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[William Broom]

No, that's ammo. You only get one life  :D

I might change that if it turns out too hard, but I really want to force players to proceed cautiously and feel out the environment.

[Rory]

I playtested this and it is AWESOME!
Fucking creepy as hell though. The music is really creepy, and the enemy sound effects are suitably creepy as well.
At first it is very difficult, but if you persevere it gets a bit easier to work.

There were really only three things that were annoying: pushing blocks looks just like you are moving slowly, checkpoints are undetectable, and pellets that disappear once they are offscreen, but we decided chutup would do a pushing sprite, make checkpoints more visible and make pellets last for maybe two screens.

Also a section where you have to sink up to your neck in quicksand, but there's really no way to find that out.

An idea: for the checkpoints have them remain invisible, but have a particle burst.

Overall, an excellent prototype.

[William Broom]

I'm worried about not getting this finished in time so I am paring it down a bit, aiming at the best ideas I have and discarding the rest. So it will probably be fairly short, but hopefully good while it lasts.

About half the level design is finished, and most of the difficult coding/animating.

[Loren Schmidt]

This is an intriguing idea, I look forward to playing it. Where did your sound effects end up coming from?

[William Broom]

Almost entirely from freesound.org. It's a great website. A few of them I made using sfxr.

[MashPotato]

This looks really interesting, good luck finishing!

[medieval]

so when can we expect a demo?

[William Broom]

Very soon now. And that demo will be pretty much complete apart from the opening cutscene and stuff. Although I will probably need to change a lot of stuff based on feedback, since it's hard to test my own levels and pretend I don't remember where everything is...

[William Broom]

Need a bit of quick help from someone experienced with GM:
To add an effect to one of my sounds on the fly, I'm using sound_effect_set (sound,effect). But I can't work out how to take the effect off again. Anybody know?

[William Broom]

Alright, demo's up. I'd really like some feedback on this before the compo ends so I can get it good. The sound effect problem still stands if anyone knows how to fix it - I just left it out of the current build entirely.

EDIT: Shit, I just realised that the first checkpoint (i.e. the ship) doesn't work. How dumb of me. Anyway, if you read this in the next 30 minutes or so, you can still play the demo, but if you die before reaching the second checkpoint you'll have to restart. 30 minutes is how long it will probably take me to upload again.

EDIT EDIT: Well, it's OK now.

[dEnamed]

I really liked the basic idea of this and the gameplay was quite creepy too. I didn't like enemies too much however, I found it too hard to dodge them because I had really no idea how big and high they were so basically everytime I ran across an enemy, I died despite my best attempts to dodge him somehow. Personally I'd prefer stationy environmental hazards instead of moving invisible blocks of random deaths.

Actually I've got another idea concerning enemies. I know we all hate QuickButton Events but in this game they might actually work. Suggestion as following: You (the player) get too close to an enemy, basically you're dead but the game gives you the chance to survive this by letting you hit a randomly chosen key. So if the game shows up z you've got to hit z really fast. If you pull it off, the enemy gets stunned and you can walk past safely. If you lose, well you were dead to begin with. This might infuse some panicking Key Hammering on the player side. Which is a good thing in a horror based scenario imho.

But Kudos for the gameplay idea, its great.

[William Broom]

Thanks... that QTE thing sounds like not such a bad idea. I'll try to work it in if I have time. Otherwise I might just make the enemies easier to see/jump over.

[Loren Schmidt]

Thanks for posting a demo. This is such a neat idea, and it's been fun getting to play around with it. By the way, is there a full screen mode? Even in a window the game scared me a couple of times, but I think I'd really be able to enjoy the game more it were full screen.

Thoughts so far (up to fourth obelisk)-
The game feels pretty varied so far. I like the assortment of challenges and lack of repetition. The graphics seem to detract from the atmosphere for me. I have trouble getting into the mood when the only thing on screen is a giant-headed cartoony spaceman! Also I think his energetic animation style clashes with slow pace of the game and the low movement speed. It's fine for a competetion, but if you ever decide to flesh this out more I'd recommend putting some work into the visuals.

Technical-

• Runs fine, no crashes.
• Once when starting the game up there was a large colorful set of random shapes on screen for a fraction of a second. After it disappeared, the game started up normally.
• When rapidly pressing the 'pellet' key and one of the movement keys at the same time, the player slowly inches forward without his feet animating at all. He just slides along.
• When dead, mashing the 'pellet' key makes the spaceman flicker between the dead frame and the pellet tossing frame.

[William Broom]

You can switch between fullscreen and windowed mode by pressing F4. I might set that as the default to make it more atmospheric.

Thanks for the bits of technical feedback too. I'll definitely sort those out before the full version.

[William Broom]

Finished! Link in first post.

[AdamButcher]

Hey, good stuff! The pellet throwing action worked surprisingly well, and I was pleasently surprised by features such as pushing blocks etc.

As with other people, I had a bit of the problem with the monsters, although monster prospect was scary. Good atmosphere as well!

Must admit I got a bit bored on the ending section- going up and up ramps and then falling all the way down. In fact, when I fell to the bottom and all my pellets had disappeared I decided it was time for bed. You should put a save system in there?

Also interesting to see the similarities and differences between mine and your Invisible Planet entries!

[William Broom]

Damn, I was afraid that ending would be boring. The checkpoint thing probably wouldn't work since you don't die, just fall down. I think instead I'll just make all the jumps really easy to pull off so you never fall down. I wanted the climb back up to be a bit of a relief after the tension of the rest of the game, but I can see now how the jumps would just get really annoying.

EDIT: Done.

[Noyb]

I really like the concept of this game. The engine was solid, and you have some nice gameplay twists as the game progresses. It was very cool to see the pebbles start to move on their own, and try to intuit why. Great job!

The endgame is a bit dull, though. It lasts for far too long without doing anything interesting, which is hard to be excited about after each checkpoint introduced a new gameplay mechanic.

[agj]

This is great, chutup! The audio really works, good job on that front. Maybe I got the bad ending, because I took the black orb, and immediately got sucked up by the evil slimy thing--and after I revived, the orb wasn't there. Also, why is the whole level circular, it's so painful to just go back where I started...

I'll have to agree regarding the graphics not being creepy enough, and the endgame being tedious. Also, it slowed a lot down for me after I had shot too many pellets, so I killed myself purposefully just to make them disappear; maybe there needs to be a maximum count of pellets, or something like that, to avoid such problems.

But don't mind my nitpicking, I maintain that you did a great job on it.

[William Broom]

Oops, thanks for pointing that out, Agj. The orb isn't meant to do that. I'll fix it right away.

Also, there is no 'good' ending :D that's Lovecraft for you.