeyUp Events. This is quite bad, as that is absolutely crucial for correct keyboard reading in AS3... I'll test it out in Opera but I don't know if this is something I can fix.

Firefox started to infuriate me with constant crashing (my day job is web development) so I stopped using it, and primarily just use Safari 4.0.4. I find Flash performance in Safari is vastly superior to Firefox in OS X. I run OS X 10.6.2 as well, but I've tested it on various iMacs/Mac Pros in 10.5.x as well.

I guess you already know about the inertia + tight jumps = incredibly unbelievably hard not to die? ;-)

Haha. Yep. If you playtest as much as I do, I guess it's easier to find the paths through the level without dying. I will tone it down for the first few levels when I get around to pure level design... For now, since death has no real effect (you can just walk out of it for now,) I'll leave it as it is.


For now, I am racking my brain trying to decide how to implement the final few features before I enter 'content building' phase...

Grappling hook? mega-sized bosses? terrain morphs during events? doors and switches? Soon...

[cheapshot]

4) ... dun dun dun... with enemies comes... BOSS MUSIC! Haha. Just swapped out the music as the one track was getting repetitive (and also I freaking love cheapshot's track!) This track will actually be played when you reach the 'boss chamber' of a level, along with other epic changes that I will not yet reveal!

Oh heck yeah! There's the boss theme Thanks for using it /bow

Just need to see the boss noew :D

[Sos]

That's one fine game
I think you need some powerups

[jotapeh]

Another update. A boss spawns now, and you are trapped in his room until you defeat him! At which point the music reverts and so forth.

Sprite over/underscaling is in as well, though I'd like to clean up that implementation somewhat.

Not much else to speak of at the moment, the beginnings of a HUD are in and I am encapsulating everything such that a proper load screen can exist.

[jotapeh]

Bleh. Not gonna lie, I am not at all happy with where I've taken this game.  

I've created a proper level editor, but I think this game needs some major changes. To name a few:

1) Remove or change 'boost mechanic' drastically. May replace this outright with a grappling hook.
2) Expand the screen size, but zoom the camera in (2x) and slow the character down a touch.
3) More inspiring 'boss fight' - or none at all. Right now just feels lame.

We'll see what happens with this by deadline.. I'm not sure. But I'm not done with it yet.

[jotapeh]

The grappling hook is in!

At least the beginnings of it are. I am somewhat furious that the code hinter in Flex suggest Math.atan2(x,y) rather than Math.atan2(y,x), but I digress...

If you'd like to try it out, the live demo has been updated. Jump into the air and press SHIFT to fire the grappling hook, and while swinging you can retract or extend it with the UP and DOWN arrow keys.

TODO:

- Conserve momentum into swings (currently all your momentum is lost when beginning a rope swing, this was for simplicity of implementation on my part.) Nerdy programmer note: This will probably involve finding the projection of your current velocity onto the tangent of the circle described by the path of the swing and converting that to angular velocity... but I digress.

- Have the rope 'shoot out' and either: a) anchor to the first piece of land it finds, or b) extend to maximum length and retract if no grapple-able terrain is found.

For now, enjoy 'free rope mode'  

[cheapshot]

Keep on keeping on dude!  and have a  while you're at it.

[jotapeh]

Alright folks - BIG update, lots of changes. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

As of now, you can officially WIN! Which is just lovely. Dying also still does nothing. Maybe slightly less lovely.

Use arrow keys to move, SHIFT to fire your grappling hook. Thoughts? Comments? All welcome. 

[SirNiko]

Played through the beta. It was reasonably enjoyable.

There's some deadly rock at the start? I touched it and turned into a puddle of something, but then I got better. My movement was never hindered.

Initially the controls took some getting use to. The movement is really slippery, as the avatar has poor acceleration/deceleration. This results in a lot of places where you fall off ledges while climbing. I didn't really care for it, as the grappling alone seemed challenging enough.

The miniboss is neat, but the rock you use to kill him isn't very well marked. Some sort of text pointing you towards the rock would probably be wise: reaching the rock is challenging enough, especially if you're not good with the grappling hook at that point.

The rest of the level was pretty simple, excepting the places where you had to climb over ledges with the grappling hook. The long horizontal stretches have a lot of tiny gaps and rocks that break your momentum in a sort of unsatisfying way, but I feel like if I was a better player I'd grapple swing through to go faster and get a better score, so that's not necessarily a bad design.

