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[Jamiec]

Update: I'm guessing folks are put off by the 134 meg filesize? In a further effort to get some players for my game, here is a version without music, and minus levels 7 to 20.

Its a puny 50 megs: Veem - levels 1 to 6



You can find the introduction, videos, a Flash tutorial, and download links here:

http://veem.forumotion.com/veem-f1/


Here are the Youtube links:

http://www.youtube.com/v/OM6HnMymM7I
http://www.youtube.com/v/d1oFXnOUC5o
http://www.youtube.com/v/NcZ1qD2oQGs

And a brief introduction on this VERY PAGE:

Veem took me over two years work to create. It is inspired chiefly by Gauntlet, Angband, Smash TV, and a bunch of other things, and I fancy it is actually a pretty unique beast given its many design components. It can be replayed indefinately; there are randomly generated rooms within hand-designed levels.

The story of madness and loss is told by means of branching dialogue between Pin, the mainly-insane ex-warlock protagonist, and several nearly-as-unhinged dungeon denizens.
 
The chief design philosophy was to draw players away from the number-crunching and inventory-micromanaging nerdery that beset modern action rpgs, instead focusing on more dinstinguishing and meaningful characteristics in monsters, traps and items. Instead of the typical +2 int rings, there are over a hundred items each with a unique effect. Want to beef up your kicks? get the Boots of Stomping, which actually kick doors down and smash any monsters which might be in its trajectory.  

Graphics rendered almost entirely from many hundreds of captured images of plasticene models.

The download is 137 or so megs, and requires a fairly good cpu.

[Fuzz]

the game looks pretty great, i'll have to check it out soon. you should introduce yourself though, just to show you're not pimping your game and running.

[jrjellybeans]

Jeez Luis!

That looks great!  Congrats on the work - it must have taken forever.

Sorry I can't play, that download is too damn big

[Jamiec]

I would never run! Unless people started saying mean things about my game.

My name is Jamie Canard. I was fiddling around with making games back as far as the 80's, but hadn't made anything since then until about 3 years ago. Those of you who are good at maths will work out that that makes me at least 90 years old.

I used to make my own kids' claymation shows for New Zealand TV. Here's an episode, which is in Maori with subs:




I went back to school to study interactive design, and although graduation is still a couple of months away, I've already been working in the biz as a junior Flash developer. Farewell plasticene!

[deathtotheweird]

Hefty download but the videos look interesting so I'll give a shot later tonight. I love claymation.

[Jamiec]

bump for the new sleeker filesize

[TheDustin]

Even at 50 megs that would take forever to download with my shitty Alaskan internetz. I'll link this to a couple people though, as this looks pretty cool.

[Fuzz]

i downloaded the full version, but unfortunately it refuses to load on my machine. it's a shame, since this looks absolutely amazing.

[Jamiec]

It doesn't load? Bugger, what specs have you if I might inquire?

[Fuzz]

crappy five year old toshiba laptop, i don't know much more than that.

i can try again later- this appears to be done in game maker, maybe try storing more resources externally? i can't recall what's outside of the game file itself.

[george]

You had me at claymation Gauntlet so I just gave the full version a go. Download was OK though those ad/spam file hosts are not my favorite.

It ran OK on my four year old laptop (1.6 ghz, integrated intel graphics, 1.5 gb ram on XP). Though it did take 760 MB ram (!) and eventually crashed when I was doing a lot of button mashing in a tight spot.

I really like the models. However I feel like they're not shown in the best light with a high overhead view like that...like it could be plasticene models or it could be something that looks like that. Anyway, perhaps an unimportant point in the end.

I didn't get very far because of the aforementioned crash. Is there any way you could get the memory footprint of this down?

Also I feel like the UI takes up too much of the screen (probably there is a way to hide that but I missed it).

Middle mouse button doesn't work on my laptop -- any way to remap that?

[Jamiec]

Yes, this was made with Game Maker. The processing and RAM requirements are pretty forbidding - this is really just due to an overindulgence on my behalf. The entire game is loaded into memory from the get-go. This is because the deepest random room generators can spawn any combination of creatures, items, traps etc from the entire collection.

I was seeing how far I could push GM. The problem there is that while it runs fine on my machine, it apparently doesn't on others. I'll have to chalk this project up to a learning experience. If I want people to play my games, I need to think about these significant "barriers to entry" and plot to kill my darlings from the outset. Its hard to imagine ever finding the time to make another game on the same scale, but perhaps Flash development will lead me in new directions anyway.

When I was running this through GM 7, I was given the advice to load my sound externally to speed up load times, which helped a lot. It didn't solve any memory issues however since like the graphics, everything had to be loaded at once anyway.

The bird's eye view: My brother give me grief about having not used an isometric view, but then that would have required at least twice as many graphics and wouldn't have worked with the control method which is essentially a top-down version of a first person shooter. If I had zoomed in the overhead view any further, you'd be screwed on all the dodging you have to do. The gameplay is at its heart all about spacial awareness (read: dodging).

Thanks for the feedback chaps, much appreciated.

[Jamiec]

Also, "F" can be used in place of a middle-mouse button. Apologies for not supporting that in the instructions; I added it recently after a friend told me of the same issue.