I liked the grappling hook mechanics, and climbing cliffs with it was entertaining, although a little finicky. You can scale vertical walls by jumping, grappling, jumping again and grappling again. I'm not sure if that's intentional. It'd be cool if there was a little colored indicator that would show where the grappling hook will attach before I fire it.

I made it to the exit with about 15 seconds left, so you had about the right amount of time there. I'm not sure how I feel about the timer right now, though. I like get-out-fast escape type of games, but this timer just feels like it doesn't add much to the game if it kills you when it runs out.

Music is good. Were there sound effects? I can't remember hearing any, but maybe I just didn't notice.

In the event that you keep focused on racing for score, you might consider making the lives and timer strictly scoring mechanisms, rather than a game-over function like a typical platformer. Or, you can drop the score and focus on making it a challenging platformer. Either way, you're off to a good start.

-SirNiko

[jotapeh]

Thanks for that laundry list of feedback, SirNiko

I couldn't implement all your suggestions, time constraints of course always make it difficult. Here's some things that did make it into the final version:

- Time counts down from 10 minutes. If you don't make it in 10 minutes, no big deal. It's only used for Bonus points.
- "Lives" counter is now a "Deaths" counter. You can die as much as you want, but it will detract from your final score.
- Coins can be collected to add to your final bonus score.

In addition, some of the drawing routines were optimized slightly and some other minor bugs were crunched out.

It's far from perfect, but I'm happy with it, and I hope you folks will enjoy it too! I had a blast making this game and will definitely be participating in future compos.

[X3N]

Hey, cool.
I was about to take a screenshot and say "I'm stuck".. then I realized you put in a grappling hook! Very cool, but I had some trouble not using the grappling hook once I started it. I couldn't seem to fall in the air without holding space (making me jump when I touched the ground again). Once I got used to it, the mechanics of "hold space to jump, release to fire grappling" worked well, its just that disabling it seemed impossible. Maybe mid-air jump fires grappling and you have to do it each time?
Also, how do you kill the boss? I didn't see a rope to burn..

[jotapeh]

Thanks for playing, X3N.  

That's a weird bug you've reported. What should happen, is that you jump by pressing space once, hit shift once to deploy rope, and swing until you jump again. The rope should not auto-redeploy nor should you be forced to hold spacebar to keep it from doing that..*

Re: Venus Flytrap Boss, there's a rock you dump on his head. It's not very obvious and I ran out of time to put in a better/more fun mechanic. Unfortunately this is one of those gaping gameplay holes due to my lack of forethought and design..

Anyhow, I put together a quick little gameplay video that shows the first half of the level (spoiler alert - shows how to kill the boss):




I've got a local version that has a bunch of minor changes, but to keep in the spirit of the contest I wanted to leave the competition version as-is.


*I think the biggest thing I've learned with this game is that I must fix my KeyboardManager class. I think certain browsers momentarily remove focus from Flash, or something similar, and this causes button KeyUp events to fail to register.. pretty sure this caused the Opera bug too.

[Oddball]

Liked: Ninja rope, everyone likes a ninja rope.

Disliked: I found the controls horrible, it's like the character is sliding on ice. I got stuck in a hole and couldn't get out. The ceiling was too high for my ninja rope and the jump didn't go high enough to get me out. I couldn't die. I'd disappear then simply reappear when I pressed a control.

Conclusion: I wanted to like this one because it's got a ninja rope, but ultimately I found the controls too unbearable.

[jotapeh]

First of all: Thank you for the feedback. I deeply appreciate it.  

Unfortunately it looks like I have to go back to character control programming school. Basically nobody I talked to enjoyed the control scheme of this character, though I found it easy.

I was aiming for more of a Sonic or SMB3 type scheme, where there is definite acceleration and deceleration. I guess I undershot the friction (by quite a bit), add that to the overly bumpy/'detailed' terrain and small jumps and well.. yeah no dice  


I've got a post-contest version I'm working on. The map will be more forgiving, the controls nicer and the boss less boring. I think next contest I will spend less time trying to convert simple pendulum physics into a ninja rope... and more time making sure it's actually fun to just run and jump